The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (20 page)

French, German, and British exports to Latin America plunged because of the collapse of the credit markets needed to finance shipments.
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Funds for capital investments dried up, dooming manufacturing and mining ventures in Central and South America and destabilizing the economies of the newly independent countries they served. The governments of Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico fell into default on their sovereign debt.
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In May 1826, as the turmoil continued around them, Eliza, Stephen, and Mary packed their trunks in Paris. After a brief stop in Dieppe, they traveled on to Le Havre. On May 26, three days after their arrival in the busy port, Eliza and Mary sailed for New York.

Their departure on the ship
Lewis
, captained by Robert Macy, was as abrupt as Eliza's previous retreat to the United States. “Mrs. Jumel made up her mind to sail as soon as the ship arrived,” Stephen
wrote to Lesparre. “If my business had permitted me to do so, I would have sailed, but I hope to be able to do so in May next.”
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The exact reason for Eliza's voyage—one might even say flight—remains unclear. On the face of it, she went to the United States to look into the condition of their investments and collect monies due to them. She took with her a power of attorney authorizing her to manage Stephen's affairs in the state of New York and, at her discretion, sell any real estate he owned there.
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But there may have been other tensions that prompted the precipitous journey.

A letter she sent to Stephen in July 1826 is tantalizingly vague. “I am very flattered that you are thinking of me,” she wrote in French, the language she used in corresponding with her husband, “but at the same time troubled to know that you are suffering from repentance. You are wrong to stay at home so much, because that could harm your health, and if that was the case, judge my despair.”
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The question of what Stephen was repentant for remains unanswered. Did he regret poor business decisions that threatened their future … or a quarrel that culminated in Eliza's departure?

There were earlier signs that problems may have been simmering between them. In January 1825 Stephen had changed the legal status of the mansion in New York and the thirty-six acres of land immediately surrounding it. Since 1815 the property had been governed by a trust that gave Eliza the use of the estate after his death and would return it to his heirs when she died. But at the beginning of 1825, he revised the trust to give her immediate possession of the house and acreage. Although a trustee would need to sign off on her business decisions, the property was effectively hers from that time onward—to manage as she wished for the rest of her life and leave to her heirs after her death.
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The precipitating factor for the transfer of ownership might have been Stephen's purchase of the Dieppe house. Far less enthusiastic about life in France than he, Eliza may have insisted on having the option of an independent li
_f
e in the United States. Or if he planned to leave his new property to his French relatives after his death, she might have prodded him to give the New York mansion to her.

Another trust, set up a year later, on January 18, 1826, settled the Broadway and Liberty Street houses on Eliza as well. Their rents would be hers, free from any debts her husband might owe, although, unlike the mansion, the two downtown properties would revert to Stephen or his heirs after her death.
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Given that Stephen was cash-strapped by this point, it seems likely that this second transfer was made to protect these assets from his creditors rather than with the intention of providing more lavishly for his wife.

