John Paul Jones

Scottish-born American military leader

• Born: July 6, 1747
• Birthplace: Arbigland Estate, Kirkbean, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland
• Died: July 18, 1792
• Place of death: Paris, France

Known in his own time for his daring raids on British territory and spectacular engagements with British vessels during the American Revolutionary War, Jones is now widely regarded as the founder of the U.S. Navy.

Early Life

John Paul Jones, born John Paul, took the surname “Jones” as an adult. He was the fifth child of an estate gardener and a housekeeper. Growing up in Galloway, near Solway Firth, he evinced an early interest in the sea. At a very early age, he was apprenticed as ship’s boy for merchant trading in the West Indies and the American colonies. Over the next several years, he learned navigation, improved his speech and writing, and learned gentleman’s manners. On stopovers in Virginia, he stayed with his elder brother William, a tailor in Fredericksburg, and developed an abiding attachment to America. At age seventeen, he shipped for a time on slavers, but, by 1768, he was master of a merchant brig. Two years later, he became a Freemason in Kirkcudbright, and, in 1772, he was commander and part owner of a large merchant vessel sailing from London (where he then lived) to the West Indies. By the time he was twenty-five, he had made œ2,500 and wrote often of his desire to become a gentleman farmer in Virginia.

Jones was somewhat below average height (five feet, five inches) and had hazel eyes, sandy brown hair, high cheekbones, a sharp nose, and a cleft chin. He dressed well, read good literature, and developed a fairly elaborate writing style, also composing poetry; from an early age, he showed a determination to rise both economically and socially. Without money or family connections in an age when both were usually necessary for advancement, he achieved much, despite obstacles and opposition, by dint of hard work and ability. Yet his own character was also sometimes a handicap: He had a violent temper; he took offense easily; he incessantly bombarded others with complaints and unsolicited advice; and he was a perfectionist and an egotist.

In Tobago in October, 1773, during an altercation with his crew, John Paul (apparently accidently) killed the ringleader; fearing a trial by a jury of the crew’s friends, he fled with only œ50. About the following twenty months, there is little real information available about him; by late 1775, he was in America, had used the name John Jones, and had met some influential North Carolina and Virginia politicians. He was unemployed, and the battles at Lexington and Concord made it impossible for him to access his funds in Tobago. So, on December 7, 1775, John Paul Jones was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Continental navy and assigned to the ship Alfred.

Life’s Work

The Alfred was part of the Continental navy’s five-ship fleet. On its first cruise, it captured some cannon and powder at Nassau in the Bahamas, and damaged HMS Glasgow. On August 8, 1776, John Paul Jones was commissioned a captain and given command of the sloop of war Providence, taking sixteen prizes and destroying fisheries on the Nova Scotia coast. A second cruise in October, in command of the Alfred, also yielded several prizes.

From its beginnings, the Continental navy was plagued with serious difficulties. Not only did it suffer, as did the Continental army, from inadequate financing, but it also usually came off second best in competition with privateers, which offered crews less danger, looser discipline, and larger shares of prize money. Furthermore, advancement went to those with powerful friends and local connections, as Jones discovered when Congress, on October 10, 1776, placed him number eighteen on the seniority list and gave him command of the Providence rather than one of the thirteen new frigates then being built. As most of these frigates never got to sea, that was fortunate for Jones. He had no success, however, in getting Congress to listen to his ideas on naval strategy: to draw off the superior British fleet from American coasts by attacking undefended British areas, rather than by using American warships as commerce destroyers.

Amid the confusion, political intrigue, and charges and countercharges that usually enveloped Congress’s naval arrangements, Jones was given command of the 110-foot, square-rigged sloop of war Ranger, on June 14, 1777 (the same day that Congress adopted the stars and stripes as the United States flag). It was November 1 before the Ranger could be fitted out to sail, during which time Jones had a coat of arms made and met, in Boston, the poet Phillis Wheatley. Having taken some prizes with the Ranger, Jones was in Paris in early December, where he met the American commissioners and became involved in the convoluted Euro-American diplomacy of the revolutionary period.

