Unfortunately for their attempt to revise history, the marriage had been dissolved on July 8, 1836, in spite of the subsequent appeal.33 Eliza had even identified herself occasionally in legal matters as the divorced wife of Aaron Burr.34 Trying to change her status on a technicality—a possible delay in the enrollment of the decree—was a losing battle, Pugh realized, after putting in a year of uncompensated efforts. This “has been the most vexacious [sic] case I ever had,” he wrote with frustration in 1863.35 He would earn nothing for his trouble, and Eliza would not get the pension she had claimed. To the federal government, she was, and would remain, the divorced wife and not the widow of Burr.
35
THE END OF AN ERA
In 1859 the Saratoga Sentinel reported that “Madame Jumel, once the wife and now the widow of the celebrated Aaron Burr,” continued to visit Saratoga annually:
She comes here ostensibly to look after an estate which she owns, located near our village, but, like all other ladies, she mingles with, and seems to enjoy, the festivities of this gay watering place with as much delight as if she was the reigning belle of the season.
… Although she has outlived most of her contemporaries, having attained upwards of eighty years, she seems to be just as full of life and vivacity as she was forty years ago, and apparently possessing all her faculties unimpaired.1
The 1859 visit to Saratoga would be Eliza’s last. A photograph that must date from around 1860 reveals unmistakable signs of age.2 Posed with her family outside her home, she allowed herself to be portrayed without hair dye or wig, white hair drawn back beneath one of the delicate lace head coverings she had favored for twenty-five years. Although she sat rather than stood for the long exposure, she had the strength to support in her lap an unidentified child, seemingly about twelve months old.
Mathilde is seated on the steps of the mansion and her mother in a chair with a book in her lap. The man whose left arm is hidden by a column may be Paul. Nelson is nearby, hat in hand. William, hands behind his back and coat buttoned up to the neck, stands at a short distance from the family group on the porch. He and Eliza, posed on either side of their relatives and friends, seem slightly isolated from the others.3
The photograph, faded from exposure to light, is tantalizing but unsatisfying. The tiny faces, examined through a loupe, fade into the background instead of moving into sharper focus. The expression on Eliza’s face cannot be read. Cannily she retains her secrets.
In spite of her frailty—she stopped sallying out to Sunday church services in 1859—Eliza remained active as a businesswoman into her mid-eighties.4 In late 1859 she filed suit against a man who had leased her troublesome ninety-six-acre lot and then defaulted on the three-hundred-dollar rent. The proceeding became a family affair. Nelson acted as her attorney, as he typically did, and William served the summons on the defendant. Eliza’s signature on the complaint is tremulous, but clearly legible. She won her case.5
A year and a half later, persons interested in purchasing or leasing her “two very valuable farms” in the village of Saratoga Springs were advised to call on Nelson Chase at his office, 46 Exchange Place, or on Eliza B. Jumel, at Washington Heights (as Harlem Heights had been renamed in honor of the first president).6 As late as 1863, when she was eighty-eight years old, Eliza’s attention to her property remained keen. Concerned “that an adjoining owner [in upper Manhattan] had encroached upon her premises, so as to take from her two acres of land on the northern bounds,” she hired a surveyor to map her farm and then refused to pay him when he did a negligent job. He attempted to collect his $375 fee in court, but abandoned the case after the quality of his work was questioned by experts.7
While Eliza remained alert to what was going on around her, there are hints that she became more difficult to live with in the late 1850s and early ’60s. The Perys resided with her at the mansion after moving to New York from France in 1856, but either at the end of 1857 or in the spring of 1858, they relocated to a house purchased by Eliza at Seventh Avenue and Forty-First Street.8 A year later, they were on West Forty-Fifth Street near Fifth Avenue, and by fall 1862, at 143 East Sixty-Fifth Street.9 William, now twenty, was living with them by the summer of 1860.10
