A jury verdict against the Bowens in late April 1871 ended the matter at last.26 But Nelson and his children had no time to celebrate. A more threatening claimant—both to the Jumel fortune and to Eliza’s reputation—had advanced fully armed for battle from the wings.
38
ENTER GEORGE WASHINGTON
Eliza’s newest relative, a man in his seventies, bore the patriotic name of George Washington Bowen. This prosperous grocer and resident of Providence announced himself to be Madame Jumel’s illegitimate child. He had been born during her youth in Rhode Island, he said—fathered by none other than the first president of the United States!
Bowen’s claim was simultaneously startling and ominous. His backers said that he was born in October 1794, a perplexingly undocumented period of Eliza’s life.1 Of her young adulthood—the years that spanned the mid-1790s—almost anything could be posited and even believed. Worse yet for Nelson and his children, if Bowen was indeed Eliza’s son—whether by George Washington or anyone else—he would receive the entire Jumel fortune. When a woman died without a will in New York State, her children’s claims superseded any others—and bastardy was no bar. Thanks to a New York law enacted in 1855, illegitimate children could inherit from their mother “as if legitimate.”2
To support his case, Bowen produced Anne Eliza Vandervoort, born in Providence but resident in New York since childhood.3 She too, it appeared, was related to Eliza Jumel. Her mother, Lavinia, had been Eliza’s sister, she claimed. Maria Jones, previously thought to be Eliza’s sibling, instead had been the fruit of the first marriage of Jonathan Clark, Phebe Bowen’s second husband. In other words, she had been Eliza’s stepsister rather than sister.4 If this newly revealed genealogy was valid, then none of Maria’s descendants were blood relatives of Eliza—not William Chase, not Eliza Pery, and not the four children of Maria and William Jones, whose claims Nelson had purchased. Nelson and his children would lose their title to the Jumel estate.
Crucially Vandervoort possessed a precious family document that recorded the maternity of George Washington Bowen. Handed down to her by her mother, it was a slender volume, barely more than a pamphlet, containing a history of the first part of the reign of King Henry IV of England. Although published in 1599, it carried a more recent inscription on the back of the title page: “George Washington Bowen born of Eliza Bowen at my house in Toun [sic] Providence R. I. October 9, 1794.” The inscription was signed “Reuben Ballou.”5
The name Ballou was a blast from the past. Reuben, born in 1747, belonged to the same Ballou clan in Cumberland, Rhode Island, as William B. Ballou, the boy Eliza had raised. (William’s father, David, was Reuben’s second cousin.)6 Reuben had worked as a butcher in Cumberland, raised a family, been widowed, and then remarried. With his second wife, Freelove, and two young children, he had moved from Cumberland to Providence in 1792. There the Ballous began to have run-ins with the law.7 Reuben was jailed briefly in December for debt.8 In mid-1794 the town officers attempted to eject him and his family from Providence, but Cumberland’s officials didn’t want them either.9 They stayed in Providence and by 1799 were taking in poor transients as lodgers.10
At some point their domicile became notorious. In 1802 Freelove was charged with selling “spirituous liquors” without a license.11 A year later she, Reuben, and a woman named Luthanea Leland were accused of being “persons of bad fame and evil conversation, keepers of disorderly and bawdy houses.”12 Eliza, it was said, joined the questionable Ballou household as a servant.13 From there, according to Bowen’s supporters, matters proceeded as follows: Reuben was injured in a fall from a horse during the time Eliza had lived with his family. He was, or had been, an express rider for General George Washington, and the commander in chief paid him a few visits after the accident.14 The brief calls had lasting results. Washington “became enamored of the beautiful servant girl, Betsy Bowen.”15 They had a liaison that produced the infant George Washington Bowen, named after his illustrious father. On the night of the baby’s birth, Reuben recorded the event in an old book he had lying about—the very book that Eliza’s sister Lavinia had preserved and passed down to her daughter Anne Vandervoort.16
