HORACE PORTER, GENERALLY AN even-keeled and diplomatic man, was peeved. More than five years had passed since he had recovered John Paul Jones’s body from its forgotten grave deep below a Parisian neighborhood. More than four years had passed since he, President Roosevelt, and several thousand other people had gathered at the US Naval Academy armory to praise the dead admiral and his long-ago exploits, the body then moved temporarily to the makeshift mausoleum beneath a dormitory staircase. The problem was that the coffin was still there, propped on two sawhorses and draped with a blue-and-white jack, an ignominious grave despite the twenty-four-hour honor guard. Once the object of reverence, Jones had become the butt of jokes among irreverent midshipmen who scampered down the stairs and past the coffin. One popular ditty in “Crabtown,” as Annapolis was called, mocked the hero of the American Revolution for his rest:
Everybody works but John Paul Jones!
He lies around all day,
Body pickled in alcohol
On a permanent jag, they say.
Middies stand around him
Doing honor to his bones;
Everybody works in “Crabtown”
But John Paul Jones!
It was, in a sense, an ignominious defeat for Porter, or at least a frustration of his ambitions. Porter was a man accustomed to achieving his goals. Nearly twenty years earlier, he had taken over the Grant Monument Association and fought long odds and disinterest to finish the tomb for his old friend and personal hero, Ulysses S. Grant. As a leader of the Sons of the American Revolution, Porter had thrown his support behind monument projects in Maryland and elsewhere. He had spoken publicly about the debts that a nation owes to its war veterans, both those killed in action and those who returned safely, and what he saw as the ingratitude inherent in failing to establish proper memorials. Jones’s body was still right where the navy had stashed it after the pomp and pageantry of the Annapolis ceremony, a fate that seemed to contradict in act the respect and thanks expressed from the podium on that April day in 1906. And the root of the problem lay with Congress, which refused to spend the money to finish the crypt.
Porter was irked to the point of action. He sat down on December 3, 1910, at a desk in his Madison Avenue house in Manhattan and put his frustrations in a letter to US Representative George A. Loud, a Michigan Republican, Spanish-American War veteran, and chairman of the House navy committee, with responsibility for vetting navy funding requests. The issue, Porter argued, was no longer about creating a monument to Jones. The issue was a matter of proper respect for the dead and the symbol that Jones’s coffin now offered to navy cadets. Congress, Porter wrote, had been asked several times to allocate $135,000 to finish the crypt. Each request had languished and then died from inaction. William Howard Taft had succeeded Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, and top officials in both administrations supported the project. Several, in fact, had written Congress about the issue, as had leaders of “the Navy League, Paul Jones Clubs, patriotic societies, the press, and hosts of public-spirited citizens. All appeals to Congress thus far, however, have been without avail.” Porter’s outrage built as he wrote. “For 113 years the body of this great central figure in our naval history was allowed to lie neglected in a sort of dumping ground in a distant land, and when brought back to the country he so eminently served it has lain for five years equally neglected, stowed away like old lumber,” Porter wrote. “The body was taken by the Government to Annapolis, believing that the memories it would awake would be an inspiration to the midshipmen at the Academy. Instead of that, it remains only as a reminder of a nation’s humiliating neglect of its historic defenders and is a sad example to young men about to enter the naval service.”1
If Congress was not willing to finish the crypt, Porter warned, other solutions were possible. “A number of patriotic gentlemen are willing to provide the means for taking the body for burial, if permitted, to a lot on a city cemetery if this session of Congress refused it a sepulcher, so that the remains may rest at least in consecrated ground.” Porter reminded Loud that Jones had been buried in Paris as an act of charity, and “it would constitute a further national disgrace to leave his remains to be buried in his own country again by the hand of charity.” It was not an empty threat. The man who had raised the money to build Grant’s Tomb and to elect a president would have no trouble putting together an organization to steal away the body and give Jones a proper grave.
