“This day America reclaims her illustrious dead,” Porter began, his words flowing over the fan-array of chairs and up to the second-level balcony. “We gather here in the presence of the Chief Magistrate of the nation and of this vast concourse of representative citizens of the Old World and the New to pay our homage to the leading historic figure in the early annals of the American Navy, to testify that his name is not a dead memory, but a living reality. To quicken our sense of appreciation, and to give assurance that the transfer of his remains to the land upon whose arms he shed so much luster is not lacking in distinction by reason of the long delay.”
He went on, as had the others, to detail some of Jones’s exploits, a history “that reads more like romance than reality…. He was a many-sided man. On the water, he was a wizard of the sea. On the land he showed himself an adept in the realms of diplomacy.” Porter had had a lot of time to prepare his remarks, and they offered a sugarcoated portrait of the man Porter knew to have embraced many faults, from his occasionally harsh treatment of his men to his vanity, sexual dalliances, and other weaknesses. But this wasn’t the platform from which to deliver the full portrait of Jones. It was the platform for extolling patriotism and for gently arranging the hero’s shroud.
“Paul Jones never sailed in a man-of-war whose quarterdeck was worthy of being trodden by his feet,” Porter told the crowd. “His battles were won not by his ships, but by his genius.” Porter detailed Jones’s victories: raids on British soil, some sixty vessels captured, the seizure of British weaponry, more than a million dollars’ worth of floating prizes and cargo, and the capture of hundreds of enemy prisoners. “He was the very personification of valor. He ranked courage as the manliest of human attributes. He loved brave men; he loathed cowards. He believed there was scarcely a sin for which courage could not atone.”
Porter did note that Jones’s tongue had sometimes cost him friendships, and that while he was alive he had suffered from the venomous words of enemies. “He lived to realize that success is like sunshine, it brings out the vipers.” And when Jones died, “by some strange and unaccountable reason he was covered immediately with the mantle of forgetfulness. In all the annals of history there is not another case in which death has caused the memory of so conspicuous a man to drop at once from the height of prominence to the depth of oblivion.” Porter went on for well over a half hour, by far the longest speech of the afternoon, and his words served ultimately as Jones’s final, and most detailed, eulogy.
The Maryland governor followed Porter, but his brief comments felt like an afterthought as he spotlighted Maryland’s connections with the navy. The ceremony ended with a brief prayer, and at a signal twenty midshipmen stepped forward to surround the casket. Moving slowly and with precision, the young men lifted Jones free of the bier. In silence, they carried the coffin outside and placed it on a small caisson, which they then hauled in a parade along pathways from the armory, past the unfinished chapel, then through the open park area to Bancroft Hall, the ornate dormitory building. A smaller detachment then lifted the coffin from the caisson and carried it inside, where it was placed atop two sawhorses under the front main staircase, a quiet spot away from the daily to and fro of the midshipmen training to be naval officers.
Midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy move John Paul Jones’s body to its temporary home beneath a staircase in the Bancroft Hall dormitory, where it would remain for seven years.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-DIG-ds-03055
Jones was now at his third—but not yet final—resting spot.
19
“Stowed Away Like Old Lumber”
HORACE PORTER, GENERALLY AN even-keeled and diplomatic man, was peeved. More than five years had passed since he had recovered John Paul Jones’s body from its forgotten grave deep below a Parisian neighborhood. More than four years had passed since he, President Roosevelt, and several thousand other people had gathered at the US Naval Academy armory to praise the dead admiral and his long-ago exploits, the body then moved temporarily to the makeshift mausoleum beneath a dormitory staircase. The problem was that the coffin was still there, propped on two sawhorses and draped with a blue-and-white jack, an ignominious grave despite the twenty-four-hour honor guard. Once the object of reverence, Jones had become the butt of jokes among irreverent midshipmen who scampered down the stairs and past the coffin. One popular ditty in “Crabtown,” as Annapolis was called, mocked the hero of the American Revolution for his rest:
Everybody works but John Paul Jones!
