The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (6 page)

Probably it pleased him. Urban professionals, including merchants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors, were early supporters of the Revolution. Moderate in their political opinions, they were interested not in overthrowing French society, but in sensible economic reform. It was no accident that France's Declaration of the Rights of the Man and Citizen, proclaimed on August 26, 1789, guaranteed “life, liberty, and property,” rather than the more idealistic American triad, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Stephen may have joined Bordeaux's National Guard, which was founded on July 20, 1789, under the rousing name of the
Armée Patriotique
. It enrolled as many as twelve thousand volunteers—chiefly educated and prosperous men—in its first twenty-four hours of existence.
²⁸
On August 13, Stephen jotted down in his notebook a list of supplies needed for making a drum (two goatskins, wood for drumsticks, etc.), appending prices after a few of the items. The
finished product would have been the sort of instrument popular at patriotic festivals during which the National Guard paraded proudly.

If the early days of the Revolution promised rational and measured change to members of the professional classes, there were intimations that violence lurked beneath the surface. Bread shortages caused by the dismal harvest of 1788 sparked riots in the summer and fall of 1789. Aristocrats, nervous, began to emigrate. On October 5, a turbulent crowd of Parisian market women marched on Versailles, demanding bread. That night they invaded the palace through an unlocked gate, threatened the life of the queen, and demanded the king's return to the capital, where the National Assembly was attempting to remake France. The next day the unruly mob escorted the royal family willy-nilly to Paris. There on October 10, Louis XVI, King of France, was renamed King of the French. The people had found its voice.

Over the next two years, change accelerated. Class distinctions were attacked, and threats to the very existence of the monarchy grew. The property of the Catholic Church was nationalized on November 2, 1789. Hereditary aristocratic titles were abolished eight months later. On September 14, 1791, King Louis XVI was forced to accept a constitution.

Across the ocean in Saint-Domingue, slaves inspired by the talk of
liberté
began a revolution that led to the founding of the country of Haiti. Jacques Sonier, Stephen's uncle, died just before or during the massacres that marked the first months of the rebellion, and his widow, with Stephen's brother, François, fled back to France in 1792.
²⁹
They returned to yet more chaos. The French monarchy was abolished in September, and the king went to the guillotine on January 21, 1793. By fall, dozens of guillotines were casting their shadows over France. Masterminded by the radicals known as the Jacobins, the Reign of Terror had begun.

Growing extremism in Bordeaux paralleled that on the national stage. In September 1793 the city's municipal council, run by
merchants and lawyers, was forced from power by a mob.
³⁰
On October 17 “representatives of the people,” sent by the Jacobin-dominated National Convention now ruling France, arrived in Bordeaux and brought the Terror with them.
³¹
The have-nots (or sansculottes, literally, “those without breeches”—workers and peasants who wore loose trousers instead of breeches of silk or satin) at last had their chance to rule. In these leveling times, any citizen with money or power fell under suspicion. Merchants became “enemies of equality” and commerce “usurious, monarchial, and anti-revolutionary.”
³²
A guillotine was erected on Bordeaux's patriotically named Place Nationale (today's Place Gambetta). Efficiently it removed 301 heads before the Terror ended with the overthrow of its prime mover, radical legislator and orator Maximilien Robespierre, in Paris on July 31, 1794.
³³

Stephen Jumel did not hear the ominous drumbeats announcing the executions nor the thump of the steel blade as it fell. After October 12, 1789, the entries in his notebook break off abruptly. He had left Bordeaux, and probably France as well; he did not attend his sister's November 24, 1790, marriage in Mont-de-Marsan.
³⁴
By 1795 he was established in the United States.

5

O
n May 1, 1795, New York City was on the march. By tradition, leases of property in the metropolis expired on April 30. The ritual that followed amazed foreign visitors:

As the inhabitants in general love variety, and seldom reside in the same house for two consecutive years; those who have to change, which appears to be nearly the whole city, must be all removed together. Hence, from the peep of day till twilight, may be seen carts, which go at a rate of speed astonishingly rapid, laden with furniture of every kind, racing up and down the city, as if its inhabitants were flying from pestilence, pursued by death with his broad scythe just ready to mow them into eternity.
¹

Even an entire house might be moved when a lot lease expired. With a wheel tucked under each corner and furniture inside, the whole would be dragged away by sweating horses.
²
Annually the city convulsed on May 1 and then returned to normality.

When the dust settled in the early summer of 1795, New York was revealed to have a new resident: “Jummel, merchant, 44 Reed.”
³
In afteryears, Stephen's English would be fluent enough to ensure
that the clerks had the correct spelling of his surname when the data for the directory were compiled. Pronunciation was another matter. In French the two syllables of the name are given equal weight (jyu-mel), and the first consonant is pronounced more like the
s
in “pleasure” or “vision” than an English
j
. Probably, though, most Americans pronounced it in the same way that it is Anglicized today, with a longer, heavily stressed second syllable (ju-mell´). Indeed, in shipping reports in early nineteenth-century newspapers, the name is occasionally misspelled “Jumell,” suggesting the currency of this pronunciation.

Reed (later Reade) Street, the inexpensive neighborhood where Stephen settled, was on the uppermost border of the built-up area of New York City, just north of today's city hall. House numbers were not assigned to the street until 1794, and even then much of the land to its north was still occupied by a patchwork of farms. The city hospital and a military barracks were nearby—purposefully isolated on the outskirts of the city. Stephen's neighbors were mainly day laborers and cartmen—the Teamsters of the day, each supplying his own single-horse cart.
⁴
Reed Street sheltered modestly paid artisans as well, including house painters, masons, and carpenters.
⁵

At number 44 Stephen joined two other newcomers to New York whose names suggest that they were also of French origin. Merchant John Pichon arrived first at 44 Reed, appearing in the city directory in 1794, followed in 1795 by Stephen Jumel and a surgeon named Rennet Lisbeaupin (probably a misspelling of “René Lesbeaupin”).
⁶
All three moved on in 1796, Stephen to successively more fashionable addresses. There was no better decade than the 1790s in which to launch a career as a merchant in the United States.

The commercial opportunities that Stephen would exploit were the direct results of the revolution he had fled. Crowned heads across Europe, trembling at the sight of an absolute monarch dethroned, were willing to fight to restore a king to France and prevent the infection of revolution from spreading beyond its borders. By 1793 the young French Republic was at war with Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, and the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily). England and France preyed on each other's merchant fleets, seizing vessels plying the trade routes to and from their respective colonies in the Caribbean.

Neutral nations—including Denmark, Sweden, and above all the United States—became the key players in keeping transatlantic commerce alive.
⁷
During the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic campaigns that followed, the belligerents traded with their possessions largely through the intermediary of American shippers, who profited handsomely. The value of exports from New York rose dramatically, from $2.5 million in 1792 to $26.3 million in 1807.
⁸
It was a good time to be an American. On May 29, 1797, Stephen Jumel became a citizen of the young United States.
⁹

6

D
uring Stephen's early years in business, migrants continued to stream unstoppably into New York. Between 1790 and 1800, the city nearly doubled in size, ballooning from thirty-three thousand to sixty thousand residents.
¹
Just keeping track of them all was a challenge. “The increasing population of our city, with the passion for removal on May-day, render the annual publication of a directory absolutely essential,” opined the
Daily Advertiser
.
²

David Longworth was happy to fill the need. By the beginning of July 1803, the latest edition of his
American Almanac and New-York Register
was rolling off the presses.
³
Page ninety-eight contained the following line: “Brown, Eliza, 87 Reed.”
⁴
Betsy Bowen of Providence, Rhode Island, had become Eliza Brown of New York City.