Porter didn’t refer to it in his letter, but Congress was balking both from a penurious spirit and because some of them still doubted that Porter had, indeed, found John Paul Jones.2 The questions began in Paris as the dig was underway, with local wits joking that the Americans were going to a lot of trouble to move an unidentified Frenchmen to a fresh grave across the Atlantic. The genesis of the skepticism was a general belief that a body interred for more than a century would no longer be identifiable, despite the alcohol bath in which it had been laid to rest. There also were questions about the methods Porter and his array of experts had used to identify the body. How accurate could a Houdon bust be for the purposes of making an identity by comparison, given an artist’s predisposition to artistic license? And there was speculation that Porter, about to leave the country, had so wanted to find the body that he was ready to believe in the flimsiest of evidence. Other news articles put forward unsubstantiated claims that Jones’s body had been moved to Scotland years before and buried near his hometown. (Porter had already ruled that out through an inquiry to the pastor of the church where the body was supposedly interred.)3
The Chicago Daily Tribune, which had followed Porter’s quest closely in part through the dispatches of Charles Inman Barnard, was one of the first to publicly raise questions in the United States. In a lightly mocking editorial, the editors wondered what the misidentified corpse’s spirit would be saying at his disinterment. He “may be wondering how to get even with the person who has transplanted his remains to a foreign land. Nobody wishes to find himself among strangers on resurrection day.” It went on to say that “it may not be civil to investigate a gift corpse too closely,” but that, indeed, such an investigation was warranted, even granting Porter’s benevolent decision to foot the bill. The editorial also noted that the body had been found as Porter planned to leave Paris, which “may have made him more ready than he otherwise would have been to accept negative evidence—evidence which goes to show that the body exhumed may be that of Jones, but which does not prove that it is.” According to the article, were the evidence presented in a court of law, the verdict would be “not proven.”4
The body was still on its way to the United States when the weekly Independent magazine published an article by Park Benjamin Jr., a former editor for Scientific American and the author of several books, including History of the United States Naval Academy, which was published in 1900. Benjamin styled himself a Jones expert “because for a long time past I have been making a close study of the voluminous memoirs, letters, etc., left by John Paul Jones, in order to reach an appreciation of his real place in our naval history.” Benjamin wrote that the Independent editors had sought him out “because my professional work requires constant criticism of investigations in physical science.”5
Benjamin’s article was a response to the Parisian experts’ reports identifying the body as Jones, which had been reprinted in the previous week’s Independent. Benjamin was circumspect, but his doubts were clear. He noted that little was known about Jones’s physical appearance other than he was forty-five years old and five feet seven (though the source for that was dodgy), with dark hair. “No other physical data useful for present identification of the body without extraneous and inferential aid appear,” Benjamin wrote. “Nothing in this inquiry is more remarkable than the total absence of identifying remarks or objects in or upon the coffin.”
Benjamin also was skeptical about the story of Jones’s burial and the lost cemetery, arguing that it was unlikely that the grave and coffin of such an esteemed man would go unmarked. And the absence of scars and mended bones contradicted what he believed to have been evidence that Jones had, in fact, suffered a wound in battle, based on a letter written four months before Jones’s death in which he referred to a social slight. “M. de Sartine … did not say to me a single word or ask me if my health had suffered from my wounds and the uncommon fatigue I have undergone.” Benjamin also rejected the close match of measurements of the corpse’s head and the Houdon bust, suggesting that the changes in flesh after death should have made the measurements different. Like the Tribune editorial, Benjamin invoked the metaphor of a trial and asked readers to imagine themselves jurors. Would “you … bring in a verdict of guilty solely on the proof of the corpus delecti here advanced and thereby send the prisoner to execution?”
Other doubts followed. In 1911, six years after the body arrived in Annapolis, a biography of Houdon, the sculptor, renewed questions about the identity of the corpse. The authors, Charles Henry Hart and Henry Biddle, took issue with perceived discrepancies in the shape of the nose on the corpse and on the statue. They also argued rather thinly that the sculpture used to identify the corpse was a copy of a copy—and thus unreliable—and that it was inherently problematic to use a piece of art to establish anatomical fact.
