The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (39 page)

W
ithin two days of Eliza's funeral, a reporter for the
New York Observer and Chronicle
had scented scandal. “It is understood that nearly one-half of [her] property has been left for benevolent purposes, and if the will is unbroken, some of the institutions in the neighborhood of Washington Heights may be enriched by her death.”
¹
The innocent little phrase—”if the will is unbroken”—cleverly suggested that the reverse might occur.

Eliza had left a bequest of five thousand dollars to Rev. Smith of the Church of the Intercession, seventy thousand dollars for a new church and rectory, and a plot of land to build them on. Nine charitable institutions—ranging from the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Children of Seamen to the Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females—would receive legacies of five hundred to five thousand dollars each.
²

Eliza's family, in contrast, was partially disinherited. William would get nothing. Nelson, for over thirty years her loyal son-inlaw (or strictly speaking, nephew-in-law), would receive the interest
on a principal of ten thousand dollars—an income of about seven hundred dollars per year.
³
His daughter, Eliza Pery, would receive the same, instead of the twenty-thousand-dollar legacy she had been promised in her marriage contract. However, she would share the residuary estate (what remains of an estate after specific legacies are paid) with the charities.
⁴
The residuary estate contained about 90 percent of the Jumel fortune. The estate as a whole was worth approximately one million dollars—equivalent in purchasing power to nearly fifteen million dollars today.
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The will was a bitter blow to Nelson and his children—particularly William. In an earlier testament drafted in 1851, most of Eliza's property had been left to her great-nephew.
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He would have received the farms in Saratoga Springs outright and the income from the downtown properties, mansion, and homestead lot. In addition, he and his sister, Eliza, would have shared sixty acres of Washington Heights farmland. His sister would presumably have a husband to support her as well (she was a girl at the time that document was written), plus any marriage settlement that might be made in the future. Although Nelson would have been guaranteed only five hundred dollars per year, he could have anticipated support from his son, who would have been a very wealthy man. With the 1863 testament, everything had changed. William was left penniless and most of Eliza's estate would go to charity.

The Chases decided to challenge the will. Nelson proved himself a worthy successor to Eliza in the shrewdness with which he managed the litigation. He made an agreement with his children to oversee the legal proceedings in exchange for one-third of what they would receive from the estate.
⁷
Although not a blood relative of Eliza, with this maneuver he secured a claim on a third of her enormous fortune.

In addition, Nelson negotiated a crucial deal with the four surviving children of Eliza's sister, Maria Jones. If the will were to be overturned, by New York State law the estate would be divided among Eliza's nearest relatives: the four Jones children (her nieces and
nephews). Nelson bought out the Joneses' claims for forty thousand dollars, so that William and Eliza, her great-niece and great-nephew, would become their great aunt's only heirs.
⁸

Quiet consultations with the charities named in the will followed. Nelson promised to pay each organization the bequest it had been promised if it did not obstruct his attempts to overturn the will or demand its cut in the residuary estate.
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As much as it must have grated on him, he agreed to pay Smith's five-thousand-dollar legacy and a portion of the money promised to the Church of the Intercession as well.
¹⁰

Nelson neglected to contact one of the will's beneficiaries. During the battle over Stephen's estate, Eliza had agreed to pay her half share of the three thousand dollars her husband had promised his niece Felicie, but not until after her own death. The bequest was listed in her will, but Nelson ignored it.
¹¹
Felicie was on the other side of the Atlantic and unlikely to hear of Eliza's death.

The next move was to arrange a court hearing: a jury would have to be convinced to set the will aside. Nelson and his children hired Charles O'Conor, the most celebrated member of the New York bar, to serve as lead counsel.
¹²
Thirty years before, O'Conor had served on Aaron Burr's legal team, helping Burr to defend himself against Eliza's bill of divorce.
¹³
Then he had driven Eliza to a draw in one of her dower rights cases, but represented her in a later tussle over Stephen's estate.
¹⁴
In the 1850s he had become famous for his defense of Catherine Sinclair Forrest, accused of adultery by her actor husband, Edwin Forrest.
¹⁵
More recently he had been in the news for agreeing to defend Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, against charges of treason.
¹⁶
He was acquainted with Nelson, who had assisted him in handling the Forrest case.
¹⁷

The offense O'Conor and Nelson designed was two-pronged. They claimed that Smith had exerted undue influence on Eliza to convince her to make bequests to him and his church.
¹⁸
Concurrently they put forth the complementary argument that Eliza had suffered from dementia during her last years, making her incapable of comprehending her duty to her family and preparing a valid will.
¹⁹

When the case came up for trial in New York State Supreme Court on November 13, 1866, the testimony of Eliza's loving family members was riveting. They drew a picture of a woman who had become increasingly irrational over the last six years of her life. In response to carefully calibrated questions from O'Conor, Nelson dated her decline to her last visit to Saratoga, in 1859. One evening at dinner, she had felt a transient shock, followed by persistent headache. Later, homeward bound on the train from Saratoga to Schenectady, she was disturbed by some boisterous travelers. The first clear manifestation of her insanity followed. In Nelson's telling, she jumped up, put her face close to theirs, and, startlingly, “gave a most powerful screech.”
²⁰

After her return to New York City, she developed strange delusions: “She charged some very respectable gentlemen, neighbors of hers, with robbing her or trying to rob her of her property” and “persisted in that charge for three or four years before her death.” On other occasions, “she used to tell that she had been in heaven, and she insisted upon it; and when told she must have been in a trance or a dream, she would insist upon it that it was a reality; she said she had seen the angels of heaven fluttering about her, and that she had seen the winding sheets of the dead and bright new pins which had come out of their grave clothes in very large piles.” In 1860 and '61 she had become convinced that British loyalists had buried valuables on the grounds of the mansion for safekeeping during the American Revolution. She hired men to dig and blast rocks in search of the treasure.
²¹

