My husband left France at the beginning of the Revolution and established a home in New York (U.S.A.) with the resolution of never again seeing his native land until the return of the Bourbons. He became a merchant and has been very fortunate in his business, becoming one of the most influential men in New York. He is so patriotic that he has been unwilling to have commercial relations anywhere except with France. He was the first to introduce La Soirée [she means la soierie, i.e., silk goods] at wholesale in the United States, and in doing this has created a demand for French merchandise, in consequence bringing about an enormous trade, so that the most celebrated manufacturers of France have worked for him and have sent millions … through his business.
He has had the misfortune to lose two of his ships, all loaded, which were seized by Napoleon and held at the Port of Bayonne—for which he has never been reimbursed.
His kindness of heart and his directness in business have made him known and loved throughout the United States. He has frequently been offered very honorable and lucrative positions, which he has always refused, saying he still hoped again to see his own country.
What a joyous day for him when he got the news of the return of the Bourbons. Immediately he made haste to sell his ships and his stocks and to leave his temporary home, which was for him a sort of exile, since it was so far away from his dear country.
We came to Paris, and he, seeing a great deal of misfortune, was moved by his kindness of heart to set up several manufacturers, who today are prosperous. At the same time he himself has met with nothing but losses. His lofty nature will not allow him to ask for a place at Court for himself, as he thinks he has not yet done enough for his country to deserve such a favor.
But, accustomed to being received as persons of high position, and our fortune admitting of our living in excellent style, and having also the good fortune—since our stay in Paris—of knowing many ladies of the Court, I often find myself embarrassed. When I see that I have no title and my husband no cross [i.e., the cross of an officer of the Legion of Honor]—in spite of all he has done for his country and of his devotion to the King—I feel utterly discouraged, and beg him to go back to his adopted country. But knowing your Majesty’s extreme kindness, I am anew inspired with the hope that you will not ignore a subject so worthy as Stephen Jumel. Whatever post your Majesty might deign to offer—even without remuneration—it would be his greatest delight to fill it, and your Majesty would find in Stephen Jumel a faithful subject and one wholly devoted to his King, and in his wife, eternal gratitude.16
The letter is revealing. It seems that nothing could fill the void left by the poverty and exclusion of Eliza’s youth: not a thoughtful husband, not a loving niece become daughter, not an elegant home, not a carriage and pair, not even a bow of recognition from a king. Whatever she craved, once acquired it was not enough, and again she would feel “embarrassed” and “utterly discouraged.”
In pursuit of the fashionable life, the Jumels summered in Dieppe in 1824. A port on the English Channel, the city had begun to attract attention as a seaside resort in the last years of the First Empire, thanks to visits by Napoleon’s stepdaughter, Hortense Beauharnais, whom he married to his second-youngest brother, Louis. Once peace arrived, proximity to England turned Dieppe into a popular vacation destination for visitors from across the channel. “You see nothing but Englishmen in this city,” Stephen commented.17 Throughout the summer, a steamboat from Brighton arrived daily, carrying “from fifty to sixty passengers, carriages, and horses.”18
In 1824 a three-week visit by Marie-Caroline, duchesse de Berry—a member of France’s royal family—prompted French aristocrats to join the English tourists. Eliza, Stephen, and Mary followed in their wake. “We spent a most delightful summer in Dieppe,” Mary wrote to her birth mother, Maria Jones. “The sea bathing was very agreeable, the balls and parties were charming, and the Princesse De Berry [sic] with all her attendance aded [sic] to the gaiety and brilliance of the place.”19
Stephen was equally enthusiastic. “People enjoy themselves very much; everybody bathes,” he wrote to his nephew-in-law Lesparre. “As for me, I took sixty baths this year,” during a stay of “more than two months.”20 Stephen decided to purchase a summer home in Dieppe on the modish place des Bains. The three-story structure had a central block with ten windows on the façade, flanked with two wings, each sixty-eight feet in length. Stephen, Eliza, and Mary would inhabit one of the wings. The center section could be rented out; it was big enough “for three families, with their cooks, stables, etc., etc., with a place for two horses for each family, and a carriage house.”21 In addition to Stephen’s two horses (used to pull Eliza’s carriage), “there will be room enough for ten or twelve others,” he told Lesparre. “In the yard it will be possible to put thirty carriages, which can be brought in and taken out.”22 Offering storage for vehicles would be a useful source of revenue.