The consensus of opinion of the most eminent of American sculptors which the writer has obtained, is against the measurements of a bust being accepted as the exact measurements of the living head reproduced, as the true artist makes but little moment of measuring and is likely to vary in his work from the measurements of nature, exaggerating parts, either plus or minus, to produce a desired effect. The truth is that the sculptor seeks to express character and general lifelikeness, not the mathematical measurements of the subject, and therefore, while Houdon unquestionably was very exact, he may have been also very inaccurate; consequently, to take a work of art to prove a scientific fact seems, to say the least, most unscientific.6
The sweep of skepticism, from the jokes in Paris to Benjamin’s piece to the Houdon biography, is worth considering. But it dissolves under close scrutiny. That the average citizen of Paris didn’t believe an alcohol-pickled corpse could be so well preserved after a century underground does not mean that it could not be so. The Paris medical experts who examined the body and conducted the autopsy had exemplary credentials, and no whispers are found about their integrity as men of science. While the corpse wasn’t photographed in the moments after the coffin was opened, when it was at its best preserved, the autopsy reports are quite detailed, and some of the methods Porter and the doctors used to identify the corpse—including matching photographs of the corpse against the busts—were path-breaking techniques in forensics. Later examinations of the reports raised no fresh questions, and academics revisiting the evidence as recently as 2004 came to the same conclusion: the body was Jones’s.7
Part of the problem for skeptics has been that much of the evidence was circumstantial. Jones had never had any reported injuries, and the corpse bore no scars. His height, set at five feet seven, came from a source—a biography by A. C. Buell—that was later found to have been heavily fabricated. In life, Jones was described as being diminutive, and biographer Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Pulitzer Prize—winning John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography, estimated he was only five feet five. A 2004 review by forensic experts found, after an exhaustive review of the evidence and the questions of the identity, that estimates of Jones’s height and that of the corpse were consistent. Benjamin’s point about the accuracy of the Houdon bust was also dismissible, since “Houdon described himself firstly as an anatomist and secondly as an artist.”8 Houdon took great pride in delivering precisely accurate sculptures of his subjects, and Jones was so taken with his that he had at least eight copies made and sent to friends. Jones’s contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, described the bust as a perfect likeness. And while there were quibbles about the measurements of the face compared with the bust—deteriorated flesh versus stone depicting the full-fleshed head—those too were dismissed, since the measurements recorded at the time of the autopsy were based on bone structure. And no one has questioned a subtle but crucial match: the unusual shape of Jones’s earlobe, which those present at the exhumation said was visible on the corpse and matched a malformation depicted on the Houdon sculpture. Unfortunately, photos of the corpse did not show the earlobe.
While individual bits of evidence cited to identify the body as that of Jones might be challenged, all of the evidence taken together is convincing. The coffin was found where the historical record suggested it would be; the autopsy remains unindicted; the identified manner of death was consistent with Jones’s reported final ailments; the physical resemblance between corpse and bust were persuasive to those who viewed them. There is no reason, more than a century later, for significant doubt. To tweak an old joke about one of Porter’s other projects: if asked who is buried in John Paul Jones’s tomb, the answer surely is John Paul Jones.9
When acting navy secretary Charles H. Darling sent his order in July 1905 to the Naval Academy that it “maintain, night and day, a guard over the remains until the final interment takes place,” he doubtless didn’t envision the guard would be on duty for seven years.10 But Congress would not be moved. The original budget for the chapel called for leaving the crypt as a roughed-out space of “exposed concrete and brick work” for future completion. And that future was coming quickly, Bonaparte wrote to Congress two days after the April 1906 Annapolis ceremony. The crypt needed to be finished—and soon. He asked for $135,000 to cover the design costs—Flagg, at the navy’s request, had already done preliminary designs—and construction. Bonaparte pointed out that Porter had spent $35,000 of his own money to find and identify Jones’s body, and he relayed the news that the former ambassador had rejected plans to reimburse him with the suggestion that Congress spend the money on the crypt instead. Naval officials had initially thought $100,000 would be enough to do the job but were revising their estimates upward, and even with Porter’s act of generosity, “this sum, it is believed, is barely sufficient to complete the work in a simple but suitable and substantial manner,” Bonaparte told Congress.11
Bonaparte’s request met a chilly reception in Congress, which should not have come as a surprise. As the dig was underway in early 1905, President Roosevelt had asked Congress to pay for the search and recovery of the body, a request that died without action, leading Porter to forge ahead on his own. Later bills submitted by sympathetic congressmen had died at the committee level in successive Congresses. This lack of support had continued once the body was tucked away under the staircase in Bancroft Hall. In session after session, the navy and the White House had requested money to finish the crypt. The US Senate had managed a vote on the measure, approving it, but the legislation died when the House failed to vote on a parallel measure.
Porter’s letter in December 1910 was part of a coordinated campaign that seems to have come together after an article appeared in the April 9, 1910, issue of the mass market magazine Collier’s. The piece was by artist and navy reserve officer Henry Reuterdahl, who two years earlier had roiled the naval bureaucracy with a scathing article about ship designs crafted amid an inflexible bureaucracy. The earlier article, in McClure’s magazine, had sparked investigations and, eventually, changes in how the navy designed its ships.