Most disturbingly, Nelson said, Eliza had become convinced that he and his children were trying to kill her: “I used to get my breakfast very early, and she would reserve her tea and would not touch it at all until I got back, under the idea that it had been poisoned, and I had on my return to buy and convince her to take the tea and drink it myself in her presence; I did so many times; she also charged me and my daughter with attempting to poison her food, her beef tea, and her medicine.” Often he would have to drink a little of the medicine before she would take it herself.
²²

Eliza Pery seconded her father's narrative: “She gave manifestations of craziness; she accused us all of poisoning her; she said my father put the bed-bug poison in her tea—(laughter)—and put tacks in her shoes when she got out of bed, so that it would kill her.” She accused her great-niece of trying to poison her too: “She said I carried arsenic in my pocket to sprinkle in her tea and over her beefsteak; afterwards she would turn around and kiss me very affectionately, and say, ‘how much I love you!'”
²³

William testified that Eliza had changed toward him too, beginning in 1859:

I was still at the supper table, when she came down from [her] room in a furious passion, and said that I intended to kill her. I said, “How is that?” She said, “Oh, you know,” and further, “You have been in my rooms and unscrewed the top of my wardrobe to kill me.” I said “That is outrageous.” I then brought her up into the room and showed her that there was nothing the matter with the wardrobe; she would not believe it; I said I better leave the house, then. I left and afterwards met my sister, and she wanted me to call on her and see her, which I did. She received me very kindly, but in going away she always repeated the charge that I intended to kill her and asked if I was not sorry and wanted me to confess it. I said I would not confess a thing of that kind that I was not guilty of.
²⁴

After that 1859 incident, she put a patch over the image of his face in the portrait painted in Rome—or so William said.
²⁵
The canvas shows no indication of damage today.

Regardless of whether the picture drawn of Eliza in court was an accurate representation of her mental state, the tactic used to challenge the will—arguing that the testator was insane at the time she made it—was widely employed in estate litigation by the 1860s.
²⁶
This approach had become possible after medical practitioners in the late eighteenth century began to differentiate among de
_g
rees of insanity, arguing that an individual could be irrational in certain domains, but competent in others.
²⁷
For example, a woman like Eliza
might be capable of conducting business, but “morally insane”—emotionally and ethically unbalanced.

A will with provisions that cut off a child or other “natural” heir could be presented as evidence that the testator was of unsound mind when it was made. As early as 1811, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush had opined that a man who left most of his estate “to a church, or any other public institution, or to a stranger, to the injury of a family of children who had never offended him, and whose necessities, or rank in life, as well as their blood, intitled [
sic
] them to be his heirs … should be considered as morally deranged; and his will should be set aside as promptly as if he had disposed of his estate in a paroxysm of intellectual derangement.”
²⁸

More often than not, charges of undue influence by a person acting against the testator's best interests accompanied moral insanity claims in estate litigation.
²⁹
Smith was assigned the unsavory role of the influencer in the Jumel case, accused of having taken advantage of Eliza's derangement to persuade her to benefit him and his church. He was questioned aggressively about his meetings with her.

The picture that could be pieced together from his answers was far from black and white. His claim that Eliza had asked him to visit her in 1862 was suspect, since she had not seen him for three years previously. Her decision to give him a personal legacy raised the possibility of undue influence as well. On the other hand, most of the provisions of the will that Eliza had signed under his supervision did not differ greatly from those drafted by her family attorney, Wetmore. Even many of the charities that he and Smith had suggested were the same.

Nelson had fared the worst from the revisions Smith had superintended. In Wetmore's draft, he was to receive the interest on thirty thousand dollars. According to the clergyman, Eliza had said that “it must be put down at ten thousand dollars.” She had insisted that Eliza Pery's share be reduced also: her great-niece should receive the interest on ten thousand rather than on twenty thousand dollars. The reverend had tried to dissuade her, he claimed: “I said, ‘Madame, I have one request to make of you, and that is that you will not put down Mrs. Pery.' She said that she must do so, as it was too much;
that Mrs. Pery was vain and frivolous and would waste it all in folly. ‘But Madame,' said I, ‘remember that this is your last act.'” After further persuasion on his part, Eliza said, “Perhaps we had better split it; put it down at fifteen thousand dollars.” But when Smith read the revised will back to her, “she declared ‘that she could not allow it to stand at fifteen thousand dollars, that it was too much, and that she must put it at ten thousand dollars.'”
³⁰

The narrative is not implausible. Wetmore himself had tried unsuccessfully to persuade his client to increase her bequest to her great-niece when he prepared the draft will. “I want you to give to Eliza twenty thousand dollars more,” he had said. But she wouldn't discuss the matter. “I suggested, after all, that she should give Eliza another sum,” Wetmore said, “but I could not bring her mind to comprehend it; she would talk always of persons trying to kill her; her mind was vague.” Indeed, he was unable to get her to specify the disposal of more than about one hundred thousand dollars of her estate.
³¹
“When he could not persuade her to make any other bequests, he said, ‘Shall I put down that the rest shall be divided evenly among these people?” In the end he did so, leaving her with the draft.
³²
Wetmore, therefore, was largely responsible for the way in which the residuary estate was handled.
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