The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (42 page)

There was a charge of perjury to deal with as well. Witness Joseph F. Perry, who claimed he had lived in Providence and had been aware that Reuben “had an illegitimate child by [Eliza],” was proven never to have resided in Providence at all.
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Vandervoort's reliability was questioned too. Not only had she promulgated the George Washington story (before backpedaling and claiming it to be a joke told by her mother), she had offered multiple accounts of Bowen's maternity, supposedly identifying him at different times as Maria Jones's son, Eliza's son, and even the son of her own mother, Lavinia.
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It came out that Bowen had promised her half of anything he received in return for supporting his case.
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Bowen himself had changed his tune. He had denied being related to Eliza in 1866, when inquiries were made to identify any
possible relatives before her will was overturned.
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It was only later that he had claimed Eliza as his mother. This inconvenient fact was discounted by one of his lawyers, who explained that his client had been told that his mother was Betsy Bowen and didn't know that she had become Madame Jumel.
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If the credibility of Bowen and his supporters was shaken, Eliza's reputation took a beating as well. Details of her youth and parentage, hidden discreetly throughout her adult life, were dragged out into the light of day. Now all the world knew that she had lived with her mother in two brothels and spent time in a workhouse, and that her mother had been jailed and warned out of Providence.
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These details made it easier for auditors to believe that she could have had an illegitimate child. The defense's inability to document exactly where Eliza had been in 1794 didn't help. The gap in the record made it possible to conclude that she had been in Providence giving birth to Bowen.

Those chosen to weigh the rights and wrongs of the affair were unable to untangle the knotty strands. At 11:10 pm on March 17, 1872, the jurors returned to the courtroom after more than eight hours of deliberation. When the deputy clerk “asked them if they had agreed upon a verdict,” the foreman answered, “we have not.” The trial ended with a hung jury.
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By the time the suit was reheard during the winter of 1872 to '73, Bowen had gathered additional witnesses to support his case. The deposition of “Henry Nodine, an ancient person,” was particularly dramatic.
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When he was a teenager, Nodine said, he had worked at the Jumels' mansion for two or three years, before Eliza and Stephen went to France. One day he was called up from the kitchen. When he entered the hallway, his employers were arguing. Stephen, in fractured English, referred to himself in the third person. “My Eliza,” Stephen said, “You never tell Mr. Jumel you have one little boy, or else Mr. Jumel won't marry you; then you tell Mr. Jumel you very sick and going to die; then you want to die one married woman; you
go straight to Heaven you sure; the doctor tell Mr. Jumel marry you, you die before morning; the doctor tell Mr. Jumel one story too; Mr. Jumel marry you—two days [later] you ride around town in carriage.”
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This narrative was cooked up from the story John Pintard had told years before about Eliza tricking Stephen into marriage. Now Bowen had been stirred into the mix.

Nodine added that Eliza would curse Stephen occasionally, calling him “‘a damned old French son of a bitch,' and all such names.” Then she would threaten him with a pistol and chase him out of the house.
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This last piquant detail may have been inspired by the sixbarreled pistol (almost certainly imaginary) that Eliza was said to have purchased after being mocked in Saratoga.
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Nelson's lawyers attacked Nodine's credibility: he had claimed to have served in the militia during the War of 1812, yet had been too young to participate.
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They could have made an even stronger case against him had they realized that Eliza had evicted a “Mr. Naudine” from one of the Jumel farms, and Stephen had sued Lewis and Peter Nodine—probably Henry's older brothers—over an unpaid debt.
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But few outsiders could have known that the Nodines had reason to be vengeful against Eliza or that Henry's account had been fabricated from repurposed bits and pieces. Details of his deposition, reported in the newspapers, further tarnished Madame Jumel's reputation.
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It was stained blacker yet as a parade of witnesses, recycled from the earlier trial, trooped in and out of the courthouse. Each claimed that Eliza had mentioned having a son—or rather, was barred from saying so. At the beginning of the trial, the judge had ruled that testimony on what Eliza might have said to others about having a child in Providence was inadmissible hearsay. Bowen's lawyers got around this by introducing the witnesses one by one, questioning each about his or her relationship with Eliza, and then telling the judge that they would like to use the witness to prove that Eliza said she had a son. Although the judge refused every time, the repeated use of the strategy gave listeners the impression that Eliza had spoken of Bowen frequently.
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Vandervoort was not called to testify—Bowen's lawyers must have concluded that her credibility was ruined—but Daniel Hull reappeared and fared badly. Cross-examination revealed that he had been an infant at most in 1794, the year in which he was supposed to have seen Eliza with the newborn Bowen.
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The stories of other elderly witnesses were challenged too, as a correspondent for the
Boston Journal
reported:

Old and decrepit people have been placed in the stand to tell of conversations held in their presence when they were four and five years old. One person gave a circumstantial conversation she had held with Madame Jumel, which detailed the disgrace of the madame. On cross-examination the party admitted that she was only five years old at the time. A damaging witness was cornered on cross-examination by fixing dates, by which it appeared that his wife, when he married her, was only eight years old. There is a good deal of bad blood in the case, and O'Conor, usually cold as an iceberg, denounced the opposing counsel as a liar.
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A note of humor was introduced by former U.S. attorney general Ebenezer R. Hoar, one of Bowen's lawyers. After seating his client in front of the jury, he held up an impression of the lithographed self-portrait Eliza had commissioned in 1852, using it to detail the “very striking” resemblances between Bowen's features and hers, from the length of the ear flap to the placement of the eyelid crease. Next he requested his client “to look at the foreman of the jury and laugh.” This novel instruction “excited general laughter, in which Mr. Bowen joined.” Taking advantage of the moment, Hoar pointed out to the jury “that when Mr. Bowen smiled he had a dimple in his left cheek which did not appear in the other,” just like his putative mother. Getting in a dig at Nelson's lawyers, who had implied that he and his colleagues had manufactured evidence, Hoar said sarcastically that the “dimple had doubtless been put there by Mr. Tucker [Hoar's fellow counsel], having been gotten up because Madame Jumel had a similar peculiarity.”
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It is only fair to say that Nelson and his lawyers adjusted facts too, if not as spectacularly as their opponents did. They cleaned up Eliza's family history by suggesting that Mary was born legitimately of a marriage between Maria and “some worthless fellow who had deserted her” and pushing back the date of Maria's union with William Jones so that her oldest son arrived sixteen rather than four months later.
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In a dramatic change in strategy from the initial trial, they produced the conveyances Eliza had implemented in the 1820s that gave her the downtown and Harlem Heights properties, with reversion to Mary or Mary's heirs after her death. The significance of these deeds is hard to overstate. As O'Conor explained, they showed that Eliza had never owned the real estate that made up the bulk of the Jumel fortune. The properties were only in trust for her during her lifetime—so Bowen couldn't inherit them even if he proved to be her son.
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The real estate would have to go to Mary's heirs, not Eliza's. O'Conor glossed over the irregularities that had accompanied the formation of the trusts, such as the purported sales of the lands to Mary. Just in case anyone questioned their validity, however, he and Nelson produced a carefully coached witness, who testified to having worked at the Jumel mansion as a boy and hearing Stephen say that he was content to have the property go to Mary.
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The judge understood the importance of the trusts and made that clear in his instructions to the jurors. They were to decide whether Bowen was Eliza's son. But whatever that verdict might be, he also directed them to find “the special fact ‘that Eliza B. Jumel, at the time of her death, had no estate or interest in the lands claimed which was descendible to her heirs.'”
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After an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom. As instructed, its members found “the special fact” that Eliza's title to the Jumel estate could not be inherited. They delivered their verdict on the plaintiff's parentage as well. “We find for the defendant,” the foreman said. George Washington Bowen was not Eliza's son.
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One week later Bowen appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court.
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39

O
utside the courtroom, life continued for the Chases. On August 12, 1868, fifty-seven-year-old Nelson married twenty-two-year-old Hattie Dunning, daughter of a prosperous lumber merchant in upper Manhattan.
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They had a child, Jumel, who died in infancy in 1869, but a second son, Raymond, born in 1874 or '75, survived the epidemic diseases of the era.
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His name was a thoughtful tribute to Nelson's son-in-law, just as the choice of Jumel for his older brother had honored Stephen and Eliza. Raymond was a traditional name in the Pery family and one of Paul's middle names.

Nelson and Hattie lived at the Jumel mansion, sharing the house with the Perys and the William Chases. By 1870 the homestead housed not only the three adult couples but four children as well—the Perys' fifteen-year-old daughter Mathilde, William and Isabella's infant daughter, Ella, and their sons, William and Leslie, aged three and five.
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Five female domestics and a gardener and coachman served the trio of families.
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The stress of the endless litigation began to tell on the occupants of the mansion. The legal bills were colossal, and money was tight. Much of the Jumel fortune could not be touched until the litigation over its ownership ended. Nelson had been administering the estate
since Eliza's death. In spite of some substantial influxes of cash—including $24,000 for the sale of two lots Eliza had owned at Seventh Avenue and Forty-Third Street and $170,000 for land taken by the city for public improvements—he had had to take out a $25,000 mortgage as security for payment of a legal bill and borrow $75,000 from lead counsel O'Conor.
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Unpaid invoices accumulated alarmingly: $2,236 for horse feed and groceries; $12,604 for renovations at 150 Broadway; $306.50 for coal.
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