In his new piece, Reuterdahl again sought to spur the recalcitrant into action. And the article should not have caught navy officials by surprise. In February, two months before the piece was published, Reuterdahl wrote to navy secretary George von Lengerke Meyer asking if it was true that Jones’s coffin was still resting “upon two wooden horses back of the stairs in Bancroft Hall, at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and that no money is available for the proper interment of his remains.”
Meyer responded that the body was being properly treated. “No criticism of this location was offered by any of the distinguished visitors present on that occasion (when placed), who included among their number those most actively interested in the return of the Body to this country from its original burial place; nor, until the receipt of the attached communication, has any hint of such criticism reached this office.”12
Reuterdahl was unswayed. Under the headline JOHN PAUL JONES, OUR GRAYELESS HERO, Reuterdahl drew a picture of the chapel and a second illustration of Jones’s casket under a starred banner beneath the grand staircase at Bancroft. The article offered a survey of Jones’s importance to US naval history and then finished with a public lament at the ingratitude of a nation. “His earthly remains are not properly cared for by the nation. It is over a century since Paul Jones died, and his body has not yet found its final resting place.” The US Senate, he noted, had approved spending $135,000 to complete the crypt. “It remains for some patriot in the House of Representatives to make its members understand that it is a national shame that the founder of the American navy has not what is accorded to every decent citizen—the right to a final resting-place.”
Over the next few months, members of the Sons of the American Revolution began lobbying Congress to allocate the money to build the crypt. The Vermont legislature, two weeks after Porter sent his letter, passed a resolution urging Congress to act.13 Porter also wrote an appeal to Congress on May 28, just six weeks after Reuterdahl’s article was published. “Many promises were made by the Government that the body of Paul Jones should be given a decent sepulcher, but not withstanding the urging of our Presidents, Secretaries of the Navies, 19 patriotic societies, Paul Jones clubs, and public press, etc., there has been no step taken even to place it in some consecrated place…. His poor body was probably better off during the 113 years of neglect in Paris, for at least there it reposed in consecrated ground.”14
The campaign finally gained some traction in early 1911 when the House’s navy committee once again sent an expenditure measure to the full House. But this time it recommended a lower amount—up to $75,000, instead of the $135,000 the navy had been pushing for. Even that amount found deep resistance. Illinois Republican representative James Robert Mann pointed out that the navy wanted Congress to pay for designing and building the crypt without seeing what those plans would be. He wondered “if it would be better to properly authorize the Secretary of the Navy to have estimates, plans, and specifications prepared and submit them to Congress before acting upon this?” His Democratic colleague, Augustus Stanley of Kentucky, was even more direct and skeptical. “I am surprised and grieved at the wanton and reckless expenditures by the Committee on Naval Affairs,” he said on the floor of the House. “Of all the bills that ever came before the House, it strikes me that this one is the most reckless in regard to expenditure of the dear people’s money. Now, you have proposed the erection of a building not only to take care of all the live people in the Navy, but you are building a gilded mausoleum for people who are not yet dead and you do not know when they are going to die…. You do not know how much it will cost, how many are going to be buried there. You just know you are taking the people’s money to start a kind of military graveyard.” Besides, he said, “nobody knows whether it is John Paul Jones or John Paul Jones’s coachman; but that does not keep the Committee on Naval Affairs from throwing away money like a drunken sailor.”15
Despite the resistance, the House finally approved the expenditure, and the project let out for bids. Flagg, the original designer of the new Annapolis, had hoped to design the crypt but found himself on the outs with the navy after his lawyers filed a court claim for additional fees for the work already done. Flagg’s bid for finishing the crypt died, and the project eventually went to Grand Central Terminal architect Whitney Warren and his “less imaginative design” (in the words of Flagg biographer Mardges Bacon).
Work proceeded relatively quickly, and the unfinished concrete basement was transformed into a mausoleum, minus some of the grandiosity of Flagg’s vision. Given the lower budget, the skylight effect of the original plan was scrapped. Warren went with eight Doric dark marble pillars encircling the crypt, and a twenty-one-ton sarcophagus of Grand Antique des Pyrénées marble resting on the backs of swimming dolphins. The names of Jones’s navy ships—the Ranger, Alliance, and Bonhomme Richard—were inlaid in the floor, made from Knoxville and Tennessee marble. The limestone-faced wall ringing the sarcophagus was set aside for displays and other memorials—but not the niches for heroes that Flagg had wanted.16
Finally, in January 1913, the crypt was ready for Jones, bringing the story of the search for an American hero to its end. This fourth and final funeral was also the least elaborate. Meyer, the navy secretary, accompanied by Porter, the man who had rescued the body from beneath Mme Crignier’s Parisian buildings, led a small entourage on a train trip from Washington, DC, on the morning of January 26, an unusually springlike day in Annapolis. They watched as a small contingent of seamen retrieved Jones’s coffin from its sawhorse bier beneath the staircase and carried it outside to a caisson, which was wheeled through the treed park to the chapel, where the pallbearers carried the coffin down the short flight of stairs to the waiting sarcophagus. After a brief prayer service in the chapel, the attendees filed downstairs to the basement crypt and became the first tourists to visit the final resting place of John Paul Jones.
