John Paul Jones
U.S. NAVAL INTITUTE COLLECTION
As THE STRAINS OF “THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER” DIED, SECRETARY of the Navy Charles J. Bonaparte rose, walked to the lectern, and began to speak. “We have met to honor the memory of that man who gave our Navy its earliest traditions of heroism and victory.” With these words, the Secretary began his introduction of the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, the first of several dignitaries to deliver addresses at the 1906 commemorative exercises held in honor of John Paul Jones at the U.S. Naval Academy. Before the podium stood a star-draped casket containing the body of John Paul Jones, recently returned to the United States after lying for more than a century in an unmarked grave in France. Upon the casket lay a wreath of laurel, a spray of palm, and the sword presented to Jones by Louis XVI of France in honor of his victory over the Serapis.
The ceremony’s date had been selected by President Roosevelt—24 April, the 128th anniversary of Jones’s capture of the Drake—and the observance in Annapolis capped a series of activities that included a White House reception and an official visit by a French naval squadron. Congress ordered the publication of a commemorative volume whose introduction stated, “There is no event in our history attended with such pomp and circumstances of glory, magnificence, and patriotic fervor.”1 This may have verged on hyperbole, but there can be no doubt that the splendor surrounding America’s reception of the remains of John Paul Jones, and their reinterment in a crypt below the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy, contrasted sharply with the treatment accorded him at the time of his death in Paris.
The author wishes to thank Dale T. Knobel for his advice and comments on this essay.
In July 1792, as Jones lay mortally ill in rented rooms near the Luxembourg Palace, America’s Minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, seemed to have trouble finding time between social activities for a visit to his deathbed. In his diary, Morris recorded: “A Message from Paul Jones that he is dying. I go thither and make his Will. . . . Send for a Notary and leave him struggling with his Enemy between four and five. Dine en famille with Lord Gower and Lady Sutherland. Go to the Minister of the Marine’s. . . . I go to the Louvre. . . . Take [my mistress] and Vic d’Azyr [a physician] to Jones’s Lodgings but he is dead, not yet cold.”2
Morris ordered Jones’s landlord to arrange for as private and inexpensive a burial as possible, but others interceded, and the French Legislative Assembly, wishing to “assist at the funeral rites of a man who has served so well the cause of liberty,” took charge of the arrangements. Two days later, a cortege of soldiers, representatives of the Assembly, and Masonic brethren from the Lodge of the Nine Sisters accompanied Jones’s body to the Protestant cemetery outside the city walls for interment. Gouverneur Morris was giving a dinner party that evening and did not attend. Such was the sad ending to the life of the man whom Benjamin Franklin had once considered the chief weapon of American forces in Europe and whom Thomas Jefferson had described as the “principal hope” of Americans in their struggle for independence. What kind of a man was Jones to be so heralded during his lifetime, ignored at the time of his death, and honored a century later?
The answer is complex, just as Jones was complex. From humble origins he rose through sheer force of character and combat success to prominence in the Continental Navy. More than any other American of his era, he wrote about naval policy and offered suggestions to foster professionalism in the service; but congressional leaders refused to heed his advice. When the war ended, the Continental Navy was disbanded and its officers returned to civilian endeavors. The transition was difficult for Jones. For a few years, he served the United States as a diplomat, but he was a military man whose ambition focused on naval command. When he accepted service in the Russian navy of Catherine the Great to increase his naval knowledge, there were those who mocked his earlier contention that he fought in the American Revolution for the cause of liberty. When he died in Paris, he seemed a man passed by time.
If Jones feared he would be forgotten by history, he need not have. His image might change, but his name was etched on the Anglo-American memory. For a century, Americans would recall him as a battle leader, a brave, almost foolhardy captain who inspired his men with “I have not yet begun to fight.” To Britons his name conjured up images of treason and piracy. But this would change. At the start of the twentieth century, when the United States was building a modern navy and Britain and America were drawing closer together, this image began to shift. Britons began to view Jones more positively, and Americans rediscovered his ideas. With these changes came a desire to know more about all aspects of Jones’s life, a life of enough adventure to satisfy any biographer.
John Paul Jones rose from humble stock, a fact he seems never to have forgotten. Born in 1747, the fifth child of a gardener, John Paul, as he was then known, received only a rudimentary education. His father worked for William Craik, owner of “Arbigland,” an estate on the Scottish shore of the Solway Firth. Young Paul’s contacts with Craik and other area landowners helped instill in him a desire to better his position in society. There being little chance for advancement at home, John Paul was apprenticed at age thirteen to a shipowner from Whitehaven, a town on the Cumbrian coast of the Solway.
His first voyage took him to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where his older brother, William, was a tailor. A number of voyages between England, the West Indies, and the Chesapeake followed until his master went bankrupt and released Paul from his apprenticeship. At least his next two voyages were on board slavers, but he could not long abide what he called that “abominable trade,” and in 1768 took passage home from Kingston, Jamaica. En route, both the ship’s master and mate died of a fever, and Paul assumed command. The owners rewarded him by giving him permanent command of the vessel, the sixty-ton brig John.
Only twenty-one years old, John Paul had risen quickly. His biggest handicaps were his temper and his inability to get along with people whom he considered incompetent or lazy. In 1770, on a voyage from Scotland to Tobago, he had Mungo Maxwell, the son of a prominent resident of Kirkcudbright, Scotland, flogged for neglect of duty. Maxwell lodged a complaint against John Paul with authorities in Tobago, but it was dismissed. Maxwell then boarded a packet ship for home but died from a fever en route. Learning of his son’s death, Maxwell’s father had Paul arrested on a charge of having inflicted fatal wounds on his son. John Paul was jailed briefly before being allowed bail to gather evidence that cleared his name.
In the meantime, he joined the Masons in Kirkcudbright, probably with the knowledge that membership was a step up socially and that it could help clear any blemish on his character left from the Maxwell affair. Years later, his Masonic membership would open doors to him in Boston, Portsmouth, Philadelphia, and Paris.3 By age twenty-five, John Paul formed a partnership with a merchant-planter in Tobago and commanded ships in the triangular trade between Britain and her colonies in North America and the Caribbean. In 1773 his crew mutinied and he killed the ringleader in self-defense. Friends in Tobago advised him to “retire incognito to the continent of America and remain there until an Admiralty Commission should arrive in the Island” to hear his case. The young captain took their advice, fled to Virginia, and adopted the surname “Jones” as a precaution.4
Still in Fredericksburg at the outbreak of the Revolution, Jones traveled to Philadelphia where he became friendly with Joseph Hewes, a congressman from North Carolina, whose partner was a brother of Jones’s sponsor when he joined the Masons. Through Hewes, he obtained a commission as senior lieutenant in the Continental Navy on 7 December 1775. When offered command of the sloop Providence (of twenty-one guns), he refused and chose instead to serve on board the frigate Alfred (with thirty guns) in the hope that he could expand his knowledge of ship handling and fleet maneuvering. It was characteristic of Jones throughout his career to seek such opportunities to add to his professional education. In this capacity he took part in the New Providence raid and the squadron’s engagement of HMS Glasgow. The latter convinced him that he had nothing to learn from Esek Hopkins, the commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. When he was again offered command of the Providence in the shuffling of positions that followed the Glasgow affair, he eagerly accepted.
