The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel

by Margaret A. Oppenheimer

  The resort offered occupations for every taste. Eliza and her family could learn about temperance, phrenology, “the inutility of animal food,” and even “the destructiveness of tight lacing.”1 They could marvel at demonstrations of “animal magnetism” (i.e., hypnotism); propel themselves in hand-cranked cars on a circular railway; and enjoy pleasure-boat rides on Saratoga Lake.2 On Sundays they could compare the sermons at half a dozen churches (after watching a conjurer evoke the supernatural on Saturday night—in an old chapel, no less!).3 They might even have their silhouettes cut by a traveling artist, as Eliza and Nelson did in 1843.

  During Eliza’s early years in the village, the theater on her property at Broadway and Caroline Street contributed to the cultural life of Saratoga. In the summer of 1833, managers Barrabino and La Burriss kept the playhouse open six nights a week “with an efficient company and a good orchestra.”4 Two years later a performance by “the great magician, Adrien,” launched the high season with a bang.5

  The artist John Vanderlyn’s Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles hung in the theater in the summer of 1839, while the usual gallery in which Vanderlyn displayed it was being rebuilt.6 The 360-degree view of the landscape and château featured Louis XVIII on a balcony overlooking the gardens. The sovereigns and generals who had restored him to the throne strolled on the greensward below.

  It is not clear if the immense canvas was used as a backdrop for performances or the theater served merely as an alternative exhibition space. But the choice of this particular panorama, rather than Vanderlyn’s views of Geneva or Amsterdam, accorded with Eliza’s revised self-presentation after her visits to France. As early as her first return to New York in 1817, she had begun to reinvent herself as an habitué of Parisian high society. By the late 1820s she was using the French form of her name in the United States—“Madame Jumel” rather than “Mrs. Jumel.”7 After her divorce from Aaron Burr, she readopted the French sobriquet, passing the remainder of her life as Madame Jumel, “widow” of the former vice president (with occasional, strategic reversions to “Mrs. Burr”). The members of her family addressed her affectionately as “Madam.”8

  As a major landowner in Saratoga, Eliza was a personality at the resort. Although she sold her Broadway and Caroline Street lot in 1841 (for two and a half times the price she had paid for it), she retained 217½ acres of farmland acquired in 1836.9 Her extensive property holdings allowed her to enjoy a prestige in Saratoga denied her by the Manhattan elite. An Englishman who visited the village in 1838 commented on the permeability of class barriers in the village:

  Hundreds who in their own towns could not find admission into the circles of fashionable society there—for the rich and leading families of America are quite as exclusive in their coteries as the aristocracy of England—come to Saratoga, where, at Congress Hall or the United States [Hotel], by the moderate payment of two dollars a day, they may be seated at the same table, and often side by side, with the first families of the country; promenade in the same piazza, lounge on the sofas in the same drawing-room, and dance in the same quadrille with the most fashionable beaux and belles of the land: and thus, for the week or month they may stay at Saratoga, they enjoy all the advantages which their position would make inaccessible to them at home.10

  Eliza and her family stayed at the United States, which was favored by “the rich mercantile classes”—and by Joseph Bonaparte as well.11 At night the hotel hosted balls and hops, where as many as “three cotillions, of twelve couple [sic] each, [were] danced at the same time.”12 Clerics and invalids favored the respectable Union Hall, while the Congress Hall hosted visitors who prided themselves on birth rather than money.13 Striving clerks and upwardly mobile grocers headed for the Pavilion, “more miscellaneous in its company.” Innumerable boardinghouses welcomed travelers of modest means.14

  Social tensions were never far beneath the surface in Saratoga, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the mixing of classes in public spaces. A visiting Swede remarked that he had heard “on various occasions, individuals boarding at the fashionable Congress Hall speak of those who had taken up their quarters at the Union, or United States Hotel, in a way which clearly indicated their own presumed superiority in point of rank.”15 Visitors who challenged class distinctions risked derision, as an incident that involved Eliza illustrates.

