The Admiral and the Ambassador (24 page)

Read lost an internal political battle in the interior ministry and was forced to resign his job in 1857, but he didn't give up his work. Over the next few years he continued to write, and as part of his archival research, Read made regular trips to the pre-Commune Hôtel de Ville, where he scoured official records for details on the evolution of Protestant Paris. And he made copies of records pertaining to Protestants—including burial records.
¹⁹

In March 1859 Read published a small item in the French magazine
Correspondance Littéraire
that included the detail that Jones had not been buried in Père Lachaise as generally believed but was laid to rest in the now-closed Protestant cemetery near l'Hôpital Saint-Louis. It also set the date of Jones's death as July 18, 1792, a fact that had been in dispute among historians. And it reported that he died at home at 42 Rue de Tournon as a “consequence of ‘dropsy of the chest'
(hydropisie de poitrine),
in the sentiments of the Protestant religion.” The interment came two days later, witnessed by a deputation of members of the National Assembly; Pierre-Francois
Simonneau, the king's representative and a friend of Jones; and several of Jones's American friends, including Blackden.

Translated and truncated versions of Read's article showed up in the American
Atlantic Monthly,
which credited the source but left out the cemetery reference, and in the June 1859 issue of
Russell's Magazine,
which included the cemetery name. The
Russell's
article did not cite its source, but in that era, periodicals often republished material without credit.
²⁰

Nearly thirty years later, Read revisited the Jones item in an article in the Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français's
Bulletin Historique et Littéraire
that revisited some of the notable death records he had found years earlier in the now-destroyed city archives. Among them was the entry for John Paul Jones.
²¹
Read's article and notes indicated the original record had come from one of five city registers of burials in a Protestant cemetery near Porte Saint-Martin, which had opened in 1724 after Cornelis Hop, the Dutch ambassador to France, persuaded Louis XV that the city needed a place to inter foreign Protestants who died in France. Catholic doctrine forbade placing non-Catholics in the consecrated ground of parish cemeteries, which forced Protestants to bury their dead on private land, and often in secret. With the opening of the Porte Saint-Martin cemetery, the Protestant dead were accorded some final dignity. That cemetery eventually was closed in 1762 to make way for the extension of Boulevard Saint-Martin. Read, though, discovered that it was soon replaced by another cemetery for foreign Protestants near l'Hôpital Saint-Louis, with the same family of caretakers, the Corroys, in charge. And it was there that Jones was buried.

So the information was readily available—if one knew where to look.

O
NE PERSON CAME CLOSE
to finding John Paul Jones's body: John Henry Sherburne, the politically connected naval bureaucrat who wrote the 1825 book based on a collection of Jones's letters.

Sherburne's interest in the Scottish-born sailor was part of his own family legacy. Sherburne was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1794, two years after Jones died. He was the son of a Dartmouth- and Harvard-educated lawyer who left his Portsmouth practice to fight in the Revolutionary War, where he lost a leg during the August 1778 Siege of Newport. While no doubt painful, life-threatening, and a tremendous sacrifice to the cause, the loss of the limb came about in a rather ignominious manner: a British cannonball barreled through Major Sherburne's tent while he was sitting at the breakfast table.

After the war, the elder Sherburne, a quick-tempered and disagreeable man, entered politics, first sitting in the New Hampshire legislature before winning a seat in Congress. He knew Jones from the commodore's days
in Portsmouth (they corresponded after the war), and they counted James Madison and Thomas Jefferson among their mutual friends. In 1804, President Jefferson appointed Sherburne to a seat as a federal district judge for New Hampshire. The position came shrouded in controversy. Sherburne had been a key witness in the impeachment of the previous bench-holder, Judge John Pickering, but to avoid cross-examination, he disappeared after giving his testimony. Pickering was duly ousted, and Sherburne then won the appointment to the vacancy he helped create. He remained a federal district court judge until his death in 1830.
¹

The Sherburnes were a family of privilege and thus had connections. Descended from one of the earliest settlers in Portsmouth, the elder Sherburne's sister was married to John Langdon, the shipbuilder with whom Jones had wrangled over the building and outfitting of the
Ranger
and the
America.
Langdon served in the Second Constitutional Congress, was a US senator from 1789 to 1801, passed up Jefferson's overture to appoint him secretary of the navy, and became governor of New Hampshire in 1805. Seven years later, citing his age, Langdon turned down the nomination to stand for election as Madison's vice president in the 1812 election.

The younger Sherburne reaped the benefits of those powerful family connections. He entered Phillips Exeter Academy in 1809 at the age of fifteen, and was married at age eighteen to Mary Ann Hall, a daughter of Elijah Hall, who had served as a naval lieutenant under Jones aboard the
Ranger.
Hall was part of Jones's most daring escapades, including the raid on the Scottish Selkirk estate (in which the lord wasn't home but the family silver was captured). And Jones deputized Hall to sail the captured British warship
Drake
to Brest, France, as a prize. The stories told by his father-in-law, as well as those offered by his father and uncle, intertwined Sherburne's sense of family history with the life of Jones.

Sherburne worked for a time as a correspondent for the
Saturday Courier
newspaper in Philadelphia, traveling extensively up and down the East Coast and into the western territories. In 1825, while his father was still alive and, one suspects, able to pull a string or two, Sherburne was hired as the register for the US Navy, a $1,400-a-year civilian position usually filled as an act of political patronage.

