Inside the church, on the left side of the aisle, sat Premier Rouvier and most of the French Cabinet (Loubet was not present), as well as most of the foreign diplomats assigned to the French capital, each wearing the formal regalia of his home country. The right side was reserved for the Americans, including Sigsbee and the commanders of the ships in his squadron; US senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who happened to be in Paris; and McCormick, Loomis, and Porter, who was wearing a dark suit and a thick red sash of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Morgan, the pastor, delivered a short prayer, and then Porter moved from his front-row pew to the altar and stood beside the flag-draped coffin.
“This day,” Porter began, “America claims her illustrious dead.” He went on to talk about the length of time between Jones’s death and his repatriation to American soil. “It is a matter of extreme gratification to feel that the body of this intrepid commander should be conveyed across the sea by the war vessels of a navy to whose sailors his name is still an inspiration.” He thanked the Frenchmen who helped him decipher the hints of the past, thanked Sigsbee for leading the squadron to retrieve the body, thanked the French government for its support and help in honoring “the memory of a hero who once covered two continents with his renown in battling for the cherished principles of political liberty and the rights of man, for which the two sister republics have both so strenuously contended.” He reminded the audience that the US Congress in one resolution both adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag, and gave Jones the helm of the Ranger. He then quoted Jones: “The flag and I are twins; born the same hour from the same womb of destiny. We can not be parted in life or in death.” “Alas,” Porter added from beside the flag-draped coffin, “they were parted during a hundred and thirteen years, but happily now they are reunited.”15
Loomis followed, accepting the coffin on behalf of the United States, and thanked Porter for his “patient, persistent, self-sacrificing search for the grave and body of John Paul Jones.” He went on to detail Jones’s history, delivering a eulogy, really, more than a century late. Sigsbee followed with a much shorter speech, pointing out that Jones’s naval achievements were due in large part to the support he had received from France, where he outfitted his ships and trained his crews before heading off for British waters. He, too, thanked Porter, and then accepted custody of the body from Loomis and promised to “bear the remains of John Paul Jones most reverently to their final resting place within the Naval Academy at Annapolis.”
With that, a choir in robes sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” as the vocalists walked to the church doorway. Twelve uniformed men under Sigsbee’s command, each over six feet tall, hoisted the over-large coffin and carried it from the altar down the center aisle and out the door to the street, where they slipped it onto the bed of a horse-drawn artillery wagon decorated with both French and American flags, a mishmash of funeral floral arrangements, and a large wreath ordered by Sigsbee on behalf of his squadron. Around 5 PM the procession began along Avenue de l’Alma to the Champs-Élysées, led by a small contingent of French police, followed by regiments of French military units and US marines and sailors—the troops who had taken the early morning train in from Cherbourg. With the exception of the caisson carrying the coffin, a handful of artillery pieces, and the horse brigade, the procession was entirely on foot “as an additional mark of respect and courtesy.”
The parade moved slowly along the Champs-Élysées to the cutoff to the Pont Alexandre III, the sidewalks filled with tens of thousands of cheering people despite the solemnity of the occasion. When the parade reached the Esplanade des Invalides, the twelve pallbearers moved the coffin from the wagon to a raised bier near Napoleon’s tomb, where diplomats and other dignitaries, the parading troops, and then members of the public walked past as military bands took turns playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise.” A guard remained posted while Sigsbee and his commanders joined Porter, McCormick, Loomis, and others at a dinner.
John Paul Jones’s body on parade at the start of its journey from Paris to Annapolis.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Horace Porter Collection, Manuscript Division
As darkness fell, the coffin was moved from the bier through the Gare des Invalides to a mortuary car. A little after 9 PM, the special train started its westward journey with the body of Jones and the American sailors and marines; Sigsbee, his command staff, and the diplomats remained in Paris until the next evening for another round of receptions, including a luncheon hosted by President Loubet. That evening, Sigsbee joined Loomis for a smaller, more private dinner with some old mutual friends, and then caught a 9:10 train that night. Porter had gone on ahead earlier in the day and Sigsbee had arranged for him to spend the night on the Brooklyn.
