When Eliza’s French tutor visited Stephen’s counting house in early June 1804 to collect his fee, he referred to her as “Miss Brown” rather than Mrs. Jumel, suggesting that she and Stephen had not publicized her change in status.17 But as word leaked out, the marriage of a successful merchant to a young woman of unknown antecedents must have led to speculation. Iniquitous rumors like the one Pintard reported could have been generated to explain a seemingly inexplicable event. Alternately, since the story is not recorded until Pintard tells it in 1821, it might have sprung up years after the marriage, at a moment when Eliza was attracting censorious attention for living apart from her husband.
Broadly speaking, the yarn reverses the popular fictional device of a fortune hunter tricking an innocent girl into marriage. Eliza is placed in the man’s role, deceiving the credulous Stephen. The story could have been inspired by Eliza Haywood’s widely read novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), which features a deathbed ceremony followed by the instant recovery of the male suitor who perpetrated the fraud.18 Someone who disapproved of Eliza might have inverted the scene from the novel to stigmatize her. She became the deceiver; Stephen the deceived.
Regardless of what the world thought of their union, Eliza could take pleasure in becoming a woman of means. The marriage was an extraordinary step upward in social status for someone who had lived in a workhouse and labored as a domestic servant. Children like Eliza who were bound to service because their parents were unable or unfitted to support them were at high risk of becoming poor transients as adults. Up to 40 percent of persons warned out of Rhode Island towns in the second half of the eighteenth century had been bound out in their youth by the overseers of the poor.19 In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, 84 out of a group of 110 indentured servants—more than three-quarters—needed public assistance at least once during the thirty years after completing their service.20
Scattered anecdotal reports about women apprenticed as servants in their youth suggest that they led modest and often difficult adult lives. Among the women who had been bound to Elizabeth Drinker of Philadelphia in childhood, at least two were impoverished in later years and a third married a blacksmith who didn’t always have stable employment.21 A fourth, Sally Brant—the girl who had borne an illegitimate child while serving out her indenture—later married but did not have an easy life, judging from Drinker’s subsequent references to her (in 1803, “poor Sall, she has her troubles,” and in 1806, “poor girl she has enough to do”).22 A grimmer example was an orphan girl bound out in Pennsylvania in 1759 who wasn’t even taught to read and write, although she had been promised those skills as part of the indenture. By the end of her service, a clergyman wrote, she had “been so completely debauched that she prefer[red] to remain with her mistress” and was “satisfied with her brutish life.”23 In Providence, Rhode Island, the town councilors complained that bound-out girls were “entice[d] away” from their masters into prostitution, “to the great injury of themselves and their employers.”24
That virtually no eighteenth-century American women indentured in childhood have entered the historical record is a reflection of the difficulty they would have had in achieving the literacy necessary to leave memoirs or the training required to build successful careers. A rare exception is Deborah Sampson, born in Massachusetts in 1760 and bound out at the age of ten, several years after her father deserted the family. After completing her service, she disguised herself as a man to serve in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War. Later she gave lectures about her wartime experiences and became a minor celebrity regionally. But even for her, social mobility was limited. She married a small-town farmer and did not rise above the lower-middle class.25
Given the circumstances into which she was born, Eliza’s marriage to a wealthy man was strikingly unusual and possibly unique.
* By comparison, Stephen would rent an entire house for just under twenty-three dollars a month in May 1804.