  The event took place in 1846. In August she had arrived in Saratoga with an unusually elegant equipage: “a turn out consisting of four grey horses and a barouche with a seat behind.” She had ridden out several times “with her footman seated behind the carriage,” and “no one … took any notice of it.” But on August 26 she had the coach await her in front of the United States Hotel for an hour. A black footman was seated in the jump seat and two postilions, also black, were mounted on the left-hand horses to guide the vehicle. They were “dressed in livery with broad gold band[s] around their hats.”16

  A “dense crowd had collected” before she exited the hotel for “an afternoon excursion,” accompanied by ten-year-old Eliza Chase and six-year-old William.17 The reason for onlookers’ excitement became clear almost immediately, as the Alexandria (Virginia) Gazette reported. “She had no sooner started off in her carriage, and at the very instant she passed the corner of the hotel, than she encountered another turn out exactly like her own, with the exception that it had white postilions and footmen”—dressed “in a ragged livery,” according to another observer.18 The horses “were a shade lighter” than hers, the Gazette reported, and the carriage’s occupant “a shade darker, he being nothing more nor less than the Negro Tom Campbell, and away they both went in gallant style amid a deafening cheer from the assembled multitude.”19

  The two dueling carriages raced down the street:

  On reaching Congress Spring, the Negro’s carriage had distanced the Madam’s. At this point Madam Jumell’s [sic] carriage turned around, and up she came again. But Black Tom was not to be outgeneraled in that manner. His postilions wheeled his carriage around in a masterly style, and away he went up Broadway again … standing erect in his open carriage, displaying a shining rope of ivory from ear to ear, and as he passed the different hotels, gracefully acknowledging cheers he received by bowing to the assembled multitude, or holding his beaver [hat] in one hand, while with a white handkerchief in the other he saluted the bystanders on the sidewalks. In this manner they drove up Broadway, and turned down Church Street. About one hour afterwards they were seen coming down Congress Street, the horses attached to both carriages neck and neck. Turning the corner they both came up side [by] side to the hotel; Black Tom’s postilions having managed to get their carriage on the inside, Madam Jumell was compelled to drive around to the side door.20

  The affair “created a great excitement” in town.21 Eliza’s supporters called the incident “a flagrant insult” to her, a “disgraceful scene,” and an “outrage to an aged and unprotected Female.”22 She is “a harmless person,” the Springfield (Massachusetts) Gazette declared, “and had done nothing to provoke such an insult.”23

  Her critics held “to a very different opinion.”24 A Saratogian, writing in 1881, said that Eliza “had offended some persons who had worked on her property, and they got up this burlesque to ridicule her in revenge.”25 The explanation is plausible, given her history of conflicts with tenants and employees, as well as the identity of one of the participants in the charade. Thomas Campbell, the passenger in the “phantastic Vehicle which was driven after” her, worked for Jacobus Baryhyte, whose land was adjacent to one of Eliza’s farms.26 Campbell could have labored on Eliza’s property as well. Possibly he hatched the plot or, alternatively, acted on someone else’s behalf, as was suggested by the Alexandria Gazette: “Several gentlemen have been employed by Madam Jumell [sic] to ferret out the persons who furnished the Negro with the money to hire the horses, and paid him and his postilions for their services.”27 The latter scenario does not rule out the possibility that Campbell was among those offended by t
he original insult.

  An anonymous contributor to the Bellows Falls (Vermont) Gazette explained the episode not as the outgrowth of a private quarrel but as an expression of working-class outrage against Eliza. “The B-hoys”—the term referred to gangs of rowdy young men, often recent immigrants from Ireland—“had some fine sport here with Madame Jumel,” the correspondent wrote. “She came to Saratoga, took rooms at the United States Hotel, and paraded the streets in ‘coach and four,’ attended by three servants in livery. The feelings of the people were outraged at such an impudent exhibition of this paragon of corruption, and they manifested their indignation by getting up a counter establishment, with a Negro inside, which followed her carriage about the streets.”28 The writer implied that Eliza was no better than a prostitute and that she was affecting airs unbecoming to her station. The Alexandria Gazette had hinted at similar themes, discernible in the double meaning of the phrase “the Negro’s carriage had distanced the Madam’s,” and the light manner in which the cruel behavior was treated.29