He lies around all day,
Body pickled in alcohol
On a permanent jag, they say.
Middies stand around him
Doing honor to his bones;
Everybody works in “Crabtown”
But John Paul Jones!
It was, in a sense, an ignominious defeat for Porter, or at least a frustration of his ambitions. Porter was a man accustomed to achieving his goals. Nearly twenty years earlier, he had taken over the Grant Monument Association and fought long odds and disinterest to finish the tomb for his old friend and personal hero, Ulysses S. Grant. As a leader of the Sons of the American Revolution, Porter had thrown his support behind monument projects in Maryland and elsewhere. He had spoken publicly about the debts that a nation owes to its war veterans, both those killed in action and those who returned safely, and what he saw as the ingratitude inherent in failing to establish proper memorials. Jones’s body was still right where the navy had stashed it after the pomp and pageantry of the Annapolis ceremony, a fate that seemed to contradict in act the respect and thanks expressed from the podium on that April day in 1906. And the root of the problem lay with Congress, which refused to spend the money to finish the crypt.
Porter was irked to the point of action. He sat down on December 3, 1910, at a desk in his Madison Avenue house in Manhattan and put his frustrations in a letter to US Representative George A. Loud, a Michigan Republican, Spanish-American War veteran, and chairman of the House navy committee, with responsibility for vetting navy funding requests. The issue, Porter argued, was no longer about creating a monument to Jones. The issue was a matter of proper respect for the dead and the symbol that Jones’s coffin now offered to navy cadets. Congress, Porter wrote, had been asked several times to allocate $135,000 to finish the crypt. Each request had languished and then died from inaction. William Howard Taft had succeeded Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, and top officials in both administrations supported the project. Several, in fact, had written Congress about the issue, as had leaders of “the Navy League, Paul Jones Clubs, patriotic societies, the press, and hosts of public-spirited citizens. All appeals to Congress thus far, however, have been without avail.” Porter’s outrage built as he wrote. “For 113 years the body of this great central figure in our naval history was allowed to lie neglected in a sort of dumping ground in a distant land, and when brought back to the country he so eminently served it has lain for five years equally neglected, stowed away like old lumber,” Porter wrote. “The body was taken by the Government to Annapolis, believing that the memories it would awake would be an inspiration to the midshipmen at the Academy. Instead of that, it remains only as a reminder of a nation’s humiliating neglect of its historic defenders and is a sad example to young men about to enter the naval service.”1
If Congress was not willing to finish the crypt, Porter warned, other solutions were possible. “A number of patriotic gentlemen are willing to provide the means for taking the body for burial, if permitted, to a lot on a city cemetery if this session of Congress refused it a sepulcher, so that the remains may rest at least in consecrated ground.” Porter reminded Loud that Jones had been buried in Paris as an act of charity, and “it would constitute a further national disgrace to leave his remains to be buried in his own country again by the hand of charity.” It was not an empty threat. The man who had raised the money to build Grant’s Tomb and to elec
t a president would have no trouble putting together an organization to steal away the body and give Jones a proper grave.
