The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel

by Margaret A. Oppenheimer

  One week later Bowen appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court.58

  39

  ON THE HOME FRONT

  Outside the courtroom, life continued for the Chases. On August 12, 1868, fifty-seven-year-old Nelson married twenty-two-year-old Hattie Dunning, daughter of a prosperous lumber merchant in upper Manhattan.1 They had a child, Jumel, who died in infancy in 1869, but a second son, Raymond, born in 1874 or ’75, survived the epidemic diseases of the era.2 His name was a thoughtful tribute to Nelson’s son-in-law, just as the choice of Jumel for his older brother had honored Stephen and Eliza. Raymond was a traditional name in the Pery family and one of Paul’s middle names.

  Nelson and Hattie lived at the Jumel mansion, sharing the house with the Perys and the William Chases. By 1870 the homestead housed not only the three adult couples but four children as well—the Perys’ fifteen-year-old daughter Mathilde, William and Isabella’s infant daughter, Ella, and their sons, William and Leslie, aged three and five.3 Five female domestics and a gardener and coachman served the trio of families.4

  The stress of the endless litigation began to tell on the occupants of the mansion. The legal bills were colossal, and money was tight. Much of the Jumel fortune could not be touched until the litigation over its ownership ended. Nelson had been administering the estate since Eliza’s death. In spite of some substantial influxes of cash—including $24,000 for the sale of two lots Eliza had owned at Seventh Avenue and Forty-Third Street and $170,000 for land taken by the city for public improvements—he had had to take out a $25,000 mortgage as security for payment of a legal bill and borrow $75,000 from lead counsel O’Conor.5 Unpaid invoices accumulated alarmingly: $2,236 for horse feed and groceries; $12,604 for renovations at 150 Broadway; $306.50 for coal.6

  William resented having to depend on his father for money. In 1873 he sued Nelson to force him to give an accounting of his stewardship of the estate and share the available funds.7 A settlement was negotiated that allowed the children to control some of the money the estate generated.8 William and his family moved to Suffolk County, Long Island, and took up farming.9 Eliza Pery, with her husband and daughter, remained at the mansion with Nelson and Hattie.

  Paul Pery would not live to see the end of the fight over the Jumel fortune. He died of tuberculosis on February 27, 1875, and his bones were laid to rest in the Jumel crypt.10 He was only forty-two years old.11 Six months later, his widow took their twenty-year-old daughter Mathilde to Europe, probably to visit his relatives.12 In 1878 Mathilde made a French marriage, just as her mother had done. The bridegroom was Louis-Antoine Gourreau of Bordeaux.13

  Eliza Pery remarried in 1876, choosing a prosperous merchant, Julius Henry Caryl.14 They set up housekeeping at the mansion, where Eliza had lived with Paul. As with her first marriage, family connections were at work. When her father, Nelson, had lived in Worcester as a young man, he had studied law with Schuyler Crippen. Caryl, born in Worcester, was Crippen’s nephew.15

  As a backdrop to the marriages, births, and deaths, Bowen’s appeal to the Supreme Court moved up on the court calendar. In a document weighing in at more than eleven hundred pages, he argued that the circuit court had erred in its handling of the suit against Nelson, chiefly in the admission and exclusion of evidence.16 The judge had allowed hearsay regarding the identity of Mary Jumel, but had stopped witnesses from testifying that Madame Jumel had spoken of a son.17 In addition, Bowen contended that the judge had misinterpreted the laws governing trusts when he had instructed the jury that Eliza had no heritable interest in the Jumel estate.18

  Nelson and his children, proving worthy opponents, appealed to the Supreme Court too. They asked the court to bar Bowen from pursuing further suits to obtain the Jumel estate (including his appeal to the Supreme Court itself ).19 Their suit was heard first, in October 1876. The justices upheld the final conveyance Eliza had made in November 1828, by which the downtown properties and uptown real estate would go to Mary or Mary’s heirs after she and Stephen were dead. Bowen would not be allowed to enter into more litigation to claim the lands described in the deed.20 However, he was permitted to continue his appeal with regard to a sixty-five-acre tract in Washington Heights that was not mentioned in the 1828 document.21 This parcel (probably omitted from the conveyance inadvertently) was the only portion of Jumel real estate in Washington Heights that Eliza had not transferred to herself, although she had managed it later as if it were hers.

