IN LATE NOVEMBER 1898, Americans in Paris carved out a little piece of home by celebrating Thanksgiving with private dinners and a handful of public functions. In the most high-profile celebration, Consul General Gowdy presided over a banquet at the ornate Hôtel Continental, where the American peace delegation was housed, midway between the Tuileries gardens and la Place de Vendôme. The toasts and speeches went late into the night. Horace Porter, a West Point graduate, gave one of the addresses, speaking of the American universities that had spawned leaders “who have won distinguished positions not only in war, but in the Cabinet and on the bench, whose renown has extended to the uttermost parts of the earth.” Other celebrations stretched into the weekend, including a gathering of expatriate art students in “club rooms” along the Quai de Conti, a party that seems likely to have been much livelier than the speeches delivered at the Continental.1
A few days after Thanksgiving, Congressman Landis’s letter, in which he wondered about the location of Jones’s body, arrived at Gowdy’s desk. The letter itself has disappeared, but given the men’s relationship back in Indiana, the tone was likely a personal overture from one friend to another rather than a congressman’s formal request for assistance.
Gowdy seems to have made a perfunctory search and replied in early January that he agreed with Landis that the United States had been remiss in not trying to find Jones’s body and in not according him an appropriate memorial. “It does seem strange that we have not identified ourselves in gratitude to him who fought our battles at sea in our struggle for independence,” Gowdy wrote. “Every thoughtful American citizen can not but feel the deepest regret that we have shown no interest in his resting place” while “other heroes of the Revolution have been marked, and honor paid…. He certainly deserves a fitting memorial as the great hero that he was, and as the founder of our American navy.”2 Still, Gowdy couldn’t be particularly encouraging. “I very much fear that the remains of John Paul Jones lie in the Catacombs,” the vast network of old quarries and tunnels beneath Paris that hold the unidentifiable remains of some six million people that had been moved there over the decades from old Parisian cemeteries. “I am still trying to get some information, if possible, and if I succeed will write you at once.”
The truth was, it seemed no one knew where Jones’s body might be, in part because of the confusion sown by the French Revolution and in part because, as the legend of John Paul Jones grew, so too did erroneous details of his life and death. Public interest in the mercurial war hero had surged and ebbed. In the early 1800s, while the United States was still finding its place in the world, letters between Jones and some of the Revolutionary-era heroes were reprinted in pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines, the first wave of image-buffing.
Books also emerged, beginning with a translation of Jones’s private memoir of his role in the American Revolution, which he had written for the French king Louis XVI. The book was published in Paris in 1798 as Memoires de Paul Jones by “Citoyen Andre,” Benoit Andre, Jones’s secretary. Eight years later, a first-person memoir of the Bonhomme Richard’s fight with the Serapis came out in the United States. Called Narrative of the Adventures of an American Navy Officer, the book was published anonymously because of its scandalous details about Jones, from his treatment of his men to his ego and his rather full love life in bordellos and in the boudoirs of married women. The author was identified in subsequent printings as Captain Nathaniel Fanning, the midshipman who had directed the rigging-level battle against the Serapis. After Fanning died of yellow fever on September 30, 1805, in Charleston, South Carolina, his brother, Edmund, a writer, published the book to raise money for Fanning’s widow.3
That book is most interesting for the details Fanning included about the battle with the Serapis. Published well before other books that began to romanticize Jones and the famous sea fight off Flamborough Head, Fanning described four hours of blood-soaked confusion, with cannons blasting through timbers and limbs, cutlasses gashing deeply into flesh, and flaming decks slick with gore. Fanning wrote that at one point, as word circulated that Jones and his top lieutenants were dead, three of his crewmen called out a surrender and began lowering the Bonhomme Richard’s flag as a signal that they had given up. A very much alive Jones shouted out, “What damned rascals are them! Shoot them! Kill them!” Then the commander threw his unloaded pistols at the men, cracking the skull of one of them and knocking him unconscious. The flag remained aloft, and the fighting raged on. When the battle ended, its cost was clear: “I now took a full view of the mangled carcasses of the slain on board of our ship; especially between decks, where the bloody scene was enough to appall the stoutest heart. To see the dead lying in heaps—to hear the groans of the wounded and dying—the entrails of the dead scattered promiscuously around, the blood (American, too) over ones shoes, was enough to move pity from the most hardened and callous breast.”4