8
MRS. JUMEL
Soon after the marriage, Stephen purchased a gig—a two-wheeled vehicle pulled by a single horse—from the coach makers Donaldson and Blackgood.1 The high price of the model Stephen chose—$471—suggests that his conveyance was handsomely finished. Perhaps there were silver- or gilt-plated mounts on the harness, as on a model Donaldson had built a few years earlier.2
The purchase was a gesture Eliza would have appreciated. “To the minds of Americans,” wrote a visitor to our shores, “that which without exception denotes the greatest superiority is the possession of a carriage. Women especially desire them to a degree that approaches delirium; and a woman who owns one is very certain that no other woman who lacks a carriage will ever be considered, or ever become, her equal.”3 Did a gig count? If not, no matter—soon the couple acquired a larger vehicle.4
Eliza was acutely conscious of such markers of status. She made charitable contributions under her own name, even though her money came from Stephen. When the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children was soliciting donations in 1810, “Mr. Stephen Jumel” gave ten dollars, but “Mrs. Eliza Jumel” contributed thirty. She was the second-most-generous donor to the campaign.5
In 1807 she affiliated herself with the wealthiest and most prominent members of New York society by becoming an Episcopalian. In her decision to adopt a new religion—notably, not the Catholicism of her husband—it’s hard to believe that she did not weigh worldly needs in the balance. The Episcopal Church, as the Anglican Church was renamed in the United States after the Revolution, wielded influence far out of proportion to the size of its membership (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists combined constituted only about 9 percent of the American population.)6 In the first half of the nineteenth century, 45 percent of U.S. presidents were Episcopalian. So were 39 percent of the Supreme Court justices appointed between 1789 and 1839. Among signers of the Declaration of Independence, 61 percent had belonged to the Anglican Church.7 As late as 1842, an English visitor to New York commented that “the most respectable part of the citizens attend the Protestant Episcopal churches.”8 For a woman who wanted to be accepted by the establishment, Episcopalianism—rather than Stephen’s Catholicism—was the logical choice.
Both Eliza and William Ballou were baptized at Manhattan’s Trinity Church.9 When she attended services, Eliza could worship near the pew that George Washington had occupied and walk in the cemetery that boasted Alexander Hamilton’s grave.10 The church was only a few blocks north of the Jumels’ rented house at 5 Beaver Street. It remained within walking distance when they moved south to 28 Whitehall, another rental, in 1808. A niece of Eliza’s recalled visiting the couple at the second of the two houses when she was three or four years old. One of the treasures it contained remained vivid in her memory sixty years later: “I remember going there and turning the handle of an organ or musical instrument that, if the crank was simply turned, played tunes.”11
Stephen, who would prove to be a generous and warmhearted man, took William Ballou into his household and made a place for him in his business. From 1805 onward, William’s signature appears occasionally in Stephen’s receipt books or letter book, marking occasions when the young man witnessed a transaction or hand-delivered a letter.12 By 1810, aged nineteen or twenty, William was importing a small amount of “silk goods” himself.13
Stephen helped others connected to his wife as well. Eliza’s sister, Polly, was living in New York by the turn of the century. Like Eliza, she had updated her name, calling herself Maria Bowne. On September 6, 1801, she had given birth to an illegitimate daughter, Mary Ann Walter Bowne.14 The inclusion of Walter and the altered spelling of Bowen were significant. Although no one spoke of it publicly until after Mary’s death, her father was the merchant Walter Bowne.15 Born in 1770 of a prominent Quaker family in Flushing (part of New York City’s borough of Queens today), he would one day be mayor of New York.16 His relationship with Maria probably terminated before his 1803 marriage.17
In late 1805 Maria was pregnant again, with a child fathered by a man named William Jones. She married Jones on December 19, 1805; their first child, William Ballou Jones, was born four months later.18 Although his first name was the same as that of his father, his full name suggests a tribute to William Ballou as well. A second child, born January 28, 1808, was named Eliza Jumel Jones, honoring both Eliza and her husband.19
Stephen and Eliza assisted the Joneses financially. In May 1809 Stephen paid school tuition for “Mary Jones,” Maria’s illegitimate child, who was using her stepfather’s surname.20 Mary’s half siblings, William and Eliza Jones, and their younger sister, Louisa, born in 1809, were baptized at Trinity Church in September 1810, possibly at their aunt Eliza’s prompting.21 In another indication of the ties between Eliza and her sister’s family, William Jones opened a short-lived boardinghouse at 24 Pearl Street in 1812, immediately across the street from Stephen’s business premises at 23 Pearl.22
Seeing the Jones family growing up around them, Eliza and Stephen may have felt a private sorrow. The years passed, but they had no children. The youngest member of their household, William Ballou, moved into rented lodgings, paid for by Stephen, in 1810.23 Later that year he married a dressmaker’s assistant.24
It was probably around this time that Eliza and Stephen took her oldest niece, Mary Jones, into their home. By spring 1813 Mary had become “Miss Jumel.”25 They would raise her as their daughter.