Yet Sherburne styled himself as a writer more than a military man; the same year he took the bureaucratic job, he published his
Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones.
And he commissioned portraits of himself and his wife by Charles Bird King,
²
an artist noted for his paintings of Native American tribal leaders who passed through Washington, DC. The Sherburnes made a handsome couple. King depicted Mary Ann with a full face, soft hazel eyes, and curled brown hair. In the portrait, Sherburne's eyes are a little darker, as is his hair, which is teased upward above a large forehead and a long, aquiline nose. In a mark of ego, Sherburne had King paint into his portrait a copy of a letter from Jefferson on the table at which he sits, and his book about Jones open in his hand, a nineteenth-century version of an author's publicity photo.
³

Sherburne returned in late February 1837 to the trove of letters and other documents Jefferson had sent him as he was preparing his book on Jones. This time through, Sherburne discovered something he had overlooked before: a mention of $50,000 that Jones had given to Jefferson, then the minister to France, as a portion of the prize money due his crew members on the
Bonhomme Richard
and the
Alliance.
Digging through Congressional records, Sherburne discovered that the money had never been paid out to the crews or their heirs.

In February 1839, before the wave of books that renewed public interest in Jones, Sherburne went to the District of Columbia's Orphans' Court, an early version of probate court, and sought appointment as the administrator for the Jones estate. As evidence of his legal standing, he provided letters dated 1826 and 1838 from two descendants of Jones's sister, Mary Ann Lowden, who had granted him power of attorney. Both descendants were dead by the time of the court action. Despite writing about the will in his book, Sherburne told the court that Jones had died intestate and that he anticipated there would be no money to claim for Jones's heirs, who had already received some cash from the US government. He did believe there would be a small amount due to Jones's crew. By downplaying the money involved, Sherburne was able to win the court order appointing him administrator by posting a $500 bond instead of a bond equal to the amount of money at stake (as was usual).

Janette Taylor, Jones's niece, got wind of what Sherburne was up to and filed an appeal, arguing that Sherburne had no standing to be administrator because Jones had left a will and his heirs were known. The court let Sherburne keep his authority to administer on behalf of the estate in the United States, but ordered him to post a $30,000 bond. Sherburne missed the deadline, and his rights as an administrator were revoked, a decision that was upheld on appeal on August 22, 1842. The claim itself lingered but was finally paid on July 6, 1848, some fifty-six years after Jones died and on what would have been his 101st birthday.
⁴

Sherburne wasn't done with Jones, though. In 1845, he approached navy secretary George Bancroft seeking permission to use a navy ship to bring Jones's body to the United States for a proper burial and memorial. Never mind that he didn't know where the body was. It didn't matter; Bancroft never responded. (Bancroft, in a bit of historical symmetry, also founded the US Naval Academy at Annapolis that same year.)

Sherburne moved on to other projects. When his father died fifteen years earlier, in 1830, Sherburne had inherited the old man's library, which included a copy of
The History of the Administration of John Adams.
A controversial book, it had been published in 1802 and then immediately bought up by some of those scandalized by what the author, John Wood, had written. Aaron Burr, in particular, took umbrage, claiming libel and factual errors, and Wood, in a change of heart, wrote his own publisher repudiating the work, asking that it be scrapped, and offering to pay for the production costs. The printed copies were dumped in a pile and burned, but a few copies escaped the conflagration. One of those copies was in the Sherburne family library; Sherburne claimed (without detailing how he knew) the book had been a gift from Jefferson, a political rival of Adams, to his father.
⁵

Sherburne began shopping the book around in 1840 and finally found a taker at Walker and Gillis, publishers in Philadelphia. As the book neared publication, the publisher distributed a pamphlet seeking subscribers, promising that the book would be “printed on fine white paper; new type, bound in cloth of 400 pages and delivered for one dollar.” Sherburne sent copies of the prospectus far and wide, including to President James Polk, saying that the former president and son of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, had “
personally
observed to me at his own mansion that should the work be
published, he should publicly notice it in order to correct the early history of the Republic.”
⁶

The new version, with an introduction by Sherburne detailing the book's history, was published in 1846 as
The Suppressed History of the Administration of John Adams.
Sherburne's additions were a distraction. His writing voice was pompous, spotlighting his family connections and heritage with an overwrought writing style common to the era. Critics found as little to like in it as they had in Sherburne's life of Jones. “Fortunate indeed is it that the endorsement of [Sherburne's] name is not sufficient celebrity to give it currency,” the
Southern and Western Literary Messenger and Review
wrote of the book. “A want of method and discrimination is manifest in this volume as well as in the Life of Jones, both exhibiting a dull collection of disjointed documents thrown together without order, taste, or judgment, while to keep up the appearance of legitimate narrative…. The conclusions at which Mr. Sherburne arrives in almost every instance, so palpably contradict truth as to excite disgust in every reader conversant with our annals.”
⁷
The review was unfair; the book was written by Wood, not Sherburne, so he wasn't responsible for its disjointed nature. Still, it was hardly the kind of review any writer would want to stomach.

Yet Sherburne kept writing. He had traveled to Europe in the mid-1840s and in 1847 published
The Tourist's Guide, or Pencillings in England and on the Continent with the Expenses, Conveyances, Distances, Sights, Hôtels, Etc., and Important Hints to the Tourist
(Philadelphia: G.B. Zeiber and Co.). Later that year he was back in England, part of a tour that would also take him to Ireland and France. He rented a room at 96 Strand, in the heart of the hustle and bustle of London. Part of his trip was to serve as something of a diplomatic courier, “as bearer of dispatches” to, among others, George Bancroft, who had been moved from President Polk's cabinet to the Court of St. James's as the American minister to Great Britain.