By the time Sigsbee arrived back in Cherbourg on July 8, the coffin had been transferred to a dockside chapel. After a shorter program of speeches by French and American naval commanders, it was loaded onto the Zouave and, amid a flurry of cannon salutes, steamed out to the anchored Brooklyn, where the flags were at half-mast. A winch swung out over the smaller ship, and a hook was lowered carefully to the deck. French sailors attached it to a net of straps fitted around the coffin, which was then slowly lifted and swung into place on the catafalque on the deck of the Brooklyn. A few hours later, as the clock neared 5 PM, the American squadron weighed anchor and steamed slowly out of the port, the sailors exchanging cheers and salutes with their counterparts aboard the French vessels, and throngs of people lined up along the shore and jetty. Once clear of the harbor, Sigsbee gave the command to increase speed to 11 knots, and the ships set a course for the West and the capes of northern Virginia.
One figure missing from the Brooklyn was Horace Porter. Sigsbee had offered the former ambassador a private berth so he could return to America with Jones’s body. Porter demurred. His role, he believed, ended with finding the body and serving as its caretaker until it could be sent to the United States. That job was now done, and his special ambassadorship had expired. He was, once again, a private American citizen. So Porter turned down Sigsbee’s offer. The morning after the Brooklyn left Cherbourg, Porter—who had arrived in France eight years earlier with a family and grand expectations—boarded the Hamburg America liner the Deutschland and sailed, alone, back to America.
Sigsbee’s squadron took its time crossing the Atlantic, encountering fog, rain, and moderate seas for most of the voyage. Sigsbee set a speed of 10 to 11 knots, and it wasn’t until July 20, when the squadron was within thirty or forty miles of the Nantucket Lightship, that the Brooklyn was able to get a message through to his superiors. “Report to Navy Department Paul Jones Squadron is off Nantucket light-ship and is due at Chesapeake entrance early forenoon of Saturday,” Sigsbee radioed the lightship. “No stops needed on passage. All well.”16
The Nantucket Lightship was anchored about forty miles southeast of Nantucket Island off Massachusetts and marked the southeastern edge of the dangerous Nantucket Shoals, which had claimed hundreds of ships over the years. The lightship also served as the unofficial western end of the transatlantic shipping lane. Sigsbee’s squadron sighted the Nantucket about 8:30 PM on July 20, then changed course to the southwest, headed for the Cape Charles lightship off the Virginia coast and the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.
The next day Sigsbee spotted the new USS Maine, launched in 1901, which had been dispatched with six other ships from the North Atlantic Fleet to greet Sigsbee’s squadron. At the direction of the commander of the Maine, Sigsbee aligned his ships one behind the other, and all eleven ships steamed around the southern tip of Cape Charles and on into Chesapeake Bay, where the Brooklyn and seven other ships continued northward, finally anchoring off Thomas Point Lighthouse, some seven miles from the US Naval Academy. The next morning, Sigsbee again weighed anchor, and the eight ships steamed in the midst of a furious storm to an anchorage just off Annapolis itself, where the French cruiser Jurien de la Gravière was waiting.
