The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  The captains sailed their ships in a slow-motion dance, each trying to angle his ship such that his men could fire across the other vessel’s deck, with cannonballs and grape shot shredding flesh, wood, and rigging. Jones, realizing that he was outgunned and likely to lose in a battle of broadsides, quickly changed strategy. Gliding to within feet of the Serapis’s starboard quarter—the back right of the ship—he attempted to board her. As gunfire from the Serapis mowed down the men trying to cross over, Jones veered off. Pearson countered by trying to cut across the front of the Bonhomme Richard, where his gunners could fire blasts along the length of the deck, front to back. He miscalculated time and speed, however, and the bow of the Bonhomme Richard struck the Serapis’s stern.

  The most famous words of Jones’s life never came from his mouth, but they are part of the lore anyway. Pearson asked Jones if he was ready to strike his colors—to surrender. Years later, one of his crew members would say that Jones replied, “I have not yet begun to fight.” According to biographer Morison, the true words were closer to “I have not yet thought of it, but I am determined to make you strike!” A memoir by the midshipman Fanning offered a different version: “Ay, ay, we’ll do that when we can fight no longer, but we shall see yours come down first. For you must know, that Yankees do not haul down their colors till they are fairly beaten.”18

  Whatever his actual words, Jones was not ready to quit, even though the Bonhomme Richard had taken several cannon shots below the water line and was leaking badly, with many of her guns no longer working. The ships separated, and Pearson ordered several of his sails struck to reduce speed, letting the Bonhomme Richard come up alongside her where the British cannons blasted yet again as the American ship sailed past. Jones steered his ship to starboard—the right—as it cleared the Serapis, cutting across her path and getting the British bowsprit (the mast jutting forward from the front of the ship) caught up in the sails at the back of his ship. Jones kept steering to the right, using the Serapis’s spar as a pivot point, and came alongside so close that “the muzzles of our guns touched each other’s sides,” Pearson said later.19 Jones ordered his men to tie the ship to the Serapis, which significantly reduced the cannon advantage the British enjoyed.

  The crews battled for two hours under the near full moon. Each kept trying to board the other’s ship, only to be repelled by lead and sword. The fighting was gory, the decks covered with bodies and limbs and blood as flames licked at the timbers. The Americans won the battle of the upper masts, with Fanning and others firing muskets and blunderbusses directly across at the men aloft above the deck of the Serapis. When the last of those British sailors fell, the Americans moved across and turned their weapons to the deck, peppering it like snipers.20

  The Alliance had stayed out of the engagement (as had the Vengeance). In an act of treachery, its captain, Landais, now sailed around the bound ships and poured cannon fire to try to sink the Bonhomme Richard, hoping to claim the Serapis for himself. Cannon blasts did significant damage to the ship, disabled several of the Richard’s cannons, and killed a number of crew members. Then Landais sailed off to watch the end of the death struggle between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard.

  The wind had died down, turning the sea to glass, and a current was carrying the two ships closer to shore. Pearson ordered an anchor dropped, hoping that if the grappling lines could be severed, the Richard would float free of his ship and give the Serapis enough space to finish her off with cannon fire. The effort failed and the ships remained tethered, a bond made faster after the Americans strapped their yardarms to those on the Serapis. The gunfire from above by Fanning and his men kept the British on the lower gun decks, where they continued to blast holes in the Bonhomme Richard’s hull—above the water line and on levels in which no American sailors remained—with eighteen-pound and twelve-pound cannons. More than a dozen fires broke out on the Serapis alone, from below deck to the sails and rigging, which meant sailors had to fight both fires and the enemy seamen. Pearson again ordered some of his men to cut the binds that held the two ships together, but they couldn’t get past Fanning and his men in the rigging. Lashed together, Jones stood a chance; if the ships separated, and the Serapis could again use her cannons, the Bonhomme Richard would be lost.

