The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel

by Margaret A. Oppenheimer

  Ultimately Guendet collected—but only because Eliza valued spiting Madelaine more than resisting Guendet. Since late 1839, when Madelaine had received her quarter share of Stephen’s estate, Eliza had collected additional funds that the estate was due. However, she hadn’t given Stephen’s sister her cut, according to a petition Madelaine addressed to the chancellor in September 1840. Eliza managed to stall this newest demand for nearly two years, before finding a cunning way to deny it. Possibly she concocted the solution in collaboration with her former adversary, Charles O’Conor, whom she hired as her counsel. First Eliza settled with Guendet for $2,100. Then she announced that she had collected an additional $1,542.35 due to the estate, but had spent it all on the settlement with Guendet.18 Madelaine, disappointed, died in 1844.19 Eliza’s battle with Stephen’s family ended with her.

  As late as 1846, however, Eliza was still pursuing her late husband’s assets in the United States. Presenting herself as an impecunious widow, she asked for payment for silver and church vestments that Stephen had purchased for Saint Patrick’s Cathedral thirty years before.20 Bishop Fenwick of Boston, who had served in New York early in his career and remembered the items Stephen had sent from Paris, supported Eliza’s quest for reimbursement. “Madame Jumel is now a widow, and it appears she stands greatly in need of the money—surely under the circumstances not a moments [sic] further delay ought to be suffered,” he wrote to Bishop Hughes of New York.21

  It is hard to believe that Eliza was cash-strapped. In 1839 the City of New York had taken a strip of land running through her acreage on Harlem Heights for the building of the Croton Aqueduct, which would supply clean water to Manhattan. She was paid $11,524, which has the purchasing power of $298,000 today.22 But by the mid-1840s she had new demands on her purse—personified by two young children.

  31

  A SECOND FAMILY

  It took time for Mary and Nelson to build their family. After a year of marriage, there had been the stillborn child: in the frost of winter, in the dark year after Stephen’s death, a tiny shoot of new life had withered away. Another child slipped out of the world too, so quietly and unobtrusively that only the barest mention of its existence remains.1

  But to Eliza’s joy, two infants arrived and thrived. Her namesake, Eliza Jumel Chase, entered the world on March 25, 1836. She was born, it was said, at the Jumel mansion.2 A brother, William Inglis Chase, joined the family on August 17, 1840, when Mary was nearly thirty-nine years old.3

  The young family lived in rented quarters in New York in the mid-1830s and then in Hoboken from 1837.4 According to Nelson, Eliza lived with them some of the time and other times, chiefly “in winter, when the ice made it difficult to cross the river,” occupied furnished lodgings in Manhattan.5 She rented out the mansion, returning to it whenever tenants departed.

  Leases and legal papers help us reconstruct the financial dealings that allowed her to support herself and assist Nelson and Mary in the years after her divorce from Aaron Burr. Although the female businesswoman is virtually absent from nineteenth-century American literature—perhaps because pecuniary pursuits would have seemed unfeminine—throughout the era women of all classes were deeply involved in the capitalist economy. Mostly barred by their gender from active involvement in the stock market, manufacturing, or shipping, and professions such as law and medicine, women found investment opportunities as mortgage holders and moneylenders, collecting interest payments that provided a regular income. They were prominent among the ranks of the landlords as well, renting out rooms in homes or boardinghouses they occupied or leasing out commercial properties or residences they owned. Female investors—Eliza among them—proved to be as quick as their male peers to foreclose or prosecute if rent, mortgage, or loan payments were not made.6

  The majority of Eliza’s income came from renting out the buildings on the lot at the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street that she and Stephen had purchased in 1812. In 1835 she had the three-story Liberty Street house torn down and replaced with two attached, five-story buildings, 71 and 73 Liberty Street.7 She replaced the three-story building at 150 Broadway with a five-story structure as well.8 Given the timing of the rebuilding campaign—just before Eliza was forced to begin settling Stephen’s estate—there may have been cash reserves in the mansion at the time of his death that she wanted to spend before an inventory was taken.