There wa
s considerably less official pageantry surrounding the transfer of Jones’s body ashore than had accompanied his departure from Paris and then Cherbourg. While Sigsbee was still at sea, the decision was made in Washington that the arrival of the body would be marked solemnly and only by the military, saving a full public ceremony for later.17 Yet there was still considerable local excitement. After the storm passed, cottagers lined the shores to look at the ships at anchor. More than one hundred small pleasure boats and yachts, many sailing down from Baltimore, took to the bay off Annapolis to get a closer look. A floating party evolved, and more than one thousand people found space aboard the boats, for up to two dollars apiece, for a close view of the ships; a few dozen managed to secure permission to board the Brooklyn for a personal look at the flag-draped coffin.18
Around 9 AM on July 24, the USS Standish, a naval tug, pulled up alongside the Brooklyn, and the coffin was hoisted from the deck of one ship to the other. The Standish, with Sigsbee also aboard, then steamed between two rows of navy ships, which fired off a fifteen-gun salute and continued on to the Naval Academy, where scores of seamen and some fifty sailors from the French Jurien de la Gravière stood silently as the Standish docked at a float attached to the north seawall. Midshipmen carried the coffin from the ship to the float to dry land, where an officer barked the order to present colors, followed by three quick flourishes by the academy band and then another fifteen-gun salute. As the echoes died out across the bay, the pallbearers loaded the coffin onto a hearse drawn by a team of four black horses. The band launched into Chopin’s funeral march as the cortege began to move, a contingent of marines and sailors first and then the coffin. They crossed the open park area to the under-construction chapel, near the Herndon Monument, where a temporary red-brick vault had been built in a rush over the previous few weeks. Hundreds of sailors and marines standing at attention lined the route and the park. After a brief prayer, a salute of three volleys was fired, and a single bugler played taps as the coffin was deposited in the brick crypt. The grated door was locked, and as an armed, though mostly ceremonial, guard took up its position, the crowd began dispersing.19
The morning’s ceremony came just days after the 113th anniversary of John Paul Jones’s first burial in Paris’s Saint Louis cemetery, an act that was viewed in some quarters as temporary, but that, were it not for the dogged efforts of Horace Porter, would have become permanent. This new interment was also intended to be temporary, though there was little risk that anyone would lose track of the coffin in the vault in the middle of the US Naval Academy grounds. There would be more pageantry and ceremonies and celebrations in the year to come as Annapolis prepared Jones’s final resting place. There would be delays, too, and political bickering by a penurious Congress. But the long-lost American hero was at last on American soil.
18
Annapolis Celebrates
THE DEUTSCHLAND MADE A much faster journey west than Sigsbee’s squadron, perhaps reflecting the difference between a funeral fleet and a ship seeking to make a profit. Porter landed in Hoboken on July 14, and as he stepped onto the Hamburg America Steamship Line wharf, he was accosted by a larger-than-usual gaggle of newspapermen seeking scoops and tidbits among the arriving dignitaries and celebrities. A few asked Porter about diplomatic issues, questions he waved off. The newsmen also pressed him about how he could be certain that the recovered corpse was, indeed, that of John Paul Jones. Porter ticked through the steps taken to identify the cemetery, and the list of evidence that led the French experts to conclude that the body was Jones’s. “There is absolutely no room for doubt,” Porter said in what was for him a rare public display of impatience.1
The Brooklyn was still at sea when Porter traveled a few days later to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to lunch with the vacationing President Roosevelt at his home, Sagamore Hill. At one level, it was a recently returned ambassador’s courtesy call on his former boss. But Porter also wanted to discuss the plans underway for building a permanent place for Jones’s body on the grounds of the US Naval Academy, which, despite its role as the nation’s elite training ground for future navy officers, was little more than a cluster of outdated and dilapidated wooden buildings.
The academy had been established in 1845 at Fort Severn in Maryland, on a small rise overlooking the confluence of the Severn River and Chesapeake Bay. As time passed, the land around the fort had been expanded through levies and fill. Wooden buildings were added as needed, though little thought was given to the design of the grounds or the buildings, let alone maintenance and upgrades. A special naval Board of Visitors commission, chaired by academy graduate and Manhattan industrialist Robert M. Thompson, investigated conditions at the academy and issued a report in 1895 faulting the complex as unsafe and unsanitary. The Thompson report was followed by an internal investigation by five naval officers that reached the same conclusion. The reports spurred the navy to draw up plans for a modern facility, but the deterioration outpaced the planning. In November 1897, one of the campus’s main buildings, a recitation hall used by some 250 cadets a day, was found to be so compromised that it was deemed too dangerous to enter. Engineers, in fact, feared it could collapse at any moment and damage nearby buildings as well. Under emergency orders, workers razed the hall, and Congress was asked for $5,000 to replace it. That was just the first of a series of discoveries of compromised buildings at the academy. The walls of several, in fact, were held in place from the outside by wooden beams jammed at an angle into the ground.
