The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel

by Margaret A. Oppenheimer

  As rivers go, the Midouze was modest. Shallow and sandy, it was nearly unnavigable during the driest weeks of summer. But most of the year, flat-bottomed barges floated southwestward down the Midouze to its junction with the Adour River, then continued southwest on the Adour to bustling Bayonne, an Atlantic seaport near France’s border with Spain.1

  The riverine highway made Mont-de-Marsan a transit hub. Goods from the surrounding regions of southwest France were assembled and shipped onward to the coast. Wool came from sheep that grazed the heather-covered moors to the northwest. Pine plantations supplied pitch, tar, turpentine, and wood. Bags of grain were loaded onto the barges too: millet, barley, sorghum, rye, and corn—crops tolerant of the poor, dry soil. The southeast supplied brandy, especially the prized Armagnac that bore the name of the area from whence it came. From even farther east, the broadcloth of Toulouse was sent to Mont-de-Marsan and passed down the Midouze to Bayonne.2 Little favored by nature, barren of industry, Mont-de-Marsan was dependent on trade.

  From the time Stephen Jumel was old enough to explore his hometown, he would have made a beeline for the hum of activity near the docks. There a young boy could immerse himself in the hubbub of commerce—dart among sweating porters hauling barrels and sacks, beg a ride from one of the boatmen poling barges and rafts, or eavesdrop on prosperous merchants supervising the arrival of cargoes.

  The port was only about a ten-minute walk from home, an easy adventure for an active child. Stephen’s family lived at 16, rue du Bourg, the main street of the commercial quarter of Mont-de-Marsan.3 Located south of the so-called old city, which was nestled inside the thumb formed by the Douze and Midou, the rapidly growing bourg, or commercial sector, contained shops, craftsmen’s workshops, and the lively port. There were also warehouses, merchant’s houses, and humbler residences—the homes of artisans, boatmen, and tradesmen.

  Stephen’s family had deep roots in this mercantile economy. His paternal grandfather kept an inn, invested in land, and traded in salt, cereal grains, and cloth—activities continued by Stephen’s paternal uncle.4 His maternal grandfather was a tailor who had his own shop.5

  Stephen’s parents, also shopkeepers, owned and operated a droguerie.6 Literally, the word means “drugstore”—but there is no exact modern equivalent of an eighteenth-century droguerie. It was a store that carried a broad range of imported products that fell into two basic categories: drugs (the raw ingredients for medications prepared by pharmacists or doctors) and chemicals (organic and inorganic products used in the craft industries, especially by dyers and furniture makers).7

  The Jumels’ droguerie would have been a treasury of products from around the world: exotic items that were funneled into Bayonne, hauled up the Midouze on barges tugged by oxen and men, and tucked into every nook and cranny. Carpenters could have found isinglass (fish gelatin used to make glue) and lac (secreted by insects in India) to dissolve in alcohol to produce shellac. For dyers the Jumels would have stocked a range of West Indian woods: brazilwood for rich reds; fustic for a gamut of yellows; logwood for purples, grays, and blacks.8

  The selection of drugs would have been even more extensive. Since eighteenth-century doctors could do little but try to expel disease, the range of purgatives was staggering. From China came gnarled, yellow pieces of rhubarb. From the West Indies, castor beans, mottled and striped. From Mexico, jalap root, riddled with resinous veins. From Lebanon, senna leaves, pointed like a lance. If a purgative didn’t work, there were always expectorants—most important, ipecac from the Americas, its varieties distinguished by the color and striations of their roots.

