The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel

by Margaret A. Oppenheimer

  A day or two after the marriage, Colonel and Mrs. Burr left for Hartford, Connecticut, on a trip that agreeably combined business and pleasure. In Hartford, they visited Burr’s cousin, Henry Waggaman Edwards, a lawyer recently elected governor of Connecticut.9 The meeting was a social coup that Eliza would have treasured. But the choice of destination was dictated by her need to settle Stephen’s estate. Back in the mid-1820s, during the worst of their financial difficulties, Eliza had wanted to sell the forty shares of stock that Stephen had owned in the Hartford Bridge Company and put in Lesparre’s name.10 They had ended up retaining the shares, which faithfully yielded quarterly dividends. Now, however, as assets forming part of Stephen’s estate, the stock would have to be sold.

  The nuptial pair seem to have enjoyed their honeymoon. In July a Hartford newspaper reported that the “happy couple spent a few days of the ‘first month,’ in this city, apparently swallowed up in conjugal felicity … Mrs. Burr is a lady of fifty or fifty-five, rather comely, and we should think well fitted to sustain an old gentleman under the infirmities of age.” However, the penman snarkily concluded, “We really hope she will prove an Aaron’s rod, and not a rod to Aaron.”11 Had the journalist observed underlying tension between the two? Perhaps he was simply showing off a clever phrase.

  While in Hartford Eliza and Burr met with the management of the Hartford Bridge Company. The sale of the stock was not entirely straightforward. Stephen had never registered the transfer of the shares to his nephew-in-law in the company’s books.12 But with the bulk of the paperwork showing Lesparre to be their owner, Eliza’s claim to the shares as Stephen’s widow was in question. Indeed, she and Nelson might have already visited Hartford after Stephen’s death in an unsuccessful attempt to sell the stock.13

  Whether or not they had done so, the present sally, at last, was successful. If Stephen had planned that the profits from the sale would go to Lesparre, as his refusal to sell the shares earlier had suggested, his intent would not be honored. On July 5, 1833, Eliza received the handsome sum of six thousand five hundred dollars for Stephen’s forty shares.14

  Of what happened next, we have only Parton’s account. As with his story of the Jumel/Burr courtship, the details must have come directly from Eliza or through Nelson Chase. According to Parton, Eliza was offered the money, but ordered it paid to her husband instead. That done, Burr “had it sewed up in his pocket, a prodigious bulk, and brought it to New York, and deposited it in his own bank, to his own credit.”15 Regardless of the pocket that hid the money, the marriage gave Burr legal possession of all of Eliza’s assets (except the real estate held in trust for her). This fact would soon trouble the tentative harmony between them.

  After completing their business in Hartford, the couple returned to New York over the weekend. Monday, July 8, found Burr back at the legal grind, writing to an associate in Utica regarding the progress of a case.16 But he was looking forward to retirement, which he hoped would come sooner rather than later. In early September, he wrote to his friend John Bigelow, a Bostonian, that he was still dealing with “vexatious concerns of business, which a determination to wind up [his] worldly affairs” had necessitated.17 In this missive of September 8, he also thanked Bigelow for the latter’s congratulations on his marriage. “Your letter of congratulation,” he wrote, “amused me very much—I consider it as a sort of Epithalamium—but really my friend you did not consider that the parties who were the subject of congratulations were past their grand climacteric and it would therefore have been utterly impractical either by invocation of muses, or even by beat of drum, to have summoned the loves or graces to such a celebration.”18

  The amusement he felt at the idea of an ode to the marriage (or an “epithalamium,” to use the terminology of English poetry that he had employed) is a damning admission that Burr never felt the kind of warmth or tenderness for which Eliza might have hoped, even if she had entered the alliance largely for practical purposes. Strictly speaking, only he and not Eliza was past the grand climacteric—the age of sixty-three, at which the physical powers were believed to undergo a marked decline. Evidence suggests that he remained attractive to, and attracted by, the fairer sex. In a codicil to his will, drawn up in 1835, he left his residuary assets to two natural daughters, one of whom was only two years old.19

