The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (27 page)

Although neither Wandell and Minnigerode nor Stillwell were sympathetic to Eliza, this claim deserves serious consideration. In arranging a marriage for Mary, Eliza had utilized marriage as a bond that could be dictated by financial and practical concerns. Years later she would use money again to secure a desirable suitor, this time for a child of Mary's. Why not arrange such a marriage for herself?

Certainly there was some horse trading going on. In spite of Parton's story, which has Nelson introducing Burr into the family after studying with him for “some months,” Nelson himself stated that he did not begin training with the older lawyer until May 1833.
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Until then they were scarcely acquainted.
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Given the compressed time frame—the marriage would take place July 1—it is likely that either Eliza made Nelson's admission to Burr's office one of the criteria for the nuptials or, more probably, that Burr arranged the apprenticeship to gain closer access to Eliza.

There is indirect evidence that Eliza discussed money matters with Burr before their marriage, understanding that her financial assets would form part of her appeal. In a court filing in 1834, Burr testified that her personal estate amounted to fifteen thousand dollars, plus an income of five thousand dollars or more per year, not including the mansion house nor real estate held in trust for her that was valued at around two hundred thousand dollars.
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This was probably information Eliza had shared with him before the marriage.
In addition, she had shown him a letter she had drafted to send to one of Stephen's relatives, in which she declared that her late husband had left only debts. Mailed just before or just after the wedding, the missive was written to ward off claims for money from Stephen's brother and sister.
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Ultimately both parties had practical reasons for the marriage: on Burr's side, money; on Eliza's, social acceptance—and probably also the utility of having a clever lawyer at her side to help her guard her assets. Eliza, then, was no passive victim of Burr's machinations, but a bride who expected to benefit from this union. It is a telling point that the couple's honeymoon would be a business trip to reclaim monies Eliza was owed under Stephen's estate. On balance, however, it was probably Burr rather than Eliza who was the aggressor in their alliance. Given his tangled finances, he needed Eliza more than she needed him.

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T
he marriage of Madame Eliza Jumel, née Bowen, and Colonel Aaron Burr took place at the bride's house on Harlem Heights Monday evening, July 1, 1833.
¹
The day was clear and a little sticky—seventy-two degrees at dawn, eighty by afternoon—presaging the dog days of the summer to come.
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As evening fell, Nelson and Mary were in attendance. But no infant would interrupt the ceremony with a cry; on January 27, Mary's child had arrived stillborn.
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Burr, raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, had supplied the pastor, Reverend David Bogart.
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As the bride and bridegroom stood in the southwest parlor of the mansion, waiting for the minister to begin the ceremony, did Eliza pause a moment to reflect on her first wedding, twenty-nine years before?
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After the ups and downs of those decades with Stephen, what were her expectations for this marriage? Did she hope for love—and why wouldn't she; Burr could charm the birds from the trees—or simply a working relationship?

The sober opening of the Dutch Reformed marriage service hardly lent itself to optimism. “Married persons,” Rev. Bogart
would have intoned, “are generally, by reason of sin, subject to many troubles and afflictions.” Although they could count on “the certain assistance of God,” the Lord would “punish whoremongers and adulterers.”
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As the ceremony continued, Burr and Eliza would have listened to Bogart describing the mutual respect they owed each other. The husband should honor, teach, comfort, and protect his wife; the wife should love, honor, and obey her husband. Given the occasional dissension in Eliza's first marriage, it wouldn't be surprising if she felt a moment's scorn when Bogart told her, “You should not exercise any dominion over your husband, but be silent: for Adam was first created and then Eve, to be a help to Adam.”
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Whatever inner voices the couple heard, the two consented to the marriage: first seventy-seven-year-old Aaron, then fifty-eight-year-old Eliza. After solemnizing the union, Bogart would have stressed once more the sanctity of the marriage bond, warning against divorce. Finally he would have blessed the newly married couple: “The Lord our God replenish you with his grace, grant that ye may long live together in all godliness and holiness. Amen.”
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A day or two after the marriage, Colonel and Mrs. Burr left for Hartford, Connecticut, on a trip that agreeably combined business and pleasure. In Hartford, they visited Burr's cousin, Henry Waggaman Edwards, a lawyer recently elected governor of Connecticut.
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The meeting was a social coup that Eliza would have treasured. But the choice of destination was dictated by her need to settle Stephen's estate. Back in the mid-1820s, during the worst of their financial difficulties, Eliza had wanted to sell the forty shares of stock that Stephen had owned in the Hartford Bridge Company and put in Lesparre's name.
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They had ended up retaining the shares, which faithfully yielded quarterly dividends. Now, however, as assets forming part of Stephen's estate, the stock would have to be sold.