Assigned to convoy and transport duty in May and June 1776, Jones set sail on his first independent cruise in August. Operating off the Grand Banks, he captured sixteen British prizes and destroyed the local fishing fleets at Canso and Isle Madame in Nova Scotia. In recognition of his achievement, he was promoted to the rank of captain on 10 October 1776 and transferred to command of the Alfred. In a second cruise to the Grand Banks, Jones took seven more prizes, including the armed transport Mellish and her much needed cargo of winter uniforms.
Upon his return to port, Jones learned that he had been placed eighteenth on the seniority list established by Congress and that he had been reassigned to the Providence. Incensed, Jones wrote letters of complaint to congressmen, charging in one of them that several men placed senior to him were “altogether illiterate and utterly ignorant of marine affairs.”5
Congress had not purposely slighted Jones when it compiled the list; clearly, he was the most successful officer to date. Family relationships and place of residence, not ability, were the main criteria. The four most senior officers on the 1775 list were related to members of the congressional committee that directed naval affairs. The 10 October 1776 list was drawn up shortly after Congress had ordered the building of thirteen frigates, and, in order to enlist local support in the construction of the vessels and to facilitate the recruitment of sailors, local men were assigned to command the vessels. Jones was an outsider. He had no relative in Congress to press his appointment, no shipyard interest to support him, and no local community to put forward his name. This may have saved him from the provincialism of an Esek Hopkins, but it certainly did not help him gain advancement.
It is perhaps of more note that his name appears on the list at all than that it appears so low. But it is also natural that Jones should resent what he took to be a slight. That he should continue to complain throughout the war of what he considered to be an insult is a testament to his personal sense of honor, though he also believed that there was a principle involved. Jones regarded the existing system as unfair and wanted to replace it with one based on merit and seniority. “Perhaps it would have been good policy to have commissioned five or seven old mariners who had seen War, to have examined the qualifications of the candidates . . . ,” he wrote. At the least, no officer should have been superseded by another unless such a change in seniority was based on the proven abilities of the men involved.6
Jones traveled to Philadelphia and pressed his case without success. He also proposed a strategy for carrying the war beyond American waters. Specifically, he suggested a voyage along the unprotected coasts of Africa to prey on British trading outposts and the India fleet. Robert Morris, speaking for Congress, endorsed such an overseas strategy but suggested that the Caribbean was a better place to attack the British than Africa.7 When plans for the Caribbean expedition were canceled—through the jealousy and backwardness of Esek Hopkins, Jones suspected—he was given command of the Ranger, a sloop-of-war under construction in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.8
For months, Jones worked to ready the Ranger for sea. Cordage, sails, and cannon were collected from all over New England.9 Though he anticipated only a single voyage in the ship—once in Europe his orders called for him to take command of a frigate under construction in Holland—Jones took great pains in his work. A perfectionist, he was rarely satisfied with the condition of a ship when he took command. His seasoned eye told him that the Ranger was too lightly built to carry the twenty guns her sides were pierced for, and he reduced the number to eighteen.
On 1 November 1777, the outfitting and alterations complete and a crew enlisted, Jones set sail for Europe. The passage was not used for resting after the months of work on the ship but for exercising his officers and crew. Jones was a hard but fair commander who had the best interests of the entire ship’s company at heart. “The care . . . of our seamen is a consideration of the first magnitude,” he wrote to Robert Morris soon after his arrival in France.10 Before proceeding to Paris, Jones advanced spending money to the crew from his own account, ordered the purchase of fresh meat and vegetables for them, purchased new sails for the Ranger, altered her rig, and reballasted her.
In mid-December he was summoned to the capital by the American commissioners to France. Jones quickly became friends with the first two of them, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, but, probably because of this, did not enjoy good relations with Arthur Lee. The divisions among the commissioners reflected political alignments in Congress. Because of the friendships he had developed with Morris, Franklin, and other members of the Middle States faction, Jones became almost anathema to many of the Adams-Lee faction, of which Arthur Lee and John Adams, who succeeded Deane, were principals.
Jones was disappointed to learn that the ship promised to him would not be available because the British had learned of her intended use and convinced the Dutch not to deliver her to the Americans. He then sought and obtained orders from the commissioners allowing him to retain command of the Ranger and to “proceed with [her] in the manner you shall judge best, for distressing the enemies of the United States by sea, or otherwise.”11 The final phrase reflects Jones’s strategic ideas. The Continental Navy could best contribute to victory by preying on British commerce and raiding Britain’s coast. The Royal Navy should be left to the French, who had a fleet capable of engaging it in a pitched battle. Thinking in broad strategic terms, Jones proposed a plan to bring the war to a speedy close:
Were any continental marine power in Europe disposed to avail of the present situation of affairs in America . . . a single blow would now do the needful. Ten or twelve sail of the line with frigates . . . would give a good account of the fleet under Lord Howe. . . . Small squadrons might then be formed to secure the coast and cut off the enemies supplies while our army settled the account current.12
Jones’s ideas were ahead of their time. The French had greater interests in the West Indies, but his belief that a French fleet in American waters could bring victory was correct.
In February and March, Jones cruised the Bay of Biscay to prey upon British commerce and familiarize himself with the area. On 14 February 1778, during a visit to Quiberon Bay, he arranged the first official salute of the American flag by a foreign power. Early in April he set sail for the Irish Sea with plans to raid a coastal town to repay Britain for her raids on towns in Connecticut and to seize one or more prisoners who could be exchanged for American seamen held in British prisons. Jones was always concerned about Americans so incarcerated. One of his objections to the use of privateers was the fact that they captured so few English seamen who could be used to gain prisoners’ release.13
Within a month Jones fulfilled both his goals, though not in the way he had planned. On the night of 22 April, he led an attack on Whitehaven where he spiked the guns of the fort and set fire to colliers in the harbor. The damage was minimal in financial terms, but the alarm it spread was great. Not for over a century, since the Dutch burned Sheerness in 1667, had foreign forces so treated a British seaport.
On the following day, he led a party ashore on St. Mary’s Isle in Kirkcudbright Bay, across the Solway Firth. Jones planned to seize the Earl of Selkirk as a hostage to force the release of Americans held prisoner by Britain. To a boy raised in a nearby gardener’s cottage, the earl seemed worthy of such a price. In fact, he was a minor Scots peer at best and by his own admission “scarce known” to the king. When Jones learned from a servant that the earl was away, he ordered his men back to their ship, but the men “were disposed to pillage, burn, and plunder all they could,” and refused to obey. Faced with mutiny, Jones proposed that a small group go to the house and “politely demand the family plate.” His plan was accepted, the silver taken, and violence averted. In a letter to Lady Selkirk written upon his return to France, Jones informed her of his original plan to kidnap the earl, promised to purchase and return the plate, and explained his motives:
It was my intention to have taken [the earl] on board the Ranger, and to have detained him till thro’ his means, a general and fair Exchange of Prisoners, as well in Europe as in America had been effected. . . . I have drawn my Sword in the present generous Struggle for the right of Men; yet I am not in Arms as an American, nor am I in pursuit of Riches . . . I profess myself a Citizen of the World.
