The Admiral and the Ambassador (43 page)

Bonaparte made the public announcement that the ceremony would be held April 24, at which time Jones's body would be moved from the temporary vault and installed in one of Flagg's completed buildings until the crypt below the chapel could be completed. It would be a grand and fitting celebration, including comments by President Roosevelt, Ambassador Porter, and others. It was lightly noted that the placement of the body would once again be temporary. It would allow official Washington to wash its hands of the matter and pretend that justice had been done to the memory of the Revolutionary War hero.

So Annapolis prepared for a party. And once again, Jones's bones would be set aside and, for a time, forgotten.

As April 24 neared, the yachting class of Baltimore and Washington made their own plans for attending the celebration. Boats began arriving off Annapolis a day or two early, and what had been intended as a quiet and reverent celebration began taking on the trappings of a national holiday. The Daughters of the American Revolution chartered a steamship from Baltimore to ferry its members to Annapolis, where the group had managed to arrange a separate reserved section of seating for the ceremony. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Baltimore similarly leased the
Susquehanna
steamship and packed some 250 members aboard for the daylong excursion, though only a few had tickets to the event itself. The ship left at 9 AM, and the passengers enjoyed Smithfield ham steamed in champagne and “other tidbits,” an open bar, and music. The day was raw—chilly and strong winds kept the passengers inside—but good for sailing, and the
Baltimore Sun
noted that the
Susquehanna
engaged in an impromptu ten-mile race with a steam-powered yacht owned by R. Brent Keyser, the chairman of the board of Johns Hopkins University. When the
Susquehanna
reached Annapolis, it did a couple of turns around a flotilla of eight US and three French naval ships that had anchored about five miles into the Chesapeake as part of the celebration. Then the steamship headed for the levy, where it docked temporarily as the passengers swarmed
ashore. Smaller yachts anchored offshore and ferried their passengers to the academy in small launches. Still others came by land, and as the morning progressed, the grounds slowly filled. For most, the day was an excursion, with an overlay of patriotism.
¹²

Bonaparte's office had sent out six thousand official invitations to the ceremony, but most of the on-site decision making was undertaken by academy superintendent Sands. Requests poured in from passenger ship companies and private groups seeking permission to dock at the academy pier to offload passengers.

Given the historic and patriotic underpinnings of the day, newspaper reporters were dispatched as well. The
Baltimore Sun
requested seats for four reporters, and
Collier's,
the Associated Press, and several New York and Washington newspapers staffed the event as well. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company sought permission to film the event, offering to sell the navy a copy of the film for the standard rate of twelve cents per foot. Extra trains were added to the regular services from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. A special train dubbed the “Congressional Unlimited” made its way from Washington with 750 passengers, including more than thirty US senators and representatives.

Some had deep personal interest in the celebration. Henry T. Rainey, as a freshman member of Congress, had sponsored a bill three years earlier to pay for the search and repatriation of Jones's body. (That bill died in committee.) Charles B. Landis was aboard too. His letter to American consul general Gowdy in November 1898 could well have been the catalyst for the extensive search for—and Porter's obsession with finding—Jones's body. Yet questions bubbled about whether they were going to spend the day celebrating around the body of John Paul Jones or that of some unknown Frenchman. The discussion prompted a bit of satire from
Washington Post
reporter Josephine Tighe, who was aboard the train: “It was echoed and re-echoed all day, ‘It is. It isn't.' The starboard piston rod plunging in and out of the cylinder said, with the escaping steam, ‘It iss, it iss, it iss hiss body,' The port piston rod shrieked in angry response on the other side: ‘It issn't, it issn't hiss body.' The smokestack thundered out: ‘Piff, paff, pouff; what's the odds bodikins?'”
¹³

President Roosevelt, with an entourage of about eighty people—including Porter, who had traveled from New York City, members of the cabinet, and France's ambassador to the United States—boarded his own special
three-car train at the Baltimore and Ohio station around 11 o'clock that morning. The entourage arrived at Annapolis around 12:45 PM and was greeted by superintendent Sands and other Annapolis dignitaries. They boarded motorcars for the short trip to the grounds, cheered by onlookers as they passed in an informal parade. Roosevelt, Porter, the French ambassador, and other high-ranking officials immediately went to a private reception at Sands's house, hosted by Maryland's Governor Warfield, while others were entertained at luncheons scattered around the grounds and the village hotels. By then the grounds—in fact, Annapolis itself—were swarmed by visitors. Thousands of people crammed into the village, filling the few small hotels, bars, and restaurants. It's unclear whether those without tickets realized there would be little for them to see.
¹⁴

The biggest room on the grounds was within the massive armory, which was some 425 feet long and 100 feet wide, a cavernous structure large enough for indoor parade exercises, a basketball court, and a second-floor running track designed as a four-sided balcony overlooking the floor below. On this day, the armory would serve as a chapel. Sands and his superiors at the Department of the Navy decided that the tone should be more commemoration than funeral, since Jones was long dead and had been eulogized several times before. So, early in the day, midshipmen retrieved the body from the brick vault and moved it with solemnity but no ceremony to a stand near the midpoint of the armory, where they laid it in front of a temporary stage that would hold Roosevelt, Porter, and other speakers. The coffin was draped with an American naval union jack—a large dark blue flag decorated with foot-wide white stars. Other union jacks festooned the front of the balcony and the stage, and chairs were placed on the main floor facing the coffin and the speakers' stand. A double row of some eight hundred midshipmen stood at attention around the armory walls, and gold strips of cloth accented the deep blue of the union jack bunting.