  Burr was also capable of deep loyalties and strong affections. When Luther Martin, one of the lawyers who defended him during his trial for treason, was an old, broken man, Burr gave him a home for the last year or two of his life.20 In September 1833 he performed a similar action, welcoming John Pelletreau, a long-term client who was by then near death, into the mansion on Harlem Heights.21

  But apparently his marriage to Eliza failed to touch Burr’s heart. The lack of true affection, whether on his side or on both, would have made the inevitable stresses and strains of the early months of a marriage harder to weather with aplomb. Indeed the bonds knitted on July 1, 1833, would soon be ripped asunder. By October Aaron Burr had left Mount Stephen. By November he and Eliza had parted for good. On July 11, 1834—thirty years to the day of Burr’s ruinous duel with Hamilton—Eliza filed for divorce.

  27

  THE UNRAVELING

  On June 19, 1834, Eliza saluted an old acquaintance on the street. It was William Dunlap, the impresario of the Park Theatre, where she had trod the boards so many years before. If he had planned to pass her by in silence, she outfaced him by addressing him directly. “You don’t know me, Mr. Dunlap?” she said.

  “Oh yes, Mrs. Burr,” he replied. “How does Colonel Burr do?”

  “Oh, I don’t see him anymore,” Eliza replied brusquely. “He got thirteen thousand dollars of my property, and spent it all or gave it away and had [no] money to buy him a dinner. I had a new carriage and pair of horses cost me one thousand dollars; he took them and sold them for five hundred.”

  Dunlap was appalled at her frankness. “What confidence can be placed in the words of such a woman it is hard to say,” he wrote in his diary, “but Burr’s marrying her makes anything told of him credible.”1

  Bluntness shocked in nineteenth-century America when it came from a woman—especially when it was a commentary on her husband. Even a woman who managed her own lands and investments would be expected to show outward deference to her spouse.2 But that was not Eliza’s way.

  If money had brought Eliza and Aaron together, it was also what tore them apart. Although Eliza knew that her money would attract Aaron, she cannot have suspected how fiscally irresponsible he was. Without contacts in the upper echelons of New York society, she lacked access to the informative gossip that circulated among the elite.3

  The marriage barely celebrated, Burr began to lay claim to Eliza’s money—now his money by virtue of the matrimonial laws of the day. In her bill of divorce, Eliza detailed his depredations. She had given him money (probably the proceeds of the shares in the Hartford Bridge Company) to pay down a mortgage on real estate held in trust for her. He had promised that he would do so, but kept the money for himself.4 Eliza wouldn’t be able to pay off the mortgage for another two years.5

  Nor was that all. Burr’s creditors had seized some personal property that Eliza had purchased since the marriage (including the carriage and horses she lamented to Dunlap, perhaps?). To save the items from being sold, she was forced to pay off her new husband’s creditors herself.6 Given Burr’s usual state of chronic indebtedness, this tale rings sadly true.

  Still more: Burr had been trying to obtain the rents and profits from real estate held in trust for her, and had even threatened to sell the property in Saratoga Springs that she had purchased shortly after Stephen’s death.7 This last was a particularly serious threat to Eliza. Burr would have had difficulty obtaining approval from her trustees to sell property in which Eliza held only a life estate, but as her husband the rest of her real estate was his.

  In his answer to the bill of divorce, Burr admitted the truth of most of Eliza’s charges, although he slanted the n
arrative to place his conduct in a more favorable light. He conceded that he had spent the money from the Hartford Bridge stock, but said he had paid out two thousand dollars of it on debts that Eliza had contracted before and after their marriage (although no records of any such debts can be found). Part of the rest went “for the support of himself and family,” and the remainder he spent “for his own uses and purposes, as he had full and lawful authority to do.” Moreover, he said, without his legal expertise, Eliza wouldn’t have received the money for the stock at all.8

  Nor, he stated, did he try to seize any of the profits on the real estate held in trust for her—although at the same time he conceded that he had forbade one of her trustees from paying her the rents without his own consent.9 It is clear from Burr’s words that he’d been exercising his rights as Eliza’s husband to control her assets. Legal? Yes, except for meddling with the rents from the trust. Acceptable to Eliza? No.

