Stephen left these demands from Eliza unanswered. Given how badly he needed money by 1827, his failure to facilitate a sale suggests that he intended the stock to be Lesparre and Rose’s inheritance and would not go back on that decision. Rose’s husband had become Stephen’s confidant, a relative he treated in many ways like a son.
In February 1827 François Jumel’s son Étienne (called Ulysses in the family), a hardworking young man who had a close relationship with his uncle Stephen, wrote to his father about the latter’s troubles:
My uncle is just now at Dieppe, where living is better and cheaper than at Paris. I know also that it is very necessary for him to economize, for when Mrs. Jumel sailed for the United States, like a good and confiding husband, he gave her full and complete power of attorney to collect all the income of his property. Since his chaste wife left, and it is nearly one year since she sailed, my poor uncle has not received one cent from her; on the contrary, after she had received all the back rents due by tenants, she obtained advances from them. She is spending the whole, leaving her husband in France in quite a critical position. Thus you perceive that want may be felt even with a large fortune.38
Ulysses and Eliza did not get along well, so any reading of this paragraph must take his biases into account.39 Moreover, there is contemporary evidence that Eliza had not exaggerated the difficulty of wringing money from the Jumel farmlands in central New York. In February 1827 Morse had notified Eliza that most of her and Stephen’s tenants were in arrears, and he had been unable to unload any of the property: “I have been to Albany, and have tried also to negotiate a sale with people here; but I find it impossible to sell the bonds and mortgages at the discount you propose or even at any other discount. People in the city will not at present advance money on bonds or mortgages in the country, and there is no one in the country that I can find has money at present to invest in this way.”40
But with rental income coming in from the downtown houses, it seems that Eliza could have managed to send Stephen something. Instead she sent excuses: “I offered my diamonds for sale, but no one wanted to give me virtually anything for them.”41 She stressed her frugality: “I have neither horses nor cook, [we are] doing all the work ourselves [she and Mary]. Mr. Phillipon tells me that it is truly shameful to come into town on the diligence and run about on foot and offered to loan me enough to buy some horses, but I refused him, not wanting to be in debt to anyone.”42 She pressed again for the sale of the Hartford Bridge Company stock: “That will be a sacrifice but there is no other way to have the sum that you request.”43
By fall Stephen had become frustrated with her evasions. Instead of one of his usual detailed letters, addressed to “my dear Eliza” and including a thoughtful inquiry about her health, a half-page letter dated October 14 opens with the unadorned salutation “Madame Jumel.” To Stephen’s displeasure, she had told Philippon that she was not able to supply the money her husband had requested. Stephen disagreed: “if you are economical, you don’t need anyone’s help to remit to me the sum that I need, of which I have received the larger part. I count on your economies to supply it and to remit me as promptly as possible four to five thousand francs [i.e., eight hundred to one thousand dollars], having the greatest need of it.”44
If Eliza supplied the funds requested, there is no indication of it. On December 23 Stephen wrote her again, once more addressing her frigidly as Madame Jumel. He had just signed a note for four hundred dollars and required her help: “For the moment, I beg you, [if] you can, to send me double that amount. It would be to pull me out of a very great embarrassment, because I expected a decision from Havana a long time ago, in order to receive some funds. I count on your exactitude to remit the two thousand francs …”45
Their surviving correspondence from the period ends with this letter.
21
DECEPTION
Stephen spent the fall and winter of 1827 in the apartment in the place Vendôme. He shared it with his nephew Ulysses, who was working in a solicitor’s office to gain legal experience after being admitted to the bar. Stephen’s future plans were uncertain. “I pledged myself to Ulysses to keep him at my home until the fifteenth of April next when my lease expires,” he told Lesparre in September. “After that I don’t know what place I shall select, New York or the neighborhood of Toulouse. First without keeping house for the sake of my tranquility: a good table board, a little horse, a pointer, a country full of game. But I have not made up my mind about it. If I do go to New York, six thousand francs a year is enough to spend in the country.”1
Eliza had continued to encourage her husband to return to the United States. “My dear Stephen,” she wrote on May 1, in her last surviving letter from 1827, “come back and with economy we will live very well; there is absolutely nothing that can prevent you from returning.”
