The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (29 page)

The ambiguity over the precise dating of Eliza and Aaron's separation—“October or November”—is curious. The evidence suggests that Burr left Eliza, then returned temporarily to the mansion after suffering a disabling stroke, accounting for the absence of a single, specific departure date.

The medical crisis occurred in the autumn of 1833. Walking down Broadway with an acquaintance, Burr lost the ability to use one leg.
³⁰
The exact timing of the event is not recorded, but a female acquaintance sent a letter to his office on November 1, 1833, to ask after the colonel's health, so the illness was probably a recent occurrence.
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In a letter of October 18, she had made only a routine inquiry on how he did—nothing more than politeness demanded in correspondence with a friend.
³²

According to Parton, Eliza visited Burr after hearing of the stroke. She took him back to the mansion to recuperate and nursed him for the following month.
³³
(Presumably her plans to travel to France were abandoned in the wake of this crisis.) Tending to confirm Parton's account, Burr, in his answer to Eliza's bill of divorce, claimed that she behaved “in a manner most undutiful, disobedient, and insulting, and particularly at a time when the defendant [Burr] was in a very low state of health and not expected to survive, which was in the month of October or November 1833, and that in consequence of such treatment this defendant did leave the house of the said complainant.”
³⁴
After this interlude in late fall 1833, Eliza and Aaron would not live together again.

Ultimately Eliza would use McManus's letter to Burr to build a case to divorce her husband for adultery. But for the moment, with Burr gone from the house and in uncertain health, she played a waiting game. Although there must have been a certain awkwardness in the situation, her nephew-in-law Nelson Chase, admitted to the New York bar as an attorney in October, was still working in her estranged husband's office.
³⁵
In the winter of 1833 to '34, Burr, with Nelson's assistance, was again attempting to collect veteran's benefits for
his army service during the Revolutionary War. By late December 1833 he had sent Nelson to Washington City, as the nation's capital was then known, to advocate for him and gather information on his behalf.
³⁶
Letters to Nelson that Burr dictated to his secretary, John M. Lewis, show that the seventy-seven-year-old lawyer's mind was sharp in spite of his physical infirmities. Often he found it necessary to rebuke his junior for inattentiveness. On February 5, 1834, with Nelson still in Washington, Burr complained:

No letter has been recieved [
sic
] since yours of the 31st. ult. which communicates nothing.

That of the 30th informed me that you had made acquaintance with a gentleman of influence and consideration who was willing to assist you for a commission, the amount not named, but you are not pleased to give the name of that gentleman, nor any clue to, or indication of him.
³⁷

A week later Burr reproved Nelson for failing to provide any details on a Mr. Young and a Mr. Cox, nor even a progress report on the matters at hand.
³⁸

Nevertheless, Burr remained cordial to Nelson, typically closing his letters with “God bless you and speed you,” and occasionally dropping in bits of family news. On January 5, 1834, he noted, “Your wife was here yesterday for a few minutes merely to inquire if I had heard from you and when your return might be expected to which inquiry I could give no reply.”
³⁹
It seems that Nelson could not be bothered to write to his wife of less than two years.

On January 20, 1834, Burr dropped a nugget of information about his own wife into the middle of a letter otherwise focused on business: “Madame, of the heights, has been here today. I had not the honor to see her, though She [
sic
] passed an hour in the office of Mr. C. [Burr's law partner, William D. Craft], who has not mentioned to me the visit, or the subject of it.”
⁴⁰
Had Eliza begun to consider the possibility of a divorce? Although she might have assumed—even hoped—in late 1833 that Burr's death would resolve the differences
between them, by the new year the old soldier was on the mend. On February 10, 1834, John Lewis wrote to Nelson that “the health of Col. B is rapidly improving, and his manner quite changed since you last saw him.”
⁴¹
By March he was up to a forty-five-hour stagecoach trip to Albany “with only one break for a meal,” although the weather was cold enough that the coach was drawn on sleigh runners north of Peekskill and the wind whipped through the vehicle's torn curtains.
⁴²

On May 17 Burr wrote to Nelson from Albany regarding the progress of his claim for veterans' benefits, addressing him at their Nassau Street office.
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(Burr would soon learn that he had been awarded an annual pension of six hundred dollars, payable retroactively from March 1831.)
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He ended the letter with a courteous inquiry about his wife and Nelson's: “How is Madame, and la belle pite [petite]—are you in town or Country [
sic
]?—and where—?”
⁴⁵

If Burr hoped to maintain a polite status quo with regard to his unsuccessful marriage, he would soon be disillusioned. On July 11, 1833, Eliza filed her bill of divorce. In it she described Burr's financial depredations. She also accused him of adultery with Jane McManus. Date and place were carefully specified: the adultery occurred in Jersey City, New Jersey, in August 1833, a month after Eliza and Aaron's marriage. For good measure, Eliza claimed that since their marriage, Burr had been “in the habit of committing adultery at divers times with divers females,” whose names Eliza did not know.
⁴⁶
The phrasing was standard terminology in a divorce suit.

