The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (33 page)

In addition to the 36-acre homestead lot, Eliza owned 136 acres of farmland, also in upper Manhattan. Although the lands were rocky and not very fertile, she found ways to profit from them nevertheless. The history of a forty-acre parcel extending between the Kings-bridge Road and the Hudson River is instructive in this regard. The Jumels had sold it to their neighbor John R. Murray for $5,495 before leaving for France.
¹⁶
When Murray failed to make the required payments, they foreclosed and reclaimed the land.
¹⁷
In May 1835 Eliza sold it again, this time for nearly four times the sum negotiated with Murray. Two New York City merchants agreed to pay five thousand dollars upfront, another five thousand within a year, and an additional ten thousand within two years. When the buyers did not produce the second installment of the purchase price, Eliza foreclosed. She made five thousand dollars on the transaction, since she had the right to retain the down payment.
¹⁸

She continued to derive income from the repossessed lot. In 1847 she gave the Hudson River Railroad Company the right to run its tracks through the western edge of the acreage for a payment of eight hundred dollars.
¹⁹
Then in 1850 she sold the parcel to Ambrose C. Kingsland, a wealthy merchant and future mayor of New York. She demanded the same twenty thousand dollars she had asked in
1835.
²⁰
With the neighborhood, now served by the railroad, ripe for development, the forty acres constituted a good investment for Kingsland. This time the property did not return to her hands.

In contrast to the forty-acre parcel, a ninety-six-acre lot north of the mansion yielded little but trouble and aggravation.
²¹
Some years Eliza did not collect any rent; instead, she would give the use of the land to a tenant who would be responsible for maintaining the fences and giving her half the profits from any livestock pastured on the plot.
²²

She went to court more than once to pursue tenants who failed to fulfill their side of the bargain.
²³
A lease she negotiated in 1838 with a farmer, Philip A. Levy, came to a particularly dramatic end. Levy rented the property—which included a house, cider mill, apple trees, meadows, and arable land—for a modest two hundred dollars per year. Eliza loaned him some of her cattle—probably he was permitted to sell milk and butter in exchange for pasturing them—and he agreed to keep the fences and buildings in good repair.
²⁴

The situation soured quickly. In 1840 Eliza filed suit against Levy for failing to return the animals when she asked for them: “four English milch cows and four calves … property of the said plaintiff of great value, to wit, of the value of two hundred dollars.”
²⁵
Levy sued Eliza in return. He had been leasing a barn from her and claimed she hadn't paid him for storing her carriage in it. She owed him some fifty dollars, he said, at the agreed-upon rate of two dollars per month.
²⁶

At that point Eliza unleashed a defense that, on the face of it, seems truly bizarre. The suit should be dismissed, she argued, because the plaintiff, Levy, was a married woman rather than a man, and a married woman couldn't file a lawsuit in her own name. Odd as it seems, this argument was actually a variant on a legal tactic used by men wanting to weasel out of agreements with women. In common law a wife did not exist legally apart from her husband and could not contract with anyone. Therefore, if a married woman negotiating an agreement did not have her husband act for her or have a power of attorney designating her as his agent, a man could claim that the provisions of the resulting compact were
unenforceable. For example, in 1858, when a male New Yorker was sued for failing to pay rent to a woman, he didn't dispute the fact that the money was due, but argued that their contract was invalid because of her married status.
²⁷

Eliza, then, was not unusual in making gender a bar to a lawsuit, but the way in which she did it—claiming that an apparently male plaintiff was female—was unprecedented. Even more remarkably, she produced a respectable witness to testify for her: the Rev. John Power, vicar general of the Roman Catholic Church of the Diocese of New York.
²⁸

On July 3, 1840, Power stood in a Manhattan courtroom. How long had he known Levy? he was asked. He had been acquainted with her for about twelve years, the priest replied. Initially Levy had come to his house requesting to be married to a man named Anthony Bolla. “Levy gave her name as Jane or Jean,” Power testified, “which [one], he did not recollect,” but “said Levy was dressed in men's apparel.” Nevertheless, “he accordingly married them [and] has seen said Levy frequently since.” Eliza's lawyer testified that Levy and Bolla “reside[d] together.”

On cross-examination, Power admitted “that he did not put down the marriage in his register” and did not know for sure whether Levy was a man or a woman. There his statement ended.
²⁹

What are we to make of this curious testimony? Was Levy a cross-dresser, a woman who dressed as a man? Or was he a man, perhaps with androgynous features? The court records are silent. Nelson Chase claimed years later that “the gender of this person was a great deal in doubt in the neighborhood. She dressed as a man, but in fact was a woman. Madame Jumel, in speaking of her, always called her ‘it.'”
³⁰

If Nelson was telling the truth, neighborhood gossip about Levy—with respect to his/her gender or relationship with Bolla—could have inspired the unlikely defense Eliza chose. That said, Nelson is not always a reliable witness. At the time he spoke these lines, he was involved in litigation in which it would have been beneficial to portray Eliza as perfectly rational until the last six years of her life.
Admitting that she had trumped up an outlandish story years earlier would hardly have supported his case.