Having rerigged the Ranger completely (as he always did with his ships) to obtain greater speed and maneuverability, Jones left Brest on April 10, 1778. At dawn on April 23, Jones raided his old home port of Whitehaven, doing little material damage but considerably boosting morale. Later that morning, he landed near his old home in an attempt to capture the earl of Selkirk as a hostage, to force Britain to exchange naval prisoners (whom, unlike army captives, the British considered pirates and refused to exchange). As the earl was not home, some of the men prevailed on Jones to let them go to the mansion and take the family silver from the countess. The next day, as Jones remained in the same waters, there occurred a spectacular battle with the sloop of war HMS Drake. Using a tactic frequent with him, Jones moved close to the enemy vessels while his ship was disguised by covered gun ports and because the uniforms of officers and crew were similar to those of the British navy. The raid and the victory over HMS Drake provoked a general popular panic in British coastal areas, drove up shipping insurance rates, infuriated Britain, and made Jones well known from then on.

France, however, was not as enthusiastic about Jones’s cruise as he had hoped, and for the next nine months he could get no new command, while experiencing major problems concerning the disposition of the prizes and the disinclination of the crew and some of the officers to accept naval discipline and naval, rather than financial, goals for future operations. Jones’s own personality made things no smoother, and his irritation was increased by the lack of any official recognition of his exploits and by the fact that the French navy kept most of the British fleet in home waters while the remainder operated freely in American waters while Jones remained idle. Finally, in February, 1779, the French government gave Jones command of a refitted forty-gun East Indiaman, which, after six months of diplomacy and hard work, was finished and named the Bonhomme Richard (after Jones’s friend Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard”). Jones had a squadron as well: the American frigate Alliance (commanded by Captain Pierre Landais) and three French ships (the frigate Pallas, the brig Vengeance, and the cutter Le Cerf). He was to make a diversion in northern England while a combined Franco-Spanish invasion fleet descended on southern England. As the projected invasion petered out without even a battle, Jones’s exploits were to receive great attention.

Jones’s cruise around the British Isles began in August with the taking of several prizes, an abortive attempt (because of a contrary wind in the Firth of Forth) to demand ransom from Leith (the defenseless port of Edinburgh), and a general alarm of the coastal population. The other captains refused to attack Newcastle; such general insubordination and lack of cooperation were common in fleets of the time, especially if the commander, like Jones, was unconventional. The Richard’s officers and crew, however, were enthusiastic and loyal. On September 23, off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast, a forty-four-ship British merchant fleet from the Baltic was sighted, convoyed by the sloop of war Countess of Scarborough and the fifty-gun copper-bottomed frigate Serapis. By the time that a nearly full harvest moon rose, the Richard and the Serapis had engaged with broadsides; when the Richard’s bowsprit plowed into the Serapis’s stern, its captain, Sir Richard Pearson, asked, “Has your ship struck?” to which Jones replied, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The Richard finally grappled the Serapis, which could not break loose to bring its superior firepower to bear; the two-hour battle was watched from Flamborough Head by many who had come from nearby towns. The Serapis continued firing its below-deck eighteen-pounders into the topsides of the Richard, which (in the words of historian Samuel Eliot Morison) became “little more than a battered raft.”

In the meantime, the Pallas successfully engaged the Countess of Scarborough, but Landais, in the Alliance, sailed around the battle and deliberately fired into the Richard several times, doing major damage. By 10:30 that night, the Richard was in desperate shape, but Jones was determined to fight on, serving one of the three nine-pounders himself; with the Serapis mainmast about to go, Captain Pearson struck. Jones, the better captain in a worse ship, won; he transferred to the Serapis the next day, and, on the following day, the Bonhomme Richard sank. It had been a bloody battle: Half of the Richard’s crew and a third of the crew of the Serapis had been killed.

When the American task force came into port in Holland, Jones became a hero in France. The British press was angry, calling him a pirate and printing much misinformation about him, but simultaneously he became a hero in British popular opinion, with several ballads produced about him. His position in neutral Holland, however, complete with his squadron, prisoners, and prizes, presented diplomatic difficulties and complicated the matter of prize money even more than usual. (The Richard’s share later came to $26,583, of which Jones got $2,658.) A brief cruise on the Alliance (from January 16 to February 10, 1780) was both unprofitable and unhappy. In mid-April, Jones spent six weeks in Paris, trying unsuccessfully to settle the problems of the prizes. During that brief period, he was generally lionized, presented to Louis XVI (who gave him the Order of Military Merit and a sword), had a new coat of arms made, mixed happily in sophisticated Paris society, was the subject of a mezzotint by Jean Michel Moreau and a bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon, and conducted at least one major love affair.