McKinley’s assistant secretary of the navy at the time was Roosevelt, who reported to navy secretary John Long that the US Naval Academy was both an embarrassment to the navy and a threat to its cadets. Roosevelt noted that George Bancroft had founded the academy in 1845 with no map in mind and that “it has grown little by little in an almost haphazard way … so that the only note of harmony among them is their condition of utter decay and of unsuitableness for the purpose for which they are used.” The secretary forwarded Roosevelt’s report to Congress after adding his own voice:
If they were merely unsuitable; if it were merely desirable that they be replaced by others built in accordance with a general scheme to turn the Annapolis Academy into what it should be as a training school for the nation’s naval officers, it might be advisable to wait before seeking to reconstruct them. But it is not possible to wait, because the buildings are not merely unsuitable, but are for the most part in the last stages of decay.2
Long asked Congress to do something bold. Rather than embark on a regimen of emergency repairs to buildings that weren’t worth saving, he suggested they completely rebuild the academy. He recommended a massive project be undertaken—requiring maybe a decade or more of work—to create a campus “made primarily for use and not show, and yet one in which the nation can take the heartiest pride because it will in every way be a fit training school for a naval service as ours.” The most pressing needs were for “an armory, a boathouse, and a power house,” but also new officer quarters because the existing ones would be razed to make way for the new armory. And Long asked that the bay be dredged and a new seawall built to accommodate a training ship and torpedo boat. Other buildings needed replacing, as well, including dilapidated dormitories with a kitchen and bathrooms in the basement and upper-level floors of small rooms holding three cadets each. The first phase would cost about $1 million, Long estimated. The whole project would cost some $6 million (later increased to $10 million, or about $225 million in today’s dollars).
Puffed up by Dewey’s victory over the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay just a month earlier, Congress agreed in June 1898 to the first phase, which architect Ernest Flagg had begun designing two years earlier, after the Thompson commission assessed the dire state of the buildings and grounds.
Flagg was one of the era’s most celebrated—and controversial—designers of Beaux Arts—style buildings. His portfolio included the Scribner Building and St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, among othe
rs. Yet most of his commissions were won through the favors and influences of friends—he was a cousin to the Vanderbilt fortune. Flagg was brought into the academy project by Thompson, the kind of connection that made Flagg the subject of professional envy among East Coast architects. His abrasive personality did little to help his reputation. Neither did revelations that his older brother, who had been his business associate in controversial speculative building deals in Manhattan, was running a whorehouse, a sideline that cost the brother a month in New York’s notorious Tombs jail. That Flagg had already drawn up a redesign for the academy by the time the navy was prepared to make a decision spawned another round of criticisms about favoritism, just when the federal government was moving to a system of competitive bidding for government contracts.3
Flagg later wrote that he was surprised by how indiscriminately the existing academy grounds had been laid out, roughly on a quadrilateral facing the river, and with no consideration given to the flow of people around the campus. Cadet housing was far from the marching field and the armory, for instance, necessitating long walks to change for drills. He drew up plans that sought to make more efficient use of the space, while preserving a couple of key aspects: The integration of village streets, through gates, into the academy, and a parade ground, like a village square, serving as a commons near the riverbank. The main entrance to the grounds, Maryland Street, crested the highest elevation, some thirty feet above sea level. “Here seemed the best place for the chapel, which from its height would be the dominating feature of the design,” Flagg wrote. And it would face the commons to the northeast, with a marine basin and the Severn River in the distance, the entrance marked by twin lighthouses. (The basin eventually became sports fields.)4
Flagg, for reasons he didn’t detail publicly, had John Paul Jones’s body in mind when he designed the chapel. “I have always been a great admirer of John Paul Jones, and when I made the first rough sketch for the rebuilding of the academy in 1896, I had in mind that the Chapel should be his burial place, if his remains could be found,” Flagg wrote in a 1908 magazine article. He met with Long, the navy secretary, in 1900, and told him that he had included space for a crypt in the basement of the chapel and suggested “that a search be made in Paris for the body.” Flagg didn’t mention Porter’s 1899 announcement that he believed he had found the cemetery. And Flagg didn’t claim to have instigated the search. Yet Flagg’s prescience was uncanny given that in 1896, when Flagg drew up his initial plans, the commodore was, for most Americans, little more than a forgotten hero of the past.
The Admiral and the Ambassador Page 28