PAUL JONES 301 In the same lofty spirit, he refused to receive any advantages from a bill exempt- ing the soldiers of the militia from prosecution for acts committed in the service. He felt that his conduct needed no shelter. The Legislature rewarded him with thanks, and the more substantial appointment of Commandant of the Port of Charleston, a nominal office, with the salary of ^500, which were cut down to dollars. A timely marriage, however, with a wealthy lady of Huguenot descent. Miss Mary Videau, a spinster of fifty, who was attracted by the hero, relieved him of pecuniary anxieties, leaving him an old age of ease in agricultural pur- suits. He still represented his parish in the State Senate, and sat in 1790 in the Convention for forming the Constitution. In 1794 he resigned his military com- mission given to him by Rutledge, and the following year, yielding to a gradual decline, expired on February 27th, at the age of sixty-three. Marion was a true, unflinching patriot a man of deeds, and not of words ; a prudent, sagacious soldier, not sudden or quick in quarrel, but resolute to the end ; a good disciplinarian, and beloved by his men, who came at his call. There was no power of coercion, such as restrains the hired soldier, in his little band ; it was held together only by the cohesive force of patriotism and attach- ment to the leader. We hear of no acts of cruelty to stain the glory of his victo- ries, but much of his magnanimity. PAUL JONES (i 747-1 792) PAUL Jones, the popular naval hero of the Revolution, the son of John Paul, a gardener in Scotland, was born July 6, 1747, at a cottage on the estate of his father's employer, Mr. Craik, at Arbigland, in the parish of Kirkbean. His parents belonged to a respectable class of the population of the country. The boy, as is wont with Scottish boys, however humble, received the elements of education, but could not have ad- vanced very far with his books, since we find him at the age of twelve appren- ticed to the sea. The situation of Kirk- bean, on the shore of the Solway, natu- rally gave a youth of spirit an inclination to life on the ocean ; and he had not far to seek for employment in the trading-port of Whitehaven, in the opposite county of Cumberland. Paul's first adventure the appendix of Jones was an
