THE REVOLUTION was not going well. In August, while Jones was sailing circles around HMS Solebay, British forces had invaded Long Island and battered Washington’s army. The Continentals had escaped across the East River in a “providential fog,” but in September the British bombarded and attacked Manhattan, and the rebel forces broke and ran. General Washington himself had stepped into the breech, swatting fleeing soldiers with his riding crop in a futile attempt to rally them. At Harlem Heights, British dragoons were said to have arrogantly sounded the fox-hunting call, “View Halloo.” Washington was forced to evacuate to New Jersey, then across the Delaware to Pennsylvania to take refuge with a dwindling band of “winter soldiers,” the “summer soldiers” having gone home to their farms and families.
The American Continental Navy, Jones excepted, was stuck in port in the fall of 1776. Jones intended to cruise off New York harbor near Sandy Hook, hoping to pick off British merchantmen rushing to supply the British army of occupation before winter set in. But Commodore Hopkins tugged at Jones’s “finer feelings” with a more noble mission. In the coal pits of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the British were using at least a hundred American prisoners as slave labor. Would Jones mount an expedition to rescue them? “All my humanity was awakened,” Jones wrote. He was not gushing. Jones’s desire to liberate American prisoners would be a constant preoccupation. While the coal pits were particularly cruel, other incarcerations were also grim. Jones knew the story of the Jersey, a verminous prison hulk, a “Hell Afloat” that was moored off a mud flat in New York harbor, crammed with half-naked rebel prisoners riddled with disease. For many of the rebels consigned to the coal pits of Nova Scotia, Jones feared, winter would be a death sentence.
To accomplish his rescue mission, Jones was given a small fleet: the Alfred, Jones’s old converted merchantman from the New Providence expedition; the sloop Providence; and the Hampden, a two-masted brigantine. The former lieutenant could now call himself commodore. The ships did not, however, come with anywhere near enough men. The Alfred, which normally required a crew of 200, had only thirty sailors aboard. Jones knew why: the lure of privateering was too strong.
Sailing on a privateer was at once more free-wheeling and more lucrative than serving aboard a ship of the Continental Navy. Congress and the different colonies gave “letters of marque”—license to seize enemy ships—to about 2,000 privateers during the Revolutionary War. The privateers aided the war effort, seizing so many British ships that they drove up insurance rates in London. Such were the rewards from licensed piracy that at war’s end in the seaport of Salem, Massachusetts, “there were many persons dejected on the return of peace,” wrote one local observer. But the privateers, employing some 20,000 men, were a drain on the Continental Navy. Captains like Jones tried to recruit with handbills and advertisements promising glory and honor and by offering inducements like rum and cash. Unscrupulous seaman would pocket the money and run off to join a privateer.
Shows of unpatriotic self-interest infuriated Jones. “Privateers entice men away as soon as they receive a month’s pay,” he complained to Robert Morris, his new friend on the Marine Committee, in a letter dated October 17, ten days after he had returned from his voyage on the Providence. The muster roll of the sloop Providence is dotted with the names of men with an “R,” for “run,” after their names, and notations like: “inveigled away.” Advertisements in local papers offered rewards of $5 for each deserter recaptured. (One Providence deserter was described in a wanted ad as a “sly, smooth tongued fellow … lurking somewhere in Jersey”) Jones largely blamed the politicians in Philadelphia for creating the manpower shortfall. Strapped for money, Congress hoped to raise funds by taking half to two thirds of the profits from prizes seized by its warships. This was “penny wise and pound foolish,” Jones argued. The government of Britain, he pointed out, wisely made no claim on prizes, leaving the rewards to be divvied up by the officers and men of its navy. In America, the navy was being essentially outbid by the privateers. Until its sailors made more money, Jones warned, the American navy can “never become respectable—it never will become formidable—and without a respectable navy—Alas America!” Jones’s urgings were heartfelt and sensible. He heard nothing in return.
As he scrambled to find the men to man his tiny fleet, Jones was understandably impatient. He knew he was running out of time to rescue the poor prisoners in the coal pits of Nova Scotia—the winter would sock in along the Canadian coast if his ships did not make haste. He finally decided to leave the Providence behind and use her crew to man the Alfred. On October 27, he shoved off along with the Hampden—and never made it farther than the mouth of Narragansett Bay. The boneheaded captain of the Hampden, Hoystead Hacker, muddled his navigation and put his ship right onto a rock. “The noble captain doth not understand the first case of plain [sic] trigonometry!” despaired Jones. It was back to port to switch men from the wounded Hampden into the Providence—as the days shortened and the season grew late.