  The reading of Eliza as a woman who had made a living on her back was made explicit in the second paragraph of the story in the Bellows Falls Gazette, in which she was described as “the widow of the notorious Aaron Burr.” The author claimed that she

  married Jumel, after living with him in a state of concubinage; but a quarrel arising between them, they separated, dividing Jumel’s large fortune between them. She afterwards went through the same course of profligacy with Aaron Burr, and at his decease was the wife of that vicious but talented man. Jumel lost his property in France, and returned to this country penniless. He sought out his former wife, who took him into her family, and supported him through life, as a sort of ‘upper servant.’ At the decease of Burr, she assumed the name of Jumel, and is now living upon the fortune acquired by her first marriage.30

  Factually, there is little to praise in this summary. The chronology is jumbled; Eliza’s relationship with Stephen is distorted; and she is turned into Burr’s mistress, his reputation tainting hers. But it gives a sense for what must have been whispered salaciously behind her back. The only bright spot was that the writer swallowed Eliza’s ongoing fib of being Burr’s widow rather than his divorced wife.

  Eliza’s four-horse carriage and servants in livery would have been a flashpoint even if her character had not been in question. The gulf between the rich and the poor was widening in the mid-nineteenth century, and increasingly the lower classes resented the elite.31 In 1849 the Home Journal cautioned readers that “wealth, in a republic, should be mindful where its luxuries offend.”32 Although most middle-class families had a young servant or two to help with the manual labor of running a home in an era before the advent of modern appliances, liveried black servants were employed rarely by the 1840s.33 In New York they were utilized only by wealthy residents or visiting plantation owners from the South.34 Their purpose was to “emphasize the social position of employers.”35

  With her use of a liveried footman and postilions rather than a simply dressed coachman, Eliza was aping the modes of a class to which she was not born—a class that was facing mounting hostility for its excesses. Many appreciated her comeuppance. At one and the same time, she had infuriated the elites who disdained social climbers and the disadvantaged who hated the affectations of the elite.

  Eliza stood up to her hecklers. She rode out again the next day, “drawn by her four greys with their mounted postilions” and “provide[d] … with a six-barreled revolving pistol.”36 Or so said the Alexandria Gazette. But undoubtedly the firearm was a journalistic flourish. Eliza outfaced her critics through strength of character, refusing to be driven away by detractors.

  Over the years, she continued to embellish her image through canny self-presentation, adjusting facts as necessary. In 1850 she or a family member slipped a writer for the Saratoga Whig a scintillating description of a costume she planned to wear to a ball at the United States Hotel:

  Mad[ame] Jumel will, on this occasion, personate the Duchess of Orléans—dress white lace—diadem of diamonds—headdress of diamonds, the same owned and used by Josephine, the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, bequeathed to her niece, and sold to Mons[ieur] Jumel for $25,000. Her watch is the same that was purchased after the Duchess de Berry had offered $2,000 for it. Besides these, her dress will be spangled with diamonds to the amount of upward of $3,000.37

  Eliza being Eliza, she had inflated the value of the jewels—her diamonds were valued at $5,500 dollars, not $25,000, in 1872.38 Almost certainly she had invented their distinguished provenance as well.39

  A pleasing puff piece, also focused on her attendance at the ball, gives us a sense for how she presented herself to others at the age of seventy-five. After signaling out Madame Jumel among “the distinguished individuals arrived for the Fancy Dress Ball,” the anonymous author commenced with compliments:

  A fashionable acquaintance of good authority and most familiar with the history of this distinguished lady, informs us that neither lapse of time, nor a multiplicity of cares attended upon administering her immense estate, impairs in the least her strong mental vigor and extraordinary [sic] charming conversational powers … For nine years she was the only lady admitted at the Court of France, except the nobility, and none in France except these, during that time, could excel her in the value and magnificence of her apparel.40

