The Life of Eliza Jumel
Eliza Jumel and Her Adopted Children
|
Eliza Jumel was born Eliza “Betsey” Bowen in a Providence, Rhode Island brothel, to Phebe Kelley Bowen on April 7, 1775. Her mother’s madam was a free Black woman, and Eliza grew up “in the life.” The brothel, located in Providence’s “old gaol,” so outraged the citizens of that town that a mob tore it down with their bare hands, despite the presence inside of the “girls,” the madam, and Phebe, with her daughters Betsey and Polly. After being expelled from Providence, the family lived in a hovel outside of town selling “yerbs and greens,” gathered from roadsides and water-courses. As a girl, Betsey sold herbs in the streets, and in 1794, upon coming of sufficient age to join the family business, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, George Washington Bowen, who would grow up to bear an uncanny resemblance to his namesake. When the seventeen-year-old mother left her two-month-old son behind in Providence, Betsey Bowen was illiterate. Upon her reappearance in New York City as Eliza Bowen, she both read and wrote in French and English. After a turn at running a “boarding house,” and another on the stage as what today we would call an “extra,” she gained the reputation as “Manhattan’s greatest beauty.” Eliza Bowen kept her past a secret, romantically claiming to have been born on the high seas to a French naval officer and his aristocratic English wife. Soon she met French merchant Stephen Jumel. Twenty-five years her senior, Jumel’s fortune came from smuggling fine wines and spirits through Thomas Jefferson’s embargo. She lived “in sin” with Jumel for four years, until, fearing abandonment, she feigned illness, and, in a deathbed seduction scene straight out of a romance novel, Jumel ceded to her “last request” to make their union legitimate. As soon as the deal was sealed, Eliza was up, the illness – vanished. Her marriage to Stephen Jumel in 1804 was an attempt to gain social standing, but she was repeatedly rejected by New York society, who knew of her chequered past. In 1810, looking for a country retreat from their downtown home near the Battery, Stephen and Eliza Jumel purchased the Morris house on Harlem’s Heights. Built by Roger Morris, a Royalist to the British Crown, the house was abandoned by the Morris Family, who fled the United States when New York began to heat up with the stirrings of Revolutionary War. Subsequently, it quartered General George Washington during the Battle of Harlem Heights, from whence he commanded his troops. It also took a brief turn as an inn, and, in the early days of the US Government, was a gathering place for many of the “Founding Fathers.” Recognizing the historic importance of the house, upon purchase the Jumels restored it to the way it had looked in 1776, when it served as Washington’s headquarters. Traveling to Bordeaux, France in 1815, the Jumels entered the harbor through the British blockade to find themselves in the unique position of offering Napoleon Bonaparte safe passage to America after his defeat at Waterloo. Although Napoleon declined the offer, Eliza gained the social acceptance she craved as a Bonapartist sympathizer, but in France her stance proved controversial. Madame Eliza Jumel’s flamboyant lifestyle, opinions and actions brought about her arrest in 1816. She was asked to leave the country by King Louis XVIII, and was taken under military escort by the Royal Guard to one of Jumel‘s ships in the harbor. Stephen Jumel stayed in France as his marriage deteriorated. Eliza returned to New York with Stephen Jumel’s power of attorney as a “femme sole,” an independent woman’s status, which, under the law, entitled her to function as if she were unmarried. Coverture was a legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband, in accordance with the wife's legal status of femme covert. An unmarried woman, a femme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. Madame Jumel also returned to New York with over 200 old master paintings, which she arranged to have exhibited at the American Academy of Fine Arts, curated by John Trumbull. It was an audacious event in American cultural history, particularly because as a woman she was stepping into a male-dominated elitist world of art, taste and public display, as a “collector”. The decorative arts alone were thought an appropriate venue for the creative interests of women, as they were personal, but Diane Sachko Macleod wrote, “Jumel’s proprietorship of an impressive art collection, combined with her involvement in commercial activities that had previously been the exclusive preserve of male domains, put those tenets to the test.” Returning to New York, Eliza sold off Stephen's business holdings. With great business acumen, she sidestepped the constraints of coverture, turning instead to the law of equity, formulating a trust in favor of her niece Mary, who lived with the Jumels as a daughter. Eliza transferred all of Jumel’s real estate and other holdings into the name of her adopted niece as a safeguard against creditors. Through power of attorney, Madame Eliza Jumel entitled herself to a life estate that afforded her all profit and control of the entire Jumel estate. Through her financial prowess, Eliza bought and sold properties, tripling the Jumel fortune. Left behind in France, Stephen Jumel made poor financial decisions, and physically and financially declined. Elderly and destitute, he returned to New York in 1827, where he had to depend upon his wife’s compassion. In 1832, Stephen Jumel died in an accident, described as having “fallen on his pitchfork” off of a hay wagon. Eliza was suspected as complicit. Stephen Jumel was found dead the next morning, having died from loss of blood. Fourteen months after her husband's death, Eliza Jumel married the controversial former United States Vice President Aaron Burr. She married to increase her stature; he married for access to her fortune. The life estate, and transfer instruments which Eliza has enacted in 1817, still in place, proved to be a source of frustration to Aaron Burr as he attempted to access funds during their brief marriage. Burr squandered money with alarming rapacity. Eliza filed for divorce in 1834, utilizing the suspicion of adultery as cause—an action that prompted one historian to marvel, “Nothing more vividly revealed her business ability than the efficiency with which she got rid of Burr.” The divorce was granted on September 14, 1836, the day of Burr's death. Madame Jumel lived the rest of her life in the mansion, where her increasing eccentricities gained her notoriety throughout the countryside. She died there in 1865 at the age of 90. The ensuing seventeen-year battle over her fortune, with the myths and rumors surrounding her name and legacy, have obscured our knowledge of this extraordinary woman. Suffice it to say, she was a woman who dared, uncompromisingly, to be herself: sexual, smart, business savvy and eccentric, long before American society would begin to recognize a woman’s right to political, social and sexual self-agency. Eliza Jumel is buried at the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in northern Manhattan. _________________________ Shelton, William. The Jumel Mansion, Houghton Mifflin, NY, 1906. Sachko-Macleod, Dianne. Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940, University of California Press, Berkley, CA, 2008. Huey & Thometz. The Loves of Aaron Burr: Portraits in Corsetry & Binding, House of Execution, 2013. |
|---|