Most of the books about Jones, though, ignored the brutality of the battles in which he fought and the occasional petulance of his character, preferring instead to frame him as the embodiment of what many supposed a great naval leader should be: smart, brave, and daring, with a touch of insouciance thrown in. And they served to rehabilitate a reputation that during Jones’s lifetime had been dragged down by his personality, his womanizing, and the scandalous circumstances of his departure from Russia. While admired for his seamanship, bravery, creativity (attacking White-haven might have failed militarily, but it had had a significant psychological effect on the British), and ferocity in battle, Jones’s peers simultaneously disparaged him for his ego and boorishness. Naked ambition and a need for public recognition aren’t very endearing qualities, and, in the words of James Fenimore Cooper, they engendered “a species of indefinite distrust [that] clouded his reputation even in America, until the industry of his biographers” began reconstructing his public persona.5
Yet Cooper was part of that reconstruction himself. He helped popularize Jones with his novel The Pilot, published in 1823—just after The Pioneers, which established Cooper as the nation’s preeminent novelist. The Pilot was based on Jones’s raids on the British coast. A former navy midshipman himself, Cooper wrote the book in part as a response to earlier sea tales by Sir Walter Scott, which Cooper thought had failed to capture the spirit of life at sea, because Scott was not a sailor himself. “Paul Jones is the real hero of the novel,” one review said. “Its principal design is to delineate his skill and courage in the most desperate enterprises.” The review then left Cooper’s book behind and offered a lengthy biography of Jones. Like other articles of the period, the spotlight was focused on Jones’s bravery and contributions to the Revolution, while the more sordid details of his life fell into the shadows.6 Yet Cooper himself was ambivalent about Jones’s character, and a close reading of The Pilot suggests Cooper viewed him as a consummate sailor and commander but also a man nursing resentment against the aristocratic class for not granting him the recognition he so craved.7
With the newfound interest in Jones, newspapers and magazines reprinted even more letters between Jones and figures in the Revolution, some of whom, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were still alive. This helped cement Jones’s public image as a hero of the Revolution while the young nation faced growing tensions over slavery, nagging economic crises, and political turmoil between the Whigs, who favored a more powerful Congress, and Jacksonian Democrats, who simultaneously championed the voice of the common man and sought a stronger presidency. They were divisive, distracting times, and one gets the sense that readers of The Pilot and the reprinted Jones letters were looking for the comfort of nostalgia and a time when the political options seemed simpler: freedom or colonial subjugation.
Jones himself, despite his lack of formal education, was a prodigious letter writer. In the latter years of his life and career, he kept copies of many of the letters he sent as well as those he received, leaving behind a significant paper trail. Or rather, many trails, for after his death the letters scattered to the winds. When Jones left for Europe at the end of the Revolutionary War to try to recover the prize money from the ships he and his crews had captured, he put his logbooks and other papers in the hands of his friend Robert Morris in Philadelphia. The rest, mostly letters, he took with him, and they were part of the estate bequeathed to his two sisters when he died.
The estate also included claims to war prizes, and the sisters and their heirs spent years petitioning Congress to make good on debts owed—primarily, three ships and cargo Jones had captured and sent to Bergen in Norway, then under Denmark’s rule. Denmark, to appease the British, seized the ships and returned them to England, creating a diplomatic rift with the United States. The heirs believed the issue was between the US government and Denmark; in the interim, the US government owed them their prizes. Jones’s heirs hired Robert Hyslop, a lawyer and family friend in New York (Jones had stayed with him in the summer of 1787), to handle the estate’s American claims, including petitioning the young House of Representatives “for compensation of services rendered, or property to be secured and recovered in this country.”8 It would be decades before that claim was settled.
