Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

by Berkin, Carol

  The American Bonapartes seemed to settle into their anonymity with sighs of relief. Junior, who resigned his commission in the French cavalry and returned to his native country, appeared content to enjoy the prosperous and respectable life relished by his father and his maternal grandfather before him. With his wife, Caroline Leroy Appleton Edgar Bonaparte, the granddaughter of one of antebellum America’s greatest orators and political figures, Daniel Webster, Junior lived out the century as a businessman, released at last from his grandmother’s ambitions.

  By the time Junior’s son, the fourth to carry the name Jerome Bonaparte, came of age, the burden of Betsy’s ambitions had been entirely lifted. This Jerome entertained no thoughts of an active connection to his European relatives; he was American born and bred. In 1914, as a new war appeared on Europe’s horizon, he married an American divorcée and made his home in Washington, D.C. The only member of the Bonaparte family to achieve a place in European nobility was his sister, Louise Eugenie, who married a Danish count, Adam Comte de Molke-Huitfeldt. When she died in 1923, at the age of forty-nine, she left behind five children who were not newsworthy in America.

  William Patterson’s devotion to respectability seemed to run in the veins of Betsy’s descendants, but there were signs that her pride in bearing the name Bonaparte was not entirely absent. Her son, after all, could be seen until his death in 1870 riding in an elegant carriage that carried his mother’s unofficial coat of arms on its doors. And his grandson raised his family in a home on Washington’s K Street so lavish that neighbors dubbed it “Chateau Bonaparte.”

  Still, it was not a Jerome but a Charles Bonaparte who brought the family name to national prominence once again. This second son of Jerome and Susan Bonaparte, born twenty years after his older brother, grew up in a new, modernizing America, far more confident of itself than the fledgling republic that had seen potential danger in a seventeen-year-old’s marriage to Napoleon’s brother. Charles was a Harvard junior in 1871, the year his brother married and Napoleon III lost his throne. As a young boy, Charley had been Betsy Bonaparte’s favorite oceanside companion, and as an adult, he became her trusted business manager. But in 1875 he too disappointed his grandmother by taking Ellen Channing Day, the daughter of an attorney, as his wife.

  Charles was a lawyer—and by all accounts a brilliant one. He opened his practice in Baltimore, but having inherited a fortune from his grandmother, he had no need to take on cases that brought in huge fees. Instead he established himself as a champion of justice. He joined the Baltimore Reform League and the Maryland Civil Service League, thus aligning himself with one of the major reform efforts of the Gilded Age. With other civil service reformers, he campaigned to replace a patronage system that led to the corrupt and inefficient operations of government with a nonpartisan test of competency for appointees. The Pendleton Act of 1883 marked the movement’s first major success. In 1889 Charles met Theodore Roosevelt, who was then serving on the relatively new Civil Service Commission. The two Harvard alums became close friends, and when Roosevelt became president, he appointed Charles Bonaparte to the Board of Indian Commissioners. Soon afterward he made Charles a special prosecutor in cases of fraud in the postal service. By 1905 Charles Bonaparte had entered Roosevelt’s cabinet as secretary of the navy, and the following year, at age forty-five, he was sworn in as U.S. attorney general.

  As attorney general, Charles produced an impressive record. He appeared before the Supreme Court more than five hundred times and delivered more than a hundred opinions on a broad range of legal matters to the president. His prosecution of cases under the antitrust laws earned him a national reputation as one of Teddy Roosevelt’s “trust busters.” During his years with the Justice Department, he mounted a crusade to improve law enforcement by creating special agents under his direction. The result was a Bureau of Investigation; its agents became known as “G Men,” and the bureau was the precursor of the FBI.