Now it was Jones’s original congressional patron, Joseph Hewes, who got to hear the bleats of a thwarted warrior. On October 30, as he bleakly sat in his cabin while a “gale of wind at S.E. with thick weather” lashed the Alfred at her mooring, Jones complained about the problems besetting “our infant navy.” Other captains—who, maddeningly, had been given better commands, new frigates just now sliding down the ways—held hidden interests in privateers, Jones charged. These selfish scoundrels “not only wink at, but encourage and employ deserters from the navy. What punishment is equal to such baseness?—and yet these men pretend to love their country!”
Here, Jones felt obliged to state his own principles. While delivered in an indignant huff in Jones’s grandiose style, they reflect his hope for a new republic in a new age that will reward virtue and merit, not a mighty empire (like Britain) that exists to protect power and privilege (“since liberty hath chosen America as her last asylum every effort to protect and cherish her is noble and will be rewarded with the thanks of future ages”).
Jones was not just spouting platitudes. He went on to make practical suggestions, like unlimited enlistment periods (so the sailors would not just vanish after their tours of duty), an impartial Board of Admiralty to run the navy (rather than a highly politicized congressional committee), and wages and prize shares competitive with those of the Royal Navy and American privateers. At the end, he offered an unusual personal insight He was not asking for more money for himself. “I am easily provided for and am not in the least uneasy on my own account” This was not just because he had shown luck and skill at winning prizes, but because, as he said, “I have no family or dependents and probably never will.”* Jones may have occasionally pined for Miss Dandridge, and he certainly compensated with serial love affairs. But he had no Lady Hamilton. He saw himself as an essentially solitary figure, fated to remain alone at sea or on land.
Jones finally got to sea on November 1. His provisions for the cruise included 600 gallons of rum, enough to keep the crew warm until Christmas. As the Alfred cruised down Vineyard Sound, heading east, the lookout spotted a mast in Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon Island, an old haven for pirates. The evening was mild; the wind had dropped, and the Alfred was coasting slowly along. Jones decided to investigate and found a privateer, the Eagle. Before dawn, Jones sent two boatloads of marines (some of them apparently disguised as Indians) to probe a little deeper. Using cutlasses, Jones’s men pricked at bags in the hold, hoping to flush out any deserters who might be hiding there. They kicked down a false bulkhead and found what they were looking for: a pair of men who had run from their naval duty to become privateersmen. Already in a white heat about lost seamen, Jones decided to take twenty more sailors from the Eagle, just for good measure. The Alfred sailed away, leaving the Eagle’s enraged captain cursing about the navy’s illegal “press gang”—as unjust as British tyranny!—and threatening to sue.
Jones ignored him. By mid-November the Alfred and Providence were pitching and rolling in the cold gray waters off Nova Scotia, keeping a lookout for prizes as they raced to liberate the prisoners. Off Louisburg, Jones made a great catch: the Mellish, a British transport carrying chests of medicine, fine silks, some important British citizens bound for Halifax, and, most critically, thousands of winter uniforms. The warm clothes were destined for General Burgoyne’s army, then preparing to drive south from Canada to split the rebellious colonies in two. “The prize is, I believe, the most valuable ship that hath been taken by American arms,” wrote Jones to the Marine Committee on November 12. “I found sixty women and children on board the Mellish, several of whom are persons of distinction…. The loss of the Mellish will distress the enemy more than can be easily imagined, as the clothing on board her is the last intended to be sent out for Canada this season…. The situation of Burgoyne’s army must soon become insupportable.” Describing his capture of some 10,000 uniforms aboard the Mellish, Jones wrote Robert Smith, a North Carolina merchant and fellow Mason, “This will make Burgoyne ‘shake a cloth in the wind’ and check his progress on the Lakes.” Jones was not exaggerating the significance of his prize. Burgoyne’s march down through Lake George and Lake Champlain was hobbled by the loss of uniforms. And Jones was later proud to hear that the British uniforms were used to clothe General Washington’s freezing men, who recrossed the Delaware to defeat British Hessian troops quartered at Princeton and Trenton at Christmas and New Year’s.
Jones did not have much time to gloat over his coup. He learned on November 16 from another captured prize that the harbors of Cape Breton were freezing, threatening to upset his plan for a dramatic shore raid to liberate the American prisoners. “Stormy and contrary winds still prevail,” Jones wrote the Marine Committee, in one of his periodic reports sent home aboard a prize ship. Aboard the Alfred and Providence the pumps were working. The relentless pounding in the mountainous wintery seas had opened up the seams of both vessels. “I will however pursue the expedition while there is a possibility of success,” Jones wrote.