While the family members seemed to be hungry for their due under Jones’s will, some were also cognizant of their connection with history. At the sisters’ direction, Hyslop obtained the papers that Jones had left with Morris in Philadelphia. There were some rustlings about getting them published, but nothing materialized. In late March 1820, Janette Taylor, Janet Taylor’s daughter9 and Jones’s niece in Edinburgh, Scotland, wrote to Hyslop that she possessed a large—though incomplete—collection of Jones’s letters, many of them to or from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, the Marquis de Lafayette, and other key players from those tumultuous years. Taylor had contemplated publishing the papers in England but feared Jones’s anti-British comments would be suppressed.
The family wanted to publish the letters at a profit, yes, but not at the expense of history. “I apprehend the suppression would have essentially injured the work,” the niece wrote, adding that she hoped the letters would “exhibit my uncle’s character in a just point of view.” She asked Hyslop to show the letters around and “let me know if there is any bookseller in New York, who would undertake to publish them, and what I may expect for them. There is one thing however, must be insisted upon, which is, that they are not to be garbled, but are to be given to the world just as they are, without either adding or diminishing.” She acknowledged it was impossible to get an estimate since Hyslop did not have all of the letters, but “you may perhaps, after enquiry, have it in your power to give me a hint of what it is probable that I might receive. If you will have the goodness to assist me in this affair, the papers shall be sent to you, addressed as you shall direct, and to be disposed of as you think best; with only this one provision—that they must be published as they are.”10
It’s unclear how many of Jones’s letters Taylor sent along, but it was only a taste of the collection. Hyslop approached the New-York Historical Society, whose members saw the value of the letters, but a book project there fell through. Hyslop died, and the letters passed into the possession of his brother, John Hyslop, who owned a bakery in New York, and from there to a man named George A. Ward, who turned them over to John H. Sherburne, register of the US Navy.
Sherburne was already at work on what he hoped would be a biography of Jones. He advertised in newspapers that he was seeking letters and other details on the war hero’s life, and he approached the Taylors for whatever documents they might have. Jones’s heirs refused to share any letters, likely because they were planning their own book. Sherburne, though, gathered letters from other sources, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He had asked Jefferson for his memories of Jones, but Jefferson, then eighty-two years old, demurred. “My memory is so decayed that from that source I can furnish you nothing worth a place in his history,” Jefferson replied. “I believe I cannot better comply with your request than by sending you all the papers relating to him in my presence.”11
Sherburne published his book, Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones, in 1825 to scathing reviews. Sherburne did little with the material, simply stitching together excerpts of the letters he collected, with transitions of over-the-top accolades for the Scottish captain. The New-York Review and Atheneum Magazine dismissed the book as a money-grubbing exercise by Sherburne that fell far short of the project he had advertised at the start in hopes of gaining public subscriptions. (It was common at the time to publish a book based on preorders by readers.) “We do not hesitate to declare it our opinion that Mr. Sherburne has unfairly disappointed the expectations he had so industriously excited,” the magazine wrote. The work indicates “an ignorance of history, and a crudeness of style, only pardonable in a work of the most moderate pretensions. The want of method and discrimination manifest in the selection of the letters, induces us to believe, that they were taken blindfold[ed] from the mass to complete the complement of pages…. In short, it is very palpably, a money-making concern, and Mr. Sherburne, the editor, and Mr. Van Zandt, the compiler [publisher], are probably the only persons not disappointed.”12 Another critic writing the foreword to a later biography incorporating the Taylors’ letters dismissed Sherburne’s work as having been presided over by “some singularly capricious demon, wonderfully ingenious in producing puzzling and painful disorder.”13
Still, the book helped fan interest in Jones. In 1830, the Taylor collection was finally published in New York. A year later, an American naval lieutenant named Alexander B. Pinkham took a year’s leave to travel to the British Isles to seek out the haunts of some of his favorite authors, such as poet Robert Burns and novelist Sir Walter Scott, who was still living. He also wanted to visit the birthplace of Jones, “whose memory he venerated to the point of idolatry, not only as a brother sailor and adopted citizen of America, but above all as the first man who dared to hoist the flag of independence on the gigantic waters of the new world.”14
Pinkham, the son of an American whaling captain and a Scottish mother, was a powerfully built, heavyset man, gentle in demeanor despite his prizefighter physique, with a face reddened and worn by years of sea, sun, and wind. He landed at Cork in southwest Ireland with a small stash of cash, a single faded blue suit, and a knapsack “containing a change of linen, materials for writing, and a few books and mathematical instruments.” After wandering Ireland for a few weeks, Pinkham shipped out from Dublin across the Irish Sea to Liverpool and then headed north to Dumfries, where he spent a few days resting up and visiting with the editor of the local newspaper. From there, Pinkham journeyed some fourteen miles west to Jones’s boyhood home at Arbigland, where he was saddened to the point of tears to find the cottage a roofless wreck. He sketched the ruins in his notebook and continued on his travels.