  Charles retired from national public office when Roosevelt’s second term ended. He returned to Baltimore and to his law practice, but he remained an active supporter of the reform of government. He founded the National Municipal League and served as its president. His reputation continued to grow, as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals later put it, because he was “an honest-to-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool, brash reformer.” An outpouring of books, essays, and articles on reform by Charles seemed to confirm this view. Yet Charles’s devotion to clean government did not arise from a humanitarian or philanthropic philosophy. He was, in the spirit of William Patterson, an advocate of individual responsibility and a strong opponent of public assistance to the poor. He earned the nickname “Soup House Charlie” in the 1880s when he declared that a public school system was undesirable and “as ridiculous … as … free soup kitchens.” As one reporter astutely observed, Charles Bonaparte was a walking contradiction: “by instinct a royalist, by profession a democrat and a reformer.”

  Physically, Charley did not resemble either the Bonaparte or the Patterson line. True, he was said to have a “Bonaparte smile” and the small hands and feet of his grandmother, but he was a large and sturdy man, with a bull neck and a massive head. His combination of physical and intellectual superiority was captured in the description of that “vast round, rugged head, a double-decker head; a cannon ball head, like a warrior’s, with room for two sets of brains.” His personality, however, reflected a remarkable blending of William Patterson’s moral certitude and judgmental impulses and his grandmother’s charm and sarcasm. He was comfortable sitting in judgment of others, and many of his books and essays focused on the need to rid the nation of men he labeled public or private sinners. He was admired for his witty repartee, heavily laced as it was with sarcasm, and as one observer noted, he was a man of great wit but no sense of humor. He was a favorite of newspaper reporters, who liked to interview him, not simply because of his high profile in Teddy Roosevelt’s government or his prominence in reform organizations, but because he was “good copy.” He spoke his mind; he did not mince words; and he did not care if his opinions brought criticism down upon him.

  With Charles, any lingering connection to the European Bonapartes was finally severed. He responded coolly when told he resembled the famous Napoleon, and he distanced himself from the history of the family in France by declaring he came from Italian and Scottish stock and did not have a drop of French blood in his veins. He never visited France or made any effort to contact European relatives. His concerns, while he served in the national government and after his retirement from office, were entirely American: conservation, Indian affairs, regulation of trusts, efficient criminal investigation, and civil service reform. The rise and fall of kings and European governments were matters of only mild and passing interest.

  Charles Bonaparte died in 1921. He had no children, and thus his line in the family genealogy ended with his death. In his spirited devotion to a single cause, Charles most closely resembled his grandmother, and like her, he achieved national prominence for this American branch of the Bonaparte family.

  Acknowledgments

  Most writers like to think of their work as a solitary endeavor, but this is an illusion. When we sit down to write that section of a book called “Acknowledgments,” we realize that every book is a collaborative effort. And for me, this has never been more true than in the writing of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s biography.

  The idea of telling Betsy’s story came from my good friend, the talented scriptwriter of many PBS documentaries, Ronald Blumer. Ron encountered Betsy while working on a show about her good friend Dolley Madison. He e-mailed me and suggested—no, ordered—that I tell Betsy’s story. I heard, and I obeyed.

  Betsy’s papers, as well as many of the Patterson family papers, are in the Maryland Historical Society archives. The society’s Lord Baltimore Fellowship allowed me the time and resources to plumb their rich collections. The Johns Hopkins University’s History Department’s grant of a visiting professorship opened th
e university’s libraries to me as well. My work there was made easier by the willingness of my niece, Laurie Berkin, to sign on as my unpaid research assistant. In addition to helping me go through the many boxes of Betsy’s letters, Laurie proved expert at locating the best crabcakes in Baltimore. Soon after I returned from Maryland, Eric Herschthal, now a graduate student at Columbia University, volunteered to do research for me. He scoured secondary sources on everything from Haitian refugees in Baltimore, to the architecture of the city in the eighteenth century, to minor Jeffersonian-era political figures. When I was stymied over how to locate an obscure journal article, I could always turn to Michael Hattem, a brilliant former Baruch student, now getting his Ph.D. in history at Yale. Michael’s investigative skills are remarkable, as are his computer skills. I have him on speed dial for all the technological problems that terrify members of my generation. Raoul Boisset, a Baruch College senior with a French background, translated some of the trickier paragraphs in letters to Betsy, as did Kimberly Adams, my friend in Guilford, Connecticut, whose knowledge of nineteenth-century French slang is most impressive. When it was all done, another excellent graduate student, Laura Ping, helped me get my endnotes in their proper form.