Eighty-three-year-old Daniel Hull of Providence testified to the presence of Eliza and an infant in the Ballou’s home. As a child he had lived in the house of a baker named George Wheeden, who would send him “with a hand-basket with biscuits to Mrs. Newell’s and Mrs. Ballou’s” every morning. One day, he said, Eliza “called me into her bedroom and wanted to show me her good fat boy, as she called it; afterwards she gave me some coppers to buy candy.” The baby “was about three or four days old,” he estimated, and Eliza somewhere between fifteen and eighteen years of age. He continued to “see her pretty often,” because there was a monkey at the Ballous’ house that he “used to go up to see.” Between four and eight months later, Eliza and her sister Lavinia moved to New York, leaving the baby in Freelove Ballou’s care. Years later she returned to Providence and delivered a lecture about her life in France from the porch of a tavern, Hull said. But “the boys made such a hooting at her, hallow, and hissing that [he] couldn’t hear half she said.”17
Elderly witnesses who claimed to have known Eliza when they were children described her as a girl likely to have had an illegitimate child. In a deposition read to the jury, Reuben’s eighty-one-year-old daughter-in-law Sally Ballou spoke of seeing the future Madame Jumel “walking the streets of Providence.”18 Eighty-three-year-old Catherine Williams tottered to the stand in person to say that Eliza had passed her house in Providence “in the company of disreputable persons.”19 Nelson provided unwitting ammunition to those attacking Eliza’s character. During the 1866 battle to overturn her will, he had hinted that his wife, Mary, was Eliza’s illegitimate daughter, fathered by Stephen before he and Eliza had married.20 The slur, designed to strengthen his children’s claim to the Jumel estate, came back to haunt him. Bowen’s lawyers used it as evidence that it would have been in character for Eliza to have had an illegitimate child.21
Bowen supplemented his case by producing witnesses who swore that Eliza had mentioned to them that she had a son. It appeared that she had spoken of the matter to a remarkable number of people: the wife of a dentist who had treated her; a woman who had worked as the caretaker of her Saratoga home; long-ago servants who were children at the time.22 A fire marshal who had met with Eliza after a conflagration in her barn testified that she had told him that “she had a son who would one day return and drive away the people who were around her.”23
Eliza’s apparent openness about her child’s existence raised the question of why she had not reached out to him during her years in New York. In fact, she had done so after her marriage, Vandervoort said, but Freelove Ballou had refused to give up young Bowen.24 Later Nelson, who “had made the pursuit of Madame Jumel’s wealth the business of his lifetime,” had cut her off from the world.25 He had denied her the opportunity “to send to Providence for her son, even if she had desired to do so.”26 The latter contention, at least, was hardly convincing. As Nelson observed, “Madame Jumel was the most determined spirit he had ever met with, either in life or in history, and, so far as he knew, she could at any time have gone to Rhode Island until she became so infirm as not to be able to travel.”27
As the suit advanced, progressing from depositions taken in Rhode Island to an eight-week trial in federal circuit court in New York, cracks and holes appeared in Bowen’s case. In spite of his mild likeness to the first president—“the assertion of his counsel that he [bore] a striking resemblance to the Father of his Country [was] not altogether fanciful”—the story of his distinguished paternity disintegrated quickly.28 As Charles O’Conor pointed out, if Reuben Ballou had been injured during his military service, George Washington’s visit to him and concurrent affair with Eliza “could not, as a matter of history, have been later than 1782 … and all that time [she] must have been carrying that child until Hull saw him, some twelve years after, a