9
BLOOMINGDALE
The Jumels’ shared life as a couple remains hazy. According to a narrative written in 1908 by historian Hopper Striker Mott, they socialized with a community of French émigrés established in Bloomingdale. Mott painted a romantic picture of the habitués of this pretty, rural suburb that has since become the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The social center of the community was Chevilly, a house occupied by “Mme. d’Auliffe, dame d’honneur to Marie Antoinette,” who lived there with her three little daughters.
Among its constant visitors was the marquis de Cubières, a gallant of the vanished court, who was a fine type of the gentleman of the ancient régime, though, perhaps, never quite reconciling himself to the institutions of republican America. He named his horse “Monarque,” and, mounted thereon, he might have been seen making frequent pilgrimages out into the country from his home in Broad Street, to visit his friends at Chevilly. Another welcome guest was Col. August de Singeron who had commanded the Cuirassiers of the Guard at the Tuileries on the fatal Tenth of August.1
Diplomats, too, entered the drawing room of Chevilly:
The great Talleyrand was always a welcome arrival. Another Frenchman who at this time made New York his home was the famous General Moreau, the rival of Napoleon in popular favor and the victim of that eminent man’s jealousy. The Moreaus lived at 119 Pearl Street … We can well imagine he was also a guest at Chevilly, for he had property interests nearby.2
Even royal princes frequented this Paris in exile. “When the young duc d’Orléans”—who became in 1830 King Louis-Philippe of France—“and his brothers, the duc de Montpensier and the prince de Beaujolais, came to New York, they soon found their way to Chevilly, where madame and her little circle made the fugitives feel less poignantly the loss of country, rank, home, and kindred, surrounding them with an atmosphere that reminded them of Versailles.” The future king “was often actually in need, as were the young princes who accompanied him, and to gain a livelihood taught school during his stay in Bloomingdale.”3
In these lofty if sometimes purse-pinched circles, “M. Jumel, although not to the manor born, was well received because of his kindliness and the popularity of his famous wife. He owned land in Bloomingdale, on which they lived, the house being located between 77th and 78th Streets on the east side of present Amsterdam Avenue.”4
This charming picture of aristocratic life in the early republic turns out to be a muddle of epic proportions. The most noble Simon-Louis-Pierre, marquis de Cubières, said to have trotted out into the country from his home on Broad Street, never visited the United States at all.5 Equally incredibly, Colonel August de Singeron, that brave French officer, was plucked from an 1829 article in a New York literary magazine and set down at Chevilly, which was not mentioned in the original source. In the article, delusively titled “Reminiscences of New-York,” he is described improbably as having “turned pastry cook and confectioner” after arriving in the United States, fashioning gilt gingerbread figures of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and marzipan stamped with the façade of the Tuileries Palace.6 Yet no one named Singeron appears in New York’s city directories, as a confectioner or otherwise, during the French Revolutionary or Napoleonic periods. Although an officer named Lavaur, who was a member of Louis XVI’s guard, fled to the United States after the August 10, 1792, attack on the Tuileries, he returned to Europe in 1796 and there is no evidence that he worked as a confectioner or visited Chevilly.7 Possibly his story inspired the creation of the fictional Singeron, whose name may have been a play on the French word for monkey (singe), matching his description (or rather, caricature) as a short, red-haired man whose “broad shoulders overshadowed a pair of legs under the common size” and whose “voice was an exaggeration of the usual sharp tones of his nation.”8
