The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (10 page)

In later years the Jumels would socialize with the Cubières family in France, suggesting that Stephen had been on friendly terms with Nicholas Olive in New York and stayed in contact with Olive's widow, the future marquise de Cubières. Thus a tiny nugget of truth was buried beneath the legends. Another kernel of fact underlies the story of the house in Bloomingdale that Eliza and Stephen supposedly inhabited. In fact, they did own land in Bloomingdale briefly,
but didn't purchase the six-acre property until 1811, never lived on it themselves, and sold it in 1813.
¹⁷

With Mott's romantic stories removed from the picture, Eliza's life on a day-to-day basis remains shadowy. Only Stephen's business accounts and not the household accounts have survived, and therefore the staffing of the house is unclear, but it is probable that the Jumels had servants who did the cooking and cleaning. At a minimum they employed a coachman by 1812.
¹⁸
Eliza and her adopted daughter could drive out together, and she and Stephen could take the carriage on formal occasions. Dressed in her best, she might wear the diamond earrings and pin her husband purchased for her in 1809.
¹⁹

If a new dress was needed, Eliza had a mantua maker visit her home to take her measurements and sew the gown, the typical practice among middle-class women.
²⁰
On Sundays she would attend church, but perhaps not with her husband and daughter. Unlike her step siblings, Mary was never baptized in the Episcopal Church, suggesting that Stephen preferred that his adoptive daughter share his religious affiliation. By 1812 he was renting a pew at the Catholic Church of Saint Peter the Apostle.
²¹

Eliza would say many years later that her favorite occupation was reading.
²²
Traces of this interest survive in a handful of books from this period that list her as a subscriber (the publication of books in the early nineteenth century was often funded by collecting subscriptions in advance). She appeared on a long roll of men and women (headed by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams) who subscribed to Donald Fraser's
Compendium of the History of All Nations
, which traced the rise and fall of “empires, kingdoms, and states” from the creation of the world to the present.
²³
If this acquisition was made for her own edification, she may have had Mary in mind when she subscribed to a second Fraser production:
The Mental Flower Garden: or, An Instructive and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex
. This miscellany included “a variety of entertaining and moral Dialogues,
partly
original
, calculated for Misses from Eight to Twelve Years.”
²⁴
Together Eliza and Mary could have enjoyed the
Mental Flower Garden
's essays, devotional poems, and “interesting sketches of Female Biography.”

For Sabbath reading, Eliza had her issues of the
Churchman's Magazine
, an Episcopal publication designed “to promote the knowledge and the practice of the truths and precepts of Christianity,” and an abridged version of John Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
, which immortalized heroes and heroines who had died for their faith.
²⁵
For Mary, Foxe's often-gory narratives could have functioned as Plutarch's
Lives
did for another young girl: “like a long continued fairy story.”
²⁶

The Jumels' adopted daughter received the education of an upper-middle-class girl who would not have to earn her own living. In April 1813 Peter Smith was paid sixteen dollars “for Miss Jumels [
sic
] tuition on the Pianoforte,” and he continued to instruct her through the fall of 1814.
²⁷
Mary received painting and drawing lessons, too, in 1814 and early 1815.
²⁸
Nor were social skills neglected. In April 1815 Charles Bérault was paid fifty-four dollars for teaching dancing to “Mademoiselle Marie.”
²⁹
Eliza may have sat in on the piano lessons; at some point she acquired a modest competence on the keyboard, an accomplishment expected of genteel women.
³⁰

The money for these luxuries came from Stephen's shipping business, which flourished during the challenging decade leading up to the War of 1812. During the first dozen years of the nineteenth century, his ships navigated the waters of a world at war.

10

O
n May 21, 1804, Stephen's brig
Minerva
docked in New York after a sixty-day passage from Bordeaux.
¹
From her berth on the west side of the Old Slip, a visitor could have marveled at the “busy hum” of commerce pervading this “Tyre of the New World.” Wharves were “crowded with commodities of every description.” “Carts, drays, and wheel-barrows” rattled to and fro. “Hogsheads of sugar, chests of tea, puncheons of rum, and pipes of wine; boxes, cases, packs and packages of all sizes and denominations, were strewed upon the wharfs and landing-places, or upon the docks of the shipping. All was noise and bustle.”
²
With her cargo of wine, brandy, dry goods, and oil, the
Minerva
had arrived at one of the busiest ports on earth.

