The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (44 page)

Banquo's ghost had risen indeed. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Stephen's long-dead brother and sister had decided to make a bid for the Jumel fortune. They claimed that Eliza's conveyances of the Jumel properties in the 1820s, particularly those with purported payments from Mary, had been illegal transactions designed to defraud Stephen and his heirs. This argument was not new—Madelaine and Ulysses had tried to overturn the deeds on the same grounds after Stephen's death—but this time it was bolstered by vigorous attempts to besmirch Eliza's reputation. The “French heirs,” as they came to be called, asserted that Eliza had abandoned Stephen callously after he returned to the United States. First she
went south with Mary (a reference to the 1828 trip to Charleston) and then “into the interior of New York” (where Mary had met Nelson). The latter trip was assigned an ominous purpose. It was not “to find cool weather, as they [Eliza and Mary had] alleged,” but rather to consult with Schuyler Crippen “as to the most effectual mode of defrauding the said Stephen Jumel out of his property.” In this retelling, Nelson joined the conspiracy after Eliza promised to leave Stephen's estate to him and Mary.
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Eliza was said to have cemented her betrayal of Stephen by isolating him from his friends. The French heirs claimed that he was “in a condition of absolute physical and social duress” from the time of Nelson and Mary's marriage, and “as he became more infirm, he was the closer watched and confined.” It was only in “the early part of the year 1832, [that] he, for the first time, acquired any knowledge of the gross frauds that had been perpetrated upon him and his heirs.” He “had declared his purpose of taking legal steps to annul the whole of the said fraudulent deeds and conveyances,” but was prevented from doing so by “his feeble condition and advanced age.” Eliza and Mary treated him “in the most cruel manner” during this time period, until he died suddenly “from the effects of an alleged fall from a load of hay, whereby he broke his leg and soon expired, without any of his personal friends or acquaintances having been permitted to see or speak to him previous to his death.”
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The French heirs asked uncomfortable questions. Why had the details of Stephen's decease been kept secret, “other than it was said to have been very sudden, and the result of a fall”?
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Why had there not been any “information or reason given why a man of his advanced age should be riding on a load of hay, even if it were customary for hay to be harvested as early as the 22d of May in the latitude of New York”?
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The implication was that the death had been suspicious and Eliza had been involved. The French heirs did not fail to note that “her bridal couch was already spread for Aaron Burr” at the very moment she had declared herself “disqualified for the accustomed enjoyments of life” due to “the sudden loss of her dear friend and husband.”
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Once more depositions were taken, evidence was trumped up, and family secrets were divulged. John G. Caryl, a cousin of Eliza Pery's second husband, Julius Caryl, was brought in to bolster the validity of the conveyances of the estate. He had worked at the Jumels' mansion as a boy, he said, and witnessed Mary making payments to Madame in “large bank bills … [t]he idea was conveyed that property was being sold to Mary.”
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The point of this testimony was to suggest that the transactions challenged by the French heirs had not been fraudulent, because Mary had paid for the lands before putting them in trust for Eliza.