The men aboard the Providence were not so keen. There arose “an unaccountable murmurring in the sloop,” reported Jones. Jones rowed over from the Alfred, sitting grim and erect in the stern of his ship’s boat as it tossed about and the sailors strained at the oars. Gathering around the crew of his old ship, he gave the men an impassioned pep talk: “I represented to them how much humanity was concerned in our endeavors to relieve our captive ill-treated brethren from the coal mines,” Jones wrote. Jones had a very fluent tongue. His sailors sometimes grumbled that he used it to con them into believing that his desperate schemes were a matter of duty. But the gap between Jones’s glory-seeking, theatrical zeal, and the harsh, everyday drudgery faced by his crewmen was too great. In his black, boatlike cockaded hat, his hawkish face fierce and unyielding in the streaming storm, Jones must have seemed like a madman compared with the diffident or easygoing merchant captains most sailors were accustomed to.
Jones’s humanitarian rhetoric met blank stares and scowls. His urgings were “in vain,” Jones recorded. “On the 18th we had a gale from the N.E. with snow—it could not be called a hard gale.” Hard enough for the Providence: when Jones looked through the driving sleet the next morning “to my great surprise … I found the Providence had disappeared.” In the dark, the sloop’s men, acting in cahoots with the hapless Captain Hacker, had raised their sails and run for home. In the British Navy, such willful disobedience, not to mention cravenness, would have cost Hacker his job if not his neck. In the Continental Navy, Jones could only fume and write angry letters to Congress.
The “epidemical discontent” spread to Jones’s ship. The frozen sailors were not malingering. Sailing in winter can be a brutal hardship. Climbing icy ratlines in a snowstorm to furl sails frozen stiff as a board is a heart-stopping endeavor. Ice imperiled the whole ship: the weight of ice in the rigging can unbalance a sailing vessel and make her more prone to rolling over in a storm. Still, Jones stubbornly pressed on: “The season was indeed severe and everyone was for returning immediately to port but I was determined at all hazards while my provisions lasted to perservere in my first plan.”
On November 24, Jones had a scare. In “thick weather” the Alfred was suddenly surrounded by three ships. Jones and his officers all assumed they were in the company of enemy men-of-war. Jones had been told by local fishermen that after the attacks of the Providence on the British fishing fleet at Sable Island in September, the Royal Navy had dispatched three frigates to cruise for the rebel raiders.
For Jones, in his feverish state, it was do-or-die. “Resolving to sell my liberty as dear as possible” or go out in a blaze of glory, Jones steered straight at one of the three shadowy vessels. As the drummer beat to quarters, the men prepared for what they feared would be their last battle before death or consignment to a prison hulk in Halifax. Jones, sword and pistols at the ready, eagerly peered through the murk at the dark hull and perceived, to his crew’s immense relief, that she was a merchantman. The enemy cruiser turned out to be a plodding collier carrying coal from the Cape Breton mines, bound for New York. Jones quickly took her as a prize, though he continued to keep a weather eye for the convoy’s escort. (Indeed, the British frigate Flora was sailing close by in the fog.)
Seizing coal ships meant less fuel for the stoves of the British army wintering in New York, and Jones further cut the lobsterbacks’ supplies by sending in armed boats to burn a British supply ship and destroy an oil warehouse in the fishing port of Canso. But from the captured collier’s crew he learned some deflating news. The American prisoners in the coal pits had decided to end their suffering by capitulating. They had joined the British navy.
His rescue mission now pointless, his fleet battered by “high winds and frequent gales from the westward,” Jones swung his ships and their accompanying prizes for home. On December 7, off the St. George’s fishing bank, Jones again encountered the frigate that he had humiliated back in September—HMS Milford. In the gloom, Jones could not be sure of the identity of the looming ship, but since she was bearing down, not running, he made a good guess that she was an enemy man-of-war.
This time Jones could not bob and weave and taunt. The ice-ridden Alfred was slow and crank, even tippier than usual because she had almost exhausted the provisions in her hold that served as ballast Jones needed to use his imagination. He sent for his former first officer and partner in getaways, Lieutenant Rathbun, who was at the moment commanding one of Jones’s prizes, the sloop John. Jones obviously valued Rathbun’s seamanship and resourcefulness and wanted him by his side.