fine, fat baby.”29 Perhaps the incident had occurred after the war instead—but Washington’s last visit to Rhode Island had taken place in 1790.30 Anticipating this difficulty, Bowen’s counsel had already adjusted the narrative to make Reuben Ballou rather than George Washington his client’s father.31 In support of this genealogy, Reuben’s granddaughter Maria Cook testified that her grandfather had begetted an illegitimate son, with Eliza being the child’s mother.32 Catherine Williams said she had known Bowen when he was a boy living in the Ballou family and that he bore a striking resemblance to Eliza.33
Although this revision of the narrative did the plaintiff no great harm, other weaknesses in his case were identified. The authenticity of the inscription in the so-called King Henry book identifying him as Eliza’s child was challenged. Ballou’s purported signature did not resemble other signatures of his that survived on authenticated documents.34
There was a charge of perjury to deal with as well. Witness Joseph F. Perry, who claimed he had lived in Providence and had been aware that Reuben “had an illegitimate child by [Eliza],” was proven never to have resided in Providence at all.35 Vandervoort’s reliability was questioned too. Not only had she promulgated the George Washington story (before backpedaling and claiming it to be a joke told by her mother), she had offered multiple accounts of Bowen’s maternity, supposedly identifying him at different times as Maria Jones’s son, Eliza’s son, and even the son of her own mother, Lavinia.36 It came out that Bowen had promised her half of anything he received in return for supporting his case.37
Bowen himself had changed his tune. He had denied being related to Eliza in 1866, when inquiries were made to identify any possible relatives before her will was overturned.38 It was only later that he had claimed Eliza as his mother. This inconvenient fact was discounted by one of his lawyers, who explained that his client had been told that his mother was Betsy Bowen and didn’t know that she had become Madame Jumel.39
If the credibility of Bowen and his supporters was shaken, Eliza’s reputation took a beating as well. Details of her youth and parentage, hidden discreetly throughout her adult life, were dragged out into the light of day. Now all the world knew that she had lived with her mother in two brothels and spent time in a workhouse, and that her mother had been jailed and warned out of Providence.40 These details made it easier for auditors to believe that she could have had an illegitimate child. The defense’s inability to document exactly where Eliza had been in 1794 didn’t help. The gap in the record made it possible to conclude that she had been in Providence giving birth to Bowen.
Those chosen to weigh the rights and wrongs of the affair were unable to untangle the knotty strands. At 11:10 pm on March 17, 1872, the jurors returned to the courtroom after more than eight hours of deliberation. When the deputy clerk “asked them if they had agreed upon a verdict,” the foreman answered, “we have not.” The trial ended with a hung jury.41
By the time the suit was reheard during the winter of 1872 to ’73, Bowen had gathered additional witnesses to support his case. The deposition of “Henry Nodine, an ancient person,” was particularly dramatic.42 When he was a teenager, Nodine said, he had worked at the Jumels’ mansion for two or three years, before Eliza and Stephen went to France. One day he was called up from the kitchen. When he entered the hallway, his employers were arguing. Stephen, in fractured English, referred to himself in the third person. “My Eliza,” Stephen said, “You never tell Mr. Jumel you have one little boy, or else Mr. Jumel won’t marry you; then you tell Mr. Jumel you very sick and going to die; then you want to die one married woman; you go straight to Heaven you sure; the doctor tell Mr. Jumel marry you, you die before morning; the doctor tell Mr. Jumel one story too; Mr. Jumel marry you—two days [later] you ride around town in carriage.”43 This narrative was cooked up from the story John Pintard had told years before about Eliza tricking Stephen into marriage. Now Bowen had been stirred into the mix.