Even if only the charge involving Jane McManus were true, Burr had violated the civil laws governing marriage in New York state. He had breached the obligations of the “matrimonial contract,” as Eliza wrote in her bill. The legal recourse for this breach of contract was divorce.

Eliza also requested—and received—an immediate injunction preventing Burr from selling, mortgaging, or otherwise disposing of any
_p
art of her
_p
ersonal property or real estate—a good indicator that her desire for divorce was driven by her need to protect the fortune built during her twenty-eight-year marriage to Stephen. In
addition, she asked for alimony from the chronically broke Burr, raising the distasteful possibility that she had waited to file until his pension claim was decided in order to claim a share in that asset.
⁴⁷
But it is more likely that she and her lawyers simply followed the usual practice: asking for more than they could expect to get in order to maximize the eventual award.

Once the divorce proceedings commenced, Nelson Chase threw in his lot with Eliza. On July 10, a day before the bill of divorce was filed, he sued Burr for three hundred dollars in law books that Nelson owned, but Burr had kept in his own possession.
⁴⁸
To his mentor, Nelson's defection must have felt like a betrayal.

28

“H
e is credibly informed and believes it to be true”—Aaron Burr framed his sentences in the third person—“that the Complainant” (Eliza) had, since their marriage, “committed adultery without the connivance or consent of this defendant with one or more persons whose name or names is and are at present unknown to this defendant, but whose names, when discovered, this defendant prays may be inserted herein.”
¹

Aging and desperate for financial security, Burr contested the divorce proceedings strenuously. Eliza would collect half of Stephen's assets, once her late husband's estate was settled. If Burr remained her husband, all the money would be his. In common law man and wife were one person, and that person was the husband.
²

To try to save the marriage, Burr accused Eliza of adultery. Pointing a finger at the other party was a standard tactic used by defendants in divorce actions, because a divorce petition would be dismissed if the complainant had been unfaithful.
³
In 1835 Burr worked up a list of eight men who were supposedly Eliza's lovers.
⁴

Her lawyers demolished the straw men speedily. Robert Coveny, for example, one of Eliza's purported bedmates, had worked for her as a laborer until dismissed for drunkenness and then lost a lawsuit
against her for back wages.
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In autumn 1834 he had visited a neighbor of hers and offered to pay him “liberally” if he “would procure any person who would state that [Eliza] had committed adultery with any person.”
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In January or February 1835 he had bragged that he was intimately acquainted with Burr and “fared well” whenever he visited him.
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Charles Perry, another of Eliza's alleged amours, was “a very great liar,” according to Eliza's neighbors.
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He had illegally changed his name from Boothe and deserted a wife and two children.
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Like Coveny, he would perjure himself to order.

Then there was Patrick Delahanty, Eliza's former coachman, named by Burr for no other reason than propinquity. Delahanty swore that he had never seen or heard anything that would lead him to suspect his employer of unchastity.
¹⁰

And so it went.

On July 11, 1835—again acting on the anniversary of Burr's duel with Hamilton—Eliza countered her husband's libels by swearing to a devastating affidavit. Burr had tried to get her to agree to a settlement, she revealed: he would admit to adultery and let the divorce proceed if she would pay him an annuity of three hundred dollars a year. It was only after she “declined paying the sum of money so proposed by said Burr as the wages of his depraved and immoral conduct,” that he “and his agents commenced fabricating false and scandalous reports against” her.
¹¹
Indeed, at no point after her marriage to Stephen did rumor suggest that Eliza had engaged in affairs or even the most trifling dalliances. Only her conduct before her first marriage had been the subject of whispers.

However contrived Burr's charges were, gossip must have been flying as the investigations advanced. If Eliza had hoped that her marriage to Burr would bring her invitations and visitors, the divorce proceedings had put an end to such dreams. As the suit wound its way through the Court of Chancery, the New York State court that handled divorces, she lived in the old mansion alone but for the servants. One of them, Margaret Mulhollen—probably a housekeeper or maid—said that Eliza “lived a retired life,” and didn't receive “the
company or visits of any person or persons whatsoever, except the visits from [her] niece and nephew” (i.e., Mary and Nelson Chase).
¹²
John Hopwood, probably also a servant, confirmed “that her habits of life were reserved and retired—that she was not in the habit of receiving the visits or company of any person or persons except the visits of her relatives.”
¹³

With few options remaining, Burr compromised, signing an agreement with Eliza two days before Christmas. He would not contest the adultery charge nor claim a right to her money, but would not be obliged to pay alimony or cover her legal costs either.
¹⁴

In accepting the arrangement, Eliza wasn't giving up anything. Where would the feckless Burr have found money for support payments or legal fees? Instead the agreement gave her the hope of having the divorce finalized at last—although Burr's willingness to let the charges in the bill of divorce be taken
pro confesso
(as confessed) would not result in an immediate divorce, as both he and Eliza knew. An investigation was still required by state law to make sure that the spouses weren't colluding to obtain a divorce by having one of them admit to an adulterous relationship. The case would be referred to a master in chancery—the improbably named Philo T. Ruggles—who would collect evidence to determine whether the charge of adultery was credible, before the vice chancellor ruled on whether to grant a divorce.
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