  To counter Eliza’s claim that some of her property was seized by his creditors, forcing her to spend her own money to redeem it, Burr embellished his answer to the divorce bill with an implausible tale designed to make his wife look vindictive and unbalanced. Eliza, he claimed, had run up a bill before the marriage for repairs to her mansion; he and she were subsequently sued jointly for payment and lost.10 Consequently the creditors were given the right to seize some of their possessions, including “two horses, one carriage, and harness” purchased with part of the money received for the Hartford Bridge Company stock. Eliza, Burr said, then made a secret agreement with the officer sent to carry out the seizure. She helped the official remove certain items from the house after they had been advertised for sale. These were taken to a place that “was difficult to access by persons inclined to purchase” to ensure that there would be no competing bids. She planned to have the possessions purchased cheaply by a confederate “to be clandestinely disposed of without [Burr’s] knowledge so as to leave [him] personally liable for the residue of the amount due on the said execution.” According to Burr, this ingenious plan failed because he had learned of it by chance and arranged for someone to attend the sale and purchase the items for a fair price. At that point Eliza, “discovering that her artifice was detected, forthwith directed one of the trustees of her real estate … to pay the amount due on said execution.” But furious that her plan had been thwarted, she “then threatened to burn and destroy the carriage and shoot the horses which formed a part of the said personal property” that had been at risk from the execution.11

  To further fix the image of his wife as an uncontrolled and irrational woman, Burr added a claim that Eliza, before their marriage, had defamed the character of a neighbor, Isabella Geagan. Isabella and her husband, he said, were now suing Aaron and Eliza for five thousand dollars in damages. But Burr himself had instigated the action for slander, Eliza said, and the suit was “discontinued by judgment as in case of nonsuit.”12 No record of any such legal action survives, suggesting that the case was indeed dismissed.

  Strictly speaking, none of these charges and countercharges had any legal weight in a bill of divorce. In New York in 1834, the grounds for dissolving a marriage were few. An annulment could be granted if one or both parties were underage, mentally incompetent, married by force or fraud, physically incapable of consummating a marriage, or had a former spouse who was still alive.13 Otherwise the only possibility of freeing oneself was divorce—permitted for but one reason: adultery.14 That Burr was laying waste to Eliza’s fortune was unfortunate but not illegal. That she had unleashed her temper against him was understandable, but irrelevant. Unless she could prove that he had committed adultery, Eliza was stuck with the marriage.

  Luckily the details of Burr’s private life provided the ammunition she needed to end their short-lived union. The smoking gun was a relationship Burr had enjoyed immediately before their marriage with a woman named Jane McManus. A dark-eyed beauty with a failed early marriage in her past, Jane Maria Eliza McManus was born in 1807 in Rensselaer City, New York. Married to a law student at eighteen, by 1832 she had moved to New York City and was raising a young son on her own.15 McManus had become acquainted with Burr when they had both lived on Reade Street.16 The acquaintance-ship had ripened into friendship, if not more. Hannah Lewis, Burr’s Reade Street landlady, testified during the divorce proceedings that McManus had called on Burr as often as four or five nights per week, beginning in October or November 1831. She had spent her visits alone with Burr in his rooms, staying until one or two o’clock in the morning.17

  By fall 1832 McManus had obtained a position as bookkeeper at the New York offices of the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company.18 Probably Burr, whose friend Samuel Swartwout was an investor in the company, had suggested her for the position. The Galveston sold scrip to parcels of land in Spanish-ruled East Texas—papers that gave investors the right to settle in specific areas and claim the lands after occupying and surveying them.19

  McManus and her brother Robert soon purchased or were given scrip for some of the company’s holdings. In November 1832 they headed south to lay claim to their acres.20 Burr wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to introduce McManus to an old friend, Judge James Workman, who was organizing immigration into Texas. Praising her courage and perseverance, Burr assured Workman “that she will be able to send out one or two hundred settlers in less time and with better selection than any man or half-a-dozen men who I this day know.”21