Pinkham wandered western Scotland for a few weeks, then crossed to the east and tried to visit Scott, who refused to see him. (Scott had recently suffered from a stroke and would die the next year.) Pinkham was disappointed but did manage to have breakfast with poet James Hogg, a friend of Scott. He then spent several days in Edinburgh.
Yet Pinkham was haunted by the condition of Jones’s childhood home. So he reversed course and returned to Dumfries with a plan. Working through the local editor he had befriended when he first arrived, Pinkham approached the owner of the estate, D. H. Craik, and gained his permission to have the cottage reroofed and made habitable. Pinkham left twenty-five gold sovereigns with his editor friend to cover the cost. The amount, though substantial for a wandering seaman, was insufficient for the project; Craik made up the difference, and the cottage was restored the next spring. The renovated building, with its white walls visible from the bay, became a local sailing landmark. Its first tenant was the widow of a local fisherman who had drowned at sea. It stills stands as a summer tourist destination.
Over the next twenty years, Jones’s legacy made recurring appearances in official Washington and in popular culture in the United States as well as Europe. In Washington, Congress voted in 1834 to honor the commodore by naming a frigate after him, though the plans were never carried out.
In Paris, Alexandre Dumas père wrote the play Paul Jones: A Drama in Five Acts in 1838 and then converted it into a serialized novel, Le Capitaine Paul. Though viewed as something of a sequel to Cooper’s The Pilot, Dumas’s work made Jones a French captain and staged most of the scenes in Brittany, apparently several years after Dumas had visited Lorient, the home port for Jones’s real-life forays to England. The play was largely ignored, but Dumas’s serialized novel sold well, and several London-based houses published English translations that were also sold in the United States.
In 1841, US Navy captain Alexander Slidell Mackenzie—a writer as well as a career navy man—published another biography, Life of John Paul Jones, which received wide attention and sales. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was not a fan of Mackenzie or his work, however. “Mackenzie, I have discovered, is authority for nothing,” Cooper wrote to fellow author William Gilmore Simms in January 1844. “I do not accuse him of intentional departures from the truth, but he has an obliquity of mind, and an obtuseness of morals that are almost as bad.”15
Part of Cooper’s dislike for Mackenzie was rooted in a moment of high drama at sea. In November 1842, the year after his Jones biography appeared, Mackenzie ordered that three crewmen be executed after hearing rumors of a possible mutiny aboard the Somers, which was under his command as a training ship for young navy men. The plot purportedly included killing Mackenzie and his officers and converting the ship to piracy. The thin evidence was a conversation between the alleged ringleader and a crewman he supposedly sought to enlist in the conspiracy. Even more troubling was the nature of the Somers’s mission. It was a training ship crewed primarily by teenage midshipmen to test them for careers at sea. The alleged plot, and Mackenzie’s reaction to it, was akin to a school headmaster inflicting capital punishment, and it sparked an uproar, as well as questions about how the US Navy was training young seamen. When the Somers reached port, Mackenzie faced a court martial that was closely followed by the public because one of the dead mutineers, Midshipman Philip Spencer, was the son of a political appointee: John C. Spencer, secretary of war. But the military appeared to take care of its own, clearing Mackenzie of any wrongdoing in a process many dismissed as a whitewash. Cooper was outraged. He conducted his own review of the inquiry based on the transcript, resulting in the 1844 publication of a scathing indictment of the scandal and of the navy’s failure to deliver justice for the three young men against whom Cooper saw little evidence of culpability.