  The concession did Bowen little good when the Supreme Court took up his appeal in 1878. In spite of some ambiguity regarding the status of the sixty-five acres, the justices ruled that Eliza had no interest in it that could be inherited, regardless of whether Bowen was her son. The other components of his appeal—mainly objections to the admission or exclusion of testimony—were dismissed as irrelevant, since Eliza had no property for him to receive.22 Exit George Washington Bowen—at long last.

  In truth, Bowen never moved entirely offstage. In spite of the weakness of his case and the jury verdict that denied his claim to be Eliza’s son, history, marching on, gave him the mother he had claimed. His story, blazoned across the newspapers for years, became fact by virtue of repetition. To this day, the received wisdom is that George Washington Bowen was Eliza’s illegitimate son.23 The depiction of her as a streetwalker became part of her persona as well—to the point that a historian termed her in 1992 “the leading prostitute in post-Revolutionary America.”24

  The lies might have been exploded if any facts had been available about Eliza’s life circa 1794. But none were. Through all the years of litigation, no one ever determined what she had been doing during her early adulthood, other than not giving birth to Bowen.25

  As it turns out, it was as well for her family that she could not be tracked. Records of a previously unremarked lawsuit dating from the crucial time period would have raised uncomfortable questions about her character. The neatly folded documents, preserved in the Judicial Records Center in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, place Eliza in Providence in 1795.26 On January 21, she visited the shop of Samuel W. Greene, where candles, soap, crockery, and glassware crowded broadcloth, firkins of butter, and bags of tea.27 At Greene’s emporium, Eliza purchased materials for an expensive dress: ten yards of green lutestring (a glossy silk), three yards of Irish linen, a pair of tapes (used to fasten skirts at the waist), and several skeins of thread.28 On September 16 she returned to the shop for a pair of shoes, a skein of silk, and five yards of ribbon.29

  These elegant threads were at risk of unraveling. All the purchases had been made on credit, and as of mid-November, the bill was unpaid. Greene filed suit in Providence’s Court of Common Pleas against “Betsey Bowen,” a single woman of Providence, “for the recovery of the sum of six pounds two shillings—equal to twenty dollars and thirty-three and one-third cents—due to the plaintiff from the said Betsey.”30

  Eliza was arrested on December 1 and spent seven days in the county jail. She owed her liberation to David Ballou, who paid four dollars in bail and forty-one and two-thirds cents in fees. He did not settle Greene’s bill, however. Execution, meaning that the local sheriff could seize and sell Eliza’s possessions to cover what she owed, was granted on March 28, 1796, for $23.01 (the amount of the debt plus $2.68 in costs).31

  The reason for Ballou’s intervention remains a mystery. Perhaps Eliza was working for him in 1795, and Greene had extended credit under the assumption that her employer would pay the sum expended. Maybe Ballou had even promised Eliza a new outfit as wages, but ran into financial problems and left the bill unpaid. Alternately, if she had worked in the Ballou family as an adolescent, her former master might have been someone to call on in an emergency. Was her later care for his son William a way of paying back the debt?

  There is at least one other possibility that could account for Ballou’s involvement. He and Eliza might have had an affair, resulting in William, born in December 1790. Although this last explanation is not impossible, it is unlikely nevertheless. T
he boy would have been conceived when Eliza was only fourteen and Ballou a married man with a household of young children. Eliza’s failure to have children later is another argument against her having been William’s mother, although possibly Stephen was infertile. The question of the boy’s ancestry remains unresolved.

  Whether or not William was Eliza’s son, certainly George Washington Bowen wasn’t. The papers detailing the 1795 lawsuit offer further evidence, if any were needed, that Bowen had fabricated his case. The inscription indicating that he had been born of “Eliza Bowen” in Reuben Ballou’s house on October 9, 1794—supposedly written on the night of his birth—referred to his alleged mother by a first name that she had yet to adopt. As the record of Greene’s lawsuit proves, she was still going by Betsy in 1795. In addition, the suit demonstrates that she was in Providence throughout that year. In contrast, Bowen’s witness Daniel Hull had contended that she had left the city in the spring or summer of 1795.32 Whether she continued to reside in Providence in the second half of the nineties or accompanied her mother and stepfather south in 1797 is unknown.