  The rich and pungent scent of the shop would have been among Stephen’s earliest memories. His family lived in the building that housed the store.9 Stephen’s father, Dominique Jumel, and his mother, Jeanne Sonier, married on November 22, 1759.10 Dominique was thirty and Jeanne, twenty-two. Their first child, François, was born a year later, on November 26, 1760. A daughter, Madelaine, arrived a year and a half after François, on May 13, 1762. Stephen, the last born, joined the family three years later, on May 7, 1765.11 Named Étienne after his father’s brother, he adopted the name Stephen—the English equivalent—after moving to the United States.12

  Stephen’s first language would have been Gascon, a dialect that was the spoken language of southwest France. Soon he would have absorbed French as well—the written language and the tongue spoken in school.13 Charity schools offered poor children the bare rudiments of literacy, but as shopkeepers, several steps up the social ladder, Stephen’s parents could have afforded to send him to a schoolmaster, beginning around the age of six. Together with his brother and sister, and probably neighbors’ children as well, he would have learned his catechism and how “to read, write, and count.”14

  He would have spent happy hours running about the countryside, too. A year before Stephen’s birth, Dominique Jumel had inherited a farm from his father, François.15 Located in the parish of Parentis, about four miles north of Mont-de-Marsan, it would have been operated by tenants. However, Stephen must have paid frequent visits. As an adult he proved expert at managing a country estate—planting a vineyard, raising sheep, even preparing poultry feathers to make a mattress—surely skills he absorbed in his youth.16

  He received another education while helping out in the shop. By the time Stephen reached his teens, he would have come to recognize the products sold in the store—their colors, shapes, sizes, textures, and smells. His parents would have taught him to keep daily journals of sales and inventory, assess the quality of products and avoid fraudulent merchandise, build relationships with customers, and display stock to boost sales.17

  While the young Stephen was assisting his parents, his older brother François was launched on the world. At sixteen François journeyed to Bordeaux, about ninety miles northwest of Mont-de-Marsan. There he embarked on the ship Le Triton for Saint-Domingue, France’s richest colony.18 The world’s largest producer of sugar and coffee, thanks to the backbreaking labor of four hunded thousand slaves, Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) was the promised land for ambitious young Frenchmen who hoped to acquire property and riches.19

  Yet much of the best land was already in private hands by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Increasingly, new arrivals became and remained struggling petits blancs (little whites), as the slaves termed poor and landless white Europeans.20 François, however, had a leg up on the competition. He would be joining relatives already established on the island. His maternal uncle, Jacques Sonier, had married into the Sterlin family, whose members owned land in Saint-Domingue. As a result of his union with Angelique-Geneviève Sterlin, Sonier possessed five coffee plantations in the island’s Northern Province.21

  The Jumels’ oldest son would help his childless uncle and aunt manage their properties. Their plantations were small, but if François were hardworking and kept an eye out for opportunities, he would be able to acquire additional land of his own.22

  Having settled their eldest son on the path to a livelihood, Dominique and Jeanne Jumel turned their attention to their youngest child. They would send Stephen, like François, to busy Bordeaux, but unlike his brother, not onward to the West Indies. Instead, Stephen would be prepared for a mercantile career in Bordeaux itself, a city whose lifeblood was commerce.

  In all likelihood Stephen set out for the city around 1781, when he was sixteen years old, a typical age for apprenticeship as a merchant and the same age at which his brother began his career.23 By then the “port of the moon”—as Bordeaux was called, after the crescent-shaped bend in the Garonne River that formed its harbor—already deserved the title of “the most beautiful city in France” bestowed on it by the novelist Stendhal a half century later.24 Along the curving right bank of the Garonne, grand stone buildings with unified façades overlooked the busy quays. In the center of the arc, two commanding edifices flanking the Place Royale reflected the city’s priorities: on one side, the stock exchange; on the other, the Hôtel des Fermes
, where taxes and customs duties were collected.

  The river in front of them was “so crowded with vessels of different nations” that it looked like a forest in perpetual motion. Small boats darted here and there, and flags snapped in the breeze—Russian, Prussian, and Swedish; Spanish, English, and American. On the quays, teams of enormous oxen dragged sledges piled with wine barrels.25 The casks would be loaded onto waiting ships.

  Stephen’s life was centered on the commercial quarter known as the Chartreux, named after the local convent of the Chartreux (in English, Carthusians). The neighborhood’s wealthiest merchants lived in tall mansions fronting on the Garonne, while the port’s supporting players—boatmen, coopers, carpenters, and stevedores—resided in the medieval streets behind.26 Regardless of who lived aboveground, vaults beneath every house were stacked with wine casks, the buried treasure from which Bordeaux fortunes were made.

