John Paul Jones’s Medal.
On reaching Paris, John Paul Jones was the hero of the day. The American commissioners paid him every honor. The king (Louis XVI) gave him a gold-hilted sword appropriately inscribed and the Grand Cross of the Order of Military Merit. When he appeared in the queen’s box at the opera the whole audience rose up to cheer. Later in the evening a laurel wreath was suspended above his head, but he left his seat then—“an instance of modesty which is to this day held up as a model to French schoolboys.”
In the autumn of 1780 Jones sailed to America in the Ariel with supplies for the American army. He was the honored guest of the greatest men of the nation. The Congress passed resolutions in his honor three times. It gave him a gold medal, and it placed him at the head of the navy, which was an honor that he had fully earned and which was to him a greater satisfaction than all other honors.
John Paul Jones.
From an engraving in the collection of Mr. W. C. Crane.
Meantime the British government denounced John Paul Jones as a pirate and put a price upon his head. It offered ten thousand guineas for him, dead or alive, and that sum then was equal to more than $100,000 now.
It is to the glory of this naval captain that it was so. The English writers to this day deliberately misrepresent the man. They strive to distinguish him from all other heroes of the American Revolution because he was born in Scotland. They pretend to admire those who were born in the colonies. But in so distinguishing Jones they ignore the fact that the heroic General Montgomery, who perished before the icy walls of Quebec, was born in Ireland, as was Commodore John Barry, another American hero. The truth is that John Paul Jones entered the American navy in December, 1775, when every man in the service was a citizen of Great Britain. He became a citizen of the United States when the new nation was born. At the end of the war he could make the proud boast that “I have never borne arms under any but the American flag, nor have I ever borne or acted under any commission but that of the Congress of America.”
“I have ever looked out for the Honour of the American flag,” he writes at another time, and when, at the last, he wrote his will in the face of death, he described himself, although he had been loaded with honors, simply as “John Paul Jones, a citizen of the United States.”
“The fame of the brave outlives him; his portion is immortality.”