John Paul Jones:
Sailor, Hero, Father
of the American Navy

John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy reveals the protean figure who helped bring the Founding Fathers' ideologies to fruition through valiant sea action. But John Paul (he would add the name Jones later in life) was not one hundred percent hero. Born to a Scottish gardener (or perhaps actually the manor lord's biological son), Jones began his sea career as the second mate on a slave ship. A singularly successful naval officer, he would serve as an admiral in Catherine the Great's Russian navy and be hailed as the father of the American navy during the Revolutionary War. (His arrival on American shores did not bode such an auspicious future, however; an accused murderer, he fled Europe for America under an assumed name.) Jones died in Paris in 1792, little-remembered then, as now, but his body was returned to the United States in 1906, in a ceremony full of pomp and circumstance, for reinterment in a lavish crypt beneath the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

The author draws on Jones's wide-ranging correspondence with such significant Revolutionary figures as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to reveal the complete man. A brilliant commander who could inspire his men with brave words and martial dash, his narcissism sometimes cost him his men's affection. He was a notorious rake in Parisian society. Bold and resourceful, he was also a brooding and edgy character frustrated by failure to reach his lofty goals. He never became a great blue-ocean fleet commander, as was his ambition, and died only a few days before Thomas Jefferson's commission reached him with instructions to lead the American delegation to treat with the Dey of Algiers for release of some thirteen imprisoned American sailors.

Although Jones was a foreigner by birth, he made a deep mark on America's early national history, even if he is largely forgotten in today's high school history books. Driven by dreams of personal glory and high-minded principle to break free of the past and start a new world, he was a significant supporting character in America's bid for freedom from England and his story provides a refreshing angle to the history of the Revolutionary War.