Of the other supposed visitors to Chevilly, only Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who lived in the United States between April 1794 and June 1796, can be proved to have set foot there.9 Although he spent much of his time in Philadelphia, he was in New York from June through November 1795 and stayed at Chevilly for several weeks in late April and early May 1796, before he sailed for Europe.10 Eliza and Stephen couldn’t have socialized with him as a couple, however, since they were not married until 1804—nor is there any record of him having met Stephen. Similarly, the visit of the duc d’Orléans and his two brothers to the United States lasted well under two years and occurred long before the Jumels’ marriage. Orléans arrived in North America on October 24, 1796, and his brothers, the duc de Montpensier and the comte (not “prince”) de Beaujolais, joined him in early February 1797. They used Philadelphia as their base for trips into the American interior, spending only three weeks in New York City.11 Although they could have stopped in at Chevilly then, there is no proof one way or the other. As for the story of the future king teaching school in New York, it was not recorded until 1875 and proves to be purely imaginary.12 Louis-Philippe did teach school for eight months to support himself in exile, but that was in Richenau, Switzerland.13
Chevilly’s hostess, “Mme. d’Auliffe, dame d’honneur to Marie Antoinette,” was the victim of perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of all. The major French biographical dictionaries, including Michaud’s Biographie universelle and the Nouvelle biographie générale published by Firmen Didot frères, reveal no family bearing the name Auliffe. This is not surprising, since the French refugees settled at Chevilly turn out to have been not the Auliffes but the Olives. The origin of the error must have been a misunderstanding of the name as heard by an American, Olive (pronounced oh-leev in French) being written down incorrectly as Auliffe (oh-leef ).
Letters written by Nicholas Olive, a wealthy merchant, to his three daughters from Chevilly in 1800 and 1801 make clear that he and his wife, and not the mythical madame d’Auliffe, were living on the property.14 Although they welcomed visits from other French émigrés after arriving in the United States in 1793—Olive was a shareholder in Castorland, a settlement in northern New York State founded as a refuge for royalists fleeing the French Revolution—they returned to France in 1802 and could not have been the center of New York’s French community during the Jumels’ married years.15 Nor could they have hosted General Jean-Victor-Marie Moreau, who was only in the United States between 1805 and 1813, and didn’t settle in New York City until 1808. At least their true identity helps to explain the appearance in the story of the marquis de Cubières, despite his never having visited New York. Olive died shortly after he and his wife returned to their homelan
d in 1802, and his widow married Cubières in 1805.16 As the chronology became garbled with the passing of years, he and not she was transplanted to the United States.
In later years the Jumels would socialize with the Cubières family in France, suggesting that Stephen had been on friendly terms with Nicholas Olive in New York and stayed in contact with Olive’s widow, the future marquise de Cubières. Thus a tiny nugget of truth was buried beneath the legends. Another kernel of fact underlies the story of the house in Bloomingdale that Eliza and Stephen supposedly inhabited. In fact, they did own land in Bloomingdale briefly, but didn’t purchase the six-acre property until 1811, never lived on it themselves, and sold it in 1813.17
With Mott’s romantic stories removed from the picture, Eliza’s life on a day-to-day basis remains shadowy. Only Stephen’s business accounts and not the household accounts have survived, and therefore the staffing of the house is unclear, but it is probable that the Jumels had servants who did the cooking and cleaning. At a minimum they employed a coachman by 1812.18 Eliza and her adopted daughter could drive out together, and she and Stephen could take the carriage on formal occasions. Dressed in her best, she might wear the diamond earrings and pin her husband purchased for her in 1809.19
If a new dress was needed, Eliza had a mantua maker visit her home to take her measurements and sew the gown, the typical practice among middle-class women.20 On Sundays she would attend church, but perhaps not with her husband and daughter. Unlike her step siblings, Mary was never baptized in the Episcopal Church, suggesting that Stephen preferred that his adoptive daughter share his religious affiliation. By 1812 he was renting a pew at the Catholic Church of Saint Peter the Apostle.21
The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel Page 5