The cheerful bustle belied the dangers that the crew had experienced at sea. The
Minerva
had been boarded three times during her two-month passage: first by a British privateer, then by a French frigate, and finally by a naval schooner, also French, whose crew had commandeered a supply of wine.
³
The probability that the
vintage would be paid for was nil, but comparatively speaking, the
Minerva
was lucky. The whaler
Hannah and Eliza
had to return to port because ten of her crew members had been impressed into the British navy.
⁴

The
Minerva
's thrice-disrupted voyage was the norm. France and Britain were at war almost uninterruptedly between 1793 and 1815, and American shippers and sailors were caught in the middle. England tried to prevent France and its allies from exporting goods or importing necessities. France tried to prevent England from doing the same. Neutral vessels (chiefly American) risked seizure by the British if they carried French merchandise and by the French if they carried British goods.
⁵
Sometimes their crewmen were forced into the British naval service.
⁶

Stephen navigated these dangerous waters with flair. With his clerk, Benjamin Desobry, whom he took into a minority partnership at the beginning of 1805, he specialized in the trade between New York and Bordeaux.
⁷
Between 1793 and 1815, he sent more bottoms to “the port of the moon” than any other American merchant.
⁸
Even that statistic undercounts his activity, as it excludes shipments he sent in vessels owned by others and cargoes directed to nearby ports—most commonly, San Sebastián, in Spain—when Bordeaux was inaccessible due to British blockades.
⁹

Outward bound from New York, Stephen's craft carried foodstuffs and agricultural commodities to Europe. Some of the items came from the United States: cotton and tobacco, beeswax to make candles, and staves for constructing barrels.
¹⁰
But products from the Caribbean constituted the bulk of his cargoes: coffee, sugar, cocoa, pepper, and dyewoods such as logwood and fustic.
¹¹
Once purchased by an American merchant, they became, at least on paper, the property of a neutral, with a fighting chance of reaching Europe without being seized on the way.

The profits from these commodities, eagerly awaited in Europe, were used to purchase return cargoes of high-end merchandise.
¹²
Stephen imported an extensive array of dry goods, ranging from fabrics (silks, taffetas, linens, and lace) to ready-made items
(handkerchiefs, stockings, shoes, and gloves). Elegant accessories arrived as well: satin ribbons, silk shawls, artificial flowers, and silk suspenders; pocketbooks for men and women and silk laces for stays. Vinegar, wines, and spirits (claret and cognac above all) came from the vineyards of his native southwest France. Olive oil (then called sweet oil) arrived in quantity too, along with other specialty foodstuffs from the Mediterranean: almonds, olives, capers, anchovies, and fruits preserved in brandy. As suggested by the inclusion of anchovies and capers—hardly popular with American cooks—most of the goods were designed for reexport.
¹³
The lightly populated United States could not absorb such bounty, which went instead to colonists of European heritage prevented by war from trading directly with their mother countries. This explains the arrival of otherwise puzzling sundries, such as “five trunks' hats for Spanish monks,” “brown linen for the Spanish and French islands,” and “four thousand strong canvas coffee bags, suitable for the West India plantations.”
¹⁴
Like the Caribbean goods Stephen shipped to France, these items purchased in Europe would travel as American property, increasing the likelihood that they would reach their destinations.

In this import-reexport trade, there were huge profits to earn, but equal risks to surmount. The travails of the brig
Stephen
, which bore the name of her owner, are instructive in this regard. She was seized four times in fewer than five years—on one occasion, by the officials of her own country!

The
Stephen
's troubles began in November 1807. Homeward bound from Bordeaux, she was taken by a privateer and condemned in a British prize court.
¹⁵
Her captain repurchased her on Stephen's instructions, to get the cargo (which was exonerated) home to New York.
¹⁶
“God guide him!” Stephen wrote, as he passed on the glad news of the vessel's imminent departure from England.
¹⁷

The
Stephen
returned home to an altered political situation. On December 22, 1807, the Jefferson administration had instituted the Embargo Act in retaliation for British impressment of American sailors and British and French interference with neutral commerce.
¹⁸
The draconic edict, which would bankrupt more than a
hundred American merchants, barred U.S. vessels from trading with foreign ports.
¹⁹

With her usual destinations off-limits, the
Stephen
was sent to New Orleans. She carried cheese, flour, butter, lard, and a modest selection of previously imported goods.
²⁰
Stephen and his partner wrote optimistically to her captain on the eve of the brig's departure: “Your voyage being, as we may call it, a coastways one, we are little apprehensive that you should experience anything strange at the hands of any of the belligerent cruisers. Your vessel, cargo & freight are all American property; so we do not suppose any of them would be tempted to lay obstructions in the way of our territorial navigation.”
²¹
Their confidence was misplaced. The
Stephen
was seized by a British warship in the Mississippi River delta. A few days later her passengers and crew retook her—at the cost of two English lives.
²²