Nelson remained with Eliza most of the time, commuting downtown to his law practice. However, in September 1862 he left the mansion, lodging with his son, daughter, and son-in-law on Sixty-Fifth Street; then returned uptown in May.11 The reason for his temporary departure remains unexplained, but Eliza appears to have become distrustful of the members of her family. In the summer of 1862, she was in contact with Rev. John Howard Smith, rector of the Church of the Intercession (the Episcopal church in Washington Heights that she had attended in her later years).12 By 1864 or early 1865 she had given her bank book into his charge, but subsequently her suspicions extended to him as well.13 She insisted that six thousand dollars was missing from her account and asked Smith to account for the discrepancy. He did so twice in Nelson Chase’s presence.14
Although Eliza remained rational on many subjects, her fictions became increasingly real to her as she aged, shifting from creative exaggerations to near delusions. In December 1861 she addressed a letter to the prince de Joinville—then visiting the United States—whom she had met at Astor House twenty years before. Would he call on her at the mansion, she asked? They could converse about “his noble father,” the late King Louis-Philippe of France, whom she had known at the court of Charles X when Louis-Philippe was still the duc d’Orléans. “It was because of me or my encouragement that he much later mounted the throne,” she claimed in her letter.15
It was at a grand ball of the court; the ladies-in-waiting and the gentlemen of the king’s house surrounded the throne, waiting for the arrival of his Majesty. Although foreign, I had the honor to be with the ladies-in-waiting of the duchesse de Berry. The king arrived, saluting and smiling with his usual grace, but when he mounted his throne, his hat fell; that is when your noble father, the duc d’Orléans, approached, caught it, mounted several steps of the throne and presented it to the king. As if inspired, like one who sees everything and knows the future, I cried: “Good Omen, Good Omen, the duc d’Orléans will be king.” They came forward to lead me out and perhaps throw me in prison, when the good King Charles made a sign and seemed to say to me with regret, “It is true.”16
Eliza concluded her tale on a modest note: “The events that followed have proven your humble servant was right [Charles X was forced to abdicate in 1830], but I don’t like to flatter myself; I was only an instrument of a Superior Being that made me interpret and encourage your father to hasten the execution of his plans.”17
What the prince made of this implausible story remains a mystery. Sadly there is no indication that he paid Eliza a visit.
Eliza put off one crucial duty as she advanced in age. From 1859 onward, she spoke several times to her family lawyer, William Wet-more, about drawing up a will, but could never make up her mind to do so.18 Instead, Wetmore said, “She generally, when I went to see her conversed about Mr. Jumel, and how she got the property, and about her friends in Europe, and about her visiting the various courts of Europe … My visits to her most always were four or five hours long.”19
In the summer and early fall of 1862, she consulted Rev. Smith instead. According to his description of their meetings, she asked him to call on her. When he did, she broached the possibility of bequeathing money to construct a new building for the Church of the Intercession. In addition, she asked him to draw up a list of charities that would be suitable objects of her bounty (she had requested and received a similar list from Wetmore). She suggested leaving Smith a personal legacy also. But again she failed to act.20
The turning point came in March 1863. While suffering from a severe illness, Eliza agreed to the rector’s suggestion to ask an architect, Mr. Mold, to bring some church designs for her to consider. She went over the plans with Smith and Eliza Pery, expressing a preference for a structure with “a very beautifu
l façade” that Mold estimated could be built for sixty thousand dollars.21 Then, again at Smith’s prompting, she called in Wetmore to prepare a will. Although the lawyer could not persuade her to finalize anything, he left a draft containing the provisions he had discussed with her.22 A few weeks later, Smith modified the draft under Eliza’s direction. On April 15, she signed the document at last.23
The details of Eliza’s last years are hazy. The Civil War roiling the country barely touched her life. Its only recorded impact on her was financial. She, Nelson, and Paul were subject to the first federal income tax, imposed to cover the costs of the conflict. In 1865 Eliza reported $7,739 in income in addition to a watch and three carriages.24
By 1863 she is said to have been afflicted with gastric trouble and kidney disease.25 Then in June or early July 1865, she suffered a fall.26 The accident marked the beginning of the end. Eliza, born two weeks before the Revolutionary War began, died two months after the Civil War ended. She took her last breath on Sunday morning, July 16, at home in the Jumel mansion.27 She was ninety years old.