Capt. Skiddy’s vessel is very excellent. He is the best captain and [has] the best packet that there is, so I beg of you, don’t miss the earliest opportunity …
Think, my dear Stephen, you are no longer young. You need care that I will be able to give you as your wife. I will do all that depends on me to make you happy. The past will be forever forgotten and we will live one for the other.
The vines are in flower and it appears that we will have many grapes. Moreover we have six hundred vines. I have carefully cleaned and arranged them. You will have great pleasure in seeing them, and as for the garden, you will not be able to imagine how beautiful it is. The avenue and area around the house is so well kept that it seems a true paradise.2
Stephen was unconvinced. During Eliza’s first visit to the United States, his loneliness and longing for her were clear. But during their second separation, there were no pleas for her return; no indications that he found life empty without her. Their relationship had grown colder. “The past will be forgotten,” Eliza wrote; the implication was that there was something to regret.
Eliza had lived independently in New York between 1817 and 1821. She had been lady of the manor and made her own decisions. It would not have been surprising if she had found it difficult to subordinate her will to Stephen’s afterward. Now that they were separated again, Stephen and even she may have found life more tranquil without each other.
In spring 1828 Stephen’s lease had nearly expired, and he had yet to decide on his destination. “We are going to leave the place Vendôme, both I and your son,” he wrote to François on April 10. “As for me, I do not know where I shall go.”3 Lesparre advised him to remain in France, but by the beginning of May, Stephen had concluded that he could not. “I will tell you that my inclination would lead me to do so,” he wrote Lesparre, “but I must take another course. I gave my general power of attorney for the State of New York, where all my flowers are; that is the motive of my journey. It was to Mrs. Jumel. Revoke it and send it to anyone else in the country is what I shall not do … Men in the United States have changed very much; there is no longer this frankness as of old.”4 Stephen did not trust his fellow merchants to act for him anymore—and he suspected that he could not count on Eliza either.
Eliza Jumel betrayed her husband’s confidence “by resorting to sham and fraudulent conveyances.”5 She perpetrated “gross frauds … upon him and his heirs.”6 That is how Stephen’s relatives described her actions. If we might quarrel with the words they used, one fact was undeniable: between July 1827 and May 1828, Eliza transferred most of Stephen’s property into her own hands.
The prospect of financial insecurity must have been terrifying to her. Indelibly marked by the poverty of her youth, she could not shrug off the periodic reversals of fortune that were part and parcel of a merchant’s career. If we can imagine the specters that must have haunted her—cold, hunger, servitude, and the workhouse—it is easier to sympathize with her actions.
What she did was described by a lawyer named James Case, who investigated the matter in 1833 for François and Madelaine. According to Case, when Eliza arrived from France in 1826, “she repre
sent[ed] with some show of reason that the industrious Jumel, the builder of a large fortune, the saving man, etc., etc., etc., ha[d] been the reverse of what he ha[d] been known to be in this country and that he [was] rushing headlong to the destruction of his wealth …”7 This picture is not inconsistent with Washington Irving’s 1824 statement that Eliza spoke about “Stephen Jumels [sic] being deranged.”8 From her perspective, Stephen was risking their future with unwise investments abroad.