Caryl added that Stephen had been aware of the conveyances well before his death and had come to an agreement with Eliza about them: “Mr. Jumel talked about the property being sold and about Madame selling him out, and that he had compromised the matter with her and had an arrangement, by which, as I understood, the Madame and he should enjoy the property while they lived, and after their death it was to go to the girl—to that effect.”
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None of this testimony was terribly convincing, especially after Caryl, unnerved by a cross-examination, retreated from his assertions that Mary had paid for the disputed lands.
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Although Nelson was less easily rattled, he fared badly too, particularly in attempts to whitewash tensions between Eliza and Stephen. For example, he indicated that Eliza had spent most of the fall and winter of 1831 to '32 in Washington Heights with Stephen. However, deeds that Eliza had executed while in central New York with Mary were used to prove that he lied.
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Eliza's gift to Mary of some of Stephen's lands in New York State was exposed as well.
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Nelson's sale of 50½ acres of the Jumel lands in Otsego County, six weeks after he and Mary had wed, added color to the French heirs' contention that he had conspired with her and Eliza to defraud Stephen.
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As the litigation dragged on, family tensions reached the breaking point yet again. William, who wanted the Jumel lands auctioned in order to have his share of the money, broke with his father and sister and settled with Stephen's relatives in 1880. He agreed to give them half of his one-third share in the Jumel fortune.
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Then he filed
suit against all the interested parties, including his father and sister, to force a partition or sale of the estate.
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He won his case, a sale was ordered, and Nelson, too, decided to compromise.
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He managed to obtain a better deal than William, however. He promised the French heirs half of his one-third share in the Washington Heights properties, but retained his full third in the valuable downtown lots. In addition, they agreed to pay him twenty thousand dollars.
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Eliza held out longest, not settling until 1883.
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All told, the French heirs would receive a little under one-sixth of the estate.
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If William had not settled with the claimants, probably Nelson could have held out and defeated them in court. Letters that the French heirs themselves submitted as evidence revealed that Stephen knew at least four years before his death of the conveyances that Eliza had made of his lands, yet did not act to overturn them.
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Even the Supreme Court had upheld the trust documents in favor of Mary and her heirs, making the likelihood of nullifying them slim.
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Nor was there any evidence that Eliza had treated Stephen cruelly and kept him from contacting his friends and relatives. This line of argument appears to have been inspired by a single sentence in a letter written by Stephen's acquaintance François Philippon in 1833: “The death of Mr. Jumel in consequence of a fall was, so to say, sudden, at least for his friends, since no one saw him after that unfortunate event; before he enjoyed very excellent health and could expect to live many years.”
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This statement of fact was far from a charge that Stephen was isolated intentionally. Indeed, within a year of filing their lawsuit, the French heirs had abandoned the story that he had fallen from a hay cart and had stopped hinting that his demise was suspicious.
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But the Chases already owed their lawyers nearly two hundred thousand dollars—equivalent to approximately $4.7 million today.
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If they continued to fight the French heirs in court, they risked seeing the entire estate eaten up in legal costs—or not living long enough to enjoy the proceeds of an eventual victory. It was better to move on
with their lives. Stephen's relatives replaced the Chase family as the main protagonists of the never-ending Jumel case. The French heirs fought their own lawyers over the legal fees (which exceeded the amount recovered for them) for another seven years, and ultimately they too appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
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Wisdom prevailed and they settled in 1890 before the case was heard.
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Their lawyers fought among themselves into the 1890s over the apportionment of the fees.
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Eliza's reputation did not escape unscathed from the last rounds of the battle over the Jumel estate. Although the French heirs had abandoned their charge that she was complicit in Stephen's death, the slur persisted in the court of public opinion. By the early twentieth century, she was said to have unwrapped bandages placed on Stephen's arm after bloodletting, causing him to bleed to death.
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In 1965 an even worse story was floated during a séance at her former residence, by then a museum. Supposedly a boy had pushed Stephen from a hay cart so that he fell on a pitchfork, and Eliza, complicit, had arranged for her husband to be buried alive.
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In fairness to Eliza, it is worth taking the time to deconstruct the origin of these legends. They started with the account that the French heirs had picked up about Stephen falling from a load of hay. By 1876, when they were building their case, there could have been few neighbors who remembered the details of the accident. Because Stephen was known to have been thrown from a wagon—the fact had been stated in Parton's 1858 biography of Aaron Burr—an agricultural use of the vehicle may have been assumed.
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But in the early nineteenth century, it was common for country dwellers to use one-horse wagons for transportation as well as farm work.
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Stephen followed this practice unless he was traveling into the city. He “had a stool, being the lower part of a chair, a common Windsor chair with the back off,” that he used when riding in his one-horse wagon.
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The improvised seat bore part of the blame for his death. As Nelson described the accident in a deposition, Stephen was being driven up the Kingsbridge Road to the ninety-six-acre lot by “rather a poor driver, a Frenchman who did not know how to drive, and through
some mismanagement this stool was pitched out, and he fell out and struck [
sic
] on his breast and injured himself very much.”
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A physician who lived in Harlem, which was then “quite a rural place and little settled,” came to bleed him—a standard treatment for serious injuries at the time.
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The procedure was mismanaged. The doctor “touched an artery and the arm filled from the wrist to the shoulder.”
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Here, no doubt, is the seed of the tale that Stephen bled to death—a charge that was not made by the French heirs. Much later it was grafted onto the muddled story of the wagon they had filled mistakenly with hay and from there grew the extravagant fiction that Stephen had fallen on a pitchfork.

In actual fact, after the bloodletting was botched, he was treated by two highly competent doctors for “some ten or twelve days,” before “he succumbed to this injury.”
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Could Eliza have interfered with her husband's care after the doctors had gone home? Perhaps, but why would she? She and Stephen were living comfortably in the United States, the location she preferred. Her husband was supervising the farms, improving the property, maximizing their income, and making it possible for her to travel. She had no motivation to wish him dead, nor is there any indication that she was suspected of harming him at the time. The doctor who provided the bulk of Stephen's care was Francis Berger, at once his family physician and the son of his old friend Eloi Berger—a man unlikely to have remained silent if he had suspected foul play.
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Berger did not request an inquest—or at least none was performed—an indicator that he did not consider the death suspicious.
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According to the death certificate, Stephen's demise was caused by “inflammation of the lungs,” or pneumonia, as we would call it today.
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The diagnosis is believable. Even now pneumonia remains a threat to people immobilized from injuries. The risk is especially high when breathing is impaired, as Stephen's might have been from the fall “on his breast.”