The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (41 page)

Holes and inconsistencies appeared in the story as the deponents were cross-examined. Eliza was claimed first to be an illegitimate daughter of James Bowen's daughter Patience and then a daughter of James himself.
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Her supposed relatives were unable to describe her beyond saying that she “was richly dressed” and “a handsome woman.”
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They had trouble accounting for the existence of her sister Maria Jones, sometimes identifying her with Patience Bowen and sometimes claiming her as an illegitimate child of Patience.
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To explain why she and Eliza had referred to their mother as Phebe, they averred that James Bowen's wife, Abigail, had changed her name to Phebe Hannah after her marriage.
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It was hoped that an examination of eighty-nine-year-old Elizabeth Salisbury, who knew the Bowen family history down to her fingertips, would clarify these discrepancies. Although she was half-deaf, almost blind, and unable to walk, mentally she was still as sharp as a tack. Interviewed in her two-room house in Warren, Rhode Island, she reeled off genealogical data with ease: “Did I know Uncle James Bowen? I guess I did. Lived not more'n half a mile from him all the days of my life as long as he lived … He was a fine old man, too.” Martin Bowen? Of course she knew him: “He was Uncle James Bowen's son. Living? No, bless your soul and body, he's been dead these twenty years.”
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Under questioning, Salisbury detailed several generations of the family with impressive clarity. But just as the crucial cross-examination that would focus on Eliza began, she put her hand to her head and complained of pain. Assisted to her bed, she moaned, trembled, and fell into convulsions. The paperwork recording her deposition terminates with a brief, sad note: “The commissioners are of the opinion that the witness is entirely unfit and unable to testify unless there be hereafter an improvement in her condition.”
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She never recovered sufficiently to be reexamined.

A jury verdict against the Bowens in late April 1871 ended the matter at last.
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But Nelson and his children had no time to celebrate. A more threatening claimant—both to the Jumel fortune and to Eliza's reputation—had advanced fully armed for battle from the wings.

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E
liza's newest relative, a man in his seventies, bore the patriotic name of George Washington Bowen. This prosperous grocer and resident of Providence announced himself to be Madame Jumel's illegitimate child. He had been born during her youth in Rhode Island, he said—fathered by none other than the first president of the United States!

Bowen's claim was simultaneously startling and ominous. His backers said that he was born in October 1794, a perplexingly undocumented period of Eliza's life.
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Of her young adulthood—the years that spanned the mid-1790s—almost anything could be posited and even believed. Worse yet for Nelson and his children, if Bowen was indeed Eliza's son—whether by George Washington or anyone else—he would receive the entire Jumel fortune. When a woman died without a will in New York State, her children's claims superseded any others—and bastardy was no bar. Thanks to a New York law enacted in 1855, illegitimate children could inherit from their mother “as if legitimate.”
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To support his case, Bowen produced Anne Eliza Vandervoort, born in Providence but resident in New York since childhood.
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She too, it appeared, was related to Eliza Jumel. Her mother, Lavinia, had been Eliza's sister, she claimed. Maria Jones, previously thought to be Eliza's sibling, instead had been the fruit of the first marriage of Jonathan Clark, Phebe Bowen's second husband. In other words, she had been Eliza's stepsister rather than sister.
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If this newly revealed genealogy was valid, then
none
of Maria's descendants were blood relatives of Eliza—not William Chase, not Eliza Pery, and not the four children of Maria and William Jones, whose claims Nelson had purchased. Nelson and his children would lose their title to the Jumel estate.

