The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel
Page 27
A few of the letters Eliza wrote in French were available to me only in later translations. If more than one translation existed, I used the wording that seemed to best reflect her typical writing style. Also used in translation were more than forty-five letters relating to Stephen, including letters between him and his French relatives, among his relatives, and between his relatives and others. Used as exhibits in the 1876 lawsuit filed by the French heirs, they were published in English, together with the bill of complaint, by a legal printer for use during the litigation.3 I did not have access to the French originals, which would have been returned to their owners, but the translations provided crucial information on Stephen’s life in France between 1815 and 1828 and his relatives’ fights over his estate (first after his death and then after Eliza’s).
Much of the information in this book comes from testimony and depositions given by witnesses in lawsuits. Some of these individuals lied outright, some shaded the truth, and almost all made inadvertent errors in recounting long-past events. The depositions of Nelson Chase in the lawsuits over the Jumel estate offer particularly rich detail on Eliza, but also hidden pitfalls. Nelson shaped his testimony to strengthen his and his children’s claims to Eliza’s fortune. In this worthy endeavor, he was not beyond telling fibs. Skeptical questions posed in cross-examinations helped me to identify at least some of his and others’ evasions and lies. In drawing on depositions and other testimony, I have prioritized information that I could cross-check.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
STATE AND LOCAL COURT RECORDS
I drew heavily on manuscript records of court cases, especially those stored in the Department of Old Records of the New York County Clerk’s Office. A given file may contain anything from a one-page judgment record to a rich history of a case, including bills of complaint, exhibits, and depositions. The abbreviations used in the endnotes referring to these records are as follows:
N.Y. Com. Pl., New York Court of Common Pleas
N.Y. Ct. Ch., New York Court of Chancery
N.Y. Mayor’s Ct., New York Mayor’s Court
N.Y. Sup. Ct., New York Supreme Court
N.Y. Super. Ct., New York Superior Court
Unless otherwise indicated, citations in this book using the foregoing abbreviations refer to courts located in New York County. Frequently cited cases are abbreviated as follows:
BM 710-J N.Y. Ct. Ch., Eliza B. Jumel, Administratrix, vs. François Jumel, BM 710-J.
Liber 368 Copies of Equity Judgments, Liber 368.
FEDERAL COURT RECORDS
Most of the federal circuit court records used in researching this book make part of the collections of the National Archives and Records Administration—Northeast Region (New York City). They may be found in Record Group 21, Records of District Courts of the United States. A given box may contain hundreds of pages of documents. I have tried wherever possible to provide information that will help future researchers locate specific material within boxes. For example, some lengthy bills of complaint and answers to bills of complaint were published by legal printers for the convenience of the court. When I refer to such a document, I provide not only the box number that contains it, but also the title and publication data of the printed document. Frequently cited cases are abbreviated as follows:
3-312 United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York. Champlain Bowen vs. Nelson Chase. Law case files, 3-312, 1869.
3-466 United States Circuit Court. Second Circuit of the Southern District of New York. George W. Bowen vs. Nelson Chase. Law case files, 3-466, 1871.
B-779 United States Circuit Court. Second Circuit of the Southern District of New York. François Henry Jumel et al. vs. Nelson Chase et al. Equity cases, vol. B-779, 1878.
ABBREVIATIONS FOR OTHER FREQUENTLY USED SOURCES
1873 Transcript of Record Transcript of record. Supreme Court of the United States, no. 312. George W. Bowen, plaintiff in error, vs. Nelson Chase. In error to the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. Filed November 1, 1873. Photocopy available at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York, NY.
1876 Bill of Complaint United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York. François Henry Jumel, Louise C. L. Jumel Plante, Marie R. M. Jumel, Madeline R. Texoeres Marrast, Marie C. F. Lesparre Tauziede vs. Nelson Chase. Bill of complaint and exhibits. New York: Benjamin H. Tyrrel, Law Printer, 1876. Available at the New-York Historical Society, New York, NY.
ADG Bordeaux, Archives départementales de la Gironde.
ADL Mont-de-Marsan, Archives départementales des Landes.
Greatorex Eliza Greatorex. Old New York from the Battery to Bloomingdale. Text by M. Despard. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1875.
MJM Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York, NY. Archives.
NARA-NY-RG21 Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21. National Archives and Records Administration—Northeast Region (New York City).
NYHS-AHMC American Historical Manuscripts Collections. New-York Historical Society. New York, NY.
NYHS-BV Jumel BV Jumel, Stephen, MS 1647. New-York Historical Society. New York, NY.
NYHS-JP Stephen Jumel Papers, MS 336. New-York Historical Society. New York, NY.
NYPL New York Public Library. New York, NY.
NYPL-Letter Book MssCol 1610. Jumel and Desobry records, 1808–1810. New York Public Library. New York, NY.
Parton J[ames] Parton. The Life and Times of Aaron Burr. New York: Mason Brothers, 1858.
PTP Providence Town Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.