Regardless of the underlying reasons for the conveyances, by midsummer cash was Stephen's immediate need. Eliza began trying to collect it as soon as she arrived in New York. She attended first to the downtown houses, which had been rented out at below-market rates by their American agent, Frederick Brunel. Even though rents had begun to drop because of the currency shortage, she persuaded the current tenant of the Broadway store, a Tyrolean-born shopkeeper named Michael Werckmeister, to take a seven-year lease at $2,100 per year—“and if I had been here a year ago, I would have had at least twenty-five hundred,” she added in a letter to Stephen.
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As for the neighboring house on Liberty Street, she gave notice to its undesirable tenants. “It is in very bad condition, I mean excessively dirty,” she told Stephen, “ and before I will be able to offer it for rent, I will be obliged to paper and paint it, and without any other expense, I will make it look as it should, and there isn't any doubt that I will have double the present rent.”
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In August Eliza traveled to Cherry Valley, about fifty miles west of Albany, where she and Stephen had lands that had been transferred to them in payment of a debt. Their title to the properties—owned previously by Cadwallader D. Colden, a politician and land speculator—was problematic, Eliza discovered. “We don't have the deeds,” and because of that “no one wants to buy [the farms] from us,” she told Stephen. The paperwork had been managed poorly by Benjamin Desobry, with bonds and mortgages remaining on the lands. “We are presently at the mercy of Colden,” Eliza explained, “because he can foreclose the mortgage on us whenever it seems good to him; voilà the manner in which Desobry arranged it.”
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Their agent in Cherry Valley, who managed the properties and collected the rents, was a prominent lawyer, James O. Morse. He was also “a rascal,” according to Eliza. “Mr. Morse does everything for his own interests [and] is continually in litigation with those who live on our lands, [who] being poor and not being able to pay, all the expense falls on us. He renews [the leases of] the farms every year, and being a lawyer, he arranges everything himself, and all our interests fall into his hands.”
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While in Cherry Valley, Eliza tried to collect on debts owed to Stephen by a local firm, Hoffman and Glass. When she presented her husband's bills of exchange, Hoffman opened his books and showed her records indicating that he had already paid them. “He told me that you and he had the habit of exchanging your bills,” she wrote Stephen, “and there were several of yours that he found not long ago and burned. In saying that, I tried to stop him, but he tore yours in pieces, saying that, supposing he owed them, they were outlawed—that is to say, six years having passed, they could no longer be used to claim the debt.” Eliza was powerless against Hoffman, and her frustration is palpable. “It seems that everything conspires to prevent me from being able to procure money to send you,” she wrote.
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She complained too about the integrity of their New York City agent, Brunel. Stephen should keep track of any payments Brunel sent, Eliza told him, because whenever she asked about money, the agent told her, “I just sent it the other day” (i.e., to Stephen).
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Yet in their absence Brunel had been retaining large sums of money. Three years before, he had foreclosed on a mortgage on one of their farms in Cortlandt, in Westchester County, netting eight hundred dollars that should have been sent to the Jumels. He didn't tell Eliza about the foreclosure until she was leaving to inspect the land and would have discovered it for herself.
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Frustrated by another instance of this type, Eliza told Brunel that she “was going to demand from him the interest on the money that he had kept so long.” As she reported to Stephen, “He responded that if I demanded the interest, he would raise his commissions.” Would Stephen tell her whether or not she should insist on the interest? she asked.
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Brunel also had a collusive arrangement with a farmer leasing some of the Jumels' land on Harlem Heights: “Mr. Naudine [i.e., Nodine], not knowing the arrangements that Mr. Brunel had made for him, told me that he was giving one hundred dollars per year, while Mr. Brunel, to show good faith, put in his book of arrangements that he was receiving only fifty dollars a year from Naudine, without even warning him about it.”
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She gave notice to Nodine and also to a Mr. Parsons, who was leasing their forty-acre lot on the west side of the Kingsbridge Road.
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It is not clear whether Brunel cheated Eliza and Stephen persistently or whether some of the problems were misunderstandings or the result of Eliza's eagerness to find someone to blame. The latter tendency is clear in a letter in which she mentions two ladies who were tenants in their downtown houses. They told me “they paid everything,” she told Stephen, except for the quarter when there was a yellow-fever epidemic. They said “that Mr. Bernard had been to see them several times, showing [a] paper from Brunel that authorized him to receive those rents, and that they have several receipts from Bernard, who doubtless kept the money for his own use. But Mr. Brunel must be responsible,” she concluded.
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She presented herself to Stephen as the only person he could trust: “Thus you see that everyone betrays us, even those who have the reputation of having probity, so don't have confidence in anyone except”—here she switches from French into English—“your Eliza, who is and will be forever your true and faithfull [
sic
] and aff[ectionate] Wife.”
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20

E
liza had the tenacity of a bulldog when anyone owed her money. “I have tormented Mr. Murry [
sic
] so much that he gave me a note payable in six months for 275 dollars,” she wrote to Stephen, possibly referring to their neighbor John R. Murray. It wasn't all he owed them, but as Eliza informed Stephen, if she had insisted on having everything, she would have received nothing: “Mr. Hoffman even said to me that I couldn't claim anything, Murray having taken the
Act du bénéfice
[probably: filed for bankruptcy], but the rascals can't escape me.”
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She worried that Stephen might be too lenient in her absence, as he pursued his creditors on the opposite side of the Atlantic: “You have not spoken about Mr. Rome. How is he? Is he still your friend or has he changed like the others; and have you taken another in his place? Don't fail to tell me frankly how your affairs are progressing and if you have collected the money people owe you. I hope that you have as much firmness and perseverance as I.”
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Stephen was in fact having difficulty collecting on business debts. He offered to settle for 15 percent of what one creditor, Mr. Blanchard, owed him, but he had waited too long. “At present I can't get five,” he wrote to Eliza. He wasn't going to pursue the debt,
he explained, because it would cost him at least one hundred francs in legal fees, probably without any payoff in the end: “I judge that everything is lost.”
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Nor was he making progress in collecting funds from Peter Pillero, a merchant who had long been his business contact in Havana. Although the consulate had named five arbiters to rule on their financial dispute, two had refused to serve. Then “Monsieur Pillero recused three of them,” Stephen informed Eliza, “claiming that these gentlemen, being my friends, could only condemn him. Voilà: all that doesn't give me any money.”
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To cut costs, Stephen sublet his and Eliza's apartment in the place Vendôme to a Madame Smith for six months. “They need four beds placed there for their family,” he told Eliza. “As you know, there are five girls and a son. The last will sleep in the office; the mother in your bed with one girl; two other girls in my bedroom. I had to put another bed next to the dining room, where the general slept before we had the apartment. I am obliged to place a carpet in the salon at my expense. These are expenditures, but [they] are necessary in order to be able to rent it.”
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