The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (23 page)

She solicited advice from James Kent, “the most honest lawyer of the city.”
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Kent was the chief judge of New York's Court of Chancery and a man known to be sympathetic to women threatened by the missteps of their male relatives.
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Case could not claim personal knowledge of Eliza's conversation with Chancellor Kent, but he could guess at it: “Most certainly she must have confessed to him the conduct of Jumel at Paris, her attachment for that misled man, and suggested that it was necessary to place beyond his reach some of the
remains of their large estate for their common maintenance in the future. Who would not be caught, and who would not take an interest in a woman who speaks on the subject and especially who speaks well?”
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Case added, “I know positively that it is with this language that she won over to her side Werckmeister,” the tenant of the 150 Broadway store who would play a crucial role in this drama.
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With Kent's help, Eliza arranged matters so that Stephen would be unable to jeopardize their retirement by selling off their properties in the United States. What she did came down to six conveyances: deeds transferring parcels of real estate from one person to another. Acting in Stephen's name—using a power of attorney he had given her to manage his affairs in New York state—she “sold” Mary the two houses downtown, the uptown mansion, the thirty-six-acre homestead lot, and an additional sixty-eight acres of farmland on Harlem Heights, in return for supposed payments totaling $45,000. Mary, in turn, conveyed the properties to Werckmeister, to hold in trust for Eliza. As the only beneficiary of the trusts, Eliza was given the right to manage all of the lands for her sole use and benefit, independent of Stephen or any future husband. The trusts would end at her death and the properties would descend to her heirs free and clear—“in fee simple,” in legal terminology.
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Additionally, Eliza transferred 233½ acres of farmland in Otsego and Schoharie counties directly to Mary, making the young woman a landowner in her own right.
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From a twenty-first-century perspective, the conveyances Eliza made, with the exception of the one to Mary, seem unnecessarily complicated. Why place the real estate in trust for herself rather than putting it in her own name? The answer was straightforward: the arrangement was necessitated by the legal status of married women in early nineteenth-century America. In the common-law tradition the United States had inherited from England, a husband and wife were treated in legal matters as a single person. A married woman's property became her husband's automatically. If Eliza had transferred Stephen's real estate directly to herself, it would have remained his property, not hers. Creating a trust was the standard
procedure used to permit a married woman to own assets separately from her husband.
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Because trusts could be used to hide property from creditors, they were scrutinized closely during bankruptcy proceedings and estate litigation.
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Eliza tried to prevent suspicions from arising in the future by indicating that Mary had paid $45,000 for the Jumel real estate before settling it on Eliza. But because Mary had no money of her own, the “sales” were conducted on paper only. The illusory transactions had a single purpose: ensuring that Stephen's creditors and potential heirs would never be able to claim the lands. They were distanced from him through an outright (or apparently outright) sale, and then put in trust for Eliza (or, in the case of the last parcel, given permanently to Mary).

Eliza was never eager for her husband to spend money on his relatives, so her decision to disinherit them in favor of Mary and herself is unsurprising. “We need everything that remains to us for ourselves,” she had written to sixty-one-year-old Stephen in 1826.
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But it is disturbing that she made no provision for him, in case he happened to outlive her. Although Stephen was conscious of the need to protect their assets from creditors—in August 1826, he had even suggested that Eliza put the downtown houses in someone else's name in order to safeguard their interests in them—there is no indication that he envisioned or desired this wholesale transfer of his most valuable properties to his wife.
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By the time he returned to the United States, he was left with nothing but farmland in Westchester County, some land in central New York, and around sixty-five acres on Harlem Heights. None of these lands yielded anything but very modest rents.

22

S
tephen arrived in the United States in July 1828 after a stormy, seven-week voyage from Le Havre. “There were eight priests who brought bad luck to the ship,” he told Lesparre. He had suffered as before from seasickness and only “went to the table four times to dine.” But he could still sympathize with fellow travelers who were even less fortunate: “Then there were 150 steerage passengers inside doing their cooking. Those who were sick went without food, but thanks to the Supreme Being, we arrived all in good health.”
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Stephen went immediately to the mansion on Harlem Heights: “Leaving the ship I jumped into a carriage, and one hour later I found an excellent dinner … You may think whether I reserved peaches and strawberries for my dessert.”
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Stephen said nothing to Lesparre about his reunion with Eliza, mentioning only that “Mrs. Jumel was in the city” when he reached New York. It is unclear whether she met the ship or if he discovered she was in Manhattan only when he arrived at their country home and found that he would be eating his first dinner on land without her.

