Eliza Jumel (nee, Elizabeth Bowen) was born in Providence on April 2, 1775, the daughter of Phebe Kelly and John Bowen, a sailor. After her parents separated, Phebe lived in poverty. To survive she worked in a mixed-race brothel in which her two young daughters, Betsy, and Mary, were raised. In 1785, when the town council closed Phebe’s “disorderly house” Betsy and her sister were sent to the “workhouse” directed by the Overseers of the Poor. Eventually Betsy was indentured to the family of sea Captain Samuel Allen, and Phebe died of yellow fever during the great Providence epidemic of 1798.
Drawing of Madame Eliza Jumel (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
In the ensuring years, Elizabeth “Betsy” Bowen would burst out of poverty and transform herself from a lowly caterpillar into a prominent social butterfly known to New Yorkers as Madame Eliza Jumel. In that role she has become the heroine of a fascinating biography by Margaret Oppenheimar, appropriately titled The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage and Money in the Early Republic (Chicago Review Press, 2015).
In 1803, twenty-eight-year-old Betsy moved from Providence to New York City and changed her name to Eliza Brown to put her past behind her by assuming a prominent Providence surname. She lost no time. By April 1804 she had met and married Stephen Jumel, a wealthy French merchant headquartered in New York City who was ten years her senior. In 1810, the couple acquired a mansion with sweeping views of the Harlem River. It had been built by Colonel Roger Morris and served as George Washington’s headquarters in September 1776 during his New York Campaign. Today the well-preserved Morris-Jumel Mansion in Upper Manhattan is a museum worthy of visiting. Many of the captions describing the mansion’s historic rooms tell the story and influence on the house of Eliza.
Postcard of the exterior of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, 1904 (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
During the twenty-eight years of Eliza’s marriage to Stephen, terminated in May 1832 by his death in a carriage accident, the couple had no children, but they raised Eliza’s niece, Mary. The marriage was not smooth sailing and was punctuated by Stephen’s frequent business trips to France and elsewhere.
The union, though turbulent, was not without its pleasant trips to Europe and the American South. The couple also acquired an elegant summer home in fashionable Saratoga Springs, New York. According to the Morriss-Jumel Mansion’s website (https://morrisjumel.org/stories/history-of-the-house/), “Later in their marriage, she [Eliza] proved to be an astute businesswoman who managed the Jumel’s real estate deals. Despite their wealth, it seemed as though she and Stephen were never fully accepted into the highest echelons of New York society due to their humble and immigrant origins.” As a result of their connections to Napoleon Bonaparte in France, the website adds, “the Jumels are said to have acquired several of Napoleon’s possessions, including a set of gilt Heraldic wings, a suite of chairs, and a sleigh bed with swan motifs, all of which can be seen exhibited throughout the museum.”
After Stephen’s death, his wealthy widow was courted by the notorious Aaron Burr, the former U.S. vice president who had killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel. Eliza, seeking to preserve her social standing, married Burr on July 1, 1833, less than fourteen months after Stephen’s fatal accident. At that time, she was fifty-eight years of age. This marriage of mutual convenience was terminated on July 8, 1836, on the basis of Burr’s alleged adultery, in an acrimonious divorce proceeding. By acting quickly and boldly, Eliza preserved her fortune.
The postcard shows where General George Washington kept his headquarters prior to the Battle of Harlem Heights. The current museum of the Morris-Jumel Mansion keeps this room in a similar condition (New York Public Library Digital Collections)
Thereafter, Eliza acted out her role in New York society as one of the city’s richest women in her own right. By the end of her life, “Madame Jumel” was one of New York’s richest women, with servants of her own, an art collection, an elegant mansion, a summer home in Saratoga Springs, and several hundred acres of land. She died at her mansion on July 16, 1865 at the age of ninety.
Even in death, she did not relinquish the spotlight. A feud among her heirs and bogus claimants to her estate lasted for decades and litigation concerning it reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice. Family members told of a woman who during her visits to France earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Unfortunately, the battle tarnished her reputation and revealed her humble origins.
Eliza’s biographer, Margaret A. Oppenheimer, has offered the best summation for the life of this complex and resourceful woman: “Although Eliza was in some ways a difficult woman, her determination intelligence, and strength of character were what allowed her to survive and thrive in spite of the disadvantages of her youth.”
According to Oppenheimer, “her contemporaries would have been less disturbed by her ascent into the upper class had she been a more conventional ‘womanly’ woman- a lady who hid her emotions and ambitions beneath a veneer of delicacy, gentleness, and charm.” That was not a façade Eliza could maintain for long. But on her own terms, by being a strong, independent and resourceful woman, she achieved much: financial security, a certain social status, a landed estate, and a surviving, elegant home. She rose far above the social class to which she was born, at a time when one’s class at birth was important.
In 2020, Madame Jumel was elected into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame, an award now displayed in her New York museum.
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