Cooper, whose novels made him one of the century’s most recognized American writers, had returned to Jones and his life story in 1843, publishing a two-part biography in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine as part of a series of profiles destined to be collected in a book. Near the end of the piece, Cooper wrote that Jones’s body had been buried in Paris’s famous Père Lachaise cemetery. Taylor, Jones’s niece, was living then in New York City; she read the articles and sent Cooper a lengthy letter telling him she found the profile “substantially though not precisely correct—its errors are of minor importance.” Because Cooper planned to include a variation of the articles in a forthcoming book, Taylor said she felt compelled to correct the errors she had found, including where Jones had been buried. Père Lachaise, she pointed out, didn’t open until 1812 (she got the year wrong; it was 1804), well after Jones died in 1792. So Jones could not have been buried there. “He was interred in the old Protestant burial ground, purchased by Lord Viscount Stormont (afterwards Earl of Mansfield) when British Ambassador at the Court of France—it was situated near the Barriere du Combat, and is now, I believe, totally covered with buildings.”
Three years after receiving Taylor’s letter, Cooper finally published his Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, which included a chapter on Jones based on the magazine articles. Cooper left out some of Taylor’s added details but corrected the burial error from his magazine piece, writing that Jones “was interred in a cemetery that no longer exists, but which then was used, near la Barriere du Combat, for the interment of Protestants. It is probable that no traces of his grave could now be found.”16
While that 1846 description of Jones’s final resting spot seems vague, it was only a half century after Jones’s death. To those who knew Paris and Parisian history, there was enough evidence to find the cemetery. Over the centuries, Paris had been encircled by a series of walls, new supplanting old as the city expanded. In 1784, the farmers-general, tax-collecting financiers appointed by Louis XVI, ordered the construction of a fifteen-mile (twenty-four-kilometer) wall around Paris, encompassing some undeveloped areas that had previously been tax-free zones. The wall included sixteen gates aimed at controlling the flow of goods in and out of Paris; they were, in essence, tax collection booths in a customs barrier.17 The Combat district of Paris was in the northeast and encompassed a low hill called Montfaucon. During the Middle Ages it had been a site of public executions. Bodies would dangle from le gibet de Montfaucon—the gallows of Montfaucon—for, in extreme cases, two or three years. Later, the neighborhood earned its Combat name as the site of animal fights and eventually became a slaughterhouse for horses.18
By the late 1700s, the stench of death was gone, but the neighborhood was a crime-ridden slum. When the barriere was built through Combat, the ornate gatehouse was erected near present-day Place du Colonel Fabien—just a few hundred yards from l’Hôpital Saint-Louis and its Protestant graveyard, and about two miles northwest of Père Lachaise cemetery. Neither Taylor nor Cooper specified the name of the cemetery nor the street it was on, but a reader with access to old maps and knowledge of some of Paris’s history would have found enough clues to locate the cemetery, the only one that had accepted Protestant bodies in that era. But to the uninformed, Cooper’s reference just looked like another dead end.
No one, it seems, bothered to look in the obvious place: Paris’s l’Hôtel de Ville, or City Hall, where Parisian bureaucrats kept detailed records of burials in city cemeteries. Except one person: Charles Read, the French-born son of Scottish Protestants. In 1849 Read had been appointed assistant director of the department of non-Roman Catholic religions at France’s interior ministry, where he helped reorganize the Protestant churches in France, cofounded the Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, and wrote several books on Protestant history.
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.