  The rents from the properties in lower Manhattan totaled approximately $5,500 per year by the mid-century point.9 An observation made by Sidney George Fisher of Philadelphia helps put the buying power of this sum in perspective. In 1842 he found that his annual income of under $3,000 was adequate to supply him with “a comfortable house—servants, a good table—wine—of course—books—‘country quarters,’—a plentiful wardrobe—[and] the ability to exercise hospitality.”10 At the other end of the spectrum, $600 was an adequate annual budget for a working-class family of four in New York City as late as 1853, with $100 allocated for the year’s rent and $273 for groceries.11 In such an economy, Eliza’s rental income from the downtown properties made her a wealthy woman.

  Her real estate in northern Manhattan was less consistently profitable. A Mr. Pell occupied the mansion and homestead lot for a year or two in the second half of the 1830s.12 Then Eliza leased out the property in April 1838 for one thousand dollars a year, but evicted the tenant within a year for nonpayment of rent.13 By April 1842 the best deal that she could arrange was a profit-sharing agreement with a farmer. He received the use of the mansion, garden, and fruit trees in return for half of the money he could earn selling the produce. The agreement specified that Eliza was allowed to retain fruit and vegetables for her family.14 When she and the Chases were not living at the mansion, they had fresh vegetables and firewood sent to them from Harlem Heights. This would have been a substantive contribution to the household economy in an era when food could consume a quarter or more of an average family’s budget.15

  In addition to the 36-acre homestead lot, Eliza owned 136 acres of farmland, also in upper Manhattan. Although the lands were rocky and not very fertile, she found ways to profit from them nevertheless. The history of a forty-acre parcel extending between the Kings-bridge Road and the Hudson River is instructive in this regard. The Jumels had sold it to their neighbor John R. Murray for $5,495 before leaving for France.16 When Murray failed to make the required payments, they foreclosed and reclaimed the land.17 In May 1835 Eliza sold it again, this time for nearly four times the sum negotiated with Murray. Two New York City merchants agreed to pay five thousand dollars upfront, another five thousand within a year, and an additional ten thousand within two years. When the buyers did not produce the second installment of the purchase price, Eliza foreclosed. She made five thousand dollars on the transaction, since she had the right to retain the down payment.18

  She continued to derive income from the repossessed lot. In 1847 she gave the Hudson River Railroad Company the right to run its tracks through the western edge of the acreage for a payment of eight hundred dollars.19 Then in 1850 she sold the parcel to Ambrose C. Kingsland, a wealthy merchant and future mayor of New York. She demanded the same twenty thousand dollars she had asked in 1835.20 With the neighborhood, now served by the railroad, ripe for development, the forty acres constituted a good investment for Kingsland. This time the property did not return to her hands.

  In contrast to the forty-acre parcel, a ninety-six-acre lot north of the mansion yielded little but trouble and aggravation.21 Some years Eliza did not collect any rent; instead, she would give the use of the land to a tenant who would be responsible for maintaining the fences and giving her half the profits from any livestock pastured on the plot.22

  She went to court more than once to pursue tenants who failed to fulfill their side of the bargain.23 A lease she negotiated in 1838 with a farmer, Philip A. Levy, came to a particularly dramatic end. Levy rented the property—which included a house, cider mill, apple trees, meadows, and arable land—for a modest two hundred do
llars per year. Eliza loaned him some of her cattle—probably he was permitted to sell milk and butter in exchange for pasturing them—and he agreed to keep the fences and buildings in good repair.24

  The situation soured quickly. In 1840 Eliza filed suit against Levy for failing to return the animals when she asked for them: “four English milch cows and four calves … property of the said plaintiff of great value, to wit, of the value of two hundred dollars.”25 Levy sued Eliza in return. He had been leasing a barn from her and claimed she hadn’t paid him for storing her carriage in it. She owed him some fifty dollars, he said, at the agreed-upon rate of two dollars per month.26