By the end of her life, Eliza had become, in the eyes of many, a survival of the grand old years when the republic was young. In an impressively inaccurate obituary, the New York Times identified her as the daughter of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Capet (the surname of the French royal family before the Revolution), and placed her at the 1774 opening of Congress in Philadelphia and the 1789 inauguration of George Washington in New York.28 The World, reporting on her funeral, commented that her passing made “one less to the now small number of those who lived in those memorable days.”29 As a serial weaver of romances herself, Eliza would have appreciated not only these inventive tributes but also a small and unwitting fiction: on her death certificate, attending physician Dr. Alonzo Clarke gave her place of birth as France. The disease causing her passing was identified as “old age.”30
During the first forty-eight hours after Eliza’s death, her body lay in a “splendid rosewood coffin” in one of the parlors of her mansion.31 At one o’clock Tuesday afternoon, the casket was closed and removed to the Church of the Intercession.32 As it rested on trestles in front of the chancel, Rev. Smith read the Episcopal burial service and the lesson from I Corinthians: “But now is Christ risen from the dead.”33 Then the choir chanted the anthem from the thirty-ninth Psalm: “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days.”34 Finally, six prominent men from the neighborhood—among them Sheriff James Lynch; John E. Develin, Corporation Counsel of the City of New York; and Richard F. Carman, a large landowner in Washington Heights—served as pallbearers as the body was returned to the hearse.35
Eliza’s last journey, to Trinity Church’s tranquil uptown cemetery, was short. Her body was laid to rest in a stone mausoleum set into a hillside overlooking the Hudson River.36 Today birds chirp in the trees shading the crypt and flashes of sunlight play over the sloping lawn. But if Eliza’s bones were at peace, her legacy was not. A line of the psalm sung at the church proved prophetic: “He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.” The Jumel fortune would have many claimants. They would keep Eliza’s name alive, but indelibly smear her legacy.
36
A DISPUTED INHERITANCE
Within two days of Eliza’s funeral, a reporter for the New York Observer and Chronicle had scented scandal. “It is understood that nearly one-half of [her] property has been left for benevolent purposes, and if the will is unbroken, some of the institutions in the neighborhood of Washington Heights may be enriched by her death.”1 The innocent little phrase—”if the will is unbroken”—cleverly suggested that the reverse might occur.
Eliza had left a bequest of five thousand dollars to Rev. Smith of the Church of the Intercession, seventy thousand dollars for a new church and rectory, and a plot of land to build them on. Nine charitable institutions—ranging from the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Children of Seamen to the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females—would receive legacies of five hundred to five thousand dollars each.2
Eliza’s family, in contrast, was partially disinherited. William would get nothing. Nelson, for over thirty years her loyal son-inlaw (or strictly speaking, nephew-in-law), would receive the interest on a principal of ten thousand dollars—an income of about seven hundred dollars per year.3 His daughter, Eliza Pery, would receive the same, instead of the twenty-thousand-dollar legacy she had been promised in her marriage contract. However, she would share the residuary estate (what remains of an estate after specific legacies are paid) with the charities.4 The residuary estate contained about 90 percent of the Jumel fortune. The estate as a whole was worth approximately one million dollars—equivalent in purchasing power to nearly fifteen million dollars today.5
The will was a bitter blow to Nelson and his children—particularly William. In an earlier testament drafted in 1851, most of Eliza’s property had been left to her great-nephew.6 He would have received the farms in Saratoga Springs outright and the income from the downtown properties, mansion, and homestead lot. In addition, he and his sister, Eliza, would have shared sixty acres of Washington Heights farmland. His sister would presumably have a husband to support her as well (she was a girl at the time that document was written), plus any marriage settlement that might be made in the future. Although Nelson would have been guaranteed only five hundred dollars per year, he could have anticipated support from his son, who would have been a very wealthy man. With the 1863 testament, everything had changed. William was left penniless and most of Eliza’s estate would go to charity.