  By the summer of 1789, Stephen was working for d’Egmont frères, a firm of merchants headquartered on the prestigious Quai des Chartrons, at the corner of the rue Denise. A pocket-sized, leather-bound notebook survives, in which he recorded the number of wine barrels removed from wine cellars and the clients to whom they were delivered.27 Surnames that can be identified suggest that the firm had contacts at the highest levels. “Texié” was probably Pierre Texier, an immensely successful French Protestant ship owner; “Laffargue,” the merchant Pierre Laffargue; and “Brun,” the merchant Mathias-Basile Brun—all epitomizing the most elevated echelons of mercantile Bordeaux. The aristocracy is represented with “de Pontac”—probably the marquis de Pontac—and the army with references to the cavalry, artillery, and engineers. A list of churches suggests that clerical Bordeaux also did business with d’Egmont frères.

  Stephen may have been in business for himself already, aside from his work for the d’Egmont firm. “Remov[ed] eight barrels from my wine cellar,” he noted after a client’s name on July 30, 1789. In other words, the vintage belonging to this client of d’Egmont frères had been stored in a cellar that Stephen owned.

  Although it seemed that Stephen was safely on track to a successful career in Bordeaux, the city would soon grow less hospitable to merchants. In 1789 France was a pressure cooker, bubbling with political turmoil and social unrest. The crown was all but bankrupt after endless dynastic wars and costly support for the American Revolution. The peasantry was sinking ever deeper beneath catastrophically high taxes, while the nobility, lightly taxed, refused to pay more. Unable to achieve fiscal reform, Louis XVI resorted to desperate measures. He summoned the Estates General, a consultative body that hadn’t met since the seventeenth century, in the hope that it would rubberstamp, and thus legitimize, the financial restructuring he had been unable to accomplish.

  The Estates General turned out to have a mind of its own. Although the three estates were supposed to meet separately, some nobles (members of the First Estate) and clergymen (belonging to the Second Estate) broke ranks and joined the Third (representing everyone else). After being banished from their meeting room for the breach of protocol, the renegade representatives gathered beneath the high roof of the cavernous indoor tennis court at Versailles. There, on June 20, 1789, they vowed not to disband before establishing a constitution for France. The French Revolution had begun.

  A partially illegible line, faded with age and abrasion, is written on the last page of Stephen’s notebook. In the brief memorandum, the young businessman recorded that a display of lights took place at Bordeaux on July 1, 2, and 3, in honor of the royal audience that Louis XVI gave (grudgingly) to the rebellious Estates General on June 23. The presence of this notation, in an otherwise businesslike notebook, testifies that Stephen recognized the momentous nature of the event.

  Probably it pleased him. Urban professionals, including merchants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors, were early supporters of the Revolution. Moderate in their political opinions, they were interested not in overthrowing French society, but in sensible economic reform. It was no accident that France’s Declaration of the Rights of the Man and Citizen, proclaimed on August 26, 1789, guaranteed “life, liberty, and property,” rather than the more idealistic American triad, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  Stephen may have joined Bordeaux’s National Guard, which was founded on July 20, 1789, under the rousing name of the Armée Patriotique. It enrolled as many as twelve thousand volunteers—chiefly educated and prosperous men—in its first twenty-four hours of existence.28 On August 13, Stephen jotted down in his notebook a list of supplies needed for making a drum (two goatskins, wood for drumsticks, etc.), appending prices after a few of the items. The finished product would have been the sort of instrument popular at patriotic festivals during which the National Guard paraded proudly.

  If the early days of the Revolution promised rational and measured change to members of the professional classes, there were intimations that violence lurked beneath the surface. Bread shortages caused by the dismal harvest of 1788 sparked riots in the summer and fall of 1789. Aristocrats, nervous, began to emigrate. On October 5, a turbulent crowd of Parisian market women marched on Versailles, demanding bread. That night they invaded the palace through an unlocked gate, threatened the life of the queen, and demanded the king’s return to the capital, where the National Assembly was attempting to remake France. The next day the unruly mob escorted the royal family willy-nilly to Paris. There on October 10, Louis XVI, King of France, was renamed King of the French. The people had found its voice.