The nuptial pair seem to have enjoyed their honeymoon. In July a Hartford newspaper reported that the “happy couple spent a few days of the ‘first month,' in this city, apparently swallowed up in conjugal felicity … Mrs. Burr is a lady of fifty or fifty-five, rather
comely, and we should think well fitted to sustain an old gentleman under the infirmities of age.” However, the penman snarkily concluded, “We really hope she will prove an
Aaron's
rod, and not a rod to Aaron.”
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Had the journalist observed underlying tension between the two? Perhaps he was simply showing off a clever phrase.

While in Hartford Eliza and Burr met with the management of the Hartford Bridge Company. The sale of the stock was not entirely straightforward. Stephen had never registered the transfer of the shares to his nephew-in-law in the company's books.
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But with the bulk of the paperwork showing Lesparre to be their owner, Eliza's claim to the shares as Stephen's widow was in question. Indeed, she and Nelson might have already visited Hartford after Stephen's death in an unsuccessful attempt to sell the stock.
¹³

Whether or not they had done so, the present sally, at last, was successful. If Stephen had planned that the profits from the sale would go to Lesparre, as his refusal to sell the shares earlier had suggested, his intent would not be honored. On July 5, 1833, Eliza received the handsome sum of six thousand five hundred dollars for Stephen's forty shares.
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Of what happened next, we have only Parton's account. As with his story of the Jumel/Burr courtship, the details must have come directly from Eliza or through Nelson Chase. According to Parton, Eliza was offered the money, but ordered it paid to her husband instead. That done, Burr “had it sewed up in his pocket, a prodigious bulk, and brought it to New York, and deposited it in his own bank, to his own credit.”
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Regardless of the pocket that hid the money, the marriage gave Burr legal possession of all of Eliza's assets (except the real estate held in trust for her). This fact would soon trouble the tentative harmony between them.

After completing their business in Hartford, the couple returned to New York over the weekend. Monday, July 8, found Burr back at the legal grind, writing to an associate in Utica regarding the progress of a case.
¹⁶
But he was looking forward to retirement, which he hoped would come sooner rather than later. In early September, he wrote to his friend John Bigelow, a Bostonian, that he was still
dealing with “vexatious concerns of business, which a determination to wind up [his] worldly affairs” had necessitated.
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In this missive of September 8, he also thanked Bigelow for the latter's congratulations on his marriage. “Your letter of congratulation,” he wrote, “amused me very much—I consider it as a sort of Epithalamium—but really my friend you did not consider that the parties who were the subject of congratulations were past their grand climacteric and it would therefore have been utterly impractical either by invocation of muses, or even by beat of drum, to have summoned the loves or graces to such a celebration.”
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The amusement he felt at the idea of an ode to the marriage (or an “epithalamium,” to use the terminology of English poetry that he had employed) is a damning admission that Burr never felt the kind of warmth or tenderness for which Eliza might have hoped, even if she had entered the alliance largely for practical purposes. Strictly speaking, only he and not Eliza was past the grand climacteric—the age of sixty-three, at which the physical powers were believed to undergo a marked decline. Evidence suggests that he remained attractive to, and attracted by, the fairer sex. In a codicil to his will, drawn up in 1835, he left his residuary assets to two natural daughters, one of whom was only two years old.
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Burr was also capable of deep loyalties and strong affections. When Luther Martin, one of the lawyers who defended him during his trial for treason, was an old, broken man, Burr gave him a home for the last year or two of his life.
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In September 1833 he performed a similar action, welcoming John Pelletreau, a long-term client who was by then near death, into the mansion on Harlem Heights.
²¹

But apparently his marriage to Eliza failed to touch Burr's heart. The lack of true affection, whether on his side or on both, would have made the inevitable stresses and strains of the early months of a marriage harder to weather with aplomb. Indeed the bonds knitted on July 1, 1833, would soon be ripped asunder. By October Aaron Burr had left Mount Stephen. By November he and Eliza had parted for good. On July 11, 1834—thirty years to the day of Burr's ruinous duel with Hamilton—Eliza filed for divorce.

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