By late October he had already spent twenty to twenty-five thousand francs (four to five thousand dollars) on wallpaper and furniture for the house. If Lesparre visited, he would find all the amenities: “a nice pleasant room, soft water in the yard, excellent water which comes from four leagues across the mountains, through which a canal has been dug to Dieppe.” In clear weather, the coast of England was visible from a belvedere at the top of the house, and “the vicinity [was] all beautiful.” The land was well cultivated, there were “excellent fish,” and Rouen, with its cloth mills, was only twelve leagues away.23
Despite these assets, Stephen showed caution in making the purchase, knowing how easily Eliza became dissatisfied. “I have two years to cancel the contract,” he told Lesparre. “If Mrs. Jumel is not comfortable in it, I will be able to relinquish it.”24
That Eliza was uncomfortable about something was certain. The evidence comes from a curious note in the diary of American writer Washington Irving, living at the time in Paris. On November 27 Irving paid a visit to a fellow expatriate, a wine merchant from New York named Dominick Lynch. While Irving was there, another visitor arrived: “Mrs. Jumel called to see Bremner”—probably Benjamin Bremner, also a New York merchant—and “told a long story of Stephen Jumels [sic] being deranged.”25
The fact that Eliza was consulting a merchant suggests that she was concerned about financial decisions Stephen was making. In September he had mortgaged the Broadway and Liberty Street buildings for six thousand dollars, probably to fund the Dieppe acquisition.26 Eliza had counted on the income from the downtown properties—their most valuable real-estate investment in America—to support them comfortably when Stephen retired. Now the nest egg was encumbered with debt—all to purchase a home in France, when she preferred life in the United States.
In retrospect, late 1824 was not the moment to tie up capital, although Stephen could not have known it at the time. Within a year the European economy would crumble. Stephen Jumel’s finances would collapse with it.
19
THE PANIC OF 1825
In 1825 Europe’s financial systems failed. The London stock market peaked early in the year and then share prices dropped precipitously.1 Investors who had purchased stock in a host of risky ventures—mines, water companies, canals, and bridges—turned out, too often, to have been poorly informed and ill-advised.2
The effects of bursting speculative bubbles were apparent on both sides of the Atlantic. As the editor of Niles’ Weekly Register, an American financial paper, wrote in early September, “those who had [money], did not know how to employ it, and so they made mighty investments in the wildest and most visionary projects that ever had their day. These, in general, have returned little or nothing, and money has become ‘scarce,’ the prices of stocks have considerably fallen in both countries [i.e., Great Britain and United States], and no small pressure begins to be felt, which will probably increase and become very onerous on traders and dealers of all classes.”3
The collapse of the cotton markets added to the turmoil, as oversupply replaced fears of a short
age. “During the quarter which ended on the 30th June, nearly twenty-five millions of pounds of cotton were exported from New York,” reported the Weekly Register on September 24.