Crucially Vandervoort possessed a precious family document that recorded the maternity of George Washington Bowen. Handed down to her by her mother, it was a slender volume, barely more than a pamphlet, containing a history of the first part of the reign of King Henry IV of England. Although published in 1599, it carried a more recent inscription on the back of the title page: “George Washington Bowen born of Eliza Bowen at my house in Toun [
sic
] Providence R. I. October 9, 1794.” The inscription was signed “Reuben Ballou.”
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The name Ballou was a blast from the past. Reuben, born in 1747, belonged to the same Ballou clan in Cumberland, Rhode Island, as William B. Ballou, the boy Eliza had raised. (William's father, David, was Reuben's second cousin.)
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Reuben had worked as a butcher in Cumberland, raised a family, been widowed, and then remarried. With his second wife, Freelove, and two young children, he had moved from Cumberland to Providence in 1792. There the Ballous began to have run-ins with the law.
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Reuben was jailed briefly in December for debt.
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In mid-1794 the town officers attempted to eject him and his family from Providence, but Cumberland's officials didn't want them either.
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They stayed in Providence and by 1799 were taking in poor transients as lodgers.
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At some point their domicile became notorious. In 1802 Freelove was charged with selling “spirituous liquors” without a license.
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A year later she, Reuben, and a woman named Luthanea Leland were
accused of being “persons of bad fame and evil conversation, keepers of disorderly and bawdy houses.”
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Eliza, it was said, joined the questionable Ballou household as a servant.
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From there, according to Bowen's supporters, matters proceeded as follows: Reuben was injured in a fall from a horse during the time Eliza had lived with his family. He was, or had been, an express rider for General George Washington, and the commander in chief paid him a few visits after the accident.
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The brief calls had lasting results. Washington “became enamored of the beautiful servant girl, Betsy Bowen.”
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They had a liaison that produced the infant George Washington Bowen, named after his illustrious father. On the night of the baby's birth, Reuben recorded the event in an old book he had lying about—the very book that Eliza's sister Lavinia had preserved and passed down to her daughter Anne Vandervoort.
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Eighty-three-year-old Daniel Hull of Providence testified to the presence of Eliza and an infant in the Ballou's home. As a child he had lived in the house of a baker named George Wheeden, who would send him “with a hand-basket with biscuits to Mrs. Newell's and Mrs. Ballou's” every morning. One day, he said, Eliza “called me into her bedroom and wanted to show me her good fat boy, as she called it; afterwards she gave me some coppers to buy candy.” The baby “was about three or four days old,” he estimated, and Eliza somewhere between fifteen and eighteen years of age. He continued to “see her pretty often,” because there was a monkey at the Ballous' house that he “used to go up to see.” Between four and eight months later, Eliza and her sister Lavinia moved to New York, leaving the baby in Freelove Ballou's care. Years later she returned to Providence and delivered a lecture about her life in France from the porch of a tavern, Hull said. But “the boys made such a hooting at her, hallow, and hissing that [he] couldn't hear half she said.”
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Elderly witnesses who claimed to have known Eliza when they were children described her as a girl likely to have had an illegitimate child. In a deposition read to the jury, Reuben's eighty-one-year-old daughter-in-law Sally Ballou spoke of seeing the future Madame Jumel “walking the streets of Providence.”
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Eighty-three-year-old
Catherine Williams tottered to the stand in person to say that Eliza had passed her house in Providence “in the company of disreputable persons.”
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Nelson provided unwitting ammunition to those attacking Eliza's character. During the 1866 battle to overturn her will, he had hinted that his wife, Mary, was Eliza's illegitimate daughter, fathered by Stephen before he and Eliza had married.
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The slur, designed to strengthen his children's claim to the Jumel estate, came back to haunt him. Bowen's lawyers used it as evidence that it would have been in character for Eliza to have had an illegitimate child.
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Bowen supplemented his case by producing witnesses who swore that Eliza had mentioned to them that she had a son. It appeared that she had spoken of the matter to a remarkable number of people: the wife of a dentist who had treated her; a woman who had worked as the caretaker of her Saratoga home; long-ago servants who were children at the time.
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A fire marshal who had met with Eliza after a conflagration in her barn testified that she had told him that “she had a son who would one day return and drive away the people who were around her.”
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Eliza's apparent openness about her child's existence raised the question of why she had not reached out to him during her years in New York. In fact, she had done so after her marriage, Vandervoort said, but Freelove Ballou had refused to give up young Bowen.
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Later Nelson, who “had made the pursuit of Madame Jumel's wealth the business of his lifetime,” had cut her off from the world.
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He had denied her the opportunity “to send to Providence for her son, even if she had desired to do so.”
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The latter contention, at least, was hardly convincing. As Nelson observed, “Madame Jumel was the most determined spirit he had ever met with, either in life or in history, and, so far as he knew, she could at any time have gone to Rhode Island until she became so infirm as not to be able to travel.”
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As the suit advanced, progressing from depositions taken in Rhode Island to an eight-week trial in federal circuit court in New York, cracks and holes appeared in Bowen's case. In spite of his mild likeness to the first president—“the assertion of his counsel that he [bore] a striking resemblance to the Father of his Country [was] not
altogether fanciful”—the story of his distinguished paternity disintegrated quickly.
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As Charles O'Conor pointed out, if Reuben Ballou had been injured during his military service, George Washington's visit to him and concurrent affair with Eliza “could not, as a matter of history, have been later than 1782 … and all that time [she] must have been carrying that child until Hull saw him, some twelve years after, a fine, fat baby.”
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Perhaps the incident had occurred after the war instead—but Washington's last visit to Rhode Island had taken place in 1790.
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Anticipating this difficulty, Bowen's counsel had already adjusted the narrative to make Reuben Ballou rather than George Washington his client's father.
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In support of this genealogy, Reuben's granddaughter Maria Cook testified that her grandfather had begetted an illegitimate son, with Eliza being the child's mother.
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Catherine Williams said she had known Bowen when he was a boy living in the Ballou family and that he bore a striking resemblance to Eliza.
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Although this revision of the narrative did the plaintiff no great harm, other weaknesses in his case were identified. The authenticity of the inscription in the so-called King Henry book identifying him as Eliza's child was challenged. Ballou's purported signature did not resemble other signatures of his that survived on authenticated documents.
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