PUL Fuller Fuller Collection of Aaron Burr (C0081), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Shelton William Henry Shelton. The Jumel Mansion: being a full history of the house on Harlem Heights built by Roger Morris before the revolution; together with some account of its more notable occupants. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1916.
TCMR Town Council Meeting Records, Providence, Rhode Island, City Archives.
PROLOGUE
1. “Jumel,” Commercial Advertiser, February 8, 1873, 2.
2. Greatorex, 243; “A personal sketch of Madame Jumel, wife of Aaron Burr,” Pioneer and Democrat [Washington Territory], November 14, 1856, [1]; Parton, 661.
3. New York Herald, articles on the Jumel will case appearing between January 26 and March 17, 1872, especially February 8, 1872, 8 (for Eliza walking the streets of Providence as a girl) and March 16, 1872, 11 (summing up the claim that she had an illegitimate son); 1873 Transcript of Record, esp. 16–17; 1876 Bill of Complaint, 9–27.
4. The widow of Aaron Burr,” New York Observer and Chronicle, July 20, 1865, 230.
5. Richard Weiss, The American myth of success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (1969; repr., Illini Books, 1988), 29.
6. Stephan Thernstrom, Property and progress: Social mobility in a nineteenth century city (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 103–104, 107, 113; Edward Pessen, Riches, class, and power before the Civil War (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1973), 52–58, 64–66; Jackson T. Main, “Social mobility in Revolutionary America,” in Three centuries of social mobility in America, ed. and with an introduction by Edward Pessen (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1974), 50–51, 54.
7. Elaine Foreman Crane, Ebb tide in New England: Women, seaports, and social change 1630–1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 106–107, 134; Ruth Wallis Herndon, “‘Proper’ magistrates and masters: Binding out poor children in southern New England, 1720–1820,” in Children bound to labor: The pauper apprentice system in early America, ed. Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 51.
CHAPTER 1: BEGINNINGS
1. TCMR 5:215.
2. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 6, item 2746.
3. “New-York, October 19,” Weekly Museum, October 19, 1793, [3].
> 4. Ibid.
5. “An airing!” New-York Journal, & Patriotic Register, October 16, 1793, [3].
6. “New-York, October 19.”
7. “New-York. Wednesday, October 16,” Daily Advertiser, October 16, 1793, [2]; PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 6, item 2746.
8. Pauline Maier, From resistance to revolution: Colonial radicals and the development of American opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 4–5; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, prostitution, and the commercialization of sex, 1790–1920 (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 77–78.
9. Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, ed., Pictures of Rhode Island in the past 1642–1833 by travelers and observers (Providence, RI: Preston and Rounds Co., 1900), 55–56 (from Rev. Jacob Bailey’s journal).
10. Ibid.
11. Lynne Withey, Urban growth in colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the eighteenth century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 78.
12. Kimball, Pictures of Rhode Island, 104.
13. Ibid., 82.
14. Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the margin in early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 14, 19.
15. Ibid., 19, 178–79.
16. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 7, item 2916.
17. TCMR 5:169–71.
18. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 6, item 2746.
19. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 6, item 2745.
20. Ibid. My description of Elizabeth Gardner is based on Ruth Wallis Herndon’s description of Sarah Gardner (Unwelcome Americans, 62–65, 146), who was almost certainly the person that the issuers of the warrant intended to summon, although they wrote Elizabeth instead of Sarah.
21. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 6, item 2745.
22. Ibid.
23. TCMR 5:215.
24. The four prostitutes who had lived in the house in 1780 were women of color also (ibid., 169–71).
25. Withey, Urban growth, 72–73.
26. TCMR 4:295, 5:409.
27. Sharon Braslaw Sundue, Industrious in their stations: Young people and work in urban America, 1720–1810 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 42–43.
28. Female slaves were frequently hired out by their masters in this way, as described by John J. Zaborney in For hire: Renting enslaved laborers in antebellum Virginia (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 4 and chapter 2.
29. TCMR 4:295.
30. She signed her testimony with an X and continued to do so during later brushes with the town authorities. It remains possible that she was able to read, because reading was taught before writing at the time. See E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to read and write in colonial America (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 344.
31. Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, 5 (see chap. 1, n. 14).
32. Ibid., 2, 5–10.
33. James N. Arnold, Vital records of Rhode Island 1836–1850: First series; Births, marriages and deaths; A family register for the people, vol. 10 (Providence, RI: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1898), 157.
34. His origins are unclear (he might have gained local status by apprenticeship rather than by birth). However, he would be buried some years later at the expense of the town of Providence, an expenditure the municipality would not have approved had there been any question about his residency (PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 10, item 4077, and vol. 11, item 4563).
35. No record of John Thomas’s birth has survived, but Phebe gave his age as seventeen on January 1, 1787, which implies that he was born in 1769 (TCMR 5:409). Since her pregnancy appears to have led to her examination by the town council on September 29, 1769, John Thomas must have been born between that date and the end of the year.