Porter didn’t refer to it in his letter, but Congress was balking both from a penurious spirit and because some of them still doubted that Porter had, indeed, found John Paul Jones.2 The questions began in Paris as the dig was underway, with local wits joking that the Americans were going to a lot of trouble to move an unidentified Frenchmen to a fresh grave across the Atlantic. The genesis of the skepticism was a general belief that a body interred for more than a century would no longer be identifiable, despite the alcohol bath in which it had been laid to rest. There also were questions about the methods Porter and his array of experts had used to identify the body. How accurate could a Houdon bust be for the purposes of making an identity by comparison, given an artist’s predisposition to artistic license? And there was speculation that Porter, about to leave the country, had so wanted to find the body that he was ready to believe in the flimsiest of evidence. Other news articles put forward unsubstantiated claims that Jones’s body had been moved to Scotland years before and buried near his hometown. (Porter had already ruled that out through an inquiry to the pastor of the church where the body was supposedly interred.)3
The Chicago Daily Tribune, which had followed Porter’s quest closely in part through the dispatches of Charles Inman Barnard, was one of the first to publicly raise questions in the United States. In a lightly mocking editorial, the editors wondered what the misidentified corpse’s spirit would be saying at his disinterment. He “may be wondering how to get even with the person who has transplanted his remains to a foreign land. Nobody wishes to find himself among strangers on resurrection day.” It went on to say that “it may not be civil to investigate a gift corpse too closely,” but that, indeed, such an investigation was warranted, even granting Porter’s benevolent decision to foot the bill. The editorial also noted that the body had been found as Porter planned to leave Paris, which “may have made him more ready than he otherwise would have been to accept negative evidence—evidence which goes to show that the body exhumed may be that of Jones, but which does not prove that it is.” According to the article, were the evidence presented in a court of law, the verdict would be “not proven.”4
The body was still on its way to the United States when the weekly Independent magazine published an article by Park Benjamin Jr., a former editor for Scientific American and the author of several books, including History of the United States Naval Academy, which was published in 1900. Benjamin styled himself a Jones expert “because for a long time past I have been making a close study of the voluminous memoirs, letters, etc., left by John Paul Jones, in order to reach an appreciation of his real place in our naval history.” Benjamin wrote that the Independent editors had sought him out “because my professional work requires constant criticism of investigations in physical science.”5
Benjamin’s article was a response to the Parisian experts’ reports identifying the body as Jones, which had been reprinted in the previous week’s Independent. Benjamin was circumspect, but his doubts were clear. He noted that little was known about Jones’s physical appearance other than he was forty-five years old and five feet seven (though the source for that was dodgy), with dark hair. “No other physical data useful for present identification of the body without extraneous and inferential aid appear,” Benjamin wrote. “Nothing in this inquiry is more remarkable than the total absence of identifying remarks or objects in or upon the coffin.”
Benjamin also was skeptical about the story of Jones’s burial and the lost cemetery, arguing that it was unlikely that the grave and coffin of such an esteemed man would go unmarked. And the absence of scars and mended bones contradicted what he believed to have been evidence that Jones had, in fact, suffered a wound in battle, based on a letter written four months before Jones’s death in which he referred to a social slight. “M. de Sartine … did not say to me a single word or ask me if my health had suffered from my wounds and the uncommon fatigue I have undergone.” Benjamin also rejected the close match of measurements of the corpse’s head and the Houdon bust, suggesting that the changes in flesh after death should have made the measurements different. Like the Tribune editorial, Benjamin invoked the metaphor of a trial and asked readers to imagine themselves jurors. Would “you … bring in a verdict of guilty solely on the proof of the corpus delecti here advanced and thereby send the prisoner to execution?”
Other doubts followed. In 1911, six years after the body arrived in Annapolis, a biography of Houdon, the sculptor, renewed questions about the identity of the corpse. The authors, Charles Henry Hart and Henry Biddle, took issue with perceived discrepancies in the shape of the nose on the corpse and on the statue. They also argued rather thinly that the sculpture used to identify the corpse was a copy of a copy—and thus unreliable—and that it was inherently problematic to use a piece of art to establish anatomical fact.