She solicited advice from James Kent, “the most honest lawyer of the city.”9 Kent was the chief judge of New York’s Court of Chancery and a man known to be sympathetic to women threatened by the missteps of their male relatives.10 Case could not claim personal knowledge of Eliza’s conversation with Chancellor Kent, but he could guess at it: “Most certainly she must have confessed to him the conduct of Jumel at Paris, her attachment for that misled man, and suggested that it was necessary to place beyond his reach some of the remains of their large estate for their common maintenance in the future. Who would not be caught, and who would not take an interest in a woman who speaks on the subject and especially who speaks well?”11 Case added, “I know positively that it is with this language that she won over to her side Werckmeister,” the tenant of the 150 Broadway store who would play a crucial role in this drama.12
With Kent’s help, Eliza arranged matters so that Stephen would be unable to jeopardize their retirement by selling off their properties in the United States. What she did came down to six conveyances: deeds transferring parcels of real estate from one person to another. Acting in Stephen’s name—using a power of attorney he had given her to manage his affairs in New York state—she “sold” Mary the two houses downtown, the uptown mansion, the thirty-six-acre homestead lot, and an additional sixty-eight acres of farmland on Harlem Heights, in return for supposed payments totaling $45,000. Mary, in turn, conveyed the properties to Werckmeister, to hold in trust for Eliza. As the only beneficiary of the trusts, Eliza was given the right to manage all of the lands for her sole use and benefit, independent of Stephen or any future husband. The trusts would end at her death and the properties would descend to her heirs free and clear—“in fee simple,” in legal terminology.13 Additionally, Eliza transferred 233½ acres of farmland in Otsego and Schoharie counties directly to Mary, making the young woman a landowner in her own right.14
From a twenty-first-century perspective, the conveyances Eliza made, with the exception of the one to Mary, seem unnecessarily complicated. Why place the real estate in trust for herself rather than putting it in her own name? The answer was straightforward: the arrangement was necessitated by the legal status of married women in early nineteenth-century America. In the common-law tradition the United States had inherited from England, a husband and wife were treated in legal matters as a single person. A married woman’s property became her husband’s automatically. If Eliza had transferred Stephen’s real estate directly to herself, it would have remained his property, not hers. Creating a trust was the standard procedure used to permit a married woman to own assets separately from her husband.15
Because trusts could be used to hide property from creditors, they were scrutinized closely during bankruptcy proceedings and estate litigation.16 Eliza tried to prevent suspicions from arising in the future by indicating that Mary had paid $45,000 for the Jumel real estate before settling it on Eliza. But because Mary had no money of her own, the “sales” were conducted on paper only. The illusory transactions had a single purpose: ensuring that Stephen’s creditors and potential heirs would never be able to claim the lands. They were distanced from him through an outright (or apparently outright) sale, and then put in trust for Eliza (or, in the case of the last parcel, given permanently to Mary).
Eliza was never eager for her husband to spend money on his relatives, so her decision to disinherit them in favor of Mary and herself is unsurprising. “We need everything that remains to us for ourselves,” she had written to sixty-one-year-old Stephen in 1826.17 But it is disturbing that she made no provision for him, in case he happened to outlive her. Although Stephen was conscious of the need to protect their assets from creditors—in August 1826, he had even suggested that Eliza put the downtown houses in someone else’s name in order to safeguard their interests in them—there is no indication that he envisioned or desired this wholesale transfer of his most valuable properties to his wife.18 By the time he returned to the United States, he was left with nothing but farmland in Westchester County, some land in central New York, and around sixty-five acres on Harlem Heights. None of these lands yielded anything but very modest rents.
22
THE REUNION
Stephen arrived in the United States in July 1828 after a stormy, seven-week voyage from Le Havre. “There were eight priests who brought bad luck to the ship,” he told Lesparre. He had suffered as before from seasickness and only “went to the table four times to dine.” But he could still sympathize with fellow travelers who were even less fortunate: “Then there were 150 steerage passengers inside doing their cooking. Those who were sick went without food, but thanks to the Supreme Being, we arrived all in good health.”1
Stephen went immediately to the mansion on Harlem Heights: “Leaving the ship I jumped into a carriage, and one hour later I found an excellent dinner … You may think whether I reserved peaches and strawberries for my dessert.”2 Stephen said nothing to Lesparre about his reunion with Eliza, mentioning only that “Mrs. Jumel was in the city” when he reached New York. It is unclear whether she met the ship or if he discovered she was in Manhattan only when he arrived at their country home and found that he would be eating his first dinner on land without her.
