The Admiral and the Ambassador (34 page)

The work would be done by Weiss's government crews, but Porter would reimburse the cost, which he estimated wouldn't exceed 130,000 francs, or $25,300, “supposing that the body should be found only at the last stroke of the pick.” Another 10,000 francs would be set aside in case the buildings needed to be repaired or if a worker became injured. With other incidentals, Porter predicted the project would cost at most $35,000 and probably less. It seemed unlikely, Porter believed, that Jones would have been tucked in among the older bodies. “As the search would begin at the opposite extremities the chances are that the body would be found without having to run the excavation under the entire property and that the expense would be reduced accordingly.”
¹⁰

Porter had put a lot of thought into the likelihood of success. Even after he had received Ricaudy's report and been persuaded that Jones had been buried in the Saint Louis cemetery and never disinterred, he continued to track down leads of skepticism that came in letters from people who had read newspaper stories about the search. And he challenged his own logic and conclusions too. One of the questions was how many coffins might be found. Most of the dead, Porter reasoned, had been poor and not likely buried in coffins, let alone expensive lead coffins, as Jones had been. “It is highly probable that there are not a dozen such coffins there,” Porter said. Further, it seemed likely, given the expense, that the lead coffins would have nameplates. “If the name is not on the coffin, the identification might be verified by its location in the cemetery among the last buried there” or by matching the measurements of the body inside with what was known about Jones. There had been medals made of Jones's likeness during his life and well after his death, and Porter approached one of the mints that had made them and ordered some new copies. These he tucked away in case a body was found and the likenesses could be matched.
¹¹

Porter put most of those details in a letter to Hay, the secretary of state, as a precursor to a request that Congress be asked to appropriate $35,000 to pay for the project. He told Hay that Crignier and the tenants would not agree in writing to a set time to start the project but that he felt he had a few weeks of leeway and hoped that Congress would act quickly.

The bigger issue was the weather. The general sense among all involved was that the dig should occur “before the approach of warm weather as
there is objection here to turning up cemetery earth at that season for fear of creating sickness.” Porter reminded Hay that he had underwritten the cost of the search himself, not wanting to use public funds for a speculative project. “I now feel justified in recommending an appeal to Congress…. Even if the whole of the collected evidence should prove deceptive and for some unaccountable reason the body after all should not be found, it seems to me that it would be well worth this small expenditure and all the trouble taken to settle once and forever the question of the possibility of discovering this historic grave.”
¹²

Porter wrote separately to Roosevelt, appealing to the president's always simmering sense of patriotism. “It is humiliating to feel that this famous character in American history was buried by charity and has lain for more than a century in a squalid quarter of a foreign city in a forgotten grave. Knowing the interest you have taken in this matter I feel that you will be glad to send a message to Congress asking for the appropriation I have recommended for the recovery of the body. The finding of his remains, bringing them home in a war vessel, and giving them decent sepulture, say at Arlington, in the land upon whose history he shed such luster, would, I am sure, form one of the most notable historic events of your administration.” Porter suggested the country's “patriotic societies” would likely respond warmly to the project and could be counted on to rally widespread public support. “You remember how indignant you and I and all our citizens became thirteen years ago regarding the neglected grave of General Grant.” And Roosevelt himself had played a significant role in the modern rebirth of the American navy; bringing Jones's body to America would help burnish the navy's public image.
¹³

Shortly after Porter sent those letters, Crignier and the tenants informed him that they wouldn't consider the agreement valid without some cash up front—the equivalent of $3,000. Rather than see the deal unravel, Porter shelled out the money from his own pocket, then sent off a note to Hay in Washington that he had done so. “If the government, by rejecting the appropriation, decides to abandon the opportunity now offered to make the search for the body, I shall gladly pocket the loss and feel that I have done everything in my power to consummate this much desired undertaking.” Then, as a nudge, he reminded Hay that the
$35,000 estimate “is a maximum. It may not require the expenditure of more than half that sum.”
¹⁴

The truth was, while Porter hoped the US government would pay for the project, he was forging ahead regardless. And he was in a bit of a hurry. In December, he had told Hay that he wanted to resign his ambassadorship and return to the United States. Roosevelt had won election to a full term in the White House that November, and he would be inaugurated in March. Porter had gone to Paris as McKinley's emissary, and while he and Roosevelt were friends and politically sympathetic, Porter felt a duty to resign and let Roosevelt appoint a new ambassador of his own choosing. He also wanted to do some writing, though his letters were unspecific regarding just what he wanted to write about.

There were personal reasons too. Elsie was spending most of her time in Switzerland with her young beau Edwin Mende, the son of her late mother's doctor, and the two were making plans to announce an engagement. They intended to settle in New York, where Porter's son and daughter-in-law already lived. With Sophie dead, Porter was longing for the contact of family and old friends. He would soon be sixty-eight years old, and, including his Civil War service, he had worked steadily for forty-four years. It was time to slow down.

