Another doctor, Cornil, reviewed the tissue samples, including a microscopic examination, and added to Capitan’s conclusions. The body on the table had suffered from pneumonia (there was no evidence of tuberculosis) and severe kidney failure. The afflictions accounted for the symptoms Jones had exhibited as he neared death—the difficulty breathing, the swelling of the lower limbs and abdomen. And the kidney disease was doubtless the cause of death.
Altogether, it was a persuasive array of evidence, some direct, some inferred. There was the research trail unearthed by Porter and his deputies. The details of Jones’s physical condition in his last days. The twentieth-century autopsy of the eighteenth-century corpse. All fed into the same conclusion. “Given this convergence of exceedingly numerous, very diversified, and always agreeing facts,” Capitan wrote, “it would be necessary to have a concurrence of circumstances absolutely exceptional and improbable in order that the corpse … be not that of Paul Jones.”
A week after the coffin had been found deep beneath Mme Crignier’s Parisian properties, Porter prepared a lengthy telegram to Washington. It was understated, and choppily written, but unequivocal. “My six years search for remains Paul Jones has resulted in success,” Porter began. He skated through the research that led him to the site, the details of the discovery of the coffin, its removal to the École de Médecine, the measurements, and the autopsy that “showed distinct proofs of disease of which the Admiral is known to have died.” Porter promised to mail copies of all the reports once they were completed, but felt compelled to wire Hay with the good news: he had found the right body. “Will have remains put in suitable casket and deposited in receiving vault of American Church till decision reached as to most appropriate means of transportation to America.”10
Porter received a congratulatory reply, and the exchange was remarkably muted given the time, effort, and expense that Porter, particularly, had put into the search. The elation came through in subtle ways. On the top of Porter’s initial telegram received at the State Department, someone scrawled an undated note: “Copies made for press!”
16
The Return of the Hero
FROM A TECHNICAL STANDPOINT, the mining for Jones’s body had not gone as smoothly as Porter and Weiss had hoped. Despite the support beams and board ceilings they’d installed, the unstable ground above the tunnels had settled in places, and the walls in some of Mme Crignier’s buildings had cracked. In March—in the midst of the search—Porter was summoned to a Parisian court to answer a complaint about damage filed by Crignier’s tenants. Vignaud, replying on Porter’s behalf, pointed out that the ambassador was not subject to French subpoenas and that, regardless, his agreement with Crignier meant that all such complaints should be made to her.1
The work had also taken longer than expected. Porter had predicted the project would last three months, from the first shovelful of earth to be dug out to the last shovelful to be tapped back into place. The digging had begun February 3, and some ten weeks later, when the medical experts identified the body as Jones, sections of the old cemetery remained unexplored. And only the tunnels beneath the laundry had been refilled with a mix of the original earth and large paving stones Weiss had ordered in to add stability. The records don’t detail what became of the hundreds of bodies the men had encountered; presumably, they were left below ground, to be reburied with the filling of the tunnels.
The confirmation that Jones’s body had been found at least allowed Porter to cut the search short. The day after Porter wired Washington with his confirmation, Weiss’s crews ended their digging and began the restoration. The horse carts that had hauled away the excavated dirt to the remote storage field began the reverse process. The winch-hauled buckets that had brought the material to the surface now were used to take the stones and removed earth back below ground. Slowly, the tunnels were refilled.
There’s no clear record of when the work ended, but it stretched well into summer and then fall, nearly eleven months altogether and more than three times what Porter and Weiss had predicted. Bassigny, in particular, was affected, since most of the work took up space in the property he had leased for his granary, cutting into his business. And even after the tunnels were filled, the ground continued to shift and settle, increasing the damage to Mme Crignier’s buildings. The prolonged time of the project and the damaged walls created long-running problems and eventually a series of lawsuits for, and between, Mme Crignier and her tenants.2
The more immediate issue, though, was what to do with Jones’s body. The exposure to the air had already begun drying out the skin, and what had been a remarkably preserved corpse was turning into a ghoulish apparition—head twisted to the side, skin turned to leather, lips shrunken back in that toothy grimace. And while the body was intact, it was still very delicate. After the examination and autopsy, the medical workers tried to comb out the admiral’s long hair, which had become gnarled after it was unloosed from the bun and protective cap. Each brush stroke pulled locks away from the scalp, so they gave up, carefully rolled the hair into an unkempt ball, and tucked it back into the embroidered cap.