But it would have been better for New York, if none of her merchants had touched cotton at all. The fifty thousand, and hundred thousand dollars, that speculators in the article made in a day, while the bubble was floating, are dissolved—leaving behind only wrecks of fortune and bankruptcy, with the ruin of innocent persons … John Bull has got the cotton, the American merchants have lost a large part of the value of it, and the planters have been seduced into an extended cultivation to reduce the price, and bring themselves into trouble: and so endeth this chapter of iniquity.4
But it wasn’t the end. On December 3, the Weekly Register noted that the business climate continued to worsen:
The recent wild speculations in cotton, superadded to the various gambling projects of stock-jobbers, which built up various monied institutions without any money at all, the whole being puff and paper, has produced a very unpleasant state of things in several parts of the United States, and the demand for money far exceeds the usual supply, in several of our chief cities … And there is a shaking of confidence which is more injurious than the losses actually sustained … banks that are fully able to meet all their engagements in a regular way, merchants that can surely pay all their debts, if aided by their usual facilities, and mechanics that are ‘as good as old gold’ with the accustomed order of business—neither of these may be competent to meet a sudden derangement, and one goes on to break down another, until the ruin becomes general.5
In the second week in December, the collapse of the Plymouth Bank in Devon and two of the largest London banks spurred a run on banking institutions across England.6 Depositors demanded to withdraw their funds, and currency reserves were soon exhausted:
Expresses were hourly arriving at London to obtain gold. The people … lost confidence in paper, and assembled in great numbers about the banks to obtain money for it. At Plymouth, the uproar was dreadful. There was literally a whole population, with food in abundance staring them in the face, and yet without means of obtaining it, for … gold alone would the sellers take, and gold was not to be had. By break of day, all the banks were surrounded by mobs, and the civil power was mustered in front of them.7
By early 1826 nearly 10 percent of England’s banks had failed.8
Like other businessmen who depended on the London financial markets, Stephen felt the shortage of cash and credit, and had difficulty collecting money owed him by fellow merchants. On February 16, 1826, he wrote to his nephew-in-law Lesparre, “I am more than sorry not to be able to give to my sister what I used to give her.”9
Although the English banks were beginning to recover by early spring, ripples from the crisis spread across the channel and even across the Atlantic. France went into a recession.10 “The great merchants and bankers in Germany, Prussia, the Netherlands, &c. were giving way, and for enormous amounts. The like, perhaps, was never heard of before.”11 Bankruptcies of British merchants continued—1,827 for the half year ending June 1826, compared with 489 for the same period of 1825.12
French, German, and British exports to Latin America plunged because of the collapse of the credit markets needed to finance shipments.13 Funds for capital investments dried up, dooming manufacturing and mining ventures in Central and South America and destabilizing the economies of the newly independent countries they served. The governments of Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico fell into default on their sovereign debt.14
In May 1826, as the turmoil continued around them, Eliza, Stephen, and Mary packed their trunks in Paris. After a brief stop in Dieppe, they traveled on to Le Havre. On May 26, three days after their arrival in the busy port, Eliza and Mary sailed for New York.
Their departure on the ship Lewis, captained by Robert Macy, was as abrupt as Eliza’s previous retreat to the United States. “Mrs. Jumel made up her mind to sail as soon as the ship arrived,” Stephen wrote to Lesparre. “If my business had permitted me to do so, I would have sailed, but I hope to be able to do so in May next.”15
The exact reason for Eliza’s voyage—one might even say flight—remains unclear. On the face of it, she went to the United States to look into the condition of their investments and collect monies due to them. She took with her a power of attorney authorizing her to manage Stephen’s affairs in the state of New York and, at her discretion, sell any real estate he owned there.16 But there may have been other tensions that prompted the precipitous journey.
A letter she sent to Stephen in July 1826 is tantalizingly vague. “I am very flattered that you are thinking of me,” she wrote in French, the language she used in corresponding with her husband, “but at the same time troubled to know that you are suffering from repentance. You are wrong to stay at home so much, because that could harm your health, and if that was the case, judge my despair.”17 The question of what Stephen was repentant for remains unanswered. Did he regret poor business decisions that threatened their future … or a quarrel that culminated in Eliza’s departure?
There were earlier signs that problems may have been simmering between them. In January 1825 Stephen had changed the legal status of the mansion in New York and the thirty-six acres of land immediately surrounding it. Since 1815 the property had been governed by a trust that gave Eliza the use of the estate after his death and would return it to his heirs when she died. But at the beginning of 1825, he revised the trust to give her immediate possession of the house and acreage. Although a trustee would need to sign off on her business decisions, the property was effectively hers from that time onward—to manage as she wished for the rest of her life and leave to her heirs after her death.18
The precipitating factor for the transfer of ownership might have been Stephen’s purchase of the Dieppe house. Far less enthusiastic about life in France than he, Eliza may have insisted on having the option of an independent life in the United States. Or if he planned to leave his new property to his French relatives after his death, she might have prodded him to give the New York mansion to her.