  At that point Eliza unleashed a defense that, on the face of it, seems truly bizarre. The suit should be dismissed, she argued, because the plaintiff, Levy, was a married woman rather than a man, and a married woman couldn’t file a lawsuit in her own name. Odd as it seems, this argument was actually a variant on a legal tactic used by men wanting to weasel out of agreements with women. In common law a wife did not exist legally apart from her husband and could not contract with anyone. Therefore, if a married woman negotiating an agreement did not have her husband act for her or have a power of attorney designating her as his agent, a man could claim that the provisions of the resulting compact were unenforceable. For example, in 1858, when a male New Yorker was sued for failing to pay rent to a woman, he didn’t dispute the fact that the money was due, but argued that their contract was invalid because of her married status.27

  Eliza, then, was not unusual in making gender a bar to a lawsuit, but the way in which she did it—claiming that an apparently male plaintiff was female—was unprecedented. Even more remarkably, she produced a respectable witness to testify for her: the Rev. John Power, vicar general of the Roman Catholic Church of the Diocese of New York.28

  On July 3, 1840, Power stood in a Manhattan courtroom. How long had he known Levy? he was asked. He had been acquainted with her for about twelve years, the priest replied. Initially Levy had come to his house requesting to be married to a man named Anthony Bolla. “Levy gave her name as Jane or Jean,” Power testified, “which [one], he did not recollect,” but “said Levy was dressed in men’s apparel.” Nevertheless, “he accordingly married them [and] has seen said Levy frequently since.” Eliza’s lawyer testified that Levy and Bolla “reside[d] together.”

  On cross-examination, Power admitted “that he did not put down the marriage in his register” and did not know for sure whether Levy was a man or a woman. There his statement ended.29

  What are we to make of this curious testimony? Was Levy a cross-dresser, a woman who dressed as a man? Or was he a man, perhaps with androgynous features? The court records are silent. Nelson Chase claimed years later that “the gender of this person was a great deal in doubt in the neighborhood. She dressed as a man, but in fact was a woman. Madame Jumel, in speaking of her, always called her ‘it.’”30

  If Nelson was telling the truth, neighborhood gossip about Levy—with respect to his/her gender or relationship with Bolla—could have inspired the unlikely defense Eliza chose. That said, Nelson is not always a reliable witness. At the time he spoke these lines, he was involved in litigation in which it would have been beneficial to portray Eliza as perfectly rational until the last six years of her life. Admitting that she had trumped up an outlandish story years earlier would hardly have supported his case.

  The question of Nelson’s veracity aside, the whole affair is reminiscent of the defense Eliza concocted during the fight over Stephen’s estate. There is the same tinge of melodrama—this time with a cross-dressing protagonist rather than a changeling—and the same readiness to contest a case by whatever means possible. When Eliza thought she was justified, she would adjust the facts to suit herself and fight even the most unpromising lawsuit to the end.

  In all events, her attempt to have the case dismissed on gender grounds failed: Levy’s lawyer pointed out that she had referred to his client as a man in her previous lawsuit against him. Then the suit over the storage fees was tried before a jury, which decided in Levy’s favor. Eliza appealed—probably to delay payment of the judgment—but failed to show up or send a lawyer to represent her when the case was reheard. She must have known that her chances of winning were slim. Levy won a judgment of $98.95 against her—just under the $99.38 she had been awarded in her suit against him.31

  Eliza was not unique among businesswomen in resorting to the legal system to pursue money she was owed. A female litigant was involved in approximately 15 percent of the cases brought before New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan between 1845 and 1875.32 Virtually all of those suits were clashes over money.33 Nevertheless, the sheer number of lawsuits in which Eliza was involved suggests that she could be a difficult employer and landlord. For example, she was sued by a laborer named Antoine Soili, who claimed that she owed him eight months’ unpaid wages at a rate of eight dollars per month. He demanded sixty-four dollars plus his legal costs, but agreed to take thirty dollars in settlement of the suit.34 The fact that the normally combative Eliza offered a settlement suggests that there was some truth to his claim.

