The St. Petersburg Connection. Alexis S. Troubetzkoy
all but forgotten in the United States. On July 18, 1792, he died with his face down on the bed but feet firmly planted on the floor. In the words of one historian, “It must have been simply his nature to confront the one inevitable defeat in a posture which symbolized the spirit of, ‘I have not yet begun to fight.’”
The admiral’s body was conveyed through the hot, dusty streets of Paris to the cemetery. A detachment of uniformed gendarmerie and a tiny entourage of servants and faithful tradesmen accompanied the remains to the Protestant cemetery of Saint Louis. An admiring Frenchman graciously provided funds for a lead coffin and alcohol to preserve the body in case the Americans ever wished to reclaim the remains of their forgotten hero.
Over a century later, Horace Porter took up his post as U.S. ambassador to France. A fervent admirer of John Paul Jones, Porter was determined to secure for the admiral a rightful place in the pantheon of American heroes, and to this end he petitioned President Theodore Roosevelt for assistance. Languishing in an unknown grave across the ocean was a fighting hero of the American Revolution — a man of action, a man of daring, characterized by Benjamin Franklin as “sturdy, cool and [possessing] determined bravery.” A man, in other words, like Roosevelt himself. The media-savvy president was easily persuaded, and he allocated $35,000 dollars to help conduct a search for the remains of “The Father of the American Navy.” The public-relations outcome of such an undertaking was not to be missed.
After extensive explorations, the body was eventually found and exhumed in 1905. The 113-year-old corpse was perfectly preserved, and in such fine shape that a meaningful autopsy was possible. The final diagnosis stated that cause of death was end-stage kidney failure as a result of viral or bacterial infection, coupled with pneumonia.
John Paul Jones’s body was transferred to a fresh coffin and draped with the Stars and Stripes — the first instance of such honour. It was then formally paraded through the city’s boulevards out of Paris to Cherbourg and placed on board the U.S.S. Brooklyn, one of four cruisers sent by Roosevelt to convey the remains to American shores. The remains of the great admiral today lie in the crypt of the imposing chapel of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. In front of the sarcophagus are the words “He gave our navy its earliest traditions of heroism and victory.”
The appalling humiliation John Paul Jones suffered and the unhappy conclusion to his brilliant career was, in his own words, through “the meanness and absurdity of the intrigues that were practiced for my persecution in St. Petersburg.” A poignant ending of the remarkable Kontradmiral Pavel Ivanovich Jones.
An equally engaging and out-of-the-ordinary tale may be had of a Russian aristocrat in the United States, in the wilds of the country’s frontier.
In 1792, there stepped ashore in Baltimore a nobleman, Prince Dimitri Dimitrievich Gallitzin. He came as a visitor but stayed as a resident, the first notable permanent emigrant from Russia to the United States. Today, in the village of Loretto, Pennsylvania, ninety miles east of Pittsburgh, his remains lie in the Church of St. Michael.
Dimitri Dimitrievich came from one of the noblest families in Russia, one of ancient lineage. The Gallitzin estate outside Moscow was considered to be among the finest private homes in the country, much admired by Alexander I. (Much later, Stalin took it for his country residence.) Over the centuries, members of the family unfailingly played leading roles in government, in the military, and in Russia’s social and cultural life. So distinguished was the name, that the prophetic story is told of one very young family member who, in being told about Jesus, innocently inquired, “Was he also a Gallitzen?”
Dimitri’s father was a diplomat, for many years serving as Russia’s ambassador to Holland. A wise, witty, worldly man, the prince was a product of the Enlightenment. Among his vast circle of friends were Voltaire and Diderot; the foremost thinkers of the time frequented his embassy in The Hague. It was in this residence that Empress Catherine at one time bounced the young Dimitri on her knee. So charmed was she by the delightful three-year-old, that she commissioned him an officer in the Guards Regiment.
The boy’s mother was Countess Adelheid Amalie von Schmettau, the daughter of a Prussian field marshal. In her earlier years of marriage to the prince, she was, for lack of better word, a flower child; Rousseau’s noble savage was her inspiration. The young, irrepressible Amelia persuaded her husband to permit her to move to the couple’s country estate some miles outside The Hague — it was called Niethuis, or “nobody home.” Once installed there, she cut off her long locks and donned the plainest of clothes, giving her time over to the study of Plato and Aristotle and to the care of her children, each of whom she addressed as “our dear Socrates.” The unfortunate children were subject to cold baths and pitch-dark bedrooms. Whenever they cried — and cry they did, despite mother’s exhortations to the contrary — Amelia comforted them with Socratic dialogue.
In 1783, when young Dimitri was a lad of thirteen years, his mother fell seriously ill, so ill that the boy’s headmaster counselled her to receive his own confessor. Although Amelia had been born a Roman Catholic, the church had meant little to her. Nevertheless, she agreed to meet the priest and in the days that followed as the sickness progressed, she promised herself and the confessor that if God spared her, she would seriously study religion. Amelia survived her illness, made good on her promise and two years later was received into the Church as a full communicant. At age seventeen, Dimitri followed suit and converted to Catholicism, forsaking the Orthodox Church into which he was born.
Prince Gallitzin did not take seriously either his wife’s conversion — which he deemed another capricious phase, similar to her Socratic period — or that of his son. He did, however, feel that it was time for the boy to enter military service and, through Amelia’s Germanic connections, young Dimitri was duly appointed as aide-de-camp to General von Lillien, commander of the Austrian troops in Brabant. Dimitri served two years at that posting. Amelia then determined that her son would best be served by travel and, on the suggestion of her father, she persuaded her husband to endorse the idea of having their son spend time in America. The prince, a keen admirer of George Washington and the American Constitution, thought this an excellent idea, and thus it was that young Dimitri came ashore in Maryland in October 1792.
The new arrival carried a letter of introduction to Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore, the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States. Here he found a cordial welcome and was soon quite at home in his new surroundings. Dimitri took up serious study of the church and within two years, he was determined to become ordained. The good bishop deemed the decision precipitous and he urged the young man to consult with his parents. Amelia, who by then had lost all interest in her conversion, received Dimitri’s news with horror and was appalled by the idea that her boy should become a priest. At first these developments were kept secret from the prince, but it did not take long for him to discover his son’s stunning intentions. That a scion of the Gallitzin family, traditional pillars of orthodoxy, would convert to Catholicism was bad enough; an ordination into that alien church was unthinkable. The desperate prince wrote to his wife, “Above all, I beg you to discuss that which is properly our common trouble and to seek some means of solving it. I do not know what to write to my son.”
At this stage, serendipity came into play. Notice was received from Russia that the commission bestowed by Catherine years earlier upon the infant child had now come due. Dimitri was ordered to return to Russia to join the guards regiment. But the young man, having received the summons together with pleading letters from his parents, remained adamant. Nothing would dissuade him from his declared intention. On March 18, 1795, he kneeled before Bishop Carroll to be ordained and tonsured. Prince Dimitri Dimitrievich Gallitzin became Father Dimitri.
At the time, there was a shortage of priests in the Maryland parishes, particularly in Baltimore, but Father Dimitri’s calling was for missionary work. He successfully persuaded Bishop Carroll to assign him deep into the distant countryside, over a week’s journey west, beyond the crest of the Allegheny Mountains. Here in the forests and mountains of the remote wilderness, the young priest made his home for over forty years, building a church here, converting there, “labouring in God’s vineyards.” He purchased twenty thousand acres of land in the greater the Loretto area, which he then sold for one quarter the price to impoverished settlers. In the village itself, he built a church