Was the cause Eliza? Had Hamilton hinted to Jumel of an ongoing relationship that caused Burr to be banned from the Jumel house?
After the duel, which brought on Hamilton’s slow death, Burr retreated to Washington to serve out his term as Vice-President of the United States. He had been the runner-up in the Jefferson/Burr presidential election and Vice Presidents then were the number two winner.
Dueling was of course illegal. Officially, Burr had murdered Hamilton, but in Washington, so long as he was serving in office, Burr couldn’t be touched by the law. His term finished, he fled west—to found an army to invade Mexico and establish a dominion for himself. Unfortunately, Jefferson took fright, imagining the army was intended to abduct him. The law was sent after Burr, and he was brought back ignominiously (he was a small man) tied on a lawman’s saddlebow. But accusations didn’t stick and Burr ended up exiled to France.
What was Mrs. Jumel doing all this time? Finding herself in such happy circumstances, she went to Providence hoping to rescue her sister. Their mother was dead by this time—shot as a squatter in an illegal shack. The sister, Eliza discovered, was also dead, found floating in Providence’s harbor. But she had left a little girl, also named Eliza, who was beginning the cycle of their family’s sad history again, as a servant. Madame Jumel bought little Eliza out of servitude and made her an adoptive daughter.
Then she set about creating what was probably the first historical restoration in the United States, now known as the Morris Jumel Mansion. (It claims to be the oldest house in Manhattan and can be can be visited: http://www.morrisjumel.org.)
Why did Eliza do this? Built in 1765, this magnificent home of a royalist, Roger Morris, had been abandoned as the Continental Army moved into New York, and it came to serve as George Washington’s headquarters. After the war, it had degenerated into a country inn. Eliza persuaded Jumel to buy it, then spared no expense in restoring it and magnificently furnishing its octagonal ballroom—for this was to be the occasion of her entry into New York high society.
It was a grand event, no doubt. But it backfired. A guest brought a friend who was none other than the Governor of Rhode Island, who remembered Eliza as Betsy of the dock and streets, and he told Jumel a bit of his wife’s early history.
Years later, the servants reported how Jumel confronted Eliza—and how she fought back. Had she not been a good wife? A good mother to their adopted daughter? How dare he take the word of a stranger above what he knew of her himself! And she brought from her capacious skirt’s pocket the little pistol he had given her. Jumel was reduced to tears, begging her not to shoot. Indeed, how could he have been so foolish? So cruel? Could she forgive him? If she only would forgive him, he would take her and little Eliza on a trip to France on his flagship named for her, the Eliza.
Eliza relented and put away her gun. And the Jumels went to France on the Eliza.
But nothing in Eliza’s life could be so ordinary as a shopping trip to Paris. Approaching her port of La Rochelle, the Eliza was battered by storms and driven south, taking shelter in the Gironde, near Bordeaux, to make repairs. There, a boat filled with magnificently uniformed French officers hailed them and asked to come aboard.
It seemed that Napoleon had just lost the Battle of Waterloo. He was intending to flee to America but his ship was trapped at La Rochelle, unable to leave harbor because of the storm. The American ship had been seen trying to beat her way in, then turning south. The Emperor’s aide de camp, Lelande, had been sent to see if that American ship could be found, and if it would be willing to rescue Napoleon and take him to where he might start a new life. The vanquished Emperor hoped to retire to a farm in New Jersey.
Of course the Jumels agreed. But by the time Lelande reached La Rochelle, the British had closed off the harbor. In despair, Napoleon had surrendered. In thanks, he sent Lelande back to the Jumels with a gift—his coach and his personal effects, all that remained of his earthly possessions.
The Jumels entered Paris in the Emperor’s wreath-emblazoned coach—and they were the only ones who knew what had become of Napoleon. Soon they were deep in efforts to free the Emperor, and Eliza was the darling of the Paris aristocracy. Forget about those parvenu snobs in New York City!