His old friend, François Philippon, knew of the conveyances Eliza had made of Stephen’s lands and encouraged him to contest them. “I advised him very often to do so,” Philippon wrote in 1833; “he used always to promise me, but when it was necessary to take the proper steps, he always deferred it. At last I ceased speaking of it to him, assuming that he had some motive that he would not communicate to me.”3
Stephen may have worried that creditors would claim the properties, if they were placed once again in his name. When Eliza had consulted James Kent after her return from France, one of the matters they had discussed was a past business dealing that might have placed Stephen in financial jeopardy. Kent considered the risk minimal, Eliza had reported to her husband: “He tells me that if all the papers were destroyed, there is no danger, and since the property was not seized, and it is such a long time since the affair, that is proof that no one believes it …”4 She had followed this reassurance with advice that hinted at her own modus operandi for dealing with unpleasantness: “If you come back to New York and by chance anyone speaks to you about it, deny it flatly. Say that the whole yarn is false and an imposition: that you did not have any profits from the merchandise and that you only asked for the interest on your money, which you had lost as well as the capital, and that’s the whole truth.”5 In Eliza’s worldview, what you had done in the past mattered little; what mattered was what you could persuade people to believe.
In November 1828 she did make one change in what she had done, probably under Stephen’s direction. Most of his real estate would remain under her control during her lifetime, but he would receive the lifetime use of the mansion, downtown houses, and Harlem Heights farmlands if she predeceased him, subject to an annuity of six hundred dollars to Mary. After his death, however, all the properties would go to Mary or her heirs, as Eliza desired, rather than being shared with Stephen’s French relatives.6
Stephen may not have felt driven to battle with his wife for more. Philippon noted that, although he was “in very good health, he had not the same energy, the same moral faculties that I had known him possessed of in former years.”7 It may have been equally significant that he no longer needed money for mercantile investments. He had intended to go back into business after his return to the United States, but had become disillusioned. “The
re are so many swindlers,” he wrote to Lesparre.8 He had built his career in a world in which personal connections were all-important. Merchants had shared information for their mutual benefit. They had aided one another in difficult times and assisted newcomers to get a start. But times had changed and he had come to recognize that now it was each man for himself.9 “If they fail, they go into bankruptcy to line their pockets to start again,” he wrote. “That is the way in which business is conducted today … The more I look at it, the more disgusted I am; and therefore I am keeping quiet and living on my income, and unfortunately I am spending more than thirty thousand francs a year. I don’t see anybody. Mrs. Jumel has her carriage.”10
Four months after Stephen’s return to the United States, Eliza used ill health as an excuse to spend the winter in the South.11 In late November 1828, she sailed for Charleston on the ship Lafayette, accompanied by Mary and a few servants.12 She would not return until the end of April. “She left on account of a cold,” Stephen wrote to Lesparre in March 1829. “She wanted a warm climate; she has improved by it, but she is not quite cured.”13
They wrote each other during their separation, as they had always done. One of Stephen’s letters to Eliza is extant. Long and newsy, it suggests that the two had found a workable accommodation on the basis of shared household and agricultural concerns. “I see with pleasure that your health is getting better and better,” Stephen wrote courteously. He described the new icehouse he was building to keep their meat fresh: it would be 11 feet square and 12 to 14 feet high, with 3-foot-thick walls. There were excavations in progress as well: several men were blasting the rocks from around the chestnuts of “Mademoiselle Mary’s promenade,” probably for use in building the icehouse. He and the workmen were well; “we all have good appetites,” he reported to Eliza. They baked bread twice a week and cooked potatoes every day.
The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel Page 13