Though Jones’s final resting spot had yet to be determined, Porter ordered the body packed up for the eventual trip to the United States. It was a much more involved process than simply dropping Jones back into his coffin. The medical workers rubbed glycerin onto the skin to preserve it, and sprayed essence of thymol, another preservative, as an extra protective layer over the face, before redressing the corpse in the ruffled burial shirt. They folded the original burial sheet and placed it in the bottom of the lead coffin, still split wide from the cuts at the head and foot. On top of the sheet they spread a layer of impermeable oiled silk, over which they laid cotton batting soaked in glycerin. They gently placed the body on the cotton and then added second layers of treated cotton and silk on top, from the middle of the torso down. They tucked in a small sample jar of the original packing hay near the head, and by the feet placed a sealed-up sample of the discolored earth from the breaches in the coffin. More treated cotton was tucked around the body, taking the place of the hay, and the sides of the split coffin were bent back as near as they could be to the original shape.
With Jones snugly back in his coffin, the workers turned their attention to a new lead coffin ordered by Porter, which was somewhat larger than the one in which Jones had been found. They covered the bottom with treated sawdust, then placed the original coffin lid on top of the sawdust. Gently they lowered Jones and the old coffin to rest on top of the lid, and then they sealed the new coffin’s lid in place—a lid with a glass pane “which exposed to view the head and chest” so Jones could be seen without reopening the coffin. After the coffin was soldered shut, seals were affixed bearing the imprint of the US embassy. The workers then used three bands of linen to lower the nesting coffins inside a large oak casket with eight silver handles, the lid of which was then closed tight with sixteen silver screws.3 When they were done, it resembled a morbid set of Russian matryoshka nesting dolls, six feet, ten inches long, two and a half feet wide, and a foot and a half high.4
With no pageantry and only a small entourage, the coffin was transported to the American Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, an Anglican parish dating to the 1830s. Pallbearers carried the coffin to the church basement, where it was draped in an American flag. Ambassador Porter, Vignaud, Bailly-Blanchard, Gowdy, and Weiss stood solemnly as the Reverend Dr. John B. Morgan (a cousin of J. P. Morgan) offered a prayer for the long-dead hero. And there Jones would stay, until Porter and his superiors in Washington could figure out what to do with him. It would be a more fraught decision than Porter had any reason to anticipate. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to claim a hero.
Porter’s success was heralded in newspapers across the United States, and both his and Jones’s name were invoked at businessmen’s lunches and other gatherings where American boosterism could be found. The Spokane Press managed to squeeze onto its April 14 front page a line from a Scripps News A
ssociation wire story out of Paris that “it is announced positively that the remains of John Paul Jones have been found.” An Associated Press story made it into more papers the next day, with details from Porter’s report to the State Department. The New York Tribune and the Evening World in New York City carried their own front-page stories by Paris-based correspondents that included details from the autopsy, with the World adding a touch of biography about Jones, including how he came to rest in Paris. The Tribune’s correspondent, the well-connected Charles Inman Barnard, gave the discovery his own spin. Barnard’s boss, Tribune owner Whitelaw Reid, was an old friend of Porter and had been the US representative in France under President Benjamin Harrison. Reid was also a member of the Peace Commission that Porter had hosted to negotiate the treaty ending the Spanish-American War. That connection likely helped win Barnard a coffin-side seat. In a story dated April 15, the day after Porter’s telegram to Washington, Barnard wrote that “the happiest man in Paris today is General Porter, who, after six years’ patient research, discovered yesterday the body of John Paul Jones. Your correspondent examined the remains this morning. There is no doubt whatever about the identity, conforming in every detail to descriptions and measurements at the time of his death.”