The program was scheduled to begin at 2 PM, but it wasn't until just before 2:30 PM that Roosevelt and his entourage entered the armory through the southwest doors, the crowd rising to its feet in a cheering mass. Roosevelt made his way to the middle of the armory then mounted the short flight of stairs to the speakers' stand, joined by French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand; Bonaparte, the navy secretary; Maryland governor Warfield; and Porter. Before they could sit down, and as the audience members slowly gained their
feet, the Baltimore Oratorio Society launched into the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” their meshed voices resonating through the large open space. When they finished and as the audience settled back into their seats, Bonaparte stepped forward and in a loud, projecting voice introduced Roosevelt.

The president spoke for nearly a half hour, beginning with an endorsement of the longstanding relations between the United States and France and then offering his thanks and congratulations to Ambassador Porter “to whose zealous devotion we particularly owe it that the body of John Paul Jones has been brought to our shores.” Roosevelt explained that he had finally settled on Annapolis as the resting place for Jones after lobbying from an array of cities. “I feel that the place of all others in which the memory of the dead hero will most surely be a living force is here in Annapolis, where year by year we turn out the midshipmen who are to officer in the future Navy, among whose founders the dead man stands first.” For those men, he said, Jones's life and career are “not merely a subject for admiration and respect, but an object lesson to be taken into their innermost hearts…. Every officer in our Navy should feel in each fiber of his being an eager desire to emulate the energy, the professional capacity, the indomitable determination and dauntless scorn of death which marked John Paul Jones above all his fellows.”

President Theodore Roosevelt speaks at the April 1906 commemoration of John Paul Jones at Annapolis. Seated, from left, navy secretary Charles J. Bonaparte, French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand, Maryland governor Edwin Warfield, former ambassador Horace Porter, and Admiral James H. Sands, superintendent of the US Naval Academy.

Courtesy of the National Archives, RG 19-NV, records of the Bureau of Ships, box 1

Roosevelt went on to summarize Jones's greatest moments, and he then urged members of Congress and his own administration to study more history—a favorite topic of the president's—so as to recognize that national security was defended by a robust military, including a navy. He argued that the United States had suffered during the War of 1812 from a lack of readiness and that the nation would again be at risk if it did not invest in its defense. He concluded with a direct call to the navy for better devotion to preparedness. “You will be worthless in war if you have not prepared yourself for it in peace,” the president said, leaning over the rail while reading from a sheaf of papers in his right hand. “Remember that no courage can ever atone for lack of that preparedness which makes the courage valuable. And yet if the courage is there, if the dauntless heart is there, its presence will sometimes make up for other shortcomings…. If with it are combined the other military qualities, the fortunate owner becomes literally invincible.”

Jusserand, the French ambassador, followed, detailing Jones's close relationship with France, from his friendship with the Marquis de Lafayette and King Louis XVI to his reliance on French ports to mount his raids on the British coast. “He died in France, who had proved for him another motherland, and who honored him dead as she had alive. But he had done his life's work, and that work consisted not only in playing splendidly his part in the struggle for freedom, but also in showing the young Republic the importance of having a navy of her own…. His dream, or rather, his prophecy, has been fulfilled.”

As Jusserand moved to his chair, the armory filled with applause. Bonaparte rose and stepped to the front of the stage to introduce Porter, who in turn stepped forward to thunderous applause and cheers.

“This day America reclaims her illustrious dead,” Porter began, his words flowing over the fan-array of chairs and up to the second-level balcony. “We gather here in the presence of the Chief Magistrate of the nation and of this vast concourse of representative citizens of the Old World and
the New to pay our homage to the leading historic figure in the early annals of the American Navy, to testify that his name is not a dead memory, but a living reality. To quicken our sense of appreciation, and to give assurance that the transfer of his remains to the land upon whose arms he shed so much luster is not lacking in distinction by reason of the long delay.”

He went on, as had the others, to detail some of Jones's exploits, a history “that reads more like romance than reality…. He was a many-sided man. On the water, he was a wizard of the sea. On the land he showed himself an adept in the realms of diplomacy.” Porter had had a lot of time to prepare his remarks, and they offered a sugarcoated portrait of the man Porter knew to have embraced many faults, from his occasionally harsh treatment of his men to his vanity, sexual dalliances, and other weaknesses. But this wasn't the platform from which to deliver the full portrait of Jones. It was the platform for extolling patriotism and for gently arranging the hero's shroud.

“Paul Jones never sailed in a man-of-war whose quarterdeck was worthy of being trodden by his feet,” Porter told the crowd. “His battles were won not by his ships, but by his genius.” Porter detailed Jones's victories: raids on British soil, some sixty vessels captured, the seizure of British weaponry, more than a million dollars' worth of floating prizes and cargo, and the capture of hundreds of enemy prisoners. “He was the very personification of valor. He ranked courage as the manliest of human attributes. He loved brave men; he loathed cowards. He believed there was scarcely a sin for which courage could not atone.”