  As it was, the American ship was grievously damaged. The Serapis was holding together better, but around 9:30 PM one of Jones’s men inched along a yardarm over the deck of the Serapis and began dropping grenades, one of which plummeted through an open hatch to the lower gun deck strewn with gunpowder cartridges. The grenade did its work; the blast and flash fire killed about twenty British fighters and badly burned many others.

  A short time later, the Bonhomme Richard fell quiet. A rumor ran through the British command that the Americans had “asked for quarter” and “struck,” that is, surrendered. Pearson yelled to Jones for confirmation but received no reply. Pearson ordered his crew to board the other ship, but once the sailors were on deck and exposed, Jones’s men, carrying sharp pikes, emerged from hiding spots and swung away, killing several and forcing the rest to scamper back to the Serapis. Amid the renewed fighting, Jones’s men kept firing small cannonballs at the Serapis’s main mast, which began to creak and crack. A short time later, his ship ablaze and his cannons useless, Pearson—believing incorrectly that the Alliance was also trying to sink his ship—surrendered.

  Jones had won the battle, but he lost his ship and a greater portion of his men as well. Efforts to save the Bonhomme Richard failed, and she sank into the North Sea. Jones reported 150 of his 322 men dead or wounded; Pearson, who had about 325 men, lost 49, with another 68 wounded. More would die over the next few weeks from their wounds or infections. And while Pearson lost the naval battle and two ships (the Pallas had taken the Countess of Scarborough), the convoy he was assigned to protect escaped unscathed.

  Jones and his small fleet arrived at a port on the small Dutch island of Texel on October 3, 1779, four days after the battle. The British quickly learned of his presence and blockaded the harbor; they pressed the Dutch, who were neutral in the war, to return their ships and captured crewmen and order Jones to sail from Texel and, presumably, into their waiting blockade. The French intervened, arguing that Jones’s squadron consisted of French ships, and suggested that turning them over to the British would insult the French king, a not-so-veiled threat of retaliation. As the diplomats wrangled, Jones’s crew worked to get the ships seaworthy; Jones himself traveled to Amsterdam, where he was feted as a hero. Landais went on to Paris, where Benjamin Franklin had already received reports from Jones and crew members of both the Bonhomme Richard and the Alliance of his treachery at sea, and Landais was eventually bounced from the navy.

  Jones, though, was hailed as a hero, and as word spread of the unlikely victory of the outgunned Bonhomme Richard against the Serapis, Jones’s reputation grew.

  5

  The Ambassador Arrives

  IT TOOK THE ST. PAUL a week to reach England, and Porter, who had turned sixty just a month earlier, spent a lot of the crossing thinking about his upcoming role as the US ambassador to France. Thinking, in fact, about what the proper role of an ambassador should be.1 It was a fairly new job in the American diplomatic corps. In the years after the Civil War, being an American emissary was little more than a patronage scheme, a place for the well connected and the adventurous to enrich themselves in the name of the US government.

  In 1893, the State Department was reorganized as the United States began paying more attention to foreign relations and to its place in the world. Until then, the highest possible rank available to an American emissary was minister, which in the world of international protocol was a rung down the ladder from an ambassador, who traditionally represented royal courts. By now declaring their top diplomats ambassadors, the US government put its representatives on equal footing in foreign capitals with emissaries from the great nations of Europe and around the globe. It was as though the upstarts from the New World were
inviting themselves to the adult table.

  President Cleveland opened the first American embassies in England, Germany, Italy, and France, where the United States had stationed a representative ever since Benjamin Franklin arrived to persuade Louis XVI to side with the colonial rebels against France’s recurring enemy, Britain. The first representative to hold the new rank of ambassador was Thomas F. Bayard, whom President Cleveland sent to London just a few weeks before he appointed James B. Eustis—the man Porter was replacing—to France. Porter understood the significance of the job he was undertaking. He would be the connection between the US government and that of France, the nation’s oldest ally, as well as a link between old Europe and new America. He also saw his role as representing American industry and pursuing policies and lobbying efforts that would improve trade between US businesses and France, as well as the rest of Europe. And he had to act and live accordingly.2

  The St. Paul arrived in Southampton, England, on the afternoon of May 12, 1897. Porter’s wife, Sophie, and daughter, Elsie, went on to London, where they planned to spend a month touring and visiting friends while Porter settled into his office in Paris. The ambassador spent the evening at the port, then boarded a midnight steamship from Southampton to Havre, where he transferred to a train and arrived in Paris late in the morning on May 13. It’s unclear whether John Gowdy, who also sailed on the St. Paul to assume his post as consul general, was on the same train, but he arrived in Paris around the same day.