Some of Jones’s contemporaries and many historians since have discounted his claim to have fought for the “rights of men” and to be a “Citizen of the World,” sentiments he would repeat on a number of occasions. To do so is wrong. Such statements were common during the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and Edward Gibbon expressed similar ideas, and James Otis adopted “Ubi Libertas, Ibi Patria,” meaning “Where liberty is, there is my country,” as his motto. Jones was as serious as any of them when he stated the idea, though he may have been a bit naive in stating it thus in a letter. He certainly made himself appear foolish when, later in the letter, he said to Lady Selkirk: “Let not therefore the Amiable Countess of Selkirk regard me as an Enemy. I am ambitious of her esteem and Friendship, and would do anything consistent with my duty to merit it.” It was important to him that the Selkirks consider him a gentleman. In his biography of Jones, Admiral Morison speculates that Jones might have even thought of returning to live in the area after the war.14
The Earl of Selkirk did not prove to be the key to gaining the release of American prisoners, but the action of the next day did effect the freedom of some of them. On 24 April 1778, Jones crossed the Irish Sea to Carrickfergus where he enticed HMS Drake into battle. It was an even match: the Drake mounted twenty, six-pounders and the Ranger eighteen, nine-pounders, but the Drake had more men. Jones concluded that it was in his interest to disable the Drake with cannon fire and prevent her from closing, so that her larger crew could not board the Ranger. Such tactics would also preserve the value of the sloop as a prize.
In an hour-long action described by Jones as “warm close and obstinate,” the captain of the Drake was killed, her second in command mortally wounded, and her rigging virtually cut to pieces. When the Drake surrendered, a more cautious captain might have burned his prize and sailed away before the Royal Navy could send ships after them, but not Jones. Understanding the impact that a British prize would have on the French if brought into port, he calmly remained in sight of the coast for most of the next night and day and refitted the badly damaged Drake. Finally, on 8 May, he led the prize ship into Brest “with English Colours inverted under the American Stars.” On board were two hundred prisoners, who were later exchanged for Americans held in Forton and Old Mill prisons in England.15
The entire cruise was a huge success. “What was done,” Jones said later, “is sufficient to show that not all their boasted navy can protect their own coast, and that the scene of distress which they have occasioned in America may soon be brought home to their own shores.” The Royal Navy and the British government might assail him as a pirate, but Americans knew better. John Banister, a Virginia delegate to Congress, called his attack on Whitehaven “intrepid & bold,” saying that it gave the British “a small specimen of that Conflagration & distress, we have so often experienced from our Enemies, in a much higher degree.” Fellow delegate James Lovell recognized the strategic value of the attack when he wrote that Jones’s “conduct alone will make England keep her ships at home.”16
If Jones expected immediate recognition and promotion as a reward for his actions, he was disappointed. The Continental Congress had few ships to assign, and Jones was too far away to press his claim, in any case. The American commissioners in France, especially Benjamin Franklin, appreciated his achievements but commanded even fewer resources, a fact not fully appreciated by Jones. In June, the French Minister of Marine called Jones to Paris to discuss various operations, but nothing was agreed upon, and Jones returned to Brest where he sought to make profitable use of his time.17 He had by this time become proficient enough in French that he felt comfortable using the language. He undoubtedly brought to mastering it the same determination that characterized his self-study of every subject that he considered of value to a naval officer. When word arrived of the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France, Jones sought permission to join the French fleet as an observer to study fleet maneuvering and battle tactics firsthand. To his displeasure, permission did not arrive before the fleet sailed, and Jones missed the chance to observe the Battle of Ushant.
The search for a suitable command for Jones continued. The task was not easy. Several vessels were suggested but rejected. “I wish to have no connection with any Ship that does not Sail fast for I intend to go in harm’s way,” wrote Jones.18 Finally, a ship was found. She was an old East Indiaman, the Due de Duras, which Jones almost wholly rebuilt and transformed into the Bonhomme Richard, renamed in honor of his friend and patron Benjamin Franklin.
Jones proposed “several plans related to different important operations [that he] wanted to undertake” in the vessel, but “was not reluctant” when asked in early April to join the Marquis de Lafayette in launching a raid on Liverpool.19 Work continued on the Richard and the ships assigned to join her, but in May, France and Spain agreed to a joint invasion of England and the Jones-Lafayette expedition, was canceled.20 In June, Jones made a cruise of the Bay of Biscay, and, after some changes in the crew and recovery from the first illness to strike him in years, he was ready to execute his own plans.
On 14 August, he put to sea from L’Orient with a squadron composed of the frigates Bonhomme Richard (with forty guns), Alliance (with thirty-six guns), and Pallas (with thirty-two guns) and the corvette Vengeance (with twelve guns), the cutter Cerf (with eighteen guns), and two privateers that left the squadron soon after it sailed. Jones planned first to intercept ships expected from India, then to lay Leith, the port city of Edinburgh, under contribution, and finally to intercept the Baltic convoy laden with naval stores. He proceeded clockwise around the British Isles, taking seventeen prizes before he reached the southeast coast of Scotland. Two of the prizes were sent into the neutral port of Bergen in Norway.
Almost a month to the day later—on 13 September—Jones, with the Richard, Alliance, and Pallas, was off the Firth of Forth. Writing later, he assessed his position and stated goals in the enterprise:
Though much weakened and embarrassed with prisoners, [I] was anxious to teach the enemy humanity, by some exemplary stroke of retaliation, and to relieve the remainder of the Americans from captivity in England, as well as to make a diversion in the north, to favour a formidable descent which [I] then expected would have been made on the south side of Great Britain, under cover of the combined [French and Spanish] fleet.21
His plan was to sail up the Firth to Leith where he would put a small party ashore and demand payment of two hundred thousand pounds, under the threat that otherwise the town would be burned. On the point of the plan’s execution, Jones reported, a “sudden storm rose and obliged me to run before the wind out of the Gulf of Edinburgh.”22 Jones next attempted to convince his captains to attack the city of Newcastle-on-Tyne to destroy coal supplies destined for London. Seeing no profit in such a plan, his subordinates refused but, after further pleading from Jones, agreed instead to cruise along the Yorkshire coast to prey on British shipping.
On 23 September, between two and three in the afternoon, a fleet of forty-one sail was sighted off Flamborough Head. Jones realized immediately that this had to be the sought-after Baltic convoy and set course to engage. As the wind was very light, he was not able to close with the enemy until dark. There ensued one of the hottest naval engagements in the Age of Sail.
The opponents appeared to be evenly matched. The Serapis, rated at forty-four guns, actually carried fifty and was supported by the twenty-gun Countess of Scarborough. The Bonhomme Richard was rated at forty-four guns, like the Serapis, but, in fact, carried only forty. With the eighty guns, total, of the Alliance, the Pallas, and the Vengeance to support him, Jones should have had an advantage. However, the Vengeance took no part in the battle, and the Alliance, captained by the erratic Pierre Landais, did nothing to support the American effort; on the contrary, her only part in the battle was to fire three broadsides into the Bonhomme Richard.