But soon the Jumels were near bankruptcy, attempting to fund the Emperor’s restoration.
There was the house in New York and Stephen’s warehouses—they were worth something. Eliza insisted that only she knew the mansion’s worth, so she should return and see to its sale, while Stephen remained, seeing to their interests in Paris.
In New York, the first person Eliza contacted was Aaron Burr, who was returned from his French exile and had a small law practice now in Lower Manhattan. Burr advised Eliza to keep the house and rent it, and instead sell the warehouses. He would guide her in her investments of the proceeds. Thus Eliza got into the business of real estate speculation. How much was Burr’s work and how much Eliza’s will never be known, but in a few years she could move from her miserable room in a Long Island farmhouse back into her mansion with riches to spare.
Stephen returned from France. Life was idyllic; the mansion’s hilltop lands stretched down on each side to the Hudson and the East River, and the view from the master bedroom’s balcony reached (with a spy glass) to the harbor. Stephen, elderly now, loved his land, and rode the hay wagon up to the house with the last load of haying. He slipped off, broke his arm, the arm became gangrenous, and soon he died.
Eliza was a very rich widow. Burr wasted little time. He brought a clergyman to visit. Aaron Burr and Eliza Betsy Bowen Jumel were married. During their divorce proceedings, which happened fairly soon afterward, she said he had forced her and embarrassed her into marrying him. And she accused her hasty husband of infidelity already.
It seemed that Burr, still entranced by the opportunities out West, had sold one of Eliza’s carriages and its fine team of horses and given the proceeds to a woman who was leading a group of settlers westward. In a terrific argument in the mansion’s hall, Eliza insisted the woman was his mistress. He swore she was not, and then and there suffered a stroke. Crippled, barely able to speak, Burr insisted on being taken from the house, down the length of Manhattan to his office.
Paralysed, poverty-stricken, unable to pay his office’s rent, he ended up living at the mercy of a kind woman innkeeper on Staten Island. It was there that Eliza’s lawyer, Alexander Hamilton Junior, handed Burr the final papers of divorce. Burr took the documents, saying, “I have always loved women…” and died. One might say he died at the hands of his victim Hamilton’s son.
Did Eliza regret her actions? She took up Burr’s project of invading Mexico and made it her own. But she died in her bed, composing a polite letter to a friend.
Madame Jumel, the inspiration for Miss Havisham, was a far cry from a jilted and embittered spinster.
Cameos, Silhouettes, and Cartes de Visite
by Debra Brown
Once upon a time there were no cameras, but people wanted images of their loved ones or of themselves to share. No doubt sketches and carvings were made from earliest times on whatever materials could be obtained. The likeness of the person would depend upon the skills of the artist and other factors, such as materials.
One early form of likeness is the cameo. Ancient cameos were often made from semiprecious gemstone, usually onyx or agate, where two contrasting colors meet. Less expensive cameos are made from shell or glass. Artistic cameos were made in Greece as far back as the 3rd century B.C. They were very popular amongst the Augustus family of ancient Rome.
Revivals in popularity of the cameo have occurred periodically. The first such revival in Britain was during the reigns of George III and later his granddaughter, Queen Victoria, to the extent that they were being mass produced during the latter half of the 19th century.
French Finance Minister Etienne de Silhouette cut black profil
es as a hobby. The cuttings were originally called profile miniatures or shades. The name silhouette was in use by the early 19th century. These provided family members with a likeness that was much less expensive than a painted miniature, and it is thought that Silhouette’s name became associated with them because of his severe economic policies. The likeness could be cut by a skilled artist in minutes using paper and scissors. At times, gold accents and colored paint were used to add interest. The cost of a silhouette could run from a shilling to more than a guinea. A silhouette might be done, along with a poem, to remember a departed loved one.
