The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (32 page)

In the meantime her tussle with Stephen's relatives went on. Thanks to continued stalling on her part, including an unsuccessful appeal of the decision that barred her from discharging the mortgage held by Berger using monies from the estate, it was not until October 1839—more than seven years after Stephen's death—that Eliza paid half of his net assets to François and Madelaine. Each received just over five thousand dollars, a sum roughly equivalent to $129,000 today.
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Strictly speaking, the inheritance arrived too late for François, who had died in April. His share went to his son, Ulysses, who, with Madelaine, continued to fight for more. The two launched an attempt to claim the Jumel lands that Eliza had put in trust for herself.
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Taking aim at the questionable conveyances used to establish the trust,
they argued that she had defrauded Stephen and his heirs. Her husband had failed to challenge her, they claimed, only because intemperance and “weakness and imbecility of mind” had overcome him “during the latter part of his residence in France.”
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Their suit failed, however. There was insufficient evidence of fraud.
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At the same time Eliza was sued by Felicie and her husband, Joseph Benjamin Texoeres, for the fifteen thousand francs (three thousand dollars) that Stephen had promised them in their marriage contract.
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The money should have been paid within a year of his death, but Eliza had ignored the obligation. Once more she triumphed. Most of the money in the estate had been distributed by the time the couple made their claim. Madelaine and Ulysses would be obliged to pay 50 percent of the sum out of their share of the estate, and Eliza negotiated a clever compromise for her half. She would leave Felicie the sum in her will.
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Eliza's most colorful legal battle of the period resulted from a claim by a Parisian woman, Mademoiselle Marie-Antoinette-Ambroisine Guendet. In 1823 Stephen had agreed to pay Guendet an annuity of 1,200 francs a year for life (the reason for his generosity was not stated). But the promised payments had not been made since he left France, and Guendet sued in 1840 to claim the money from his estate.
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Shrewdly Eliza delayed the resolution of the case by refusing to be served with a summons. When lawyer Walter Skidmore called at Mount Stephen in September 1840, Eliza was there, but declined to receive him. Skidmore gave the subpoena to a servant, instructing him to deliver it to Madame Jumel, “which the said servant promised to do.” But Eliza failed to show up in court.
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A man named Edward Cavanagh, probably a summons server, fared no better in January 1842. He went to Eliza's residence, but she had gone into the city, and he, like Skidmore, had to leave the subpoena with a servant. But Cavanagh had a stroke of luck a week later—or so it appeared initially. “On the 29th of January last,” he
testified, “he saw the defendant Eliza B. Jumel in John Street, opposite the office of Nelson Chase Esq.” He

was in the act of handing a copy of said subpoena to said Eliza B. Jumel when the said Chase took it out of [his] hand and looked at it and said he would attend to it. The said Eliza B. Jumel said to Chase, “Let me see it.” The said Chase then assisted her to get in the carriage which was standing near her and whispered something to her which appeared to satisfy her as to the nature of the paper. And the carriage was then driven off without the said subpoena being served; and [the] deponent was prevented from making personal service of the said writ of subpoena by reason of the interference of the said Nelson Chase Esq.
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Ultimately Guendet collected—but only because Eliza valued spiting Madelaine more than resisting Guendet. Since late 1839, when Madelaine had received her quarter share of Stephen's estate, Eliza had collected additional funds that the estate was due. However, she hadn't given Stephen's sister her cut, according to a petition Madelaine addressed to the chancellor in September 1840. Eliza managed to stall this newest demand for nearly two years, before finding a cunning way to deny it. Possibly she concocted the solution in collaboration with her former adversary, Charles O'Conor, whom she hired as her counsel. First Eliza settled with Guendet for $2,100. Then she announced that she had collected an additional $1,542.35 due to the estate, but had spent it all on the settlement with Guendet.
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Madelaine, disappointed, died in 1844.
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Eliza's battle with Stephen's family ended with her.