Nodine added that Eliza would curse Stephen occasionally, calling him “‘a damned old French son of a bitch,’ and all such names.” Then she would threaten him with a pistol and chase him out of the house.44 This last piquant detail may have been inspired by the sixbarreled pistol (almost certainly imaginary) that Eliza was said to have purchased after being mocked in Saratoga.45
Nelson’s lawyers attacked Nodine’s credibility: he had claimed to have served in the militia during the War of 1812, yet had been too young to participate.46 They could have made an even stronger case against him had they realized that Eliza had evicted a “Mr. Naudine” from one of the Jumel farms, and Stephen had sued Lewis and Peter Nodine—probably Henry’s older brothers—over an unpaid debt.47 But few outsiders could have known that the Nodines had reason to be vengeful against Eliza or that Henry’s account had been fabricated from repurposed bits and pieces. Details of his deposition, reported in the newspapers, further tarnished Madame Jumel’s reputation.48
It was stained blacker yet as a parade of witnesses, recycled from the earlier trial, trooped in and out of the courthouse. Each claimed that Eliza had mentioned having a son—or rather, was barred from saying so. At the beginning of the trial, the judge had ruled that testimony on what Eliza might have said to others about having a child in Providence was inadmissible hearsay. Bowen’s lawyers got around this by introducing the witnesses one by one, questioning each about his or her relationship with Eliza, and then telling the judge that they would like to use the witness to prove that Eliza said she had a son. Although the judge refused every time, the repeated use of the strategy gave listeners the impression that Eliza had spoken of Bowen frequently.49
Vandervoort was not called to testify—Bowen’s lawyers must have concluded that her credibility was ruined—but Daniel Hull reappeared and fared badly. Cross-examination revealed that he had been an infant at most in 1794, the year in which he was supposed to have seen Eliza with the newborn Bowen.50 The stories of other elderly witnesses were challenged too, as a correspondent for the Boston Journal reported:
Old and decrepit people have been placed in the stand to tell of conversations held in their presence when they were four and five years old. One person gave a circumstantial conversation she had held with Madame Jumel, which detailed the disgrace of the madame. On cross-examination the party admitted that she was only five years old at the time. A damaging witness was cornered on cross-examination by fixing dates, by which it appeared that his wife, when he married her, was only eight years old. There is a good deal of bad blood in the case, and O’Conor, usually cold as an iceberg, denounced the opposing counsel as a liar.51
A note of humor was introduced by former U.S. attorney general Ebenezer R. Hoar, one of Bowen’s lawyers. After seating his client in front of the jury, he held up an impression of the lithographed self-portrait Eliza had commissioned in 1852, using it to detail the “very striking” resemblances between Bowen’s features and hers, from the length of the ear flap to the placement of the eyelid crease. Next he requested his client “to look at the foreman of the jury and laugh.” This novel instruction “excited general laughter, in which Mr. Bowen joined.” Taking advantage of the moment, Hoar pointed out to the jury “that when Mr. Bowen smiled he had a dimple in his left cheek which did not appear in the other,” just like his putative mother. Getting in a dig at Nelson’s lawyers, who had implied that he and his colleagues had manufactured evidence, Hoar said sarcastically that the “dimple had doubtless been put there by Mr. Tucker [Hoar’s fellow counsel], having been gotten up because Madame Jumel had a similar peculiarity.”52
It is only fair to say that Nelson and his lawyers adjusted facts too, if not as spectacularly as their opponents did. They cleaned up Eliza’s family history by suggesting that Mary was born legitimately of a marriage between Maria and “some worthless fellow who had deserted her” and pushing back the date of Maria’s union with William Jones so that her oldest son arrived sixteen rather than four months later.53
In a dramatic change in strategy fr
om the initial trial, they produced the conveyances Eliza had implemented in the 1820s that gave her the downtown and Harlem Heights properties, with reversion to Mary or Mary’s heirs after her death. The significance of these deeds is hard to overstate. As O’Conor explained, they showed that Eliza had never owned the real estate that made up the bulk of the Jumel fortune. The properties were only in trust for her during her lifetime—so Bowen couldn’t inherit them even if he proved to be her son.54 The real estate would have to go to Mary’s heirs, not Eliza’s. O’Conor glossed over the irregularities that had accompanied the formation of the trusts, such as the purported sales of the lands to Mary. Just in case anyone questioned their validity, however, he and Nelson produced a carefully coached witness, who testified to having worked at the Jumel mansion as a boy and hearing Stephen say that he was content to have the property go to Mary.55
The judge understood the importance of the trusts and made that clear in his instructions to the jurors. They were to decide whether Bowen was Eliza’s son. But whatever that verdict might be, he also directed them to find “the special fact ‘that Eliza B. Jumel, at the time of her death, had no estate or interest in the lands claimed which was descendible to her heirs.’”56
After an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom. As instructed, its members found “the special fact” that Eliza’s title to the Jumel estate could not be inherited. They delivered their verdict on the plaintiff’s parentage as well. “We find for the defendant,” the foreman said. George Washington Bowen was not Eliza’s son.57
The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel Page 24