On February 3, Porter sent a telegram to Hay as his official notice that he intended to resign, effective on a date to be determined by the president, and asked that Hay pass along the formal notification. Porter also sent a personal letter to Roosevelt updating the president on the status of various diplomatic projects and on French legislation that could affect American trade. Porter informed the president that he was quitting and wanted to be back home by summertime. “I cannot hope to make my sojourn here immortal by making it eternal and if I remain out of the country too long, I may find myself labeled like the liniment we buy in the drugstores: ‘For external use only.'”

Porter had no intention, though, of abandoning the quest for Jones's body, he told Roosevelt. “If Congress is unpatriotic enough to reject the requested appropriation, I shall bear the expense myself, having already advanced the preliminary payments necessary to bind the options I had secured from the property owners. I have arranged to make the excavations
in three sections so that I can complete the work in three or four months by giving it constant personal attention.”
¹⁵

Roosevelt replied to Porter briefly on February 6, thanking him for the Jones update and informing him that “I shall send in a message to Congress at once.” In separate telegrams over the next few weeks, he and Porter set the effective date of the resignation for April 30. Roosevelt also replied to Hay on February 6 saying that he would respond directly to Porter about the resignation and asking Hay to prepare a statement the White House could send to Congress seeking the $35,000 appropriation to recover the body and to erect “suitable monuments” in Washington to Jones and to John Barry, a Jones contemporary in the Continental navy and a rival among historians regarding the question of who should receive credit for laying the groundwork for the American navy.

Roosevelt forwarded the Hay-crafted request to Congress on February 13, along with Porter's report on why he believed he could find the body. Roosevelt, who shared Porter's interest in memorializing military greatness, urged Congress to “take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to do proper honor to the memory of John Paul Jones.” He also appealed to Congressional leaders' sense of patriotic pride, noting that he was moved to make the request in part due to a “sentiment of mingled distress and regret felt because the body of one of our greatest heroes lies forgotten and unmarked in foreign soil.” Roosevelt's request withered and died without action, something he anticipated in a letter to Porter. “I have sent in an urgent request for Congress to act on the John Paul Jones matter, but of course I have not the slightest idea whether they will or not.”

Congress might not have felt a sense of urgency, but Porter certainly did. He expected to leave France by early summer, and he desperately wanted to bring Jones's body home with him. And he wasn't waiting for Congress to act. In fact, he had already given Weiss the go-ahead to start digging—even before sending his letters and telegrams to Roosevelt and Hay. After all that time, effort, and expense in trying to figure out where Jones might be buried, Porter was about to find out whether he was right.

On the morning of Friday, February 3, Weiss and his men showed up at Mme Crignier's property and cleared out space in one of Bassigny's granary sheds to give them room to work on the first of the planned five vertical shafts. The locations of the shafts had been carefully thought out, and Porter was having Weiss play the odds. The old entry to the cemetery had been along Rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin, around the corner from the entrances to the hotel, the secondhand shop, and the granary. Visitors to the walled cemetery would have entered through a gate leading from the street into a garden holding several fruit trees, with the caretaker's cottage to the left, anchoring the street corner. The cemetery was beyond the garden's back wall, and visitors would have passed through the gate at the top of the stairs to the ground, about eight feet below the garden level. The land, sloped roughly southward, was in effect terraced. Over the years, the bodies had been methodically buried in a pattern that meant the last bodies to be interred—including Jones's—were likely buried either near the entrance or near the back wall. Porter and Weiss overlaid the old maps with the present layout of buildings on the land and concluded that the old line between the garden and the cemetery aligned roughly with the wall of the laundry building, adjacent to the hotel building. So Porter had Weiss sink the first shaft through the floor of one of the granary sheds, in a place where workers could, once they had dug deep enough, excavate horizontally beneath the laundry.

The workers, using picks and shovels, began digging through the packed earth at the surface. After the hole reached a depth of a few feet, the workers erected a hand-cranked winch to haul up buckets full of dirt, rocks, and whatever other material they might find as they gouged their way deeper. They used wheelbarrows to ferry the excavated dirt and rocks to rapidly growing piles, first in the courtyard and then in the street. The project meant the removal of tons of material, but there was no place on the property to store it until it was time to refill the holes. So Weiss and Porter rented a vacant lot two miles away and the earth was carted off on horse-drawn wagons.

It was a poor site for construction, Weiss quickly concluded. The eight feet or so of earth that had been brought in decades ago to level the cemetery with the original fruit garden had never been compacted or otherwise prepared to hold the foundations of buildings. Thus, below the surface compaction, the earth was loose and crumbled easily, and the workers had to use timbers and rocks to stabilize the shaft walls. Weiss discovered that the building foundations themselves were shallow and “did not rest upon the natural soil consisting largely of gypsum, which forms the substratum of the region, but upon made earth.”
¹⁶