Jones’s return to the port of Lorient opened a confused time in which Landais took command of the Alliance by a coup and took it to America and a court-martial conviction. Jones took over the sloop of war Ariel on June 20, rerigged it completely, and, by December 18, sailed, with two merchant brigs, carrying military supplies for the Continental army. (Jones was later repaid $4,249.23 by Congress for his expenses since 1777.) Off the West Indies, he surprised and took a faster and stronger British privateer, the Triumph, but it managed to escape; this was to be Jones’s last battle under the American flag. He arrived in Philadelphia on February 18, 1781, in time for his cargo to be used at Yorktown. Congress passed several complimentary resolutions, and Charles Willson Peale painted his portrait.

The Ariel, on loan from the French navy, was sent back. Jones was given command of the ship-of-the-line America, being built at Portsmouth, but when a French ship ran aground nearby, Congress voted to replace it with the America. Congress also reimbursed Jones for his pay and expenses since 1775 (in the sum of $20,705.27), but the envy of the other captains blocked his promotion to rear admiral. A brief cruise as guest and pilot with a French fleet in the West Indies at the end of 1782 enabled him to study fleet evolutions and naval tactics, but the Revolutionary War ended in April of 1783.

Back in Philadelphia, Jones became one of the original members of the Society of the Cincinnati, and, in November, Congress sent him back to Paris to recover the prize money still due (of which Jones got his $22,435 share in July, 1786). During his three years in Paris, Jones invested in unsuccessful merchant ventures, had a love affair with a widow (by whom he probably had a son), and, in 1786, presented to King Louis XVI his John Paul Jones’ Memoir of the American Revolution Presented to King Louis XVI of France (published in manuscript form in 1979), a brief autobiography, which did not, however, get him a post in the French navy. On his brief visit to the United States in 1787 (still trying to clear up the prize money account), Congress voted to award him a gold medal; the next year, he spent some time in Copenhagen on the same business.

In April of 1788, Jones accepted the post of kontradmiral (rear admiral) in the imperial Russian navy from Empress Catherine the Great (r. 1762-1796), then involved in the Russo-Turkish War. He commanded a squadron, comprising a flagship, eight frigates, and four armed vessels, in two battles of the Liman, in the Black Sea, in June. His successes there, however, went largely unrecognized. His short-lived Russian naval career, marked throughout by confusion, dissension, and intrigues, ended with him writing an angry letter to Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin in October. In August, 1789, in the wake of a St. Petersburg scandal probably arranged by his rivals, he left Russia, stopping at various cities until he reached Paris in May of 1790.

In revolutionary France, Jones, short of funds and with nothing to do, irritated busy people such as the Marquis de Lafayette and the American minister Gouverneur Morris, and wrote letters, especially to Catherine and to his two married sisters in Scotland. Documents appointing Jones consul to Algeria, to negotiate for the ransom of United States captives, did not reach Paris until the end of July. On July 18, 1792, Jones died, of nephritis and bronchial pneumonia. City officials organized a funeral procession and burial in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt became interested in the exhumation of Jones’s body (which had been preserved in alcohol in a lead coffin) and had it brought back to the United States. On January 26, 1913, it was placed in an elaborate tomb in the chapel at Annapolis.

Significance

John Paul Jones had a complex and often contradictory character. From unimpressive beginnings, he educated himself, to a great degree, and developed sophistication and elegant manners, although he was rough and loud on shipboard. He never found a bride who could aid his social ambitions but engaged in numerous affairs, rarely having difficulty attracting women at any level of society. He frequently disavowed any interest in rank, wealth, or fame, yet insisted on every penny of prize money and expenses due him and his crews; was sensitive to public opinion about himself; and had ambitions of entering high society, signing himself “le Chevalier Paul Jones” after receiving the Order of Military Merit.

A complete egotist, he saw the world in terms of the scope it afforded for his talents and ideas. He had few friends and only a few patrons (such as Robert Morris, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson). Assertive, vain, and insecure, he was also courageous and considerate of inferiors and captives; his constant concern for his men, overbalanced by his temper and demands for perfection, did not gain for him their loyalty.

