The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (37 page)

The missing member of the party was soon to be present in the flesh. In the summer of 1855, young Mrs. Pery paid another visit.
⁸
But her temporary presence was not enough for her great-aunt. By the following spring, “Madame Burr” had determined that her great-niece and Paul should live permanently in the United States.
⁹
She made the economy, which was beginning to soften, the excuse. Nelson wrote to John Edouard Pery on March 22, 1856, enclosing a bill of exchange for 2,050 francs “for our dear children Paul and Eliza” and a letter “proving to them the necessity that exists, in the present state of their affairs here, that the money we are sending by this present must not be employed for any other purposes [than to] furnish them with the means to make certain of their return voyage to this country.”
¹⁰
In April the young couple left France for New York, accompanied by an eighteen-year-old female servant and the newest member of their little family: a twelve-month-old daughter, Mathilde.
¹¹
Eliza would have her closest relatives gathered about her again.

By the second half of the 1850s, the old slurs that had tarnished Eliza's reputation had been mostly forgotten. In 1855 a New York correspondent for the
Albany Express
offered readers a deferential picture of her and her domain. Her estate was “surrounded by forests and dells,” its grounds “beautifully improved,” and its “gardens laid out with taste.” Inside her home, “costly paintings (and among them a genuine Rubens), articles of vertu, presents from noble and distinguished persons, autographs, and everything that is rare and costly and curious” could be seen “in lavish profusion.”
¹²

A watercolor of the hallway gives an idea of the setting, showing the remnants of the Jumel collection mingled with objets d'art that Eliza had brought back from her later visits to Europe. In the left middle ground, Napoleon I's traveling chest—the one she claimed to have received from the emperor as a gift—occupies a prominent place.

Eliza herself, “from having mingled so much in the best kind of society,” had “all the courtly graces and blandness of manner which distinguished
les dames d'honneur
” of the eighteenth century. She bore “herself very haughtily,
_f
orbidding anything like approaches to familiarity”—truly “as much of a despot in her own dominions as any monarch who sways a scepter.” Perhaps inspired by her house's
history as George Washington's military headquarters, she had a gun fired each evening to deter potential intruders.
¹³

Each summer Eliza emerged from her self-imposed isolation in upper Manhattan to pay her annual visit to Saratoga Springs. In 1851 she had purchased a house on Circular Street to serve as her summer home.
¹⁴
With its massive square columns supporting a brooding triangular pediment, it is akin to, if less graceful than, her New York mansion. As if in compensation, she gave it the delicate name Rose Cottage and replaced the back piazza with an elegant dining room, lit by four large windows.
¹⁵

Once or twice in the early 1850s, she took advantage of having her own lodging in Saratoga to welcome members of her sister's family. Maria Jones had died in 1850, but Eliza hosted her sister's oldest surviving daughter, Eliza Jones Tranchell, and Emily Maddox, child of the younger Jones daughter, Louisa.
¹⁶
In 1853 the women stayed for four months in order to attend the state fair, which was held on farmland Eliza owned a mile east of Saratoga (no doubt she charged a rental fee for use of the property).
¹⁷
Although that year “she was sick almost all the time” and “didn't receive much company,” she was in better form a few years later.
¹⁸
In 1857 she gave an evening entertainment for the Utica Citizens Corps, presenting the company with a “modest but beautiful” white satin banner, decorated with gold fringe and the image of the goddess of Liberty.
¹⁹
Her guests received the gift following the “Army regulations for reception of colors,” and “gave her a lively serenade” before they left.
²⁰
When she departed Saratoga for New York on September 30, the local newspaper paid her an amiable compliment: “What with her presents to and entertainment of the Corps, and their attentions in return, her residence has been the scene of much that was gay and imposing.”
²¹

The year 1858 brought Eliza renewed attention with the publication of James Parton's
Life and Times of Aaron Burr
. In this wildly popular biography (it went through fourteen editions by 1861), she was treated sympathetically as “a daughter of New England” who was
“as remarkable for energy and talent as [Burr] himself.”
²²
According to Parton, Eliza was “a favored frequenter” of the French court during the “many years” she resided in Paris with Stephen—by now the legends had become the reality. After her return to New York, she had undertaken “with native energy the task of restoring her husband's broken fortunes.”
²³
Stephen was given a vivid back story: supposedly he had emigrated to Saint-Domingue as a young man and watched his coffee plantations burn at the time of the rebellion, but escaped the massacre thanks to (1) a faithful slave and (2) a passing boat that deposited him on Saint Helena—the island where Napoleon I would live in exile years later. From there Stephen made his way to New York.
²⁴
Surely it was Eliza who reassigned the Saint-Domingue getaway from François to his brother, heightening the drama by inserting a loyal slave and a mythical layover in Saint Helena. With Napoleon III on the throne of France, her tales had taken on a Bonapartist tinge.