The scheme they cooked up was an old dependable. The Milford spotted Jones’s small fleet at about three in the afternoon—already dusk so close to the Arctic Circle. Jones ordered the “fastest sailors” in his little flotilla—including the Mellish—to make a run for it as soon as nightfall set in. Then he ordered hung from the top of his mainmast a bright light He was hoping to lead his pursuer on another “wild goose chase” in the night while his most valuable prizes slipped away. The Milford took the bait. In the morning, the other ships had escaped, while Jones’s nameless antagonist still hung off his quarter “at the same distance as the night before.” Jones needed to find out exactly what he was up against. Viewing the pursuer from the bow on, Jones could not count her guns. He ordered his small prize brig, the John, to fall astern and hang to windward of the enemy, in order to take a careful look at her broadside. From the John, the signal came back, “Superior force.” By now the wind had increased “with severe squalls to a hard gale.” Jones kicked up his heels and “drove the Alfred thro’ the water” at seven to eight knots,* a rapid clip for the old merchantman, a poor sailor in most breezes. In the night, the enemy finally broke off the chase—but she captured the unfortunate John, whose skipper later complained that he had been abandoned by Jones.
Jones and his crew were worn and ragged by the time they made landfall at Plymouth harbor, south of Boston, on December 14. Beating up the harbor against the wind in a violent snow squall, the Alfred missed stays—failed to come about from one tack to the other. She ran aground at low tide and “beat considerably” before the tide lifted her off in the morning. The ship was not damaged, but Jones’s pride was wounded. He had captured the Mellish and escaped the Milford but he had not reached the prisoners in time. “My success hath indeed fallen far short of my wishes,” he reported to the Marine Committee.
WHEN JONES ARRIVED in Boston just before Christmas 1776, he did not expect to be welcomed as a conquering hero. On the other hand, he did not expect to be arrested. As he walked down a street in the old port town, he was approached by an elderly lawyer, who was accompanied by the sheriff. The lawyer represented the owner of the Eagle, the privateer Jones had found in Tarpaulin Cove in early November. Still smarting over the impressment of his twenty hands, the owner had accused Jones of “piracy” and filed a legal complaint against him.
The sheriff approached Jones to make the arrest. Jones glared at him. He had been thrown in jail once before upon returning from a cruise, and he rankled at the memory of his days in the Tolbooth of Kirkcudbright, unjustly accused in the Mungo Maxwell affair. Jones was determined not to go behind bars again. Eyes blazing, he drew his sword and threatened to “clip” anyone who touched him. The old lawyer was flustered by Jones’s defiance. Forgetting that a revolution had just occurred, he stammered that the sheriff was a “King’s officer” and that Jones dare not defy him. This just inflamed Jones even more. Brandishing his sword, Jones exclaimed, “Is he? By God, I have a commission then to take his head off!” The sheriff recoiled in horror. “I ain’t no king’s officer!” he protested. Flummoxed, the lawyer spluttered to the sheriff, “Why don’t you take him?” The sheriff replied, “The Devil! Don’t you see his poker!”
Jones put away his “poker” and wrote his lawyer, who countersued the owner of the Eagle for “inveighling away” the Alfred’s seamen in the first place. The tangled case was eventually thrown out of the courts. Jones no doubt had a good laugh with his fellow captains as they raised their Yuletide glasses at the local tavern where Jones was staying over Christmas. Any good humor vanished with the new year, however, when he learned that his reward for two straight successful cruises was a demotion.
Incredibly, he was relieved of command of the Alfred and offered nothing more promising than a return to his old sloop the Providence. Meanwhile, captains of far lesser ability were being given command of new frigates. Jones did not know it yet, but he had been shamefully wronged by the Continental Congress. On October 10, while Jones was catching his breath in Providence between “hairbreadth scapes,” the Marine Committee had promulgated a seniority list of captains. The new Continental Navy had a chance to live up to the meritocratic ideals of the Enlightenment, but instead it followed the age-encrusted custom of the Royal Navy. Seniority was crucial in the British navy; it determined the pace of promotion toward flag rank and weighed heavily in the awarding of commands. The first seniority list of the American navy had little to do with service or merit and, to Jones’s everlasting chagrin, everything to do with patronage and “interest.” Number one on the list was an obscure captain named James Nicholson. He had seen no action, but he had friends on the Marine Committee who rewarded him with a twenty-eight-gun frigate, the Virginia. Next was John Manley, who had served with George Washington’s navy in 1775 but done very little since—except to travel to Philadelphia, where he stayed for months on end lobbying for position. Described by a fellow officer as “ignorant, obstinate, overbearing, and tyrannical beyond description,” Manley was given the frigate Hancock, thirty-two guns. At number four was the haughty and incompetent Dudley Saltonstall, awarded the frigate Trumbull, twenty-eight guns.
Jones was near the bottom of the list at number eighteen. Even the hopeless Hoystead Hacker stood higher, ranked sixteenth. Jones was beside himself with scorn at the officers who outranked him. He described Thomas Thompson of New Hampshire (frigate Raleigh, thirty-two guns) as “a dull inactive genius more fit to be a ship’s carpenter than a captain.” Jones respected a few of his superiors, especially Hector McNeill, who became his friend and whom he regarded as “a gentleman who will do honor to the service.” But in later years he liked to point out that some of his seniors on the rank list initially declined to serve in the Continental Navy out of timidity—because, as his friend Abraham Whipple often told him, “they did not wish to be hanged.”