  Friends and colleagues played a major role in seeing this book to completion. From the first outline to the last written page, Professors Cindy Lobel, Angelo Angelis, and Philip Papas read the manuscript and offered their usual tough criticism, scribbled on the draft pages I sent them and shared over cake and coffee or a glass of wine. They have been the guiding spirits of my last three books—and I have given them tenure in that role. Margaret Berlin, Landa Freeman, and Julie Des Jardins read chapters as they came off the computer—and read them again, sometimes in their third and even fourth iterations. They took their duties seriously, correcting grammar and punctuation and writing “unclear” or “why?” in the margins on many a page. Margaret was gloriously relentless, and even on our daily summer walks in Connecticut, she pursued her points without breaking stride. Much that is good in this book—and none of what the reader might find wanting—can be attributed to the assistance of these friends, students, and colleagues.

  Dozens of teachers—from Colorado to Washington, D.C., to Fort Lauderdale, Bridgeport, and Huntsville—listened to me talk about Betsy at the faculty development programs made possible by Teaching American History grants. Their questions and comments were invaluable, for my goal in recent years has been to reach a broader audience than my colleagues in academe. It is a shame that this grants program has vanished, for it provided a rare opportunity for scholars and teachers to share their love of history.

  Ana Calero, who keeps the history department running smoothly at Baruch, and who has endured my shrieks of “I can’t make the printer work” for many years, patiently assisted me once again in printing out copies of the manuscript.

  Dan Green, my agent and friend, read every word, as he always does, and made astute comments—as he always does. His gentle nudges—“How’s the book coming?”—were invaluable in stirring the guilt that helps authors finish a project. My thanks too to my editor at Knopf, Victoria Wilson, and to her assistant Daniel Schwartz, as well as to the copy editor, Janet Biehl, who refined my wilder sentence constructions and judiciously added or eliminated commas and colons.

  Finally, my thanks to my family, which has expanded to include not only my daughter, Hannah, and son, Matthew, but their spouses, Eamon and Jessica, to whom this book is dedicated. These four remarkable young adults have brought me great joy, a reasonable amount of gray hair, and a new knowledge of the subway routes to their neighborhoods in Brooklyn. It saddens me to think that Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte never experienced the delight that only a loving family can provide.

  —Carol Berkin

  Notes

  1 “She Is a Most Extraordinary Girl”

  1 By July 1778: See Helen Jean Burn, Betsy Bonaparte (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2010), pp. 6–23, for a full discussion of William Patterson’s early years and his marriage to Dorcas Spear.

  2 In choosing Dorcas: Virginia Tatnall Peacock, Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century (Books for Libraries Press, n.d., reissued by University, 2011), p. 41.

  3 “What I possess”: Ibid., p. 42

  4 As a husband: E. M. Oddie, The Bonapartes in the New World (London: Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1932), p. 6, describes William as “a dour, self righteous, God-fearing man, who liked laying down the law sententiously to his fellows, and keeping his household in order.”

  5 “We treat women”: F. M. Kicheisen, Memoirs of Napoleon the First Compiled from His Writing (New York: Duffield & Co., 1929), p. 152.

  6 Dorcas’s first daughter: Inventory made by Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte [hereafter EPB], August 11, 1838, Maryland Historical Society [MdHS], ms. 142.

  7 Betsy dreamed of: Annie Leakin Sioussat, Old Baltimore (New York: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 133–34.

  8 When she was ten: Oddie, Bonapartes in the New World, pp. 7–8; Claude Bourguignon-Frasseto, Betsy Bonaparte: The Belle of Baltimore (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2003), pp. 7–9.

  9 “I always considered”: William Patterson’s Will, MdHS, ms. 645

  10 “She is a most extraordinary”: Rosalie Stier Calvert to her mother, 1803, in Margaret Law Callcott, ed., Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 62.