While Porter was roundly credited with making the discovery, another man, journalist Julius Chambers, had already surfaced to claim that he, in fact, was the man who had found the cemetery. Flamboyant and self-promoting, Chambers was very much a journalist of his time, a veteran of the yellow press wars, with a ham actor’s instinct for the spotlight. He and Barnard were longtime friends, and Chambers had also worked for Reid at the Tribune in the 1870s before he was hired away to work for James Gordon Bennett Jr. at the New York Herald. Bennett had sent him to France to create the Paris Herald in 1887. Two years later, Chambers was back in New York working for Joseph Pulitzer at the World.
Early in his career, Chambers was an investigative reporter and a bit of a muckraker. In one series, he conspired with friends to get committed to an insane asylum and, after his release, wrote an exposé about abuses of the mentally ill, sparking inquiries and policy changes. In 1872, Chambers followed the Mississippi River to its northernmost point, gaining credit for determining that Elk Lake, rather than the previously identified Lake Itasca, was the wellspring of one of the world’s mightiest rivers. The distinction is one of splitting hairs: Elk Lake is a small pond slightly south and a few feet higher in elevation than Lake Itasca, into which it empties through a short creek. Still, the discovery earned Chambers an invitation to join Britain’s Royal Geographic Society. By 1899, Chambers was out on his own, freelancing articles and traveling the world writing books, including novels.
As Porter waited for Weiss’s crews to do their work and before Jones’s body was found, Chambers had written an article for the Pittsburgh Dispatch claiming that he and Barnard, working with Ricaudy, were the ones who had read the historical trail correctly and narrowed the burial spot to the abandoned Saint Louis cemetery. They began the search, he wrote, in July 1899, and Chambers claimed that he had paid for it. By then, though, Porter had already been making inquiries, as had Gowdy. In his memoirs, published posthumously in 1921, Chambers maintained his claim but had dropped Barnard and Ricaudy from the list of credits. “At my personal expense, I had employed a friend in Paris to search the Parisian journals contemporary with the funeral of Admiral Jones, and he had thereby located the grave, beyond question, in the Protestant cemetery as it existed in 1792.” Chambers noted that “I have a letter from [Porter] denying I had found the grave,” but Chambers neither reprinted the letter nor refuted it, other than to restate his claim.5 Tellingly, Barnard, Chambers’s supposed partner in the search, never claimed that his role had any significance, writing in October 1899 only that he had “upon several occasions profited by M. de Ricaudy’s invitations, and accompanied him during some of his most interesting researches in the heart of antiquarian Paris.” Barnard notably doesn’t mention Chambers. One suspects that Chambers, like Barnard, simply accompanied Ricaudy on some of his inquiries.6
And there were other claims. The Daughters of the Revolution (a now defunct rival to the Daughters of the American Revolution), gathered for their fourteenth annual conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in late April and unanimously passed a motion commending Porter “in his work of finding and removing to this country the body of John Paul Jones—a project which originated with the Daughters of the Revolution.”7
The Sons of the American Revolution also claimed credit, maintaining that since Porter had been the founder and top official of the group’s Parisian chapter, he had conducted the search under the SAR’s banner—though Porter never linked the search with his role at the SAR.8
In rural western New York, the Randolph Register claimed that its local lawyer J. G. Johnson had prompted the search with his June 1899 letter to McKinley—which could well have been the spark that led to the discovery. Since Gowdy had made some initial queries the previous winter at the behest of Congressman Landis, it’s impossible to distill a single source to credit, given the national attention paid to Jones’s history in the wake of Dewey’s victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay.
Porter, though, had propelled the project and financed it. It’s hard to see an avenue by which Jones’s body would have been recovered without Porter. Even Chambers didn’t claim to have taken steps to confirm that Crignier’s property was indeed atop the old cemetery and that Jones was buried within.