In addition, the Serapis was a newer (less than six months off the stocks), faster, and more maneuverable ship, and her crew of Englishmen were almost certainly superior to Jones’s polyglot mix of 174 French, 79 Americans, 59 English, 29 Portuguese, 21 Irish, and representatives of six other nationalities.
By seven o’clock, the Richard and the Serapis were within pistol range of one another and opened fire almost simultaneously. On the first or second broadside, two of Jones’s eighteen-pounders exploded, killing their crews and blowing a hole in the deck above. Fearing the other eighteen-pounders would also explode, Jones abandoned his main battery. Now sensing that his only hope for victory lay in boarding the more powerful Serapis, Jones ran the Richard against the starboard quarter of the Serapis and ordered his men to board. The British drove the Americans back, and Jones sheered off to seek a better position. When Captain Richard Pearson of the Serapis tried to cross the Richard’s bow to rake her, Jones ran the bow into the Serapis’s stern.
Cannonading continued with, in Jones’s words, “unremitting fury,” the Richard receiving most of the damage. The American flag was shot away, and Captain Pearson shouted, “Has your ship struck?” Jones responded with his immortal, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
Their ships entangled, the two captains continued to maneuver as best they could until Jones was able to get the two vessels lashed together bow to stern. With his own hands he tied a loose forestay from the Serapis to his mizzenmast. “Well done, my brave lads,” he cried, “we have got her now.” For two hours the ships lay in deadly embrace with the Serapis pouring devastating cannon fire into the Richard while the seamen and French marines of the Richard swept the enemy’s deck with small arms and swivels. Remaining on the quarterdeck, Jones directed fire and worked with the gun crew of a nine-pounder. Near exhaustion, he rested for a moment on a hen coop. A sailor begged him, “For God’s sake, Captain, strike.” “No,” responded Jones, “I will sink, I will never strike,” and he jumped to his feet.
At ten o’clock the battle swung in favor of the Americans when a grenade thrown from one of the Richard’s yardarms fell through an open hatch on board the Serapis and, exploding among a pile of loose cartridges, killed at least twenty British sailors, horribly burned others, and caused panic on the gun deck.
Jones then focused the fire of his three remaining nine-pounders on the enemy’s mainmast. Growing desperate, Captain Pearson ordered his men to board the Richard. They were thrown back, and he sought to continue the battle, but within half an hour his mainmast began to tremble. Seeing no hope of victory, he surrendered. The casualties were high. Between seventy-five and eighty died in each ship during the three-and-a-half-hour battle, and some 100 others were wounded. Thus, almost half of the Bonhomme Richard’s crew of 322 were casualties, and Captain Pearson lost almost the same number of the Serapis’s 325-man crew. Lieutenant Richard Dale boarded the Serapis, and Jones, in a typical eighteenth-century gesture, invited Richard Pearson to his cabin for a glass of wine.23
Meanwhile, the crews of both ships worked frantically to extinguish fires and patch holes. In a memoir, Midshipman Nathaniel Fanning described the “shocking sight” of “the dead lying in heaps . . . the groans of the wounded and the dying . . . the entrails of the dead scattered promiscuously around, [and] the blood over ones shoes.” For two days, Jones tried to save the Bonhomme Richard, but she was “mangled beyond my power of description,” and “with inexpressible grief” he watched her sink into the North Sea.24 For a week the battered ships drifted and sailed across the North Sea. Jones wanted to try to reach the French port of Dunkirk, but the captains of the Alliance, Pallas, and Vengeance insisted on going directly across the sea to the Texel in Holland and arrived there on 3 October. A combination of foul weather and good fortune allowed the squadron, including the Countess of Scarborough, which had been captured by the Pallas while Jones battled the Serapis, to escape the dozen British ships sent in their pursuit.
Most of the Royal Navy’s ships searched the English and Scottish coasts in response to wild rumors and false sightings. When the Admiralty learned that Jones was in the Texel, ships were sent to blockade the port. Now something of a celebrity, Jones was both hated and admired in Britain. “Paul Jones resembled a Jack o’ Lantern, to mislead our marines and terrify our coasts,” said London’s Morning Post. He is “still the most general topic of conversation,” the paper said a month later. Poems and ballads celebrated his victory and attacked him as a traitor.25
In America, news of his victory was eagerly embraced; 1779 had not been a good year for American arms. The Dutch people greeted Jones as a hero. He was applauded when he attended the theater, and crowds gathered when he walked the streets. British ambassador Sir Joseph Yorke was appalled at his reception and demanded that Jones be forced to leave Holland and that the Dutch government turn the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough over to the Royal Navy. Jones, supported by France’s ambassador, asked that he be allowed to land his sick and wounded, send his 504 British prisoners ashore, and repair his ships so that he could put to sea. For the next two months Jones was the center of partisan political maneuvering in Amsterdam where the House of Orange was basically friendly to Britain and the Patriot Party favored France and sympathized with the United States. Some Dutch officials even suspected that Jones had been sent to Holland to try to provoke a war between Britain and the Netherlands.26
Jones had no desire to remain in Dutch waters and made his repairs as quickly as possible. He did try, unsuccessfully, to trade his English captives for Americans held in British prisons, but otherwise he focused his attention on his men and ships. Finally, he was forced to turn control of his prisoners and ships over to the French and set sail in the Alliance on 27 December. Leaving the Texel, Jones called his officers together and informed them that he planned to cruise for twenty days before going to L’Orient. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “you cannot conceive what an additional honour it will be to us all, if in cruising a few days we should have the good luck to fall in with an English frigate of our force and carry her in with us. . . . This would crown our former victories, and our names, in consequence thereof would be handed down to the latest posterity.”
His crew was hesitant, indeed near mutiny, but Jones imposed his will upon them, and the Alliance sailed through the English Channel and on to Corunna, Spain, where she took on supplies and made repairs before crossing the Bay of Biscay to arrive at L’Orient on 19 February. Jones immediately set the crew to making alterations in the ship that he felt had been shown essential by the cruise. Many of his crew did not believe the work was necessary and had an additional grievance: they had not been paid either wages or prize money since they left America almost a year before. This latter was not Jones’s fault, but the crew blamed him, and, in mid-April, he set out for Paris to see if he could obtain funds either from the American commissioner or from Le Ray de Chaumont, the French agent who had handled the financial arrangements for fitting out the Bonhomme Richard squadron.27
Jones proved unable to obtain money but was flattered by the welcome he received. His capture of the Serapis contrasted sharply with the failure of the combined French and Spanish fleet. His personal conduct during the battle appealed to the French sense of valor, and all Paris lionized him. Louis XVI awarded him the Ordre du Mérite Militaire and presented him a gold-hilted sword. France’s leading Masons, the brethren of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, invited Jones to join and engaged the renowned Jean-Antoine Houdon to sculpt his bust. Crowds applauded him everywhere he went. A handsome war hero, fluent in French and genteel in manner, Jones was in great demand for dinners and receptions. His wit became famous. At a dinner given in his honor by the Duc de Biron, Jones was informed that the king of England had recently knighted Richard Pearson for his conduct during the battle with Jones; and Jones replied, “Let me fight him again and I’ll make him a lord!” Women seemed to be irresistibly drawn to Jones, who often responded with poetry. His six weeks in the capital flew by.