John Paul Jones’s crypt in the Chapel at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number HABS MD,2-ANNA,65/1--23
Some 120 years after he slipped into death alone in his Paris bedroom, the hero was finally at rest.
Horace Porter was seventy-five years old in January 1913 and living a relatively quiet life with five servants in his home on Madison Avenue. In the years after he left Paris, he had initially maintained a high profile. He was part of the delegation representing the Roosevelt administration at the Second International Peace Conference of the Hague in 1907, a gathering of diplomats aimed at trying to regulate the way wars were waged. In 1908 he accepted appointment to the navy’s Board of Visitors at Annapolis. He became more active in the “patriotic groups,” such as the Navy League, for which he served as president, and chaired meetings of the International Law Society in Washington. He was elected president of the Legion of Honor, an association of living winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
In an odd juxtaposition, Porter also belonged for a time to the New York Peace Society, which began in 1906 to prod the United States and other nations to resolve disputes through mediation and arbitration, not war. Porter was accepted as a member in April 1909 at a meeting in which Andrew Carnegie warned presciently of growing frictions between England and Germany. Each nation directed a large navy sailing off the coasts of Europe, and chance encounters could easily turn into war, he cautioned. He urged the US government to lead the world in resolving disputes through the structures of international law and discussion, not weapons and invasions.
It’s unclear whether Porter was present at that meeting, but after Carnegie finished speaking, another member, E. J. Malloy, rose to ask whether the Porter who had been added to the group that day was the same Porter who was serving as president of the Navy League—an organization whose sole purpose was to promote a strong US Navy. Yes, he was told, it was the same Porter. “It seems to me thoroughly inconsistent for a man to hold office in both these societies when the very raison d’être of each is determined to defeat the plans of the other,” Malloy said. He accepted that Porter could well be a man of peace, “but under existing circumstances it is ridiculous for him to hold office in this society.” Since there was no proscription in the Peace Society’s bylaws, Porter was allowed to stay, and the chair of the meeting noted that some good might come of it. “Possibly the ameliorating effect of his association with us may induce him to stop his nefarious practices.”17
There was nothing nefarious about what Porter was doing, though. He had long been a champion of veterans and of the military—not surprising for a West Point graduate, Medal of Honor winner, and close friend of Ulysses S. Grant. Porter long identified himself as a military man. Even after he left France, he preferred to be called General Porter, rather than Ambassador Porter. Yet he was a proponent of peace. He believed in diplomacy and mediation, but also that a big US military was a prerequisite for peace. Why he wanted to belong to the Peace Society, whose members tended to believe a nation with a big military was more likely to use it, is lost to history. But given the broad sweep of his affiliations, he could have just seen it as another way to fill his time with a good cause.
Porter also remained active in Republican politics. During an internal party squabble over whether to nominate New York governor—and future US Supreme Court chief justice—Charles Evans Hughes for reelection in 1908, Porter’s name was tossed around as a compromise candidate. Hughes prevailed with his party but lost the general election.
Porter’s most visible role tended to involve eulogizing the dead at funerals and unveilings of monuments. He spoke at the 1908 Washington, DC, dedication of a statue of General Philip H. Sheridan, who was part of the Civil War battle at Chickamauga for which Porter received his Medal of Honor. The next year he offered a eulogy to Abraham Lincoln at Carnegie Hall during a celebration marking the centennial of the president’s birth, and he delivered the 1909 commencement address at the US Naval Academy. He spoke briefly at the 1912 dedication of the statue of John Paul Jones near the Potomac in southwest Washington in 1912, the year before the crypt was completed and Jones was finally laid to rest. That the statue was done before the crypt had to have galled the former general, but if it did, he kept those thoughts to himself.