The Chases decided to challenge the will. Nelson proved himself a worthy successor to Eliza in the shrewdness with which he managed the litigation. He made an agreement with his children to oversee the legal proceedings in exchange for one-third of what they would receive from the estate.7 Although not a blood relative of Eliza, with this maneuver he secured a claim on a third of her enormous fortune.
In addition, Nelson negotiated a crucial deal with the four surviving children of Eliza’s sister, Maria Jones. If the will were to be overturned, by New York State law the estate would be divided among Eliza’s nearest relatives: the four Jones children (her nieces and nephews). Nelson bought out the Joneses’ claims for forty thousand dollars, so that William and Eliza, her great-niece and great-nephew, would become their great aunt’s only heirs.8
Quiet consultations with the charities named in the will followed. Nelson promised to pay each organization the bequest it had been promised if it did not obstruct his attempts to overturn the will or demand its cut in the residuary estate.9 As much as it must have grated on him, he agreed to pay Smith’s five-thousand-dollar legacy and a portion of the money promised to the Church of the Intercession as well.10
Nelson neglected to contact one of the will’s beneficiaries. During the battle over Stephen’s estate, Eliza had agreed to pay her half share of the three thousand dollars her husband had promised his niece Felicie, but not until after her own death. The bequest was listed in her will, but Nelson ignored it.11 Felicie was on the other side of the Atlantic and unlikely to hear of Eliza’s death.
The next move was to arrange a court hearing: a jury would have to be convinced to set the will aside. Nelson and his children hired Charles O’Conor, the most celebrated member of the New York bar, to serve as lead counsel.12 Thirty years before, O’Conor had served on Aaron Burr’s legal team, helping Burr to defend himself against Eliza’s bill of divorce.13 Then he had driven Eliza to a draw in one of her dower rights cases, but represented her in a later tussle over Stephen’s estate.14 In the 1850s he had become famous for his defense of Catherine Sinclair Forrest, accused of adultery by her actor husband, Edwin Forrest.15 More recently he had been in the news for agreeing to defend Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, against charges of treason.16 He was acquainted with Nelson, who had assisted him in handling the Forrest case.17
The offense O’Conor and Nelson designed was two-pronged.
They claimed that Smith had exerted undue influence on Eliza to convince her to make bequests to him and his church.18 Concurrently they put forth the complementary argument that Eliza had suffered from dementia during her last years, making her incapable of comprehending her duty to her family and preparing a valid will.19
When the case came up for trial in New York State Supreme Court on November 13, 1866, the testimony of Eliza’s loving family members was riveting. They drew a picture of a woman who had become increasingly irrational over the last six years of her life. In response to carefully calibrated questions from O’Conor, Nelson dated her decline to her last visit to Saratoga, in 1859. One evening at dinner, she had felt a transient shock, followed by persistent headache. Later, homeward bound on the train from Saratoga to Schenectady, she was disturbed by some boisterous travelers. The first clear manifestation of her insanity followed. In Nelson’s telling, she jumped up, put her face close to theirs, and, startlingly, “gave a most powerful screech.”20
After her return to New York City, she developed strange delusions: “She charged some very respectable gentlemen, neighbors of hers, with robbing her or trying to rob her of her property” and “persisted in that charge for three or four years before her death.” On other occasions, “she used to tell that she had been in heaven, and she insisted upon it; and when told she must have been in a trance or a dream, she would insist upon it that it was a reality; she said she had seen the angels of heaven fluttering about her, and that she had seen the winding sheets of the dead and bright new pins which had come out of their grave clothes in very large piles.” In 1860 and ’61 she had become convinced that British loyalists had buried valuables on the grounds of the mansion for safekeeping during the American Revolution. She hired men to dig and blast rocks in search of the treasure.21
The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel Page 22