It’s not clear when Jones first learned of the seniority list—possibly, no one was brave enough to tell him—but on January 12, 1777, he fulminated to Joseph Hewes: “That such despicable characters should have obtained commissions as commanders in a navy is truly astonishing and [might] pass for romance with me unless I have been convinced by my senses of the sad reality.” Jones did not blame Hewes for his low rank: his patron had been away in North Carolina when the list was drawn up, and Jones had no one else in Philadelphia to plump for him. With his Scottish brogue, he was still regarded as a foreigner, and his edgy manner was not likely to win friends. Robert Morris would in time become a protector, but in October 1776, the powerful merchant-politician had been distracted. With the rout of Washington’s forces in New York, Philadelphia lay open to attack. Congress was about to flee south to Baltimore.
The Marine Committee was waking up to Jones by the winter of 1777, in part because he was a singular success story on a sea of gloom, and because he demanded to be noticed by his constant flurry of reports, recommendations, and complaints. “You have herein the copy of Capt. Jones’s acc[ount] of his last expedition in the Alfred,” Robert Morris wrote John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress on January 16. “He is a fine fellow and should be constantly kept employed.” Hancock was supportive, if condescending: “I admire the spirited conduct of little Jones. Pray push him out again.”
Morris encouraged Jones’s outpourings, which he described as “always entertaining and in many parts useful.” He saw in Jones a quality that was utterly missing from the minds of most men of the new navy: strategic vision. Jones was a dreamer and planner, not just in the cause of his own advancement, but with the hope of making America a great maritime power that could hold its own with Britain.
Even before the very first expedition to New Providence in the winter of ’76, Jones had pushed a bold plan to capture the island of St. Helena off the coast of Africa. Lying in wait at St. Helena, Jones reasoned, American cruisers could intercept the British East Indiamen, laden with riches, which invariably refreshed there as they traveled around the Horn to and from India and Asia. Morris was intrigued by Jones’s proposed African expedition and suggested as well a daring raid against British bases at Pensacola, Florida. The particulars mattered less than the overall concept, which can be roughly summarized as: hit ’em where they ain’t. Or as Morris elaborated in a letter to Jones on February 5:
It has long been clear to me that our infant fleet cannot protect our own coasts & that the only effectual relief it can afford us is to attack the enemies’ defenseless places and thereby oblige them to station more of their ships in their own countries or to keep them employed in following ours … either way we are relieved.
The germ of this idea would grow in Jones’s active and scheming mind. Diversionary hit-and-run raids, especially ones that sow fear and panic by striking directly at the enemy’s homeland, are a powerful tool for rebels who cannot match the strength of their opponents, and thus must fight a guerrilla war. In the eighteenth century, war was an orderly, ponderous affair, set-piece battles fought between disciplined armies. Although he would not have described himself this way, Jones was a futurist. In his own intuitive way, he was able to see back to the future. The aristocratic notions of warfare of the eighteenth century sought to spare civilian populations from the horrors of siege and pillage, so common to the religious wars of the seventeenth and earlier centuries. The code broke down from time to time. As Jones was well aware, the British had brutally repressed the Scots Highlanders after the rebellion of 1745. But Jones was unusual in that he saw psychological warfare—terror, if you will—as a distinct strategy. Jones could see over the horizon, to an age when war was waged not just against professional armies, but cities and peoples, as it had been in earlier times.
Just as eighteenth-century warfare should not be overidealized, Jones’s strategic genius should not be overstated. He was shrewd and prescient, but he did not write with any kind of historical sweep or espouse grand theories of war. He was simply trying to think of a way to leverage America’s small force againt imperial Britain. But the fact that Jones thought at all set him apart from other captains in the Continental Navy, who remained overawed by British naval power. Like the best of the Founders, who knew the risk of hanging but refused to be intimidated by British superiority, Jones dealt with long odds by pondering how he might undermine the Leviathan. While other captains essentially acted as privateers by chasing British merchantmen or—more commonly—hid safe in their harbors from prowling British cruisers, Jones increasingly turned his attention to this new kind of hit-and-run warfare.