The consensus of opinion of the most eminent of American sculptors which the writer has obtained, is against the measurements of a bust being accepted as the exact measurements of the living head reproduced, as the true artist makes but little moment of measuring and is likely to vary in his work from the measurements of nature, exaggerating parts, either plus or minus, to produce a desired effect. The truth is that the sculptor seeks to express character and general lifelikeness, not the mathematical measurements of the subject, and therefore, while Houdon unquestionably was very exact, he may have been also very inaccurate; consequently, to take a work of art to prove a scientific fact seems, to say the least, most unscientific.6
The sweep of skepticism, from the jokes in Paris to Benjamin’s piece to the Houdon biography, is worth considering. But it dissolves under close scrutiny. That the average citizen of Paris didn’t believe an alcohol-pickled corpse could be so well preserved after a century underground does not mean that it could not be so. The Paris medical experts who examined the body and conducted the autopsy had exemplary credentials, and no whispers are found about their integrity as men of science. While the corpse wasn’t photographed in the moments after the coffin was opened, when it was at its best preserved, the autopsy reports are quite detailed, and some of the methods Porter and the doctors used to identify the corpse—including matching photographs of the corpse against the busts—were path-breaking techniques in forensics. Later examinations of the reports raised no fresh questions, and academics revisiting the evidence as recently as 2004 came to the same conclusion: the body was Jones’s.7
Part of the problem for skeptics has been that much of the evidence was circumstantial. Jones had never had any reported injuries, and the corpse bore no scars. His height, set at five feet seven, came from a source—a biography by A. C. Buell—that was later found to have been heavily fabricated. In life, Jones was described as being diminutive, and biographer Samuel Eliot Morison, in his Pulitzer Prize—winning John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography, estimated he was only five feet five. A 2004 review by forensic experts found, after an exhaustive review of the evidence and the questions of the identity, that estimates of Jones’s height and that of the corpse were consistent. Benjamin’s point about the accuracy of the Houdon bust was also dismissible, since “Houdon described himself firstly as an anatomist and secondly as an artist.”8 Houdon took great pride in delivering precisely accurate sculptures of his subjects, and Jones was so taken with his that he had at least eight copies made and sent to friends. Jones’s contemporaries, including Thomas Jefferson, described the bust as a perfect likeness. And while there were quibbles about the measurements of the face compared with the bust—deteriorated flesh versus stone depicting the full-fleshed head—those too were dismissed, since the measurements recorded at the time of the autopsy were based on bone structure. And no one has questioned a subtle but crucial match: the unusual shape of Jones’s earlobe, which those present at the exhumation said was visible on the corpse and matched a malformation depicted on the Houdon sculpture
. Unfortunately, photos of the corpse did not show the earlobe.
While individual bits of evidence cited to identify the body as that of Jones might be challenged, all of the evidence taken together is convincing. The coffin was found where the historical record suggested it would be; the autopsy remains unindicted; the identified manner of death was consistent with Jones’s reported final ailments; the physical resemblance between corpse and bust were persuasive to those who viewed them. There is no reason, more than a century later, for significant doubt. To tweak an old joke about one of Porter’s other projects: if asked who is buried in John Paul Jones’s tomb, the answer surely is John Paul Jones.9
When acting navy secretary Charles H. Darling sent his order in July 1905 to the Naval Academy that it “maintain, night and day, a guard over the remains until the final interment takes place,” he doubtless didn’t envision the guard would be on duty for seven years.10 But Congress would not be moved. The original budget for the chapel called for leaving the crypt as a roughed-out space of “exposed concrete and brick work” for future completion. And that future was coming quickly, Bonaparte wrote to Congress two days after the April 1906 Annapolis ceremony. The crypt needed to be finished—and soon. He asked for $135,000 to cover the design costs—Flagg, at the navy’s request, had already done preliminary designs—and construction. Bonaparte pointed out that Porter had spent $35,000 of his own money to find and identify Jones’s body, and he relayed the news that the former ambassador had rejected plans to reimburse him with the suggestion that Congress spend the money on the crypt instead. Naval officials had initially thought $100,000 would be enough to do the job but were revising their estimates upward, and even with Porter’s act of generosity, “this sum, it is believed, is barely sufficient to complete the work in a simple but suitable and substantial manner,” Bonaparte told Congress.11
The Admiral and the Ambassador Page 30