The question of Nelson's veracity aside, the whole affair is reminiscent of the defense Eliza concocted during the fight over Stephen's estate. There is the same tinge of melodrama—this time with a cross-dressing protagonist rather than a changeling—and the same readiness to contest a case by whatever means possible. When Eliza thought she was justified, she would adjust the facts to suit herself and fight even the most unpromising lawsuit to the end.

In all events, her attempt to have the case dismissed on gender grounds failed: Levy's lawyer pointed out that she had referred to his client as a man in her previous lawsuit against him. Then the suit over the storage fees was tried before a jury, which decided in Levy's favor. Eliza appealed—probably to delay payment of the judgment—but failed to show up or send a lawyer to represent her when the case was reheard. She must have known that her chances of winning were slim. Levy won a judgment of $98.95 against her—just under the $99.38 she had been awarded in her suit against him.
³¹

Eliza was not unique among businesswomen in resorting to the legal system to pursue money she was owed. A female litigant was involved in approximately 15 percent of the cases brought before New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan between 1845 and 1875.
³²
Virtually all of those suits were clashes over money.
³³
Nevertheless, the sheer number of lawsuits in which Eliza was involved suggests that she could be a difficult employer and landlord. For example, she was sued by a laborer named Antoine Soili, who claimed that she owed him eight months' unpaid wages at a rate of eight dollars per month. He demanded sixty-four dollars plus his legal costs, but agreed to take thirty dollars in settlement of the suit.
³⁴
The fact that the normally combative Eliza offered a settlement suggests that there was some truth to his claim.

In a more disturbing case, a youth named John Rogers, who probably had worked for her as a house servant or farm laborer,
accused her of beating him. In the ritualized words of the complaint, she “with force and arms, to wit with swords, staves, ropes, hands and feet, made an assault upon the said John Rogers and did then and there beat, wound and ill treat him so that his life was greatly despaired of.” Through his “next friend” (the term refers to a person who represents a minor in legal proceedings), Rogers demanded damages of one hundred dollars.
³⁵

Exactly what Eliza did to him—whipped him? beat him with a cane?—is unexplained. She was protective of her public image and vulnerable to any perceived loss of dignity. If Rogers had spoken to her insolently, or she had seen him mocking her to a fellow servant, it is possible to imagine her reacting with violence.

She was nearly sixty-nine years old at the time of the incident, and he must have exceeded her in physical strength. But it is easy to understand why he did not respond to the attack with force. If he had fought back and injured her, the consequences could have been severe. Because of the age difference—and the probable difference in social class as well—it would have been difficult for him to convince a jury that he was the injured party. It was safer to pursue his assailant through the courts.

Eliza pleaded not guilty, but then withdrew the plea and agreed to pay thirty dollars to Rogers in damages.
³⁶
The concession suggests that she was at least partially at fault.

Although Eliza could be a difficult woman, she was deeply devoted to the members of her family, especially Mary and young Eliza and William Chase. Tragically, she would outlive her adopted daughter. Mary suffered from consumption—tuberculosis, as we would call it today—and by 1843 her condition was grave. On May 1, the Chases moved from Hoboken to Manhattan's West Nineteenth Street to be closer to Francis Berger, the family physician.
³⁷
They had barely arrived when the end came. Mary died on May 5, 1843, her husband and her half sister Eliza Jones Tranchell at her bedside.
³⁸
She was only forty-two years old.

Eliza did not attend the funeral ceremony. “She had a constitutional difficulty in going to funerals,” Nelson said; she “didn't like them.” But he offered a further explanation as well: “She was over-borne with grief at the loss of my wife.” She “took to her bed and remained there for one week, if not longer. I went to her house and saw her when in that condition and knew the reason; that was the reason she didn't come to the funeral.”
³⁹

It's hard to imagine that Eliza did not grieve profoundly. Mary had been a daughter to her; had called her “Mama,” while Maria Jones was simply “Mother.”
⁴⁰
She had grown from childhood to maturity under Eliza's eye. She had been her constant companion whenever Eliza traveled, at least until her marriage, which Eliza had arranged. More often than not, the two had shared a home, even after Nelson had entered the family. She was the person that Eliza had designated as her heir: her niece and at the same time her dearly loved daughter.

Mary was buried at fashionable Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
⁴¹
Because the inscription on the flat top of the sarcophagus has worn away, how Eliza and Nelson memorialized her is lost to time. But Eliza's actions proved her devotion. At the age of sixty-eight she took on the responsibility of raising Mary's two young children.

According to Nelson, Eliza welcomed seven-year-old Eliza Chase into the Jumel mansion first. She “had charge of her and supported and maintained and educated her until her marriage.”
⁴²
William, not quite three when his mother died, soon joined the household as well: “My son, who was a little bit of an infant at the time of the death of his mother, after some little short time was also taken by Madam and she kept him until the year 1859 in her charge; reared him up, sent him to school, maintained and supported him as she had done my daughter.”
⁴³
Nelson visited his children once or twice a week but lived in downtown Manhattan to be near his office until 1848.
⁴⁴
Even after he moved uptown to the mansion, it was Eliza who saw to their upbringing.