Morris was ready to equip Jones with a small fleet to attack British bases in the Caribbean and along the southern coast of the colonies. “You should take the Alfred, Columbus, Cabot, Ham[p]den & Sloop Providence,” he instructed Jones on February 5. Jones was thrilled to have such an ambitious mission. But he spent the month of February vainly trying to persuade Commodore Hopkins to give him the ships, which were in various stages of disrepair or bottled up in port by British blockaders. Jones held Hopkins responsible for the navy’s “wretched condition.” For months, the aging commodore had dithered aboard his new frigate, the Warren in Providence without making any discernible effort to put to sea. Jones was harsh in his judgment of Hopkins. “The navy would be far better without a head than a bad one,” he wrote Morris. Unfairly blaming Hopkins for his troubles over the seized seamen from the Eagle, Jones refused to submit to his authority.*
Jones would have been wise to have courted Hopkins from the beginning, when he sailed under the old man in the New Providence expedition in the winter of 1776, but his pride got in the way. “You will not blame my free soul, which will never stoop where it cannot esteem,” Jones wrote Morris. Hopkins finally grew tired of Jones’s carping (much of it behind Hopkins’s back) and turned on his too proud captain. He wrote the Marine Committee that Jones was the most unpopular captain in the navy, in part because he refused to pay his men’s wages until they reenlisted. Here Hopkins was being unfair: Jones had advanced men money out of his own pocket. But Hopkins was not wrong that Jones’s abrasive manner alienated subordinates. Hopkins was also sufficiently well informed to appreciate that Jones owed much of his success aboard the Providence to his able number one, Lieutenant Rathbun—a debt Jones himself was too self-centered or churlish to acknowledge.
As usual Jones struggled to reconcile his angry impulses with his sense of duty. On February 28, he wrote Hopkins to ask why it was taking so long to pull together the small fleet bestowed on him by the Marine Committee. Jones was unable to stop himself from dredging up an old slight. Self-conscious about his Scottish roots, Jones had accused Captain Saltonstall, the scion of an old-line Yankee family, of questioning his loyalty to the rebel cause. “I have asked Captain Saltonstall how he could in the beginning suspect me … of being unfriendly to America. He seemed astonished at the question and told me that it was yourself who had first promoted it,” Jones wrote sulkily to Hopkins.
But then Jones caught himself. “The best way is to cooperate cheerfully,” Jones continued. “I am earnest to do everything with good nature.” If only Jones had heeded his own admonitions, much of his recurring difficulty with rebellious crews and hostile or diffident superiors might have been avoided. In any case, it was too late to make amends with Hopkins. Luckily for Jones, the aging commodore was on the way out. The Continental Congress, too, had wearied of his inertia, the fleet commander’s bland resistance to their insistent prodding that he get his ships out of port and into the fight. Hopkins was soon to be suspended from his post and ultimately dismissed from the navy.
Jones decided to go in person to the Marine Committee to demand a ship—if not command of a flotilla, then any ship. Congress had slunk back to Philadelphia when Lord Howe failed to take the city during the winter (a temporary reprieve: Philadelphia would fall in September). As the heavy snows of frigid winter melted in March, Jones rode on horseback, skirting the British forces in New York, down the muddy post road to Philadelphia.
At the State House, he was effusively received by John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress. Grand and unctuous, the wealthy Bostonian praised Jones and proceeded to double-cross him.
Jones wanted to rectify the injustice of the seniority list Hancock promised that he would push back the date on his captain’s commission from August 8 to May 10, 1776, the day Jones first took command of the Providence. Hancock asked Jones to leave the actual commission with him so that he could do the necessary paperwork. But when Jones returned the day before his departure, Hancock had changed the date—not to May 10 but to October 10 and written “18”—Jones’s cursed rank on the seniority list—in the margin. “I told him that was not what I had expected and demanded my former commission,” recorded Jones. “He turned over various papers on the table, and at last told me he was very sorry to have lost or mislaid it.” Hancock, possibly, was overburdened or careless, but Jones naturally assumed he was malicious. Certainly, the two men were badly matched, alike only in pride. Jones regarded Hancock to be one in a long line of snobbish superiors who condescended to him. Hancock viewed “the little Jones” as a pushy Scotsman, a serving-class schemer with pretensions above his station. Though Jones was capable of flattery and ingratiation, he had difficulty hiding his testy moods.
The imposing Boston merchant may have reminded Jones of Mr. Craik, the imperious laird of Arbigland who had lorded over his father. Jones was not the first or last military man to feel under-appreciated by his civilian masters, but his resentment was sharpened by childhood experience as a pawn in the master-servant gamesmanship at Arbigland. Just as Arbigland could not be beautiful without Paul Senior’s gardens, the new America could not be free without a strong navy to stand up to the British. It galled Jones to be treated shabbily, to have his contribution slighted by a stuffed shirt who had never stood on a quarterdeck under enemy fire. Describing the scene in a letter to Robert Morris written six years later, Jones stiffly wrote, “I shall here make no remark on such conduct in a President of Congress.” Jones swallowed his anger and noted that Hancock had “paid me many compliments” and assured him of future commands. But the letter’s tone makes clear that in 1783 Jones was still seething over long-ago slights.