  Porter was met on the platform by a small party of fellow Americans led by Eustis, the departing ambassador, who was a Confederate war veteran and former US senator from Louisiana.3 The welcoming party also included two other Confederate veterans: the embassy’s first secretary, Henry Vignaud, another Louisianan who first went to Paris in 1862 as an aide to the Confederate minister to France, and Arthur Bailly-Blanchard, a New Orleans native who did occasional work for the embassy. A smattering of other embassy officials and Americans living or working in Paris at the time were there too, including former Union army general Edward Winslow, an old friend of Porter’s who had agreed to host the new ambassador while he searched for a home of his own. And that would prove to be no easy task.

  The American embassy occupied part of a five-story building at 59 Rue Galilée, a narrow cross street a few blocks southeast of where the Arc de Triomphe anchored the western end of the Champs-Élysées. The embassy was all offices, with no living quarters for the ambassador, a function of the US government’s policy to not provide housing for its emissaries. And it was much too small for the staff. Weeks before Porter stepped aboard the St. Paul to sail to Europe, Vignaud, the embassy’s first secretary, had written him about the need for more space. Porter agreed. “When I last saw the office rooms they did not appear to be in keeping with the dignity of the Embassy,” Porter had replied. “I appreciate the importance of moving promptly in the matter, and I have no doubt with your intimate knowledge of all the requirements you will be able to select eligible new quarters. I should think that they ought not to be a great distance from the present location, as Americans have been accustomed to finding the Embassy in that part of the city.”4

  Vignaud eventually found larger space in a five-story building at 18 Avenue Kleber, some five hundred yards west of the existing embassy and still near the Arc de Triomphe. Porter quickly approved Vignaud’s selection and made the pitch to the secretary of state, John Sherman, in Washington. “The new quarters will consist of a suite of rooms on the ground floor and a very large apartment on the second floor in a house,” which he described as being on “one of the finest streets in this part of Paris.” In addition, he declared that it was “by far the best quarters to be found for anything like the price of 8,000 francs per year. The present quarters were not fit for a legation and are totally inadequate for an Embassy. There is not even space for the archives and the rooms do not rise to the dignity of the ‘shabby genteel.’ The new location will be a matter of congratulation to all who have had to visit the present offices.” Sherman wired back that he approved, though he told Porter that regulations barred leases longer than two years.5

  Porter also decided that the US ambassador’s residence needed to be grand, an emblem of wealth and success, and large enough to host receptions and other diplomatic social obligations. So his first efforts after arriving in Paris were focused less on representing the United States than on meeting with brokers, inspecting buildings, and trying to fight off the inflated prices he was quoted once it was learned the potential renter was the new American ambassador.

  It took more than a month, but Porter eventually found the right spot, a mansion at 33 Rue de Villejust, a short street linking Avenue Victor Hugo and Avenue Bois de Boulogne just three blocks southwest of the Arc de Triomphe. Porter thought the space was perfect for what he wanted: big and roomy, it exuded a sense of contemporary wealth, with enough trappings of old Europe to give visitors a sense that this was the home of a serious man. Porter was leery of European prejudices against Americans, who were seen as brash, uncouth, money-hungry upstarts. Porter sought to project an image of modernity and business competence, but also of long-term stability. And he paid for it out of his own pocket, an annual rate about equal to his ambassadorial salary of $17,500—which meant the wealthy one-time railroad executive and former presidential aide was essentially working for free.