  Bowen’s dethronement must have been a sad disappointment to American journalists, who had filled many a column with his claims. But the Jumel estate, which had “already provided material that would serve for a three-volume novel,” had not exhausted “its capacity in this respect.” A fresh troop of claimants had stepped up with “allegations respecting the family history” that promised to “furnish an entirely new chapter for the dénouement.”33

  40

  MURDER MOST FOUL?

  “History tells us that Troy, although it held out for ten years, was at length taken and destroyed. Such may be the case with the famous Nelson Chase,” speculated a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Gazette in 1876. “The danger which now threatens Mr. Chase is one which he least expected. It rises suddenly before him like Banquo’s ghost. Who would have dreamed that Stephen Jumel ever had heirs in France? Why, he had been dead a half century, and never an heir appeared, until suddenly at this late hour, the suit is brought in the United States Court by these very heirs.”1

  Banquo’s ghost had risen indeed. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Stephen’s long-dead brother and sister had decided to make a bid for the Jumel fortune. They claimed that Eliza’s conveyances of the Jumel properties in the 1820s, particularly those with purported payments from Mary, had been illegal transactions designed to defraud Stephen and his heirs. This argument was not new—Madelaine and Ulysses had tried to overturn the deeds on the same grounds after Stephen’s death—but this time it was bolstered by vigorous attempts to besmirch Eliza’s reputation. The “French heirs,” as they came to be called, asserted that Eliza had abandoned Stephen callously after he returned to the United States. First she went south with Mary (a reference to the 1828 trip to Charleston) and then “into the interior of New York” (where Mary had met Nelson). The latter trip was assigned an ominous purpose. It was not “to find cool weather, as they [Eliza and Mary had] alleged,” but rather to consult with Schuyler Crippen “as to the most effectual mode of defrauding the said Stephen Jumel out of his property.” In this retelling, Nelson joined the conspiracy after Eliza promised to leave Stephen’s estate to him and Mary.2

  Eliza was said to have cemented her betrayal of Stephen by isolating him from his friends. The French heirs claimed that he was “in a condition of absolute physical and social duress” from the time of Nelson and Mary’s marriage, and “as he became more infirm, he was the closer watched and confined.” It was only in “the early part of the year 1832, [that] he, for the first time, acquired any knowledge of the gross frauds that had been perpetrated upon him and his heirs.” He “had declared his purpose of taking legal steps to annul the whole of the said fraudulent deeds and conveyances,” but was prevented from doing so by “his feeble condition and advanced age.” Eliza and Mary treated him “in the most cruel manner” during this time period, until he died suddenly “from the effects of an alleged fall from a load of hay, whereby he broke his leg and soon expired, without any of his personal friends or acquaintances having been permitted to see or speak to him previous to his death.”3

  The French heirs asked uncomfortable questions. Why had the details of Stephen’s decease been kept secret, “other than it was said to have been very sudden, and the result of a fall”?4 Why had there not been any “information or reason given why a man of his advanced age should be riding on a load of hay, even if it were customary for hay to be harvested as early as the 22d of May in the latitude of New York”?5 The implication was that the death had been suspicious and Eliza had been involved. The French heirs did not fail to note that “her bridal couch was already spread for Aaron Burr” at the very moment she had declared herself “disqualified for the accustomed enjoyments of life” due to “the sudden loss of her dear friend and husband.”6

  Once more depositions were taken, evidence was trumped up, and family secrets were divulged. John G. Caryl, a cousin of Eliza Pery’s second husband, Julius Caryl, was brought in to bolster the validity of the conveyances of the estate. He had worked at the Jumels’ mansion as a boy, he said, and witnessed Mary making payments to Madame in “large bank bills … [t]he idea was conveyed that property was being sold to Mary.”7 The point of this testimony was to suggest that the transactions challenged by the French heirs had not been fraudulent, because Mary had paid for the lands before putting them in trust for Eliza.

