The Admiral and the Ambassador Read Online Free PDF Page B

Indiana political bigwig who helped deliver the state’s electoral votesto McKinley, was aboard en route to Paris, where he would work with Porter as the consul general. The president’s cousin and political confidant William McKinley Osborne was sailing for London, where he also would serve as consul general, joining fellow passenger Richard Westacott of Boston, recently appointed vice consul. Colonel William H. Williams, a Treasury Department official, was also heading for Paris as an advance force in looming talks about an international approach to “bimetallism,” using both gold and silver to back up national currencies.
    Nongovernment people of note were aboard too, including Manton Marble, the owner and editor of the
New York World
newspaper during and after the Civil War. President Lincoln had ordered Marble imprisoned after the pro-slavery editor published an article in spring of 1864 based on a hoax letter that claimed Lincoln wanted to draft four hundred thousand men for the Union Army. (Soldiers occupied the newspaper offices for two days at the peak of the showdown.) In the decades after the war, Marble was an active Democrat, and President Cleveland had sent him on a tour of Europe to measure support for bimetallism. Marble was all but retired now and off to England, where he would live most of the rest of his life with his daughter and her husband. 11 The
St. Paul
also was carrying Henry Dazian, whose family business was creating costumes for Manhattan stage productions. And cast members of the play
Secret Service
by William Gillette, which had just finished a critically acclaimed run at Garrick Theatre on West Thirty-Fifth Street, were settling into cabins on their way for a performance tour of England. 12
    How many of his fellow passengers Porter knew before the voyage is unclear, but he likely was well acquainted with James D. Cameron, who was off to Europe with his wife after stepping down in March as US senator from Pennsylvania. Cameron also had served as President Grant’s last war secretary, when Porter was Grant’s personal secretary. And while it was barely noted, William S. Cramp and his wife were aboard too. Cramp was head of engineering for his family’s shipbuilding firm in Philadelphia, which had built the
St. Paul.
    One of the more intriguing figures aboard was Major General Nelson A. Miles. Like Porter, Miles was a Civil War hero. Where Porter moved into politics, Miles made a career of the military and went on to lead brutalpacification campaigns against Native Americans. Although he was not directly involved and later criticized the action, Miles’s troops were responsible for the 1890 massacre of more than 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee. Miles was born in rural Westminster, Massachusetts, about fifty miles west of Boston, and like many young men he entered the military with the outbreak of the Civil War. He became not only a military leader but also a military student who longed to witness some of the great armies of Europe in battle. That winter, tensions between Greece and Turkey over a Christian uprising in Crete turned into a military scuffle in February when Turkish ships shelled a Cretan village. Confrontations with Greek troops escalated, diplomats were recalled, and on April 17, Turkey declared war. Miles saw his chance, quickly packed his bags, and, accompanied by his aide (and future general) Marion P. Maus, he left Washington, DC, on May 4 to catch the sailing of the
St. Paul
the next day. It was a bit of a gamble, given the amount of time it would take to get to the war zone. He told a reporter as the
St. Paul
prepared to sail that he “would not be surprised to find on arriving in Europe that the Greco-Turkish war is over.” At the very least, he said, he could tour European capitals and get a sense of military policies. 13
    So it was a mixed group of passengers settling in as, with a flurry of horn blasts and cheers, a tugboat slowly