  Over the next two years, change accelerated. Class distinctions were attacked, and threats to the very existence of the monarchy grew. The property of the Catholic Church was nationalized on November 2, 1789. Hereditary aristocratic titles were abolished eight months later. On September 14, 1791, King Louis XVI was forced to accept a constitution.

  Across the ocean in Saint-Domingue, slaves inspired by the talk of liberté began a revolution that led to the founding of the country of Haiti. Jacques Sonier, Stephen’s uncle, died just before or during the massacres that marked the first months of the rebellion, and his widow, with Stephen’s brother, François, fled back to France in 1792.29 They returned to yet more chaos. The French monarchy was abolished in September, and the king went to the guillotine on January 21, 1793. By fall, dozens of guillotines were casting their shadows over France. Masterminded by the radicals known as the Jacobins, the Reign of Terror had begun.

  Growing extremism in Bordeaux paralleled that on the national stage. In September 1793 the city’s municipal council, run by merchants and lawyers, was forced from power by a mob.30 On October 17 “representatives of the people,” sent by the Jacobin-dominated National Convention now ruling France, arrived in Bordeaux and brought the Terror with them.31 The have-nots (or sansculottes, literally, “those without breeches”—workers and peasants who wore loose trousers instead of breeches of silk or satin) at last had their chance to rule. In these leveling times, any citizen with money or power fell under suspicion. Merchants became “enemies of equality” and commerce “usurious, monarchial, and anti-revolutionary.”32 A guillotine was erected on Bordeaux’s patriotically named Place Nationale (today’s Place Gambetta). Efficiently it removed 301 heads before the Terror ended with the overthrow of its prime mover, radical legislator and orator Maximilien Robespierre, in Paris on July 31, 1794.33

  Stephen Jumel did not hear the ominous drumbeats announcing the executions nor the thump of the steel blade as it fell. After October 12, 1789, the entries in his notebook break off abruptly. He had left Bordeaux, and probably France as well; he did not attend his sister’s November 24, 1790, marriage in Mont-de-Marsan.34 By 1795 he was established in the United States.

  5

  TRANSITIONS

  On May 1, 1795, New York City was on the march. By tradition, leases of property in the metropolis expired on April 30. The ritual that followed amazed foreign visitors:

  As the inhabitants in general love variety, and seldom reside in the sam
e house for two consecutive years; those who have to change, which appears to be nearly the whole city, must be all removed together. Hence, from the peep of day till twilight, may be seen carts, which go at a rate of speed astonishingly rapid, laden with furniture of every kind, racing up and down the city, as if its inhabitants were flying from pestilence, pursued by death with his broad scythe just ready to mow them into eternity.1

  Even an entire house might be moved when a lot lease expired. With a wheel tucked under each corner and furniture inside, the whole would be dragged away by sweating horses.2 Annually the city convulsed on May 1 and then returned to normality.

  When the dust settled in the early summer of 1795, New York was revealed to have a new resident: “Jummel, merchant, 44 Reed.”3 In afteryears, Stephen’s English would be fluent enough to ensure that the clerks had the correct spelling of his surname when the data for the directory were compiled. Pronunciation was another matter. In French the two syllables of the name are given equal weight (jyu-mel), and the first consonant is pronounced more like the s in “pleasure” or “vision” than an English j. Probably, though, most Americans pronounced it in the same way that it is Anglicized today, with a longer, heavily stressed second syllable (ju-mell´). Indeed, in shipping reports in early nineteenth-century newspapers, the name is occasionally misspelled “Jumell,” suggesting the currency of this pronunciation.

  Reed (later Reade) Street, the inexpensive neighborhood where Stephen settled, was on the uppermost border of the built-up area of New York City, just north of today’s city hall. House numbers were not assigned to the street until 1794, and even then much of the land to its north was still occupied by a patchwork of farms. The city hospital and a military barracks were nearby—purposefully isolated on the outskirts of the city. Stephen’s neighbors were mainly day laborers and cartmen—the Teamsters of the day, each supplying his own single-horse cart.4 Reed Street sheltered modestly paid artisans as well, including house painters, masons, and carpenters.5