Resort and spa towns came to have at least one silhouettist. The daughter of King George III, Princess Elizabeth, was an amateur in the field. Materials used included paper, wax, glass, or plaster. More costly silhouettes were framed. A famous English artist was John Miers (1756-1821), who began his career in Liverpool and then moved to a London studio at No. 111 Strand in 1788. He charged a guinea per silhouette. Some that he did on ivory came to be used in rings, lockets, and bracelets.
A proliferation of unskilled artists took up the lucrative trade, decreasing its popularity. Then another advent threatened the silhouette medium: commercial photography.
In 1854, a Parisian photographer named Andre Disderi patented a multi-lensed camera which produced eight small likenesses on one large glass negative. The resulting print was cut, the portraits were trimmed, and they were then mounted on cards measuring two and a half by four inches. This was the usual size of a visiting card, and so these photos were dubbed cartes de visite.
In 1859, Napoleon III had his photograph made up in this manner, initiating a craze throughout Europe, and then in America, called cardomania. The craze reached England in 1861 when J.E. Mayall took carte de visite portraits of the royal family. Soon, studios opened in every town. A photographer in Bath reportedly sold between sixty and seventy thousand cards in a single year.
By the third quarter of the 19th century, hardback, leather-covered photograph albums with stiff cardboard pages, often decorated with drawings, were to be found in most Victorian parlors. Cartes de visite featuring famous personalities were added to these family albums with crowds gathering whenever shop windows displayed the latest. Actors and society, political, clerical, and military figures and especially the royal family were in great demand. When the Prince Consort died, not less than seventy thousand of his cartes were ordered from Marion and Company of Regent Street. Cartes de visite were eventually made in larger, cabinet print size.
Thomas Stevens introduced something new in 1879—the silk-woven picture or Stevengraph. Two scenes of local interest were woven on a loom. These sold for a shilling, with new pictures being issued once a month. Portraits were later done in this manner, featuring members of the royal family, sportsmen of the day, and so on. By the early twentieth century, even silk-woven postcards portraying famous passenger liners were sold as souvenirs to passengers aboard the ships.
The Humble Envelope
by Mike Rendell
Scene I: 1770, London; Arabella sits down at her writing desk, extracts the envelope which she placed in the drawer earlier, and fingers trembling, inserts the paper-knife and cuts eagerly across the top of the envelope, pulling out the beautifully written letter and starts to read….
Fact or fiction? Almost certainly fiction, since the use of envelopes was almost unheard of at that time! Why? Because envelopes did not make a significant appearance until Rowland Hill’s reform of the Post Office in 1840. Prior to that date, only the very wealthy, or terminally stupid, would have used envelopes (which would have had to have been made by hand). The reason was that postal rates were fixed not by weight but by the number of sheets of paper.
Why use an envelope, which counted as a separate sheet, when the address could be written on one section of the main letter, and folded into place?
Known as “entires” by modern collectors, these letters, usually of a single sheet of paper, would be folded into three, then the “wings” tucked in at the back so that the address could be written clearly on the face of the entire. Unfolding it, the writer would then fill every part of the letter, often turning it sideways to fill in the inside of the wings. Once the letter was finished, it would be sealed across the back so that the wings could not be opened up. The seal, made of wax, was known as a wafer.
The address on the entire would sometimes be marked “via London” because roads between the towns were slower than the much longer journey via the capital. Letters to London were usually sent by reference to nearby public buildings (the local church, or public house, etc.) and although the 1765 Stamp Act introduced street numbering throughout the City, it was some years before this caught on. My ancestor, who lived at One London Bridge, was still receiving letters addressed to him “opposite St. Magnus Church” (rather than “Number One London Bridge”) well into the 1780s.
Rowland Hill published his paper “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability” early in 1837. Here was a crusader for reform who in his own words admitted, “I had never been inside the walls of a Post Office”.