36. Probably she should be identified with the Mary Bowen who was born on June 28, 1772; see Arnold, Vital records of Rhode Island 1836–1850: First series; Births, marriages and deaths; A family register for the people, vol. 2 (Providence, RI: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1892), 5. She later told her husband she was born on December 19, 1775 (1873 Transcript of Record, 305). While it remains possible that the month and day are correct, she must have adjusted the year to make herself no older than her husband, who was born June 17, 1775.
37. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 7, items 3077, 3119, 3140 (for references to her as Elizabeth); NYHS-AHMC, Mauer, Charles Arthur: untitled notes, 10 (for her date of birth); “The courts,” New York Herald, February 27, 1872, 5 (for the quotation).
CHAPTER 2: A HOUSE OF BAD FAME
1. Robert W. Kenny, Town and gown in wartime: A brief account of the College of Rhode Island, now Brown University, and the Providence community during the American Revolution (Providence, RI: The University Relations Officer of Brown University, 1976), 24–25.
2. Sharon Braslaw Sundue, Industrious in their stations: Young people and work in urban America, 1720–1810 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 104; Gloria L. Main, “Women on the edge: Life at street level in the early republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Fall 2012): 337.
3. Sundue, Industrious in their stations, 25.
4. Ibid., 24–25, 42.
5. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 7, items 3077, 3119, 3140.
6. Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As various as their land: The everyday lives of eighteenth-century Americans (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 119.
7. Heli Meltsner, The poor houses of Massachusetts: A cultural and architectural history (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012), 15–16, 19–20.
8. State of Rhode Island, &c. In General Assembly, October Session, A.D. 1796, “An act of better ordering of the police of the town of Providence and regulating the work-house in the said town,” Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 49438 (digital supplement).
9. Ruth Wallis Herndon, “‘Who died an expense to this town’: Poor relief in eighteenth-century Rhode Island,” in: Down and out in early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2004), 140, 151. There are numerous references to the cage in the Providence Town Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society, e.g., Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 6, item 6406.
10. Providence, Rhode Island, City Archives, Providence Town Meetings 4:67.
11. For example: PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 7, items 3077, 3102, 3119, 3140, 3163, 3185, 3202; vol. 8, item 3474 (verso).
12. TCMR 5:317–18; Providence Journal, and Town and Country Advertiser, May 29, 1799, [2] (for Ingraham’s age).
13. TCMR 5:213.
14. TCMR 5:207, 213, 320.
15. Ingraham had two other sons under fourteen years of age, William and Joseph (ibid.), but they seem to have been living away from home as apprentices before the Bowens moved in.
16. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 8, items 3483, 3484 (two nearly identical copies of the inventory).
17. Although there is no distinction in the inventory between upstairs and downstairs, the furnishings described here are listed first on the inventory. Logically they would be found in an upper story or attic, suggesting that the upper part of the house was inventoried first. Items that would be less likely to be kept upstairs, such as three flatirons and a gridiron, follow.
18. For the layout of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England homes, see Abbott Lowell Cummings, ed., Rural household inventories: Establishing the names, uses and furnishings of rooms in the colonial New England home 1675–1775 (Boston, MA: The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1964), xiv–xxv.
19. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 8, item 3484.
20. TCMR 5:317.
21. Ibid., 318.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. PTP, Mss 214, Sg. 1, ser. 1, vol. 8, item 3474 (verso).
25. Ibid.
26. TCMR 5:320.
27. Herndon, “‘Proper’ magistrates and mast
ers,” 40–41, 44 (see prologue, n. 7); Robert E. Cray Jr., Paupers and poor relief in New York City and its rural environs, 1700–1830 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 81; Wolf, As various as their land, 119–20.
28. Eric Nellis and Anne Decker Cecere, eds., The eighteenth-century records of the Boston Overseers of the Poor (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2007), 971; James Flint, Letters from America, containing observations on the climate and agriculture of the western states, the manners of the people, the prospects of immigrants, &c. &c. (Edinburgh: Printed for W. & C. Tait, 1822), 98.
29. E.g., Vincent Di Girolamo, “‘Though the means were scanty’: Excerpts from Joseph T. Buckingham’s Memoirs and recollections of editorial life, in Children and youth in a new nation, ed. James Martin (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 239, 236; The diary of Elizabeth Drinker, eds. Elaine Forman Crane et al. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 2:1527 (June 27, 1802), 3:1963 (September 7, 1806), 3:2039 (May 25, 1807).
30. Sundue, Industrious in their stations, 33–34.
31. TCMR 5:409.
32. Ibid., 5:375.
33. Ibid., 5:409.
34. John E. Sterling, North Burial Ground: Providence, Rhode Island; Old section 1700–1848 (Greenville, RI: Rhode Island Genealogical Society, 2000), 14, 146 (for their ages). Although indenture documents have never been found for the Bowen girls, genealogical records identify no other Samuel Allen family in Providence at this time, making it reasonable to assume that this was the couple with whom Betsy was placed.