The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (43 page)

William resented having to depend on his father for money. In 1873 he sued Nelson to force him to give an accounting of his stewardship of the estate and share the available funds.
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A settlement was negotiated that allowed the children to control some of the money the estate generated.
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William and his family moved to Suffolk County, Long Island, and took up farming.
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Eliza Pery, with her husband and daughter, remained at the mansion with Nelson and Hattie.

Paul Pery would not live to see the end of the fight over the Jumel fortune. He died of tuberculosis on February 27, 1875, and his bones were laid to rest in the Jumel crypt.
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He was only forty-two years old.
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Six months later, his widow took their twenty-year-old daughter Mathilde to Europe, probably to visit his relatives.
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In 1878 Mathilde made a French marriage, just as her mother had done. The bridegroom was Louis-Antoine Gourreau of Bordeaux.
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Eliza Pery remarried in 1876, choosing a prosperous merchant, Julius Henry Caryl.
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They set up housekeeping at the mansion, where Eliza had lived with Paul. As with her first marriage, family connections were at work. When her father, Nelson, had lived in Worcester as a young man, he had studied law with Schuyler Crippen. Caryl, born in Worcester, was Crippen's nephew.
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As a backdrop to the marriages, births, and deaths, Bowen's appeal to the Supreme Court moved up on the court calendar. In a document weighing in at more than eleven hundred pages, he argued that the circuit court had erred in its handling of the suit against Nelson, chiefly in the admission and exclusion of evidence.
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The judge
had allowed hearsay regarding the identity of Mary Jumel, but had stopped witnesses from testifying that Madame Jumel had spoken of a son.
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In addition, Bowen contended that the judge had misinterpreted the laws governing trusts when he had instructed the jury that Eliza had no heritable interest in the Jumel estate.
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Nelson and his children, proving worthy opponents, appealed to the Supreme Court too. They asked the court to bar Bowen from pursuing further suits to obtain the Jumel estate (including his appeal to the Supreme Court itself ).
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Their suit was heard first, in October 1876. The justices upheld the final conveyance Eliza had made in November 1828, by which the downtown properties and uptown real estate would go to Mary or Mary's heirs after she and Stephen were dead. Bowen would not be allowed to enter into more litigation to claim the lands described in the deed.
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However, he was permitted to continue his appeal with regard to a sixty-five-acre tract in Washington Heights that was not mentioned in the 1828 document.
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This parcel (probably omitted from the conveyance inadvertently) was the only portion of Jumel real estate in Washington Heights that Eliza had not transferred to herself, although she had managed it later as if it were hers.

The concession did Bowen little good when the Supreme Court took up his appeal in 1878. In spite of some ambiguity regarding the status of the sixty-five acres, the justices ruled that Eliza had no interest in it that could be inherited, regardless of whether Bowen was her son. The other components of his appeal—mainly objections to the admission or exclusion of testimony—were dismissed as irrelevant, since Eliza had no property for him to receive.
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Exit George Washington Bowen—at long last.

In truth, Bowen never moved entirely offstage. In spite of the weakness of his case and the jury verdict that denied his claim to be Eliza's son, history, marching on, gave him the mother he had claimed. His story, blazoned across the newspapers for years, became fact by virtue of repetition. To this day, the received wisdom is that George
Washington Bowen was Eliza's illegitimate son.
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The depiction of her as a streetwalker became part of her persona as well—to the point that a historian termed her in 1992 “the leading prostitute in post-Revolutionary America.”
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The lies might have been exploded if any facts had been available about Eliza's life circa 1794. But none were. Through all the years of litigation, no one ever determined what she had been doing during her early adulthood, other than not giving birth to Bowen.
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As it turns out, it was as well for her family that she could not be tracked. Records of a previously unremarked lawsuit dating from the crucial time period would have raised uncomfortable questions about her character. The neatly folded documents, preserved in the Judicial Records Center in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, place Eliza in Providence in 1795.
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On January 21, she visited the shop of Samuel W. Greene, where candles, soap, crockery, and glassware crowded broadcloth, firkins of butter, and bags of tea.
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At Greene's emporium, Eliza purchased materials for an expensive dress: ten yards of green lutestring (a glossy silk), three yards of Irish linen, a pair of tapes (used to fasten skirts at the waist), and several skeins of thread.
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On September 16 she returned to the shop for a pair of shoes, a skein of silk, and five yards of ribbon.
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These elegant threads were at risk of unraveling. All the purchases had been made on credit, and as of mid-November, the bill was unpaid. Greene filed suit in Providence's Court of Common Pleas against “Betsey Bowen,” a single woman of Providence, “for the recovery of the sum of six pounds two shillings—equal to twenty dollars and thirty-three and one-third cents—due to the plaintiff from the said Betsey.”
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Eliza was arrested on December 1 and spent seven days in the county jail. She owed her liberation to David Ballou, who paid four dollars in bail and forty-one and two-thirds cents in fees. He did not settle Greene's bill, however. Execution, meaning that the local sheriff could seize and sell Eliza's possessions to cover what she owed, was granted on March 28, 1796, for $23.01 (the amount of the debt plus $2.68 in costs).
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The reason for Ballou's intervention remains a mystery. Perhaps Eliza was working for him in 1795, and Greene had extended credit under the assumption that her employer would pay the sum expended. Maybe Ballou had even promised Eliza a new outfit as wages, but ran into financial problems and left the bill unpaid. Alternately, if she had worked in the Ballou family as an adolescent, her former master might have been someone to call on in an emergency. Was her later care for his son William a way of paying back the debt?

There is at least one other possibility that could account for Ballou's involvement. He and Eliza might have had an affair, resulting in William, born in December 1790. Although this last explanation is not impossible, it is unlikely nevertheless. The boy would have been conceived when Eliza was only fourteen and Ballou a married man with a household of young children. Eliza's failure to have children later is another argument against her having been William's mother, although possibly Stephen was infertile. The question of the boy's ancestry remains unresolved.

Whether or not William was Eliza's son, certainly George Washington Bowen wasn't. The papers detailing the 1795 lawsuit offer further evidence, if any were needed, that Bowen had fabricated his case. The inscription indicating that he had been born of “Eliza Bowen” in Reuben Ballou's house on October 9, 1794—supposedly written on the night of his birth—referred to his alleged mother by a first name that she had yet to adopt. As the record of Greene's lawsuit proves, she was still going by Betsy in 1795. In addition, the suit demonstrates that she was in Providence throughout that year. In contrast, Bowen's witness Daniel Hull had contended that she had left the city in the spring or summer of 1795.
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Whether she continued to reside in Providence in the second half of the nineties or accompanied her mother and stepfather south in 1797 is unknown.

Bowen's dethronement must have been a sad disappointment to American journalists, who had filled many a column with his claims. But the Jumel estate, which had “already provided material
that would serve for a three-volume novel,” had not exhausted “its capacity in this respect.” A fresh troop of claimants had stepped up with “allegations respecting the family history” that promised to “furnish an entirely new chapter for the dénouement.”
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“H
istory tells us that Troy, although it held out for ten years, was at length taken and destroyed. Such may be the case with the famous Nelson Chase,” speculated a reporter for the
Cincinnati Daily Gazette
in 1876. “The danger which now threatens Mr. Chase is one which he least expected. It rises suddenly before him like Banquo's ghost. Who would have dreamed that Stephen Jumel ever had heirs in France? Why, he had been dead a half century, and never an heir appeared, until suddenly at this late hour, the suit is brought in the United States Court by these very heirs.”
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