His old friend, François Philippon, knew of the conveyances Eliza had made of Stephen's lands and encouraged him to contest
them. “I advised him very often to do so,” Philippon wrote in 1833; “he used always to promise me, but when it was necessary to take the proper steps, he always deferred it. At last I ceased speaking of it to him, assuming that he had some motive that he would not communicate to me.”
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Stephen may have worried that creditors would claim the properties, if they were placed once again in his name. When Eliza had consulted James Kent after her return from France, one of the matters they had discussed was a past business dealing that might have placed Stephen in financial jeopardy. Kent considered the risk minimal, Eliza had reported to her husband: “He tells me that if all the papers were destroyed, there is no danger, and since the property was not seized, and it is such a long time since the affair, that is proof that no one believes it …”
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She had followed this reassurance with advice that hinted at her own modus operandi for dealing with unpleasantness: “If you come back to New York and by chance anyone speaks to you about it, deny it flatly. Say that the whole yarn is false and an imposition: that you did not have any
profits
from the merchandise and that you only asked for the interest on your money, which you had lost as well as the capital, and that's the whole truth.”
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In Eliza's worldview, what you had done in the past mattered little; what mattered was what you could persuade people to believe.

In November 1828 she did make one change in what she had done, probably under Stephen's direction. Most of his real estate would remain under her control during her lifetime, but he would receive the lifetime use of the mansion, downtown houses, and Harlem Heights farmlands if she predeceased him, subject to an annuity of six hundred dollars to Mary. After his death, however, all the properties would go to Mary or her heirs, as Eliza desired, rather than being shared with Stephen's French relatives.
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Stephen may not have felt driven to battle with his wife for more. Philippon noted that, although he was “in very good health, he had not the same energy, the same moral faculties that I had known him possessed of in former years.”
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It may have been equally significant that he no longer needed money for mercantile investments. He
had intended to go back into business after his return to the United States, but had become disillusioned. “There are so many swindlers,” he wrote to Lesparre.
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He had built his career in a world in which personal connections were all-important. Merchants had shared information for their mutual benefit. They had aided one another in difficult times and assisted newcomers to get a start. But times had changed and he had come to recognize that now it was each man for himself.
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“If they fail, they go into bankruptcy to line their pockets to start again,” he wrote. “That is the way in which business is conducted today … The more I look at it, the more disgusted I am; and therefore I am keeping quiet and living on my income, and unfortunately I am spending more than thirty thousand francs a year. I don't see anybody. Mrs. Jumel has her carriage.”
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Four months after Stephen's return to the United States, Eliza used ill health as an excuse to spend the winter in the South.
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In late November 1828, she sailed for Charleston on the ship
Lafayette
, accompanied by Mary and a few servants.
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She would not return until the end of April. “She left on account of a cold,” Stephen wrote to Lesparre in March 1829. “She wanted a warm climate; she has improved by it, but she is not quite cured.”
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They wrote each other during their separation, as they had always done. One of Stephen's letters to Eliza is extant. Long and newsy, it suggests that the two had found a workable accommodation on the basis of shared household and agricultural concerns. “I see with pleasure that your health is getting better and better,” Stephen wrote courteously. He described the new icehouse he was building to keep their meat fresh: it would be 11 feet square and 12 to 14 feet high, with 3-foot-thick walls. There were excavations in progress as well: several men were blasting the rocks from around the chestnuts of “Mademoiselle Mary's promenade,” probably for use in building the icehouse. He and the workmen were well; “we all have good appetites,” he reported to Eliza. They baked bread twice a week and cooked potatoes every day.

A small, peevish comment suggested that money was still a bone of contention in their relationship. Eliza had asked whether Stephen had gone sleighing, and he replied resentfully: “You know that I did not come back to the United States to take my pleasure. I am [at] Harlem Heights. When I have to go to New York to take my letters there, it is a great punishment for me to go there; I have testified it to you enough.”

But he implied that they continued to manage their finances jointly, regardless of Eliza's legal authority over their income-producing properties. “I haven't been to see our tenant M
^r
Durand, not having any money to claim for the rent,” Stephen wrote. “But I will have to pay him a visit.” Significantly, he wrote “our tenant,” not “your tenant.”
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