  In a more disturbing case, a youth named John Rogers, who probably had worked for her as a house servant or farm laborer, accused her of beating him. In the ritualized words of the complaint, she “with force and arms, to wit with swords, staves, ropes, hands and feet, made an assault upon the said John Rogers and did then and there beat, wound and ill treat him so that his life was greatly despaired of.” Through his “next friend” (the term refers to a person who represents a minor in legal proceedings), Rogers demanded damages of one hundred dollars.35

  Exactly what Eliza did to him—whipped him? beat him with a cane?—is unexplained. She was protective of her public image and vulnerable to any perceived loss of dignity. If Rogers had spoken to her insolently, or she had seen him mocking her to a fellow servant, it is possible to imagine her reacting with violence.

  She was nearly sixty-nine years old at the time of the incident, and he must have exceeded her in physical strength. But it is easy to understand why he did not respond to the attack with force. If he had fought back and injured her, the consequences could have been severe. Because of the age difference—and the probable difference in social class as well—it would have been difficult for him to convince a jury that he was the injured party. It was safer to pursue his assailant through the courts.

  Eliza pleaded not guilty, but then withdrew the plea and agreed to pay thirty dollars to Rogers in damages.36 The concession suggests that she was at least partially at fault.

  Although Eliza could be a difficult woman, she was deeply devoted to the members of her family, especially Mary and young Eliza and William Chase. Tragically, she would outlive her adopted daughter. Mary suffered from consumption—tuberculosis, as we would call it today—and by 1843 her condition was grave. On May 1, the Chases moved from Hoboken to Manhattan’s West Nineteenth Street to be closer to Francis Berger, the family physician.37 They had barely arrived when the end came. Mary died on May 5, 1843, her husband and her half sister Eliza Jones Tranchell at her bedside.38 She was only forty-two years old.

  Eliza did not attend the funeral ceremony. “She had a constitutional difficulty in going to funerals,” Nelson said; she “didn’t like them.” But he offered a further explanation as well: “She was over-borne with grief at the loss of my wife.” She “took to her bed and remained there for one week, if not longer. I went to her house and saw her when in that condition and knew the reason; that was the reason she didn’t come to the funeral.”39

  It’s hard to imagine that Eliza did not grieve profoundly. Mary had been a daughter to her; had called her “Mama,” while Maria Jones was simply “Mother.”40 She had grown from childhood to maturity under Eliza’s eye. She had been her constant companion whenever Eliza traveled, at least until her marriage, which Eliza had arranged. More often than not, the two had shared a home, even after Nelson had entered the family. She was
the person that Eliza had designated as her heir: her niece and at the same time her dearly loved daughter.

  Mary was buried at fashionable Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.41 Because the inscription on the flat top of the sarcophagus has worn away, how Eliza and Nelson memorialized her is lost to time. But Eliza’s actions proved her devotion. At the age of sixty-eight she took on the responsibility of raising Mary’s two young children.

  According to Nelson, Eliza welcomed seven-year-old Eliza Chase into the Jumel mansion first. She “had charge of her and supported and maintained and educated her until her marriage.”42 William, not quite three when his mother died, soon joined the household as well: “My son, who was a little bit of an infant at the time of the death of his mother, after some little short time was also taken by Madam and she kept him until the year 1859 in her charge; reared him up, sent him to school, maintained and supported him as she had done my daughter.”43 Nelson visited his children once or twice a week but lived in downtown Manhattan to be near his office until 1848.44 Even after he moved uptown to the mansion, it was Eliza who saw to their upbringing.

  She sent young Eliza to “Mrs. Haines’”—probably a dame school in the neighborhood—and then, when the girl was older, to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a girls’ school in upper Manhattan.45 The details of William’s early education are lost, but he was attending a boarding school by the time he was eleven.46 Both children accompanied Eliza to Saratoga each summer.47 Technically they were her great-niece and great-nephew, but she treated them as her grandchildren.

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  MADAME JUMEL

  During much of the year, Eliza and the children led a quiet life at the mansion. But she arranged periodically for a change of scene. First with Mary and Nelson, and then with Nelson and the children, she spent part of every summer in Saratoga Springs.