Parton treated the divorce from Burr with tact, protecting both Eliza's and McManus's reputations: “The accusation [i.e., that Burr had committed adultery] is now known to have been groundless; nor, indeed, at the time was it seriously believed.”
²⁵
Burr had been losing Eliza's money in unwise investments, Parton explained, and the charge “was used merely as the most convenient legal mode of depriving him of control over her property.”
²⁶
Eliza's claim of being Burr's widow rather than his wife was accepted. Their union, Parton wrote, “was, in effect, though never in law, dissolved.”
²⁷

Had she truly never been divorced from Burr? The investigation of that matter formed a curious sequel to her relationship with that complex and enigmatic man. In 1863 Nelson Chase arranged with a Washington lawyer, Samuel A. Pugh, to claim Burr's military pension for the former vice president's surviving “spouse.”
²⁸
Potentially Eliza could receive six hundred dollars for every year since Burr's death in 1836. Pugh agreed to pursue the claim in exchange for twofifths of any arrears awarded, while Nelson would receive five hundred dollars of Pugh's cut.
²⁹

The case rested on a copy of a document that proved (supposedly) that there had not been a divorce at all.
³⁰
At a guess, the item may have borne the date that the papers relating to the divorce suit were enrolled (i.e., legally registered).
³¹
Because Burr's appeal of the divorce was in progress when he died, the records of the case were not filed away until his death—an event that terminated the appeal. As a result, the vice chancellor's final signature on the documents was dated September 14, 1836, inspiring the poetic but inaccurate story still circulating today that the divorce was handed down on the day of Burr's death.
³²
The dating of the signature could have prompted Nelson and Eliza to claim that Burr had died before the divorce could be concluded.

Unfortunately for their attempt to revise history, the marriage had been dissolved on July 8, 1836, in spite of the subsequent appeal.
³³
Eliza had even identified herself occasionally in legal matters as the divorced wife of Aaron Burr.
³⁴
Trying to change her status on a technicality—a possible delay in the enrollment of the decree—was a losing battle, Pugh realized, after putting in a year of uncompensated efforts. This “has been the most vexacious [
sic
] case I ever had,” he wrote with frustration in 1863.
³⁵
He would earn nothing for his trouble, and Eliza would not get the pension she had claimed. To the federal government, she was, and would remain, the divorced wife and not the widow of Burr.

35

I
n 1859 the
Saratoga Sentinel
reported that “Madame Jumel, once the wife and now the widow of the celebrated Aaron Burr,” continued to visit Saratoga annually:

She comes here ostensibly to look after an estate which she owns, located near our village, but, like all other ladies, she mingles with, and seems to enjoy, the festivities of this gay watering place with as much delight as if she was the reigning belle of the season.

… Although she has outlived most of her contemporaries, having attained upwards of eighty years, she seems to be just as full of life and vivacity as she was forty years ago, and apparently possessing all her faculties unimpaired.
¹

The 1859 visit to Saratoga would be Eliza's last. A photograph that must date from around 1860 reveals unmistakable signs of age.
²
Posed with her family outside her home, she allowed herself to be portrayed without hair dye or wig, white hair drawn back beneath one of the delicate lace head coverings she had favored for twenty-five years. Although she sat rather than stood for the long exposure,
she had the strength to support in her lap an unidentified child, seemingly about twelve months old.

Mathilde is seated on the steps of the mansion and her mother in a chair with a book in her lap. The man whose left arm is hidden by a column may be Paul. Nelson is nearby, hat in hand. William, hands behind his back and coat buttoned up to the neck, stands at a short distance from the family group on the porch. He and Eliza, posed on either side of their relatives and friends, seem slightly isolated from the others.
³