  “As much as ever determined not to be outshone,” she would be costumed in white lace in her personification of the Duchess of Orléans, while “Miss Eliza, her niece,” remarked last season “as a pretty, happy, sprightly, and fawnlike lass,” would dress as a flower girl “in plain white muslin, with tucks—ornamented with roses—a gypsy hat with roses—apron decorated with pink—a little basket of flowers upon her arm.”41

  “Duchess” and “flower girl” attended the event, but Eliza could never escape malicious tongues entirely. In early October, nearly two months after the masquerade, an agricultural journal in Massachusetts noted briefly: “At the late Saratoga Ball, Madame Jumel, in the character of the Duchess d’Orléans, wore $25,000 worth of diamonds, it is stated. ‘This,’ says a croaker, ‘rendered the lady the biggest toad in the puddle!’”42

  33

  ELIZA BURR ABROAD

  In Europe, where few knew her, Eliza could reinvent herself more fully. After Stephen’s death, she returned to France three or four times, traveling as Mrs. Eliza Burr. She reveled in the prestige of being the “widow” of a vice president. According to Eliza Chase, she said often, “You know I can take that name if I choose.”1 With a new identity to give her status, “that horrible country”—as she had once called France—felt more welcoming.

  Her first overseas voyage as a widow may have taken place in 1841. On October 9 she applied for a passport, “being about to proceed to Europe.” The document, duly granted two days later to “Mrs. Eliza Burr,” informs us that she was still a brunette at sixty-six—perhaps she had recourse to the dye pot—and looked young enough that her age was given as fifty years.2 Whether she utilized the passport is unknown, but in early October she was staying at Astor House, New York’s most luxurious hotel, possibly in preparation for departure.3 There she achieved an introduction to the prince de Joinville, third son of King Louis-Philippe, France’s reigning monarch.4

  In the winter of 1850, she was surely abroad, although the surviving documentation is meager. A two-page letter from her that surfaced in 1922 contained the following lines: “You would take me to be a scarecrow. I long to return to America to find tranquility. My life is almost worn out.”5 The dealer offering the document provided no other details of its contents, but the little information provided is consistent with Eliza’s habits. She traveled when she was ill, whether physically or emotionally, returning home refreshed in spirit.

  Eliza took great enjoyment in an eight-month trip to England, France, Italy, and Scotland in the winter of 1851 to ’52, in spite of a “severe illness” that marred part of the journey.6 Her fifteen-year-old
great-niece accompanied her. “Alas!” she informed Nelson in a letter, “I shall have to spend money very freely for Eliza—court dresses will be very costly.” But she did not truly regret the expense: they expected to enjoy themselves more in Paris “than in all the other cities” they planned to visit, including Naples, Venice, and Rome.7 Indeed, in Paris “Prince Louis”—probably Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, France’s elected “Prince-President,” who would soon mount the throne as Napoleon III—obtained tickets for them to attend the splendid ceremony of the Distribution of the Eagles to the Army.8 The event attracted tens of thousands of spectators to the Champs de Mars, as Eliza Chase reported to her father.9 Also in Paris, Mrs. Burr sat for a portrait drawing.10 She had it lithographed, adding a suitable caption: “MADAM WIDOW OF THE LATE AARON BURR, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, FORMERLY MADAM JUMEL.”11 Her name was given typographical parity with Burr’s.12 Other highlights of the trip included, in Italy, attendance at the balls of Prince Alessandro Torlonia, the so-called Roman Rothschild; and in Edinburgh, visits to Holyrood Palace and the monument to Sir Walter Scott.13

  Eliza took pleasure in smaller matters as well. She told Nelson proudly of a stratagem she had employed to secure a comfortable journey from southern France to Nice:

  When we arrived in Marseilles, we went to take our passage before the steamship sailed, when to my great surprise, they informed me that all the berths were taken, and not another person could be accommodated, but that we could wait till the next day and get a berth to ourselves. I told them I must go in this steamer, if I have [sic] to sleep on the planks; his answer was, “Do as you please, for we have no accommodation.” Eliza strove to dissuade me, but to no purpose. I paid my money and on board we went. The first thing I did was to call on the captain, and in a very low tone I addressed him: “Sir, I have been looking for a berth; you would permit a President’s wife to sleep on the planks?”14