The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (8 page)

What harm could it do? Stephen calls a clergyman. In the candlelit bedchamber, the priest performs the ceremony. Eliza is propped up against the pillows, barely able to whisper her vows. After the ceremony is completed, Stephen tucks the covers around her. He sits by the bedside until she falls into a troubled sleep.

The next morning, Eliza wakes and stretches. Her cheeks blush with natural color. The new Mrs. Jumel is on the mend.

How seriously should we take Pintard's story? Certainly a healthy dose of skepticism is indicated. The fact that Stephen began paying for French lessons for Eliza and William a month before the marriage suggests that he had a long-term relationship in mind. The timing of the ceremony, precisely a week after Eliza's birthday, also suggests premeditation.

Yet it is unlikely that Pintard invented the anecdote from scratch; rather, he was retelling a good story. Throughout the letter, he mixed firsthand knowledge with tittle-tattle. For instance, he wrote that Stephen participated in an attempt to found a Roman Catholic convent in New York. This was indeed a project with which Stephen was involved; he sold the founders land for the institution.
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Yet Pintard also threw out the baseless, offhand comment, “It was said that he had been a priest.” (The stereotypical American vision of Frenchmen was that they were hairdressers, dancing masters, or clerics.) The anecdote about Stephen and Eliza's marriage should be considered similarly: as a rumor that did not necessarily have any basis in fact.

Nonetheless, it is a valuable indicator. The fact that gossip about Stephen's marriage circulated among well-connected New Yorkers
is a sign that his choice of bride violated values and conventions—specifically, rules governing courtship and marriage.
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Merchants typically married daughters of fellow merchants, or the offspring of professional men or gentlemen of leisure. But no one knew where Eliza had come from or who her family was. Worse, some New Yorkers must have recognized her face from her appearances on the stage. They would have whispered to others that Stephen had married an actress, a woman with no assets but her appearance. She was “pretty but not very handsome,” Pintard wrote some years later, implying that her attractiveness could not have been expected to outlive her youth.
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It was something a man was unlikely to say except about a woman whose social status was far below his own.

Gossip might have grown not just from the inequality of the marriage, but also from its quiet nature. The Jumels married at home—whether at his residence or hers is not recorded.
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That in itself was not unusual; many marriages were performed privately at the domicile of the bride and her family.
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But typically a small group of relatives and close friends would attend. Afterward they would enjoy a dessert, tea party, or festive meal, even though preparations were not elaborate, since a wedding might take place as little as a week after the engagement.
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There is no indication that friends were invited to celebrate the Jumels' marriage. William Ballou was one of the witnesses, which was certainly appropriate, given his close connection to Eliza. Although Stephen had no relatives in the United States, he could have invited a friend or business associate to support him. Instead, the second name on the certificate is that of an unknown—Blasius Philip Lapeyre. The name Lapeyre does not appear in the New York City directories before, during, or after this period, even when variant spellings are considered. Nor is there any reference to such a person in American newspapers or genealogical records.
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The most likely assumption is that he was a servant who worked for Stephen transiently and then moved on.

If Eliza's landlords, the Brinckerhoffs, or any of Stephen's acquaintances had attended the ceremony, there would have been
no need to call in a domestic as witness. Nevertheless, it is unnecessary and indeed, implausible, to assume that a dramatic ruse on Eliza's part accounts for their apparent absence. More probably the two were already living together and weren't anxious to advertise a ceremony that followed rather than preceded cohabitation. The French lessons Stephen was subsidizing in advance of the ceremony, not just for Eliza but William as well, are suggestive of an intimate, ongoing association.

When Eliza's French tutor visited Stephen's counting house in early June 1804 to collect his fee, he referred to her as “Miss Brown” rather than Mrs. Jumel, suggesting that she and Stephen had not publicized her change in status.
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But as word leaked out, the marriage of a successful merchant to a young woman of unknown antecedents must have led to speculation. Iniquitous rumors like the one Pintard reported could have been generated to explain a seemingly inexplicable event. Alternately, since the story is not recorded until Pintard tells it in 1821, it might have sprung up years after the marriage, at a moment when Eliza was attracting censorious attention for living apart from her husband.

Broadly speaking, the yarn reverses the popular fictional device of a fortune hunter tricking an innocent girl into marriage. Eliza is placed in the man's role, deceiving the credulous Stephen. The story could have been inspired by Eliza Haywood's widely read novel,
The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
(1751), which features a deathbed ceremony followed by the instant recovery of the male suitor who perpetrated the fraud.
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Someone who disapproved of Eliza might have inverted the scene from the novel to stigmatize her. She became the deceiver; Stephen the deceived.