Untramelled by historic considerations, he was able to take a completely fresh look at mail deliveries and come up with some startling proposals, which led almost immediately to the development of the machine-made envelope. He examined the cost of delivering a carriage-full of letters from London to Edinburgh and, having apportioned the cost per letter, he concluded that we needed a system which had a uniform rate for a letter of moderate weight, regardless of the distance it was to cover and “without reference to the number of enclosures”.
One of the people called to give evidence to the Select Committee on Postal Reform in 1838 was the paper maker John Dickinson. He referred to “the new fashioned envelope with the four corners of the paper meeting under the seal”. In other words, at that stage envelopes existed but were not in widespread use.
The upshot of the parliamentary deliberations was that Hill’s proposals were largely accepted. Gone was the idea of the recipient paying for the letter. Instead the sender would pay a uniform rate of one penny. Gone was the need to count sheets of paper, or to frank the envelope, and the cost of delivery was drastically reduced because Hill was convinced that this would result in a massive increase in volume which in turn would bring down the cost to the Post Office of delivering each item.
The result was the commissioning of the country’s first postage stamp, a gummed “Penny Black” with a portrait of the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria based on the design for her coinage by William Wyon. It also led to the design of a penny wrapper—an envelope which people could buy which already had the postage paid.
A prize of £200 for the best design of the penny wrapper was awarded to William Mulready after a competition held in 1840. He came up with a flamboyant design with Britannia seated on a lion, dispatching post to the four corners of the globe via winged messengers. The public hated it, and the Mulready envelope was quickly withdrawn. However, the stamps, and the new postal system, were hugely popular.
In the very first year, no fewer than 68 million Penny Blacks were moistened and stuck down onto envelopes which had the advantage of completely concealing the contents. Even Queen Victoria was delighted with the stamp—so much so that she refused to countenance a change to her portrait, meaning that her youthful face was still adorning her stamps some 60 years later! Arguably, our postage stamp designers are flattering to a similar degree with our present monarch, although she has been allowed to age gradually as time goes by.
Before long, in back offices up and down the country, it was customary for a clerk to laboriously cut out an envelope-shape on paper, using a tin template. He would cut through perhaps two dozen sheets at a time, using a craft tool or sharp knife. The cut-outs would then be passed to another clerk for folding, and then to another for the side triangles to be glued together. The result: an envelope which
ensured that the contents remained secure, private, and protected from the elements.
The first envelope-folding machine in this country resulted from a collaboration between Rowland Hill’s kid brother Edwin and Warren de la Rue in 1840 (i.e. almost immediately after the postage stamp was introduced, when it quickly became apparent that handmade envelopes could not keep pace with the new demand). Various other people came up with design improvements, and by the mid 1850s the modern envelope was being churned out by the million.
There is a rather nice story as to why Rowland Hill was so passionate about reforming the postal system. He explained to a parliamentary committee that he was inspired by the plight of a poor servant girl who was observed receiving a letter. Unable to pay the required fee of one shilling, she turned the letter round in her hand for a few seconds before returning it to the postman, declining to accept it because of the not inconsiderable cost. Horrified that such a potentially valuable and important missive should go unread for the sake of twelve pence, the gallant Rowland dashed forward and paid the fee, expecting gushing thanks from the grateful servant.
Not so, for she seemed not to care one way or the other. When challenged as to her indifference, she replied that she knew who it was from and when looking at the marks on the outside of the envelope could quite readily work out the contents, and had no need to pay a fee. It reminds me of the time when phone calls from a public phone box gave the caller a chance to Press Button A or B—and in that time you could just about shout a brief message for free down the line before being cut off!
Addendum: The window envelope? Patented 1902 by an American (what else could he be) called Americus Callahan. And airmail? The first mail to be delivered by air was in January 1785 in a cross channel balloon flight from Dover to Calais, carrying a letter from William Franklin addressed to Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. The first aerogramme (i.e. an envelope specifically designed for the purpose and which opens up to become a letter) is surprisingly modern—it was first issued in Iraq in 1933.
Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors Page 61