Similarly, there were competing claims on the body itself. Official Washington presumed space—and a memorial—would be made for Jones at the National Cemetery in Arlington. Even before Porter had found the body, speculative claims were being laid from different slices of Jones’s past. Officials and boosters in Fredericksburg, Virginia, argued that Jones should be buried there, since that was as close to a home as the admiral had on American soil. Jones’s brother had been a contributing member of the city in the 1700s, and Jones had lived at the house as caretaker after the brother’s death. Had Jones not left to sail under the American flag against the British, they argued, he likely would have stayed there, and Jones’s descendants would be living among them.
Philadelphia, too, argued that Jones’s most significant time of residence was there, where he received his commission to the Continental navy and where the directives for the early days of his American naval career had been issued. New York City boosters made a case as well, given that part of Jones’s story—the discovery of some of his letters—took place in the city. Perhaps they also felt that Porter’s role in finding the body would give them an edge. And while the State Department was eyeing burial at Arlington, the Department of the Navy began making noise that Jones’s body belonged at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, arguing that Jones had been among the first to advocate that the United States create a place to train and groom officers for service at sea.
Proponents of the different final resting places sent telegrams to Porter, as the man who had found the body, seeking his recommendation. “I reply that all such questions should be left to the national government for decision,” he told Francis Loomis, the assistant secretary of state. Porter, in fact, didn’t have a preference. He just wanted a commitment and a timeframe from Washington so he could arrange for the pageantry that would surround the transfer of the body to the United States.
Porter was also trying to finalize his own plans for moving home. As of May 1, new ambassador Robert McCormick would be in charge of the embassy and Porter would be just another American in Paris. “Mr. McCormick takes charge of the Embassy tomorrow morning,” Porter wired to Loomis on April 30. “I shall have my furniture packed up during this month and will ship most of it during the month of June, of which you will be advised. I beg that you will see that the necessary instructions are given for its free entry at the port of New York.”9
Porter’s spring exchanges with Washington were with Loomis instead of John Hay because the secretary of state w
as no longer in Washington. The rigors of public life had begun to eat away at the sixty-six-year-old Hay’s stamina, and his health was fading. He had intended to resign as secretary of state at the end of Roosevelt’s term in March, but the president urged him to stay on. He agreed but then immediately took a prolonged vacation at his doctor’s urging, leaving Loomis in charge of the department.
On the morning of March 18, Hay and his wife, Clara, arrived at the sprawling White Star docks in Manhattan to board the steamship Cretic en route to Genoa, Italy, from which they would travel by land to other spots in Europe. The Hays’ son, Clarence, their daughter, Alice, and her husband, John W. Wadsworth, were there to help the couple get aboard, and Henry White, the recently appointed ambassador to Italy, came along to see his new boss off on the trip. The secretary had tried to leave the country quietly, without being noticed by the newspapers. Reporters were on hand at the White Star docks to record the comings and goings of the steamships—the travels of the wealthy and the powerful made for good copy—and Hay was noticed, in part because of his deteriorated physical condition. He had lost weight, his face gaunt beneath his whitening beard, and he walked unsteadily along the pier.
Passengers boarding departing ships had to climb three flights of stairs to the deck-level portion of the White Star terminal. Hay had trouble making it up the stairs without help, and he paused for a minute at the top to catch his wind before starting the 150-foot walk across the gangplank to the ship. As he moved, Hay’s steps slowed until he suddenly leaned over and collapsed onto a pile of burlap stacked at the side. His family and White quickly surrounded him and the ship’s doctor was summoned. Hay said he was fine, just overtired, and a wheelchair was rounded up to roll the secretary onto the ship and to his suite, No. 55, on the promenade deck. The ship’s medic, a Dr. Green, told reporters that Hay was not suffering from any serious ailments and would regain his strength once at sea. Skepticism slipped into the coverage. “It was said by one of the friends who went to the pier with the secretary that no one in Washington except his family and possibly his cabinet associates realized how ill he was,” the New York Times reported. The friend, presumably, was White.10
The Admiral and the Ambassador Page 26