  11 “No sovereign”:, William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 5.

  12 “I most solemnly”: Nicholas Smith to EPB, February 1802, MdHS, ms. 142.

  13 As a child: For a sympathetic but not uncritical biography of Jérôme Bonaparte, see Philip Walsingham Sergeant, Jérôme Bonaparte: The Burlesque Napoleon; Being the Story of the Life and Kingship of the Youngest Brother of Napoleon the Great (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2005). Sergeant, who describes Jérôme as a “monumental rake,” notes that “his chief claim to notoriety lies in the fact that … he distinguished himself by the pernacity of his gallantry.” See also Clarence Edward McCartney and Gordon Dorrance, The Bonapartes in America (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co., 1939), pp. 32–33.

  14 “I am like that”: Sergeant, Jérôme Bonaparte, p. 14; Laure Junot Abrantès, At the Court of Napoleon: Memoirs of the Duchesse d’Abrantès (Gloucester, U.K.: Windrush Press, 1989), pp. 46–54.

  15 Jérôme’s character: Sidney Mitchell, A Family Lawsuit: The Romantic Story of Elisabeth Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958), p. 24.

  16 “You brought him up”: Abrantès, At the Court of Napoleon, pp. 132–33.

  17 “Signora Letizia spoils”: Ibid.

  18 Jérôme’s arrival in America: Sergeant, Jérôme Bonaparte, chaps. 2 and 3.

  19 One of the few: Mitchell, Family Lawsuit, pp. 32–34.

  20 But there are other: For the various accounts, see Oddie, Bonapartes in the New World, pp. 13–14; Burn, Betsy Bonaparte, pp. 42–43; Dorothy MacKay Quynn, “The Marriage of Betsy Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte,” unpublished ms., MdHS, chap. 1.

  21 Though young, Jérôme Bonaparte: According to one contemporary, Jérôme received three challenges to duel because of his flaunting of American courtship rules. See Richard Beale Davis, ed., Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America Collected in the Years 1805–6–7 and 11–12 by Sir Augustus John Foster, Bart. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1954), p. 65.

  2 “I Would Rather Be the Wife of Jérôme Bonaparte for an Hour”

  1 “I would rather”: E. M. Oddie, The Bonapartes in the New World (London: Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1932), p. 22; Dorothy MacKay Quynn, “The Marriage of Betsy Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte,” unpublished ms., MdHS, chap. 2; Geraldine Brooks, Dames and Daughters of the Young Republic (General Books, 2009), p. 58.

  2 Although William grudgingly: For an account of Jérôme’s flirtations, see Ric
hard Beale Davis, ed., Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America Collected in the Years 1805–6–7 and 11–12 by Sir Augustus John Foster, Bart. (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1954), p. 65.

  3 Family members now: John Pancake, Samuel Smith and the Politics of Business, 1782–1839 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972), pp. 70; Thomas Armstrong, Politics, Diplomacy and Intrigue in the Early Republic: The Cabinet Career of Robert Smith, 1801–1811 (Dubuque, Ia.: Kendall Hunt, 1991), pp. 9–10.

  4 Beleaguered from many sides: Articles of Agreement and Settlement, December 24, 1803, MdHS, ms. 142.

  5 “not without importance”: James Madison to Robert R. Livingston, MdHS, ms. 142. See William Thomas Roberts Saffell, The Bonaparte-Patterson Marriage in 1803 (General Books, 2009), chap. 2, for a full discussion of the diplomatic implications.

  6 “a man of the fairest character”: Thomas Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, November 4, 1803, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 10, Correspondence and Papers, 1803–1807 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5), p. 50.

  7 Still, not all of William’s: Oddie, Bonapartes in the New World, p. 19; the legality of the marriage is discussed at length in Saffell, Bonaparte-Patterson Marriage.

  8 “Is it possible, sir”: Ibid., pp. 29–30.

  9 “driven off to one”: Rosalie Stier Calvert to Mme. H. J. Stier, n.d., November 1803, in Margaret Law Callcott, ed., Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 61–63.