In June, Jones returned to L’Orient with plans to sail to America with a cargo of military supplies. In his absence, Pierre Landais had been busy undermining Jones’s command of the Alliance by telling the crew that Jones was acting in league with Chaumont to deny them their prize money. Arthur Lee was in L’Orient ready to sail to America and promised to use his influence with Congress to help them get their wages if they backed Landais. Benjamin Franklin warned Jones that trouble was brewing, but Jones seems to have underestimated the gravity of the situation and allowed himself to be outmaneuvered. Landais took control of the ship and sailed in June. Most of the sailors who had served on board the Bonhomme Richard under Jones were left behind and formed the nucleus of a crew for the Ariel, a sloop-of-war built for the British navy but captured by the French and lent to the United States to carry supplies to America. When given command of the Ariel, Jones was, as usual, dissatisfied with the ship and ordered her rerigged, thus further delaying his departure.
While the Ariel lay at anchor, the Independence, an American privateer, entered the harbor under the command of Thomas Truxtun. Like many other privateers, Truxtun had little respect for the Continental Navy and thus refused to accord to Jones and the Ariel the traditional signal of respect. Rankled, Jones sent an officer to remind Truxtun of the congressional resolution prohibiting privateers and merchant vessels from flying pennants when in the presence of ships of the Continental Navy. When Truxtun refused to remove the pennant, Jones wrote to him, “It is not me you have offended. You have offended the United States of America,” and sent his first lieutenant, Richard Dale, and two boatloads of seamen to forcibly haul it down. When Truxtun again flew the pennant, Jones sent a letter to the Board of Admiralty describing the incident and asking, “Is not this bidding defiance to Congress and the Continental Flag?” There is no evidence that Congress took any action on Jones’s complaint, but Truxtun’s biographer believes that the incident had an effect on Truxtun, who “put some of Jones’s ideas away in the corner of his mind” and recalled them later when he became the commander of an American man-of-war.28
Work was finally finished on the Ariel in September, and Jones put to sea only to be caught in a vicious gale that destroyed ships along the entire Breton coast. The survival of the Ariel was due to Jones’s consummate seamanship. The French commander of the port of L’Orient wrote: “The Commodore showed in this gale the same strength that he had exhibited in battle. . . . The crew and passengers all credit him with saving the ship.”29 The Ariel lost two masts, and repairs delayed Jones’s departure so that he did not reach America until February 1781.
Upon his arrival in Philadelphia, a group of congressmen sought to launch an investigation of Jones’s conduct in France to show that it had delayed the sending of supplies to America. They hoped through Jones to embarrass Benjamin Franklin but abandoned their plan when it appeared it might backfire. Instead, they decided to have Jones examined in private by the Board of Admiralty. The secretary of the board gave Jones forty-seven questions to which he skillfully responded, giving a detailed account of his triumphs and laying blame for any delays on Landais and Chaumont.
Governmental restraint soon turned to acclaim as France’s ambassador formally invested Jones with the eight-pointed star of the Ordre du Mérite Militaire, the highest award the French could give to a foreigner. Congress showed its regard for Jones by voting “that the thanks of the United States in Congress assembled, be given to Captain John Paul Jones, for the zeal, prudence and intrepidity with which he has supported the honor of the American flag; [and] for his bold and successful enterprizes to redeem from captivity the citizens of these states.” Jones was particularly pleased by the last section. Congress rewarded him more concretely by voting unanimously to give him command of the America, the Continental Navy’s only ship-of-the-line, then building at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.30
In mid-August, Jones left Philadelphia for Portsmouth where he arrived on the last day of the month. For a year Jones struggled to find the supplies and skilled workmen necessary to ready the America for launching, but, just as she was ready for sea, command of the ship was taken from him. Peace negotiations were under way with the British, and the war seemed almost over. The Continental Congress, even shorter on funds than usual, doubted the need for the ship. When a French ship-of-the-line was lost on a sandbar outside Boston Harbor, Congress voted to give the America to the French navy as a replacement.31 Jones supervised her launching on 5 November 1782 and, two days later, set out for Philadelphia. Unable to procure another command, Jones sought and was given permission to join a French fleet for a cruise to the Caribbean.
As in 1778, his goal was to increase his professional knowledge by firsthand study of fleet maneuvering and French naval tactics. Jones sailed with the fleet on Christmas Eve 1782 for what turned out to be a mixed experience. The wardroom company must have been pleasant, but for part of the voyage Jones was gravely ill. He was able to observe fleet evolutions, but there was no combat. When the fleet reached Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, it learned that a peace treaty had been signed with Britain. From there, Jones sailed to Cape Haitien, where, sick again, he left the ship.
By May, Jones was back in Philadelphia, his health so bad that Robert Morris feared for his life; and in July, he entered a sanatorium in nearby Bethlehem where he remained for more than a month—thinking, perhaps brooding, about the future. Back in March he had tried to purchase an estate in New Jersey, and, in August, he wrote to a friend that “I hope that I have occasion ‘to learn War no more,’ ” indicating that he hoped to visit Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the fall.32
Such thoughts of domesticity may have been induced by his illness. By fall, he had recovered and was planning far more ambitious enterprises. To Robert Morris he wrote suggesting that he be sent to Europe “in a handsome Frigate to display our Flag in the Ports of the different Powers,” to negotiate commercial treaties, and to study the administration of foreign navies. In mid-October, he wrote to the President of Congress concerning prize money owed to the officers and men of the Bonhomme Richard squadron in France and Denmark. Jones was confident that he could succeed where others had failed. “I beg leave to acquaint you that I am ready to proceed to Europe in order to make the necessary application at those two Courts, provided I can go honored with the Sanction of Congress.”33 On 1 November 1783, Congress gave its sanction; nine days later, Jones boarded a packet ship for France.
Negotiations in France dragged on for two years. Jones’s success in finally extracting money from the distressed French treasury is a mark of both his continued prestige in Paris and the tenacity with which he pursued almost all his objects. During this period “the Chevalier,” as Jones was known in France, renewed old friendships and cast about for future employment. He considered several commercial ventures and invested in a few with mixed results. At the same time, he yearned for more active service.
In 1784, Thomas Jefferson joined Franklin and Adams in Paris as an American commissioner to France. The three were empowered to deal not only with France but also with the Barbary states, whose corsairs had been taking American ships captive under the pretext of war. The North Africans wanted tribute, and the American commissioners were divided on how to deal with them. Jefferson opposed such payments in principle: “We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honourable occasion, or with a weaker foe? I am of opinion Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy [the Barbary states’] commerce . . . by constant cruising and cutting them to pieces by piecemeal.”34 Jones would no doubt have welcomed such an enterprise.