Feeling aggrieved and wondering whether he would ever get another ship, Jones returned to Boston in late April of 1777. The city was as desolate as his mood. Once a bustling port, Boston had been roughed up by the British occupation. For firewood during General Washington’s siege, the lobsterbacks had cut down most of the city’s trees. The Liberty Tree, the rallying point for the rebels, had been reduced to a stump. When the British pulled out in March of 1776, over a thousand of the loyalist Bostonians had sailed with them for Halifax. In the spring of 1777, Jones had plenty of time to wander Boston’s denuded streets, past its shuttered buildings, to the wharves, no longer smelling of imported spices—few merchantmen dared slip by the British cruisers hovering offshore—but instead reeking of dead fish and low tide.
He must have felt a twinge of bitterness to see, moored in the harbor, the brand-new frigate Hancock, thirty-two guns. She had been named after the perfidious president of the Continental Congress; her magnificent carved figurehead represented the great man himself, decked out in yellow breeches, a blue coat, and a cocked hat with lace. Equally galling was the Hancock’s captain, Captain John Manley, “who keeps us at awful distance,” Jones wrote sarcastically, by flying the broad pendant of the kind traditionally used by a Royal Navy commodore. Jones scoffed that Manley’s brief service in the British navy had been as a “boatswain’s mate.”
It was a low, lonely time for a man given to solitary brooding. But Jones proved resilient. Another disappointed captain would have offered his services to the owner of a privateer—there were plenty of them about—and set sail to fatten his purse. Jones could have made his fortune, bought his farm, and retired to a life of “calm contemplation and poetic ease.” But he stuck with the navy. Despite his many disappointments, he had high hopes that America would become a power on the seas and that he would be at the head of its fleet. Jones did plenty of whining, but there was an element of cussedness in him that sustained his dreams of glory. Perhaps he was not as nobly stoic as George Washington or as sure of the essential lightness of the cause as John Adams. But the effect was the same. While other summer soldiers went home, Jones was one of the men who stood fast.
Jones, though essentially a loner, enjoyed society and the company of fellow sea rovers. In Boston, he found congenial company in the captain of the frigate Boston, Hector McNeill. A fellow Scotsman with an edgy sense of humor, McNeill had once been captured by Indians and nearly killed with a tomahawk. With McNeill, Jones enjoyed making fun of Manley and the other political captains.
Jones also resumed his association with the Masons. He was not a carouser, but he liked to talk about poetry and politics. The St. Andrew’s Lodge was a hotbed of revolutionary agitation. According to Masonic lore, the Boston Tea Party was plotted at the Masons’ meeting place, the Green Dragon tavern. Paul Revere was an active member, but the lodge’s greatest hero was General Joseph Warren, the Masonic Grand Master who was bayoneted to death by the redcoats as he rallied the rebel line during the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of 1775.
As always, there was time for the ladies. Jones was a lothario, but his interest in the fairer sex was not always low-minded. Sometime during his stay, he made a remarkable friendship with the black poetess Phillis Wheatley. Small-boned and frail, she was named after the slave ship she arrived on, the Phillis. Sold to a well-off Boston family as a household maid, she showed extraordinary precocity as a young girl, learning Latin so well that, in between making beds and mopping floors, she translated heroic couplets from Ovid. She began writing verses that sound very much like Jones’s favorite, the pre-Romantic poet James Thomson.
The wealthy white men who served as the city’s worthies could not believe what they heard about the girl. An investigation was launched. A committee of these stuffy wise men, including John Hancock, convened to determine whether this slip of a slave girl was capable of true literary merit. Under interrogation, she passed with flying colors. The “uncultivated Barbarian from Africa,” as she was described in a public “Attestation,” was found to be the true author of her poems. “She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them,” concluded the judges. She became a curiosity and a bit of a celebrity in Boston society. Freed by her master in 1773, she was paraded around London before the war, where she was visited by a curious Benjamin Franklin. Returning to Massachusetts, she called on General Washington at his encampment at Cambridge. She wrote a patriotic ode to Washington and other verses that likely appealed to Jones, including one called “To a Gentleman of the Navy.” (These verses were penned before she met Jones, but the tone was suitably heroic.)