  The mansion was in the heart of the upper-class sixteenth arrondissement, which was the anchor of the expatriate American colony and home to a few notable French as well. Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot and her husband, Eugène Manet, younger brother to painter Édouard Manet, had lived up the street until their deaths a few years earlier. The place “suits me to a T,” Porter wrote. “The reception floor is as large as the entire second floor of Union League Club and with the garden etc. it enables me to receive any number of people.”6 The building and grounds had been owned and renovated by art dealer Frederic Spitzer, who died in 1890 after amassing one of France’s premier private collections of art and medieval relics (and restoring many objects—with subsequent controversy over whether some of the items he sold were forgeries). A portion of the collection was still in the mansion and included in the rental agreement. “I raked this city with a fine-toothed comb to find a house into which I would not be ashamed to take the folks when they come to see me…. It is in the best quarter of the city, has no end of rooms for receptions, is filled with old tapestries, interesting old art objects, etc., so that I am very fortunate in a matter really so important in this Capital.”7

  The Porters moved into the Spitzer mansion in time to host a formal reception on the eve of the American Fourth of July celebration, relatively meaningless to the French but significant for the expatriate community in Paris. In a sense, it was a coming-out party for the new ambassador. Following the directions of the French protocol office, Porter invited top French officials as well as all the ambassadors in residence in Paris and their families. Porter, to send a message of independence, also broke with protocol and invited another two hundred expatriate American families, bringing the top businessmen into close contact not only with French officials but also with the top delegates from other countries represented in France. Some 1,500 people ultimately were invited, and they streamed into the mansion, the most notable couples pausing to be announced by “a tall, pompous man in black, with knee-breeches, a silver chain around his neck, a rod in his hand and a voice like a megaphone.”8 Porter and his wife waited on a landing of the sweeping staircase to greet each arriving guest as they passed through the large salle d’armes and then on up to the main ballroom on the second floor. Porter wore a deep-black suit; Sophie was in a white satin dress with silver accents, wearing “diamonds around her neck and in her hair.” They made for an impressive-looking couple.

  Two days later, the Porters hosted a second, less formal reception celebrating American independence, to which, via newspaper ads, they invited every American living in Paris at the time. “His h
ouse is splendid—the finest any of our representatives have ever had here, and the American colony is tickled to death,” William S. Sims, the embassy’s naval attaché, wrote to his mother. “General Porter saws wood [note: Sims used the expression to mean “works hard”] and doesn’t bother anybody. Mrs. Porter is very nice. The daughter is a ‘kid’ of 17 and a right good-looking girl. None of them speak French well, unfortunately, but you needn’t say I said so.”9 More than two thousand people streamed through the Porters’ new residence and small grounds that day. “They all had something to eat and drink and wound up with a dance and were set ahead about ten years in their patriotism,” the ambassador later bragged to Hanna.10 The Porters had indeed arrived.

  And Paris was teeming with Americans, drawn by an endless fascination with the city. The Paris Commune was of particular interest, even though it didn’t last very long and the socialistic underpinning of the occupation was diametrically opposed to the predominant American procapitalism ethos. The Commune arose in the aftermath of a losing war with Prussia, when socialists and workers seized political control of Paris in the spring of 1871 and self-organized into the Paris Commune. They elected workers, professionals, radicals, and small businessmen to an eighty-one-member Commune council and began pushing a worker-centric set of reforms, including free education and the right of workers to take over closed businesses.

  It was a short-lived workers’ paradise. In May, the national army attacked the city. It was a rout, with more than twenty thousand Communards killed, compared with about one thousand army fatalities. The fighting was marked by atrocities on both sides, including the killing of hostages and the torching of key government buildings by the Communards. The army was by far the worst of the transgressors, however, conducting summary executions. They chased the last few remaining Communards into the Père Lachaise cemetery, where they captured 147 of the rebels, lined them up against the southeast wall, and shot them. The bodies were tossed into mass grave pits that quickly filled with other Communard bodies dragged in from all quarters of the city. A week after the battle for Paris began, the Commune was lost.11