Only a month before leaving America, he had addressed a long letter to Robert Morris, who as “Agent of the Marine” headed the Navy. “In the time of peace it is necessary to prepare, and be always prepared for war by sea,” wrote Jones. In succeeding paragraphs he discussed strategy, the officer corps, and naval education and training. “It is the work of many years’ study and experience to acquire the high degree of science necessary for a great sea officer,” he wrote. He claimed that service in the merchant marine does not adequately prepare a man for naval command, nor does “cruising after merchant ships, (the service on which our frigates have generally been employed), afford . . . the knowledge necessary for conducting fleets and their operations.” Officer candidates must be carefully selected and promoted on a merit basis. Jones recognized the financial constraints imposed on the young nation:
My plan for forming a proper corps of sea officers, is by teaching them the naval tactics in a fleet of evolution. To lessen the expense as much as possible, I would compose that fleet of frigates instead of ships of the line: on board of each I would have a little academy, where the officers should be taught the principles of mathematics and mechanics, when off duty. When in port the young officers should be obliged to attend at the academies established at each dockyard, where they should be taught the principles of every art and science that is necessary to form the character of a great sea officer.
In addition to training officers, the fleet of evolution would provide an opportunity to develop and practice signals and tactics. In his draft of the letter to Morris, Jones analyzed current French and English signaling and maneuvering systems and concluded that the French system was far superior.35
Reform of the officer system was also necessary, he believed. The Continental Navy’s ranks of midshipmen, lieutenants, and captains were inadequate. In 1775, Congress had established three grades of lieutenants, but Jones saw the need for “the same number of subaltern grades” below lieutenant. “The charge of the deck of a ship of the line should . . . never be entrusted to an officer under twenty-five years of age.” The increase in the number of grades would allow the Navy “to raise young men by smaller steps” and thereby avoid the “uneasiness” of mind that results “when they are continued too long in any one grade.” Regular promotions would also give officers a sense of accomplishment. In the same letter, he commented on Congress’s failure to mention his name when transferring the America to France. “Such little attentions to the military pride of officers are always of use to a state, and cost nothing.” Perhaps Jones was learning. During the war he had not always been liberal in his praise of his subordinates in official reports.36
By the time Jefferson made his suggestion concerning the Barbary states, Jones appears to have given up hope of any immediate service in an American navy. As early as 1782 he had written to Hector McNeill that his voice was “like a cry in the Desert” when he made suggestions to improve the Navy.37 During the fall of 1785 he wrote his “Memoir” for Louis XVI, probably with the hope that, should the threatening war with Britain become real, he might be offered a commission in the French navy. If so, he was disappointed. There was no war in 1785 or 1786, and Jones decided to return to America before proceeding to Copenhagen to press the claims of the Bonhomme Richard squadron before the Danish court.
Jones sailed from France to New York City in July 1787. There he presented his accounts for the French prize money negotiations to Congress and again sought to be named rear admiral. As in the past, officers senior to him blocked the promotion. Such an action would have been honorary at best because the United States lacked a navy at the time. Congress did honor Jones by unanimously voting him a gold medal and instructing that Thomas Jefferson have it executed in Paris. Jones was the only Continental Navy officer so recognized and was much pleased. Congress also asked the king of France, probably at Jones’s request, to allow him “to embark with one of his fleets of evolution; convinced that he can no where else so well acquire knowledge which may hereafter render him more extensively useful.” In addition, Congress renewed his authority to press the Danish government for payment for the prizes handed over to the British.
Jones left America for the last time in 1788. He arrived in Copenhagen in March and was received with ceremony. He met with the Danish foreign minister and dined with the royal family but could do nothing to obtain the money. By mid-April he was presented a far more appealing opportunity and gave up on the prize money. He certainly was not willing to devote two years to the project as he had in France.
The offer was a commission in the Imperial Russian Navy. Attracted by an opportunity to command a fleet, as well as the promise of adventure, glory, and profit, Jones accepted immediately and set out for Saint Petersburg. However, several British officers served in Catherine the Great’s navy in the Baltic, and they threatened to resign rather than serve with a “pirate”; so Jones was ordered to the Black Sea.
Jones was commissioned a rear admiral, but the limits of his authority were not clearly delineated. Prince Potemkin, one of Catherine the Great’s favorites, was the overall commander in the region. Jones thought that he was to command all naval forces, but there were three other rear admirals already serving in the Black Sea. One commanded the arsenal at Kherson, another the flotilla of galleys, and the third a separate fleet at Sevastopol. Jones was given command of the sailing ships and had to deal closely with only one of the other admirals, Prince Nassau-Siegen, an international adventurer who was very jealous of Jones and had the ear of Prince Potemkin, their common superior.
Jones boarded his flagship, the Vladimir, on 29 May 1788. With a Turkish attack imminent, Jones took strategic control of the Russian forces and deployed them across the Liman, an estuary of the Dnieper River. Eight days later the Russian forces repulsed an assault by the Turks. A second attack broke down when the Turkish flagship ran aground. During the following night, Jones personally reconnoitered the enemy fleet in a rowboat and skillfully shifted the position of his ships to meet the next day’s onslaught. The Second Battle of the Liman lasted two days and resulted in the capture or destruction of ten large and five small Turkish vessels against the loss of only a single ship by the Russians. Nassau-Siegen, with the support of his friend Potemkin, took credit for the victory, although the strategy of fighting a defensive battle had been Jones’s and was adopted over Nassau-Siegen’s protests. In fact, the victory would have been greater had Nassau-Siegen followed Jones’s orders during the battle.
After four months of political bickering over credit for the victory, Jones emerged the loser and was recalled to Saint Petersburg under the pretense of reassignment to the Baltic fleet. For several more months he languished in the capital, where he devoted much of his time to drafting plans for a Russian-American alliance, the reorganization of the Black Sea fleet, and Russian-led operations against the Barbary corsairs. He also compiled a “Narrative of the Campaign of the Liman,” which he meant to submit to Catherine in the hope that it would regain her favor.
In April 1789, a trumped-up scandal linking Jones to a young girl ended any chance for his restoration to command, and he decided to leave Russia. It took him until the end of August to put his affairs in order and to obtain the necessary exit papers. From Saint Petersburg he went to Warsaw, Alsace, and Vienna before reaching Amsterdam in December. In May 1790, he visited London and finally settled in Paris. Jones was clearly drifting. His health was deteriorating. Without money or employment, he settled into rented rooms near the Luxembourg Palace. There he spent his final days, all but ignored. To the American Minister to France he became a bore. “Paul Jones calls on me,” Gouverneur Morris recorded in his diary. “He has nothing to say but is so kind as to bestow on me all the Hours which hang heavy in his Hands. . . .” A few days later, Morris wrote “Paul Jones calls and gives me his Time but I cannot lend him mine.”38
It was a sad ending to a career filled with highlights. Jones must have sensed the attitude of Morris and have been hurt by the inattention of men like Lafayette who had once sought him. When death claimed him in July 1792, just days after his forty-fifth birthday, he may have welcomed it as a relief after two months of suffering from jaundice and other diseases brought on by long exposure to the elements. Had he known that President George Washington and his Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson remembered him and valued his services, it would have been a great comfort. Only days before his death, the two leaders signed a commission appointing “John Paul Jones a citizen of the United States . . . a Commissioner . . . to confer treat and negotiate with the [Dey of] Algiers . . . concerning the ransom of all citizens of the United States of America in captivity with the Said Dey.”39
Jones died before the commission was delivered. It was a strange and lonely death.
