The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (25 page)

Less than a month after the newlyweds moved out, tragedy struck on Harlem Heights. Stephen was traveling north on the Kingsbridge Road in a one-horse wagon. The driver was unskilled, and Stephen was thrown from the vehicle. Ten or twelve days later, on the evening of May 22, 1832, he died at the mansion.
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He had celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday only two weeks before.

Eliza, fifty-seven, was now a widow after twenty-eight years of marriage.

24

A
aron Burr, onetime vice president of the United States, was a familiar figure in lower Manhattan. As the spring of 1832 warmed into summer, he might be seen entering his law office on Nassau Street or mounting the steps of city hall to plead a case in court. About five feet, six inches tall, he was not physically imposing. But few met him without being impressed. Although his voice was quiet and his demeanor restrained, Burr's mobile features and piercing hazel eyes gave him a magnetic presence. His upright posture and brisk walk belied his seventy-six years.
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In June 1832 a carriage stopped in front of 23 Nassau Street. Eliza Jumel stepped down and disappeared into Aaron Burr's office. “She wished to take legal advice respecting some real estate,” according to James Parton, one of Burr's earliest biographers.
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Probably Eliza consulted Burr on how to begin the process of settling her late husband's estate. Parton claimed that they parted on excellent terms: gallantly Burr handed his visitor into her carriage.
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It would take some months for the acquaintanceship to ripen. Almost immediately after her visit to Burr, Eliza, accompanied by Mary, Nelson, and a servant, left the city to escape a cholera epidemic that was spreading south from Canada. By the time the disease
reached Manhattan on July 3, they were safe in Ulster County, enjoying the dramatic scenery of the Blue Mountains and Shawangunks. Later in the summer they moved east of the Hudson to Columbia County, enjoying rural tranquility at Hoffman's Gate (a stop on the post road between the villages of Claverack and Hillside) and then venturing further north to Lebanon Springs, a watering place close to the Massachusetts border.
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There they could socialize, drive out, and bathe in the health-giving mineral spring, which remained at a comfortable 73 degrees winter and summer.
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Mary's well-being may have been the impetus for the move to a watering place. By midsummer she must have known she was pregnant.

At the end of August, New York's Board of Health stopped issuing its daily cholera report.
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The epidemic was contained—or so the doctors said. Eliza, returning to the city with the Chases in September, took the precaution of spending a night with them in Hoboken before crossing the Hudson to Manhattan. Beneath their window, they witnessed a shocking sight: “a person writhing in the agonies of death, dying with the cholera.”
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They fled north once more. This time they traveled beyond Albany, to the village of Saratoga Springs, which would become Eliza's second home.
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A summer resort like Lebanon Springs, Saratoga was considerably less developed than its older and more established competitor. But James Stuart, a visitor from Scotland, was impressed by the up-and-coming village. “It consists of a fine broad street, fringed with trees,” he wrote, “having so many large and splendid hotels, that it appeared to me that there was more extensive accommodation of company than at Harrogate [an English town famed for its mineral waters].” Visitors thronged the hotels and boardinghouses at the height of the summer season. “Fifteen hundred people have been known to arrive in a week,” he marveled, many traveling from as far south as New Orleans “to avoid the heat and unhealthy weather.”
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There were fourteen mineral springs in the vicinity. The best known, on the grounds of the Congress Hall hotel, produced a
sparkling water that was bottled and sold throughout the country, even on American packet boats. “The taste is very agreeable,” Stuart commented, “and the briskness of the water at the fountain delightful. Three or four pint tumblers are generally taken in the morning before breakfast.” Many people drank it at meals as well.
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Amusements included reading rooms, ballrooms, a library, a local newspaper, and four or five churches offering public services. From the gracefully colonnaded porticos of the hotels, vacationers could admire the passing scene and keep an eye peeled for celebrities, such as annual visitor Joseph Bonaparte. “The whole appearance of the place is cheerful,” Stuart concluded with pleasure.
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When Eliza and her family arrived in fall 1832, the village was on the verge of a remarkable transformation made possible by a new invention, the railroad. Over the winter of 1831 to '32, hotel and boardinghouse owners had poured money into expanding and improving their facilities, anticipating the arrival of thousands of tourists on the “cars” from Albany and Schenectady.
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No longer would visitors from the capital region have to endure a full day's carriage ride to reach Saratoga, lurching at a snail's pace over a rugged road and sinking into deep beds of sand.
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But in a disaster for a community whose economy depended on a three-month summer season, the promised visitors failed to arrive. Tourists were frightened of gathering in a busy resort on which the cholera might descend. Repeated assurances that no cases had been reported in the village were of no avail. Hotels were half empty, and their proprietors desperate for money.
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Shrewdly Eliza seized the opportunity. Arriving at Saratoga on the brand-new steam railroad—one of the first in the nation—she, Mary, and Nelson spent the night at the home of Mr. Benedict, the train conductor.
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Venturing out in the morning in search of more convenient lodgings, they strolled down the flat, sandy length of Broadway, the main thoroughfare of the village.
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Eliza noticed a handbill on a pump advertising a “French hotel” for sale, and she proposed viewing the structure, advantageously located at the corner of Broadway and Caroline Street.
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Strictly speaking, the property
was not a “French hotel”—the phrase Nelson used in describing it years later—but a “dwelling house.” It was owned by a Cuban tight-rope walker cum acrobat, who had worked as a traveling performer with his equally talented wife and children.
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Perhaps the family took in boarders, which could explain the hotel reference.

Besides the residence, the lot contained a small barn, yard, privy house, and—sure to appeal to Eliza—a theater.
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Decisive as always, she acted quickly. In her first significant financial transaction as a widow, she arranged to buy the property.
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It was the first in a string of purchases made over a twenty-year period that would make her one of Saratoga's leading landowners.

25

I
n November the family returned to New York City. Nelson resumed his legal training. He entered the office of New York lawyer John Duer, but soon moved to the firm of Aaron Burr.
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According to Burr's biographer Parton, the transfer grew from Eliza's June visit to the old lawyer. She had sent Nelson to pick up the resulting opinion, and Burr had cultivated Nelson's acquaintance. Soon he invited the young man to read law with him.
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After some months of study, Chase, appreciative of Burr's kindness, persuaded Eliza to ask the lawyer to dine at Mount Stephen. In Parton's telling, “It was a grand banquet, at which [Burr] displayed all the charms of his manner, and shone to conspicuous advantage.” As Burr handed his hostess to the richly set table, he complimented her in his most courtly fashion, “I give you my hand, Madame; my heart has long been yours.”
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After this agreeable prelude, Burr began to call on Eliza frequently.
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She could not have failed to appreciate his polished manners or his ready wit and beguiling smile.
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As one of his former law students reminisced, “He would laugh, too, sometimes, as if his heart
was bubbling with joy, and its effect was irresistible.”
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Even men prepared to dislike him found themselves succumbing unwittingly to his charm.

Eliza would have savored her visitor's attentiveness. As her family lawyer observed, “She was a lady of a great deal of vanity, and would tell me stories of personal vanities and attentions she had had from gentlemen in very high society, and all those sort of things.”
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Burr, quick to guess what his auditor wanted to hear, would have flattered Eliza adroitly.
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Parton portrayed the old soldier as a determined campaigner. Eventually he proposed marriage—and was refused. But he treated the rebuff as a mere temporary setback. He continued to court Eliza until he received a less decisive refusal. “Improving his advantage on the instant, he said, in a jocular manner, that he should bring out a clergyman to Fort Washington on a certain date, and there he would once more solicit her hand.”
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