Another trust, set up a year later, on January 18, 1826, settled the Broadway and Liberty Street houses on Eliza as well. Their rents would be hers, free from any debts her husband might owe, although, unlike the mansion, the two downtown properties would revert to Stephen or his heirs after her death.19 Given that Stephen was cash-strapped by this point, it seems likely that this second transfer was made to protect these assets from his creditors rather than with the intention of providing more lavishly for his wife.
Regardless of the underlying reasons for the conveyances, by midsummer cash was Stephen’s immediate need. Eliza began trying to collect it as soon as she arrived in New York. She attended first to the downtown houses, which had been rented out at below-market rates by their American agent, Frederick Brunel. Even though rents had begun to drop because of the currency shortage, she persuaded the current tenant of the Broadway store, a Tyrolean-born shopkeeper named Michael Werckmeister, to take a seven-year lease at $2,100 per year—“and if I had been here a year ago, I would have had at least twenty-five hundred,” she added in a letter to Stephen.20 As for the neighboring house on Liberty Street, she gave notice to its undesirable tenants. “It is in very bad condition, I mean excessively dirty,” she told Stephen, “ and before I will be able to offer it for rent, I will be obliged to paper and paint it, and without any other expense, I will make it look as it should, and there isn’t any doubt that I will have double the present rent.”21
In August Eliza traveled to Cherry Valley, about fifty miles west of Albany, where she and Stephen had lands that had been transferred to them in payment of a debt. Their title to the properties—owned previously by Cadwallader D. Colden, a politician and land speculator—was problematic, Eliza discovered. “We don’t have the deeds,” and because of that “no one wants to buy [the farms] from us,” she told Stephen. The paperwork had been managed p
oorly by Benjamin Desobry, with bonds and mortgages remaining on the lands. “We are presently at the mercy of Colden,” Eliza explained, “because he can foreclose the mortgage on us whenever it seems good to him; voilà the manner in which Desobry arranged it.”22
Their agent in Cherry Valley, who managed the properties and collected the rents, was a prominent lawyer, James O. Morse. He was also “a rascal,” according to Eliza. “Mr. Morse does everything for his own interests [and] is continually in litigation with those who live on our lands, [who] being poor and not being able to pay, all the expense falls on us. He renews [the leases of] the farms every year, and being a lawyer, he arranges everything himself, and all our interests fall into his hands.”23
While in Cherry Valley, Eliza tried to collect on debts owed to Stephen by a local firm, Hoffman and Glass. When she presented her husband’s bills of exchange, Hoffman opened his books and showed her records indicating that he had already paid them. “He told me that you and he had the habit of exchanging your bills,” she wrote Stephen, “and there were several of yours that he found not long ago and burned. In saying that, I tried to stop him, but he tore yours in pieces, saying that, supposing he owed them, they were outlawed—that is to say, six years having passed, they could no longer be used to claim the debt.” Eliza was powerless against Hoffman, and her frustration is palpable. “It seems that everything conspires to prevent me from being able to procure money to send you,” she wrote.24
She complained too about the integrity of their New York City agent, Brunel. Stephen should keep track of any payments Brunel sent, Eliza told him, because whenever she asked about money, the agent told her, “I just sent it the other day” (i.e., to Stephen).25 Yet in their absence Brunel had been retaining large sums of money. Three years before, he had foreclosed on a mortgage on one of their farms in Cortlandt, in Westchester County, netting eight hundred dollars that should have been sent to the Jumels. He didn’t tell Eliza about the foreclosure until she was leaving to inspect the land and would have discovered it for herself.26 Frustrated by another instance of this type, Eliza told Brunel that she “was going to demand from him the interest on the money that he had kept so long.” As she reported to Stephen, “He responded that if I demanded the interest, he would raise his commissions.” Would Stephen tell her whether or not she should insist on the interest? she asked.27
The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel Page 11