Jones’s life paralleled that of the Continental Navy. Both rose from humble origins, appeared briefly on the world scene, and then passed with few mourners. Jones gave to it some of its brightest moments, including the capture of the two largest Royal Navy ships to strike their flags to Americans during the Revolution. He always made the most of the limited resources available to him. In the battle against the Serapis, he left a legacy of dauntless courage and unconquerable persistence in the most desperate of circumstances. Every fighting service needs a tradition of refusal to surrender in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. “It was [John Paul Jones] who . . . created the spirit of my country’s infant Navy,” wrote a mid-nineteenth-century naval officer.40
This was the dominant image of Jones during a century when naval officers, in particular, shared his great sense of personal honor. The era of Jacksonian Democracy found much to admire in the rise of a Scots gardener’s son to glory in the Continental Navy and to flag rank in the Imperial Russian Navy.
Early American naval officers were not an introspective group. Few conducted extensive correspondence, and fewer still left memoirs of their service. No account exists of the mundane contacts between Jones and those who served with him, of the long hours shared on the quarterdeck, the inspection tours of the ship, and the relaxing dinners in his cabin. Still, it is clear that he directly influenced such future officers as Richard Dale, Thomas Truxtun, and Joshua Barney.
At the start of the twentieth century, when the U.S. Navy took its place among leaders of the world, the image of Jones held by the general public and by naval officers began to change. The Navy’s rising professionalism led it to value Jones not simply as a courageous leader in time of battle but as a complete naval officer. Jones understood the basics of his vocation. His grasp of naval architecture was demonstrated by his supervision of the construction of the Ranger and the America, the virtual reconstruction of the Bonhomme Richard, and alterations to the masts and rigging of almost every ship he commanded. His victories were not won by courage and superior tactics alone but were the result of careful preparation. Jones took a motley crew on board the Bonhomme Richard and welded it into a team. His letters and actions show the respect he had for his subordinates, though he often failed to give enough credit to the officers who served under him.
His writings also suggest a nascent professionalism. His opposition to nepotism and his desire to establish boards to evaluate officers for promotion were visionary for his time. His proposals for a fleet of evolution and naval academies predated the establishment of such institutions in the United States by over half a century. Consequently, quotations from his writings, sometimes imaginary, appeared on the fitness report forms of the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel and on examination books at the U.S. Naval Academy in the early twentieth century.
Jones’s strategic ideals were equally sound. As clearly as anyone, he understood the limitation of the Continental Navy and advocated operations congruent with its capabilities. The need for French assistance in ejecting the British army from America was apparent to Jones. It is not surprising that French Admiral François DeGrasse’s biographer credits Jones with suggesting the strategy that ultimately brought victory at Yorktown.41
John Paul Jones’s great fault was his egotism. He could express his gratitude to men such as Hewes, Franklin, and Morris, who appreciated his abilities and helped him, but he always resented anyone who did not measure up to his standards and was in a position to control his affairs. As an individual, Jones was jealous and vain. A man of strong opinions, he generated strong feelings in others. To some, he was an arriviste whose pride smacked of overweening hubris. This partly explains his nation’s treatment of him at the time of his death.
That he was a man of talent cannot be denied nor can his patriotism. His disappointments in terms of recognition and command rivaled those of Benedict Arnold, but their reactions differed sharply. Jones’s reputation rests on his exploits of 1778 and 1779, when he took the war to the British people and strengthened American morale at times when it was sinking. Sadly, he was destined never to test his talents on a broad scale. With the end of the war, America thought it no longer needed a navy and thus had no use for Jones as a naval officer.
But Jones never fully adapted to peace. His success as a diplomat was no compensation for his disappointment when his plans for an American navy were rejected. Throughout the Revolution he had remained optimistic, convinced that the Continental Navy, no matter how low its fortunes, could win respect from Europe for the new United States. That he sought personal fame at the same time is not surprising. His pursuit of glory as a reward for self-sacrifice and service to the nation was fully in keeping with the spirit of the time.42 In the end, John Paul Jones’s legacy rests not so much on what he accomplished as on how he did it. As the inscription on his tomb reads: “He gave to our navy its earliest traditions of heroism and victory.”
John Paul Jones has been the subject of more than a score of biographies and even more works of fiction. Only four of the biographies are worthy of attention, however. These are John Henry Sherburne’s Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones (New York, 1825); Anna DeKoven’s The Life and Letters of John Paul Jones, 2 vols. (New York, 1913); Lincoln Lorenz’s John Paul Jones, Fighter for Freedom and Glory (Annapolis, Md., 1941); and Samuel Eliot Morison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (Boston, 1959). Other biographies contain so many errors that they should be avoided. Most important in this group is Augustus C. Buell’s Paul Jones, Founder of the American Navy: A History, 2 vols. (New York, 1900), which served as the basis for later biographies such as Norman Hapgood’s Paul Jones (New York, 1901) and M. MacDermot Crawford’s The Sailor Whom England Feared (London, 1913). Valentine Thomas, Knight of the Seas (New York, 1939), accepts most of Buell’s tales and adds several of her own. Gerald W. Johnson, The First Captain: The Story of John Paul Jones (New York, 1947), describes episodes, such as Jones’s service in the Royal Navy and his career as an actor, for which there is no documentation.
A comprehensive addition of Jones’s own writing was published on microfilm in 1986, The Papers of John Paul Jones, 10 reels (Alexandria, Va., 1986), edited by James C. Bradford. During the nineteenth century, Jones’s niece, Janette Taylor, arranged for the publication of the Memoirs of Rear-Admiral Paul Jones (Edinburgh, 1830), probably by Sir John Malcolm, and Robert Sands’s Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones, Including His Narrative of the Campaign of the Liman (New York, 1830). William Bell Clark and William James Morgan, eds., The Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 10 vols. to date (Washington, D.C., 1964–), include Jones’s most important papers for the first two years of the war, and Frank A. Golder’s John Paul Jones in Russia (Garden City, N.Y., 1927) includes transcriptions of most of his important papers relating to his service in the Black Sea. John S. Barnes edited The Logs of the Serapis-Alliance-Ariel under the Command of John Paul Jones, 1779–1780 (New York, 1911).
Louis F. Middlebrook edited The Log of the Bon Homme Richard (Mystic, Conn., 1936); Gerald W. Gawalt translated Jones’s Memoir of the American Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1979) that Jones prepared for the king of France; and Joseph G. Sawtelle drew from these sources to edit John Paul Jones and the Ranger (Portsmouth, N.H., 1994).
Jones’s operations are described in Gardner W. Allen’s A Naval History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Boston, 1913); his command of the Providence is included in Hope S. Rider’s Valour Fore & Aft: Being the Adventures of the Continental Sloop Providence, 1775–1779, Formerly Flagship Katy of Rhode Island’s Navy (Annapolis, Md., 1977); and the battle between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis is analyzed by John Evangelist Walsh in Night on Fire: The First Complete Account of John Paul Jones’ Greatest Battle (New York, 1978). Don C. Seitz’s Paul Jones, His Exploits in English Seas during 1776–1780, Contemporary Accounts Collected from English Newspapers with a Complete Bibliography (New York, 1917) will guide the reader to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works.