Jones’s relationship with Wheatley was certainly cordial and may have been flirtatious or romantic. The two understood what it was like to be the object of condescension by a less clever man (in their case, the same man, John Hancock). Wheadey wrote powerfully about a subject familiar to the former slaver. “In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom. It is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.” At some point in his dogged self-education, Jones had begun to write poetry, and he now sent her some of his own verses. As he was leaving to go to sea in the summer of 1777, he wrote his friend Hector McNeill, instructing him to put some verses “into the hands of the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo.”
Were they love poems? The verses he enclosed with the note to McNeill have not survived, but Professor James Bradford of Texas A&M University, who collected and annotated Jones’s papers, speculates that one of them was “Pity So Excellent a Face.” The poem is about a black-and-white profile of a lady’s head that conceals her true features: “Pity so excellent a face/Should in the shade preserve thy name,/Such beauty, harmony, and grace,/The painter’s softest taints may claim!” Could this be an allusion, at once clumsy and delicate, to the color of Phillis’s skin somehow obscuring her inner radiance? Possibly. Jones’s racial attitudes were typical of his time, notwithstanding his fascination with the “African Muse” and his convert’s loathing of the slave trade.*
Jones’s time “on the beach” in Boston was not spent entirely on Masonic fellowship and writing poems to the gender sex. In addition to his tireless flow of letters to the Marine Committee, he met regularly with other naval officers to discuss “useftd mies & regulations.” “We have had sundry meetings here for this purpose without being able to effect anything,” Jones grumped to Morris. Jones decided to ignore collective wisdom and make his own suggestions: “I have determined that if I subscribe to nonsense it shall be nonsense of my own not that of others!” he wrote, jocularly, but revealing his solitary bent.
Jones did agree with his brother officers on one particular matter: that the uniforms prescribed by the Continental Congress were dowdy. In September, Congress had decreed that the ship’s captains should wear a red waistcoat and blue coat and blue breeches. Not dashing enough, Jones believed. In March, he convened a committee of captains to design a smarter uniform: blue coat, white breeches, and white waistcoat This was exactly the dress of a captain in the British navy. Jones was motivated by both envy and cunning. Wearing the same uniform as a British captain might convey some martial equivalency—and it would aid in pulling off a ruse de guerre, making the officers play the part in a masquerade of a British man-of-war. Jones added another, non-British touch, this borrowed from the French. On dress uniforms, all officers would be entitled to wear one gilt epaulet. This fashion, not widely accepted by the English until the early nineteenth century, had the effect of making short captains—like Jones and Nelson—look taller. The uniform recommendations, adopted by a committee that included Jones, Manley, McNeill, and Saltonstall on February 27, were not adopted by Congress. No matter: Jones was an actor on his own great stage. He needed proper costumes. When it suited him—especially when going into battle—Jones wore a blue coat, white breeches, and white waistcoat—the uniform of a British naval officer.
Jones always went his own way. A fellow captain, William Grinnell, tried to persuade Jones to settle down. “You young bachelors may think [it] strange,” Grinnell wrote Jones, but “in hard times,” marriage was a “grand step” toward softening and civilizing a man. “Therefore I have made that leap,” Grinnell wrote. He had married the woman, he wrote Jones, that “you called the idol of my affections.” Now his bride was offering to play matchmaker for Jones: “Mrs. Grinnell begs you will excuse her boldness. She will give you letters to some ladies that she is certain will be very agreeable to you…. The little angels at Salem are waiting for you.”
But Jones wasn’t interested in the “little angels of Salem” or anywhere else, save for passing pleasure and amusement. He had too much to accomplish in his own cause. On he strove, seeking to be recognized as a gentleman, unaware that that he was becoming something more native to his new nation, a self-made man.
* He meant immediate family. He tried to send money, both before and during the American Revolution, to his two surviving sisters, and he included them in a will dictated in October 1777. Jones may have felt totally alone, but from time to time apparently he remembered his surviving family back in Scotland. In later years, he corresponded with his sisters.
* A knot is the maritime measure of speed for the number of nautical miles—about one-sixth longer than a regular mile—covered in an hour. An eighteenth-century warship could make ten or twelve knots in ideal conditions, but five knots was more typical.
* The chain of command was blurry and fragile in the Continental Navy. In instructing Jones to put together a flotilla, Morris was apparently speaking for the Marine Committee, but Hopkins, as fleet commander, seemed to feel free to ignore or thwart his congressional masters. The slow and erratic mails were also a factor: Hopkins didn’t get his authorization from Congress until February 28. Jones had already begun to badger Hopkins for leaving him “in the lurch.”
* A later verse suggests he was writing about a blue-eyed white woman: “Carnation and the blushing rose,/Should with the lily, vie./And grace, beyond all art disclose,/The mild blue lustre of thy eye.” Jones sometimes sent slightly amended versions of the same poem to two different women, depending on their characteristics and circumstances.