By the time the crypt was finished and Jones was placed within his elaborate sarcophagus, Porter was beginning to slow down. A New York Times reporter visited him at his Madison Avenue home in April 1913, three months after that final dedication, and found the seventy-five-year-old man vigorous, with graying hair, an erect stature, and a thick vein of humility. Noting that Porter read six newspapers each morning, the reporter asked for his thoughts on the developing issues of the day, from politics to looming war in Europe. “Individual expression of opinion does not count for much where big issues are concerned,” Porter told him. “Nor would anything I might say be of journalistic importance.” One wonders why Porter agreed to the interview in the first place.
As World War I unfolded in Europe, Porter lent his name to various fundraising efforts to support the troops, but he was no longer chairing meetings or running campaigns. Porter continued to make summer trips to West Long Branch, New Jersey, where his wife, Sophie, and their sons William and Horace M. were buried (soon to be followed by son Clarence in 1917). He also traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, and Bar Harbor, Maine, for the summer social season. Sometimes he rented a cottage; sometimes he stayed with well-heeled friends from Manhattan. His name popped up regularly in the society columns, as a guest at various weddings and as a financial supporter for a wide range of local causes. But as Porter neared his eightieth birthday, the pace of mentions became less frequent.
In June 1920, at age eighty-three, Porter was taken ill. Details are scant, but he was stricken while vacationing in Greenwich, Connecticut, at what was described as “his summer home” (presumably a seasonal rental). He was rushed back to his residence at Madison Avenue and Forty-First Street, a neighborhood of mansions under stress from Manhattan’s growing appetite for skyscrapers. Appendicitis was diagnosed, and Porter underwent surgery to remove the failing organ. While the operation was successful, Porter never really recovered. Six weeks after his eighty-fourth birthday, Porter slipped into a coma. He died on May 29, 1921, nearly a year after he first fell ill. While the cause was ascribed to a general failure of health, the start of his decline was pinned to the bad appendix.
Before his death, Porter—whose history included arranging mass public displays of a nation’s thanks to General Grant, McKinley’s first inaugural parade, and the elaborate celebration commemorating John Paul Jones’s contributions to both the nation’s independence and its embrace of a strong navy—had ordered a simple observation of his own passing. No pallbearers. No eulogies. “I want the simplest funeral a man can have,” Porter said. “A word, a song, and a prayer.” And that’s what he received on June 2, 1921, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The coffin was ferried from his home in a hearse escorted by police motorcycles and then carried to the altar, where it was draped in the Stars and Stripes with Porter’s cocked hat and ceremonial sword placed on top. The ceremony began with a choir singing “There Is a Land Beyond the Setting Sun,” followed by a prayer by pastor John Kelman, who managed to slip in a few words of eulogy despite Porter’s request.18
“For all the great and noble lives dedicated to high services in Christ’s name, we give Thee thanks,” the minister said.
For those who have not counted their own lives dear unto them, but have jeopardized their lives in the high places of the field, entering into the fellowship of His sacrifice, who gave His life for the redemption of the world, we give Thee thanks. For the high example of all upright men who have served their generation and especially today do we thank Thee for the long life and varied services of our brother now departed, for the high responsibility loftily borne and executed, for his service on the stern field of battle and on the fruitful fields of peace, for his life-long affection for his great commander, for all the share that Thou didst give to him in the international relations of the world, and for all that he did to keep these relations sound and friendly, for the world-wide fame, his fine culture, his courtesy and great simplicity and dignity, and for his distinguished self-control, we give Thee thanks. In him Thou didst grant to his generation one of Thy great gentlemen of the olden days, and we thank our God upon remembrance of him.
The pews were filled with, in essence, the survivors of a bygone era. Porter, the obituaries noted, was the last of Grant’s intimate advisors. The mourners included Elihu Root, the former secretary of war, secretary of state, and 1912 Nobel Peace Prize winner; Chauncey Depew, a lawyer for Cornelius Vanderbilt, former railroad executive, and former US senator from New York; legendary financier J. Pierpont Morgan; Cornelius Bliss, Porter’s former neighbor and cofundraiser for McKinley; and scores of others.
At the end of the service, the coffin was removed from the church and taken to a train for transport to a vault at the Old First Methodist Church Cemetery in West Long Branch, New Jersey, until Porter’s daughter, Elsie Mende, could make the trip from Switzerland for a small, private burial next to Sophie and Elsie’s three brothers.
It was a muted end to a long and public life. And while tourists and history buffs make regular trips to the crypt below the US Naval Academy chapel to contemplate Jones and the sweep of America’s birth and its history, Porter’s grave is just another headstone in a nondescript cemetery near the New Jersey coast.