Regardless of what the world thought of their union, Eliza could take pleasure in becoming a woman of means. The marriage was an extraordinary step upward in social status for someone who had lived in a workhouse and labored as a domestic servant. Children like Eliza who were bound to service because their parents were unable or unfitted to support them were at high risk of becoming poor transients as adults. Up to 40 percent of persons warned out
of Rhode Island towns in the second half of the eighteenth century had been bound out in their youth by the overseers of the poor.
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In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, 84 out of a group of 110 indentured servants—more than three-quarters—needed public assistance at least once during the thirty years after completing their service.
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Scattered anecdotal reports about women apprenticed as servants in their youth suggest that they led modest and often difficult adult lives. Among the women who had been bound to Elizabeth Drinker of Philadelphia in childhood, at least two were impoverished in later years and a third married a blacksmith who didn't always have stable employment.
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A fourth, Sally Brant—the girl who had borne an illegitimate child while serving out her indenture—later married but did not have an easy life, judging from Drinker's subsequent references to her (in 1803, “poor Sall, she has her troubles,” and in 1806, “poor girl she has enough to do”).
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A grimmer example was an orphan girl bound out in Pennsylvania in 1759 who wasn't even taught to read and write, although she had been promised those skills as part of the indenture. By the end of her service, a clergyman wrote, she had “been so completely debauched that she prefer[red] to remain with her mistress” and was “satisfied with her brutish life.”
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In Providence, Rhode Island, the town councilors complained that bound-out girls were “entice[d] away” from their masters into prostitution, “to the great injury of themselves and their employers.”
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That virtually no eighteenth-century American women indentured in childhood have entered the historical record is a reflection of the difficulty they would have had in achieving the literacy necessary to leave memoirs or the training required to build successful careers. A rare exception is Deborah Sampson, born in Massachusetts in 1760 and bound out at the age of ten, several years after her father deserted the family. After completing her service, she disguised herself as a man to serve in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War. Later she gave lectures about her wartime experiences and became a minor celebrity regionally. But even for her, social mobility was
limited. She married a small-town farmer and did not rise above the lower-middle class.
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Given the circumstances into which she was born, Eliza's marriage to a wealthy man was strikingly unusual and possibly unique.

*
By comparison, Stephen would rent an entire house for just under twenty-three dollars a month in May 1804.

8

S
oon after the marriage, Stephen purchased a gig—a two-wheeled vehicle pulled by a single horse—from the coach makers Donaldson and Blackgood.
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The high price of the model Stephen chose—$471—suggests that his conveyance was handsomely finished. Perhaps there were silver- or gilt-plated mounts on the harness, as on a model Donaldson had built a few years earlier.
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The purchase was a gesture Eliza would have appreciated. “To the minds of Americans,” wrote a visitor to our shores, “that which without exception denotes the greatest superiority is the possession of a carriage. Women especially desire them to a degree that approaches delirium; and a woman who owns one is very certain that no other woman who lacks a carriage will ever be considered, or ever become, her equal.”
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Did a gig count? If not, no matter—soon the couple acquired a larger vehicle.
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Eliza was acutely conscious of such markers of status. She made charitable contributions under her own name, even though her money came from Stephen. When the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children was soliciting donations in 1810, “Mr. Stephen Jumel” gave ten dollars, but “Mrs. Eliza Jumel” contributed thirty. She was the second-most-generous donor to the campaign.
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In 1807 she affiliated herself with the wealthiest and most prominent members of New York society by becoming an Episcopalian. In her decision to adopt a new religion—notably, not the Catholicism of her husband—it's hard to believe that she did not weigh worldly needs in the balance. The Episcopal Church, as the Anglican Church was renamed in the United States after the Revolution, wielded influence far out of proportion to the size of its membership (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists combined constituted only about 9 percent of the American population.)
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In the first half of the nineteenth century, 45 percent of U.S. presidents were Episcopalian. So were 39 percent of the Supreme Court justices appointed between 1789 and 1839. Among signers of the Declaration of Independence, 61 percent had belonged to the Anglican Church.
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As late as 1842, an English visitor to New York commented that “the most respectable part of the citizens attend the Protestant Episcopal churches.”
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For a woman who wanted to be accepted by the establishment, Episcopalianism—rather than Stephen's Catholicism—was the logical choice.