As late as 1846, however, Eliza was still pursuing her late husband's assets in the United States. Presenting herself as an impecunious widow, she asked for payment for silver and church vestments that Stephen had purchased for Saint Patrick's Cathedral thirty years before.
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Bishop Fenwick of Boston, who had served in New York early in his career and remembered the items Stephen had sent from Paris, supported Eliza's quest for reimbursement. “Madame Jumel
is now a widow, and it appears she stands greatly in need of the money—surely under the circumstances not a moments [
sic
] further delay ought to be suffered,” he wrote to Bishop Hughes of New York.
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It is hard to believe that Eliza was cash-strapped. In 1839 the City of New York had taken a strip of land running through her acreage on Harlem Heights for the building of the Croton Aqueduct, which would supply clean water to Manhattan. She was paid $11,524, which has the purchasing power of $298,000 today.
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But by the mid-1840s she had new demands on her purse—personified by two young children.

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I
t took time for Mary and Nelson to build their family. After a year of marriage, there had been the stillborn child: in the frost of winter, in the dark year after Stephen's death, a tiny shoot of new life had withered away. Another child slipped out of the world too, so quietly and unobtrusively that only the barest mention of its existence remains.
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But to Eliza's joy, two infants arrived and thrived. Her namesake, Eliza Jumel Chase, entered the world on March 25, 1836. She was born, it was said, at the Jumel mansion.
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A brother, William Inglis Chase, joined the family on August 17, 1840, when Mary was nearly thirty-nine years old.
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The young family lived in rented quarters in New York in the mid-1830s and then in Hoboken from 1837.
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According to Nelson, Eliza lived with them some of the time and other times, chiefly “in winter, when the ice made it difficult to cross the river,” occupied furnished lodgings in Manhattan.
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She rented out the mansion, returning to it whenever tenants departed.

Leases and legal papers help us reconstruct the financial dealings that allowed her to support herself and assist Nelson and Mary in the years after her divorce from Aaron Burr. Although the female
businesswoman is virtually absent from nineteenth-century American literature—perhaps because pecuniary pursuits would have seemed unfeminine—throughout the era women of all classes were deeply involved in the capitalist economy. Mostly barred by their gender from active involvement in the stock market, manufacturing, or shipping, and professions such as law and medicine, women found investment opportunities as mortgage holders and moneylenders, collecting interest payments that provided a regular income. They were prominent among the ranks of the landlords as well, renting out rooms in homes or boardinghouses they occupied or leasing out commercial properties or residences they owned. Female investors—Eliza among them—proved to be as quick as their male peers to foreclose or prosecute if rent, mortgage, or loan payments were not made.
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The majority of Eliza's income came from renting out the buildings on the lot at the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street that she and Stephen had purchased in 1812. In 1835 she had the three-story Liberty Street house torn down and replaced with two attached, five-story buildings, 71 and 73 Liberty Street.
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She replaced the three-story building at 150 Broadway with a five-story structure as well.
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Given the timing of the rebuilding campaign—just before Eliza was forced to begin settling Stephen's estate—there may have been cash reserves in the mansion at the time of his death that she wanted to spend before an inventory was taken.

The rents from the properties in lower Manhattan totaled approximately $5,500 per year by the mid-century point.
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An observation made by Sidney George Fisher of Philadelphia helps put the buying power of this sum in perspective. In 1842 he found that his annual income of under $3,000 was adequate to supply him with “a comfortable house—servants, a good table—wine—of course—books—‘country quarters,'—a plentiful wardrobe—[and] the ability to exercise hospitality.”
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At the other end of the spectrum, $600 was an adequate annual budget for a working-class family of four in New York City as late as 1853, with $100 allocated for the
_y
ear's rent and $273 for groceries.
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In such an economy, Eliza's rental income from the downtown properties made her a wealthy woman.

Her real estate in northern Manhattan was less consistently profitable. A Mr. Pell occupied the mansion and homestead lot for a year or two in the second half of the 1830s.
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Then Eliza leased out the property in April 1838 for one thousand dollars a year, but evicted the tenant within a year for nonpayment of rent.
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By April 1842 the best deal that she could arrange was a profit-sharing agreement with a farmer. He received the use of the mansion, garden, and fruit trees in return for half of the money he could earn selling the produce. The agreement specified that Eliza was allowed to retain fruit and vegetables for her family.
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When she and the Chases were not living at the mansion, they had fresh vegetables and firewood sent to them from Harlem Heights. This would have been a substantive contribution to the household economy in an era when food could consume a quarter or more of an average family's budget.
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