He had an eighteenth century attachment to concepts of liberty and asserted that he was a citizen of the world; he also claimed the title of an American patriot and found no inconsistency in serving under the despot Catherine the Great and spending the last years of his life in Europe. He began to be a legend even in his lifetime yet was always blocked and frustrated by lack of recognition for his achievements. Never a democrat, he found the insistence of American ex-merchant crews on majority voting for naval decisions infuriating. Little attention was paid to his long-range concepts, whether that of the destiny of the United States as the world’s major sea power, the organization of naval command and administration, or the overall strategy that would benefit the revolutionary war effort.

A fighting sailor, he was never given full fleet command, and so could function only as a naval tactician; in this area he excelled. Although all revolutionary naval captains had problems similar to those of Jones, not surprising in a new and difficult service plagued by localism, politics, and competition for prize money, there was none who could match Jones’s record in actual ship-to-ship combat. His abilities and ideas were often discounted during his lifetime; only later, as the importance of the Navy began to increase for the United States, did Jones begin to receive the recognition denied him in life, as the real founder of the U.S. Navy.

Bibliography

Bowen-Hassell, E. Gordon, Dennis M. Conrad, and Mark L. Hayes. Sea Raiders of the American Revolution: The Continental Navy in European Waters. Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 2003. A brief (73-page) account of the naval campaigns waged by Jones and other sailors and admirals.

Chapelle, Howard I. The History of the American Sailing Navy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1949. Chapter 2, “The Continental Navy,” is especially good. Much illuminating detail about the general naval situation and the ships themselves, with several detailed sketches of the ships.

Halliday, Mark. “An Agreeable Voyage.” American Heritage 21 (June, 1970): 8-11, 70-76. A good account of the Whitehaven raid and the Selkirk affair. Includes contemporary drawings.

Jones, John Paul. Memoir of the American Revolution. Translated and edited by Gerard W. Gawalt. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979. Jones’s autobiography, presented to Louis XVI of France, is a valuable text, as it shows Jones’s style, ideas, and perspective on the events of his life.

Lorenz, Lincoln. John Paul Jones. Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1944. Despite the style and nebulous speculations and commentary, this 700-page work is apparently the first reliable biography of Jones written in the twentieth century.

MacKay, James. “I Have Not Yet Begun to Fight:” A Life of John Paul Jones. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999. MacKay portrays Jones as a “bit of a bore,” a self-absorbed man who was obsessed by rank.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. Almost every aspect of Jones’s life—because of malice or misunderstanding—is accompanied by numerous false stories and outright fictions. Morison, in this work, provides a text based on meticulous research and in-depth knowledge of maritime matters. As an expert sailor himself, the author includes detailed passages on ship handling and other naval esoterica. The best biography of Jones, completely reliable, clear, and well written.

Morris, Richard B. “The Revolution’s ’Caine Mutiny.’” American Heritage 11 (April, 1960): 10-13, 88-91. An effective account of Pierre Landais, the paranoid martinet who fired on the Bonhomme Richard during the battle off Flamborough Head, took over the Alliance, and became so irrational on the voyage to the United States that the officers took over the ship. A 1780 court-martial convicted Landais and dismissed him from the navy.

Snow, Richard P. “Battles of the Revolution: Flamborough Head.” American Heritage 25 (October, 1974): 53-56. Points out that the grappling of the Serapis was a result of Jones’s deliberate intention and superb seamanship. Includes excerpts from Nathaniel Fanning’s account; Midshipman Fanning was hostile to Jones, and much of what he wrote was biased and inaccurate, but this part of his story is reliable.

Thomas, Evan. John Paul Jones: A Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Thomas portrays Jones as a tortured warrior and self-made man, and argues for a renewed appreciation of Jones’s role in the American Revolution.

Warner, Oliver. “The Action off Flamborough Head.” American Heritage 14 (August, 1963): 43-47, 105. A chapter from Warner’s Great Sea Battles (1963), this is a very good, succinct summary of Jones’s life and an account of the battle. Includes excerpts from some eyewitness accounts and an illustration of a 1780 painting by a French artist.