The administration of the Continental Navy and early naval policy and strategy have not received the attention they merit. Charles O. Paullin’s The Navy of the American Revolution: Its Administration, Its Policy, and Its Achievements (Cleveland, 1906) has been superseded by Frank C. Mevers’s doctoral dissertation, “Congress and the Navy: The Establishment and Administration of the American Revolutionary Navy by the Continental Congress” (University of North Carolina, 1972). Both works focus on administration rather than strategy and policy.
Three officers who served with Jones left varying accounts of their commander. Diary of Ezra Green, M.D., Surgeon on Board the Continental Ship-of-War Ranger under John Paul Jones, from November 1, 1777 to Sept 27, 1778 . . . (Boston, 1875), edited by George H. Preble, pictures Jones in positive terms, as does Lt. Richard Dale’s “Particulars of the Engagement between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis,” which is printed in Sherburne’s biography. Nathanial Fanning, author of Fanning’s Narrative: Memoirs of Nathaniel Fanning (New York, 1912), edited by John S. Barnes, served as a midshipman on board the Bonhomme Richard and is more critical of Jones. His “memoir” and the sketch of Jones’s life that follows contain a number of amusing but apocryphal stories.
1. Charles W. Stewart, comp., John Paul Jones Commemoration at Annapolis, April 24, 1906 (Washington, D.C., 1907), 13.
2. Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, 1789–1793, 2 vols. (Boston, 1939), 2:468, 471.
3. Documents relating to the Mungo Maxwell episode, including the warrant for Jones’s arrest, his petition for bail, dated 10, 13, and 15 November 1776, are in the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Clerk’s Records, Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh. Jones’s petition for admission to the Masonic Lodge is in the Naval Academy Museum.
4. Jones to Benjamin Franklin, 6 March 1779, Franklin Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
5. Jones to Joseph Hewes, 17 August and 1 September 1777; Jones to Robert Morris, 24 August and 30 October 1777 (from which the quotation is taken) and 10 October 1783; Jones to Jonathan Williams, 20 November 1780; Jones to John Ross, 23 November 1778, Jones Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as Jones Papers, DLC).
6. Jones to R. Morris, 10 October 1783, Jones Papers, DLC; Jones to Franklin, 6 March 1779, American Philosophical Society.
7. Jones to R. Morris, 12 January 1777, and the Marine Committee to Jones, 1 February 1777, Jones Papers, DLC; R. Morris to Jones, 5 February 1777, Jones Papers, Papers of the Continental Congress, National Archives (hereafter cited as PCC 168).
8. Jones to R. Morris, 10 October 1783, Jones Papers, DLC.
9. Jones to John Brown, 31 October 1777, Pierpont Morgan Library.
10. Jones to R. Morris, 11 December 1777, Jones Papers, DLC. Also see Jones to William Whipple, 11 December 1777, Dreer Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
11. American Commissioners to Jones, 16 January 1778, Benjamin Franklin Letter-book, DLC.
12. Jones to American Commissioners, 10 February 1778, PCC, 193.
13. Jones to R. Morris, 11 December 1777, Jones Papers, DLC.
14. John Paul Jones’s Memoir of the American Revolution, translated and edited by Gerald W. Gawalt (Washington, D.C., 1979; hereafter, Jones, Memoir); Jones to Lady Selkirk, 8 May 1778, original in possession of Sir David Hope-Dunbar, Kirkcudbright, Scotland. Virtually all of Jones’s biographers quote the letter. And Samuel Eliot Morison, John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (Boston, 1959), 186.
15. Jones to Commissioners, 9 May 1778, Jones Papers, PCC 168. William Bell Clark, Ben Franklin’s Privateers (New York, 1969), discusses previous attempts by Americans in Europe to obtain British prisoners for use in an exchange for American prisoners.
16. John Banister to Theodorick Bland, Jr., 31 July 1778, and James Lovell to William Whipple, 14 July 1778; both quoted in Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of the Delegates to Congress, 15 vols. to date (Washington, D.C., 1976–) 9:278, 376. Also, see G. J. Marcus, A Naval History of England: The Formative Centuries (Boston, 1969), 418.
17. Jones, Memoir, 25.
18. Jones to Le Ray de Chaumont, 16 November 1778, Jones’s Letterbook, U.S. Naval Academy Museum.
19. Lafayette to the Comte de Vergennes, 1 April 1779, in Stanley J. Idzerda, ed., Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution, 5 vols. to date (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977–1983), 2:251–53.
20. Lafayette to Sartine [16–20 April]; Lafayette to Vergennes, 26 April 1779; Lafayette to Jones, 27 April and 22 May 1779; Franklin to Jones, 27 April 1779; Jones to Chaumont, 30 April 1779; all in Idzerda, Lafayette, 2:255–68.
21. Quoted from the lost English copy of Jones’s memoir in Robert Sands, Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones, Including His Narrative of the Campaign of the Liman (New York, 1830), 171.
22. Jones, Memoir, 31.
23. All of Jones’s biographers recount the battle. The most recent and most complete account is John Evangelist Walsh, Night on Fire: The First Complete Account of John Paul Jones’ Greatest Battle (New York, 1978). Samuel Eliot Morison reconstructs Jones’s words and actions that evening in John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (Boston, 1959), 221–42.
24. Nathaniel Fanning, Fanning’s Narrative: Memoirs of Nathaniel Fanning, edited by John S. Barnes (New York, 1912), 53; Jones to Franklin, 3 October 1779, Jones Papers, DLC.
25. Morison, Jones, 247–49, contains excerpts from several.
26. Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence, chap. 5, “Here Comes Paul Jones!” (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).
27. Fanning, Narrative, 78–79, 81.
28. Eugene S. Ferguson, Truxtun of the Constellation (Baltimore, 1956), 40–42.
29. Quoted in Morison, Jones, 306.
30. W. C. Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904–1936), 27 February, 14 April, and 26 June 1781.
31. Ibid., 3 September 1782.
32. Jones to Major John Sherburne, 1 August 1783, U.S. Naval Academy Museum.
33. First quotation in Jones to R. Morris, 10 October 1783, Jones Papers, DLC; second quotation in Jones to Boudinot, 18 October 1783, PCC 168, 35.
34. Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 11 November 1784, in Paul L. Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols. (New York, 1892–1899), 4:10–11.
35. Jones to R. Morris, 13 October 1783.
36. Ibid. The draft containing Jones’s comments on the current state of the French and British navies is in the Jones Papers in the Library of Congress.
37. Jones to Hector McNeill, 25 May 1782, in Anna DeKoven, The Life and Letters of John Paul Jones, 2 vols. (New York, 1913), 1:195.
38. Morris, Diary, 2:59, 64.
39. The commission is in Jones’s crypt at the U.S. Naval Academy.
40. Lieutenant Alexander B. Pinkham quoted by Edouard A. Stackpole, A Nan-tucketer Who Followed an Ideal in a Far Country (n.p., n.d.), 2–3.
41. Charles Lee Lewis, Admiral DeGrasse and American Independence (Annapolis, Md., 1945), 70–71.
42. This is the central theme of Douglas Adair’s “Fame and the Founding Fathers,” in Fame and the Founding Fathers, edited by Trevor Colbourn (New York, 1974). Every war produces individuals whose talents seem of little value or whose temperaments prevent them from achieving success in peace commensurate with that in war. George Rogers Clark and “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—as well as Jones—come to mind as examples for the American Revolution.