  By May 1833, as the marriage of Eliza Jumel and Aaron Burr approached, McManus was back in New York, signing up German immigrants to work her land in exchange for a meager salary and transportation to Texas.22 But in late September she faced a setback. She had planned to share the costs of chartering a ship to Texas with another investor, but he withdrew from the arrangement at the last minute.23 Desperate for funds, McManus reached out to Burr, asking him for an advance of two hundred and fifty dollars “for a year or even six months.” She offered any quantity he demanded of her Texas lands as security. In the undated letter to him, sent to his and Eliza’s home in upper Manhattan, Jane wrote breathlessly, “My plans are so far advanced that with that [the money] it seems I cannot fail of success – Heaven knows I have not spent a dollar of money or a moment of time for my own amusement – heart and soul has [sic] been devoted to this business – do not let me sink … I have delayed sailing until Wednesday morning[.] If you cannot lend me this money inform me let me know the worst – This suspense will drive me wild in three days more.”

  McManus closed the letter with an apology for her appeal: “Forgive me I entreat you for calling on you,” she wrote, “but I feel I know your answer will give a color to the rest of my life – I shall expect your answer with the deepest anxiety – Farewell.”24

  Did Burr, now married, grant her request? Probably not. McManus’s biographer, Linda S. Hudson, discovered that Jane sold five hundred acres of land in Texas to a purchaser in Troy, New York, on October 2, 1833—land that she had no title to sell. She received two hundred and fifty dollars from the risky transaction, the same sum she had requested from Burr.25

  Although it is unlikely that Burr loaned McManus the sum for which she begged, her letter may have dealt a death blow to his relationship with his new wife. It survives among the Jumel papers at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. Whether at the time of its delivery—probably in the second half of September 1833—or in the months thereafter, it must have fallen into Eliza’s hands. As the divorce filing makes clear, she and Aaron were already dueling over financial matters shortly after the marriage. By early fall, there was sufficient tension between them that Eliza was planning a solitary voyage as an escape, just as she had done when she was at odds with Stephen. On October 2, Nelson requested a passport for her from the State Department to travel from New York to France.26

  Even if Burr refused to help McManus in September, the letter from her, if Eliza saw it at the time, could have increased tensions between the couple. Indeed, both parties stated in their di
vorce papers that Burr had left the mansion on Harlem Heights in “October or November” 1833—thus not long after the missive was received.27 Burr’s friend John Pelletreau was assisted into a carriage. Burr stepped in after him, followed by Maria Johnson, a servant of the colonel’s who had been attending the sick man.28 The three occupants of the carriage moved out of the mansion and into Burr’s law office at 23 Nassau Street.29

  The ambiguity over the precise dating of Eliza and Aaron’s separation—“October or November”—is curious. The evidence suggests that Burr left Eliza, then returned temporarily to the mansion after suffering a disabling stroke, accounting for the absence of a single, specific departure date.

  The medical crisis occurred in the autumn of 1833. Walking down Broadway with an acquaintance, Burr lost the ability to use one leg.30 The exact timing of the event is not recorded, but a female acquaintance sent a letter to his office on November 1, 1833, to ask after the colonel’s health, so the illness was probably a recent occurrence.31 In a letter of October 18, she had made only a routine inquiry on how he did—nothing more than politeness demanded in correspondence with a friend.32

  According to Parton, Eliza visited Burr after hearing of the stroke. She took him back to the mansion to recuperate and nursed him for the following month.33 (Presumably her plans to travel to France were abandoned in the wake of this crisis.) Tending to confirm Parton’s account, Burr, in his answer to Eliza’s bill of divorce, claimed that she behaved “in a manner most undutiful, disobedient, and insulting, and particularly at a time when the defendant [Burr] was in a very low state of health and not expected to survive, which was in the month of October or November 1833, and that in consequence of such treatment this defendant did leave the house of the said complainant.”34 After this interlude in late fall 1833, Eliza and Aaron would not live together again.