  Caryl added that Stephen had been aware of the conveyances well before his death and had come to an agreement with Eliza about them: “Mr. Jumel talked about the property being sold and about Madame selling him out, and that he had compromised the matter with her and had an arrangement, by which, as I understood, the Madame and he should enjoy the property while they lived, and after their death it was to go to the girl—to that effect.”8

  None of this testimony was terribly convincing, especially after Caryl, unnerved by a cross-examination, retreated from his assertions that Mary had paid for the disputed lands.9 Although Nelson was less easily rattled, he fared badly too, particularly in attempts to whitewash tensions between Eliza and Stephen. For example, he indicated that Eliza had spent most of the fall and winter of 1831 to ’32 in Washington Heights with Stephen. However, deeds that Eliza had executed while in central New York with Mary were used to prove that he lied.10 Eliza’s gift to Mary of some of Stephen’s lands in New York State was exposed as well.11 Nelson’s sale of 50½ acres of the Jumel lands in Otsego County, six weeks after he and Mary had wed, added color to the French heirs’ contention that he had conspired with her and Eliza to defraud Stephen.12

  As the litigation dragged on, family tensions reached the breaking point yet again. William, who wanted the Jumel lands auctioned in order to have his share of the money, broke with his father and sister and settled with Stephen’s relatives in 1880. He agreed to give them half of his one-third share in the Jumel fortune.13 Then he filed suit against all the interested parties, including his father and sister, to force a partition or sale of the estate.14 He won his case, a sale was ordered, and Nelson, too, decided to compromise.15 He managed to obtain a better deal than William, however. He promised the French heirs half of his one-third share in the Washington Heights properties, but retained his full third in the valuable downtown lots. In addition, they agreed to pay him twenty thousand dollars.16 Eliza held out longest, not settling until 1883.17 All told, the French heirs would receive a little under one-sixth of the estate.18

  If William had not settled with the claimants, probably Nelson could have held out and defeated them in court. Letters that the French heirs themselves submitted as evidence revealed that Stephen knew at least four years before his death of the conveyances that Eliza had made of his lands, yet did not act to overturn them.19 Even the Supreme Court had upheld the trust documents in favor of Mary and her heirs, making the likelihood of nullifying them slim.20 Nor was there any evidence that Eliza had treated Stephen cruelly and kept h
im from contacting his friends and relatives. This line of argument appears to have been inspired by a single sentence in a letter written by Stephen’s acquaintance François Philippon in 1833: “The death of Mr. Jumel in consequence of a fall was, so to say, sudden, at least for his friends, since no one saw him after that unfortunate event; before he enjoyed very excellent health and could expect to live many years.”21 This statement of fact was far from a charge that Stephen was isolated intentionally. Indeed, within a year of filing their lawsuit, the French heirs had abandoned the story that he had fallen from a hay cart and had stopped hinting that his demise was suspicious.22

  But the Chases already owed their lawyers nearly two hundred thousand dollars—equivalent to approximately $4.7 million today.23 If they continued to fight the French heirs in court, they risked seeing the entire estate eaten up in legal costs—or not living long enough to enjoy the proceeds of an eventual victory. It was better to move on with their lives. Stephen’s relatives replaced the Chase family as the main protagonists of the never-ending Jumel case. The French heirs fought their own lawyers over the legal fees (which exceeded the amount recovered for them) for another seven years, and ultimately they too appealed to the United States Supreme Court.24 Wisdom prevailed and they settled in 1890 before the case was heard.25 Their lawyers fought among themselves into the 1890s over the apportionment of the fees.26

  Eliza’s reputation did not escape unscathed from the last rounds of the battle over the Jumel estate. Although the French heirs had abandoned their charge that she was complicit in Stephen’s death, the slur persisted in the court of public opinion. By the early twentieth century, she was said to have unwrapped bandages placed on Stephen’s arm after bloodletting, causing him to bleed to death.27 In 1965 an even worse story was floated during a séance at her former residence, by then a museum. Supposedly a boy had pushed Stephen from a hay cart so that he fell on a pitchfork, and Eliza, complicit, had arranged for her husband to be buried alive.28