A little over a hundred years have passed. Much sea-water has pressed up the Harlem on the incoming tide, boiled and eddied in the narrow pass of Spuyten Duyvil, and slipped away again to the Atlantic, diluted by the contribution of mountain streams in the Catskills and Adirondacks, tainted by the factory waste of busy cities up the Hudson and the Mohawk. Men threw giant bridges across its ebb and flow, tunneled under its current, bit and blasted and scratched at its Hell Gate channel. The placid, austere heights that stood above the stream “nine miles from New York City” bear now the unromantic name of Coogan’s Bluff, and are as many miles within the city’s northern limits.
The camera had not been invented when Roger Morris built the house for his young wife. To the westward, where his acreage touched the Hudson, apartment houses have risen and cut off the Palisades; to the south, where once he could see far down Staten Island, a tangle of bridges and shipping is half screened by the battlements of more apartment buildings; only to the east and north, over the sunny throat of the Sound and the far blue profile of the Long Island hills, has the prospect its former grand, pure simplicity. A fan of railway tracks are at the Harlem where once was “Fishing, Oystering and Clamming,” and from the very skirts of the estate rises each afternoon the roar of fifteen or twenty thousand “busy Americans” who are totally unoccupied except with the baseball game in process on the Polo Grounds.
It is hard, without photographic record, to reconstruct the picture. Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood this lovely anachronism is the only fragment of the composition left to us. It stands on the highest point of York Island, untroubled, unruffled, and for the most part undisturbed, except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just another breathing spot.
It may be unjust to the Jumel Mansion to compare it with the lady in one of Leonard Merrick’s stories who “had outgrown her sins, but remembered them with pleasure,” but the spirit of Madame Jumel haunts the air so persistently that the suggestion is not altogether out of place. Despite the fact that when the British were advancing across Long Island in 1776 it was General Heath’s headquarters, that it housed Washington for six weeks, and that fifteen minutes after he had left it on the day Fort Washington was taken General Howe established his own headquarters there—despite its standing as one of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, the house will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequence, yet a person of caprice and beauty, ambition and impropriety, common sense and eccentricity. She was no sort of person to talk about, and therefore talked about; a kaleidoscopic contradiction—in short, a woman.
Though General Washington probably never heard of the lady, the house which she occupied was strangely related to important moments in his own career. When he was an athletic officer of twenty-five, neither Betsy Bowen nor her mother, Phebe Kelly of Providence, knew of him or cared about him, for they were both yet unborn. Of his restrained sentimental interest for Polly Philipse, the Yonkers heiress, they could not know, nor had they comment to offer when Colonel Roger Morris, a gallant of the colonial forces, crowded the young Virginian out of her affections and married her. In 1760 when Washington himself married Martha Custis, Phebe Kelly was three years old; at the age of eighteen, in the same month when Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the American army and rode to its head at Cambridge, Phebe Kelly Bowen of Providence gave birth to her second daughter, and called her Betsy.
Ten years before, Roger Morris had built a lovely house for his wife and their growing family on the topmost point of Manhattan; the wailing baby in Providence in that turbulent July, 1775, scarcely suspected that one day she would be the mistress of that house, or that a month ago Roger Morris, a Tory, too peaceful to fight, had fled to England for refuge. But there began the chain of events which finally landed his estate in Betsy Bowen’s hands.
The city of Providence was so named because its founders had supreme confidence in its namesake. With the advent of a pathetic little atom of humanity called Betsy Bowen, Providence the power, through the agency of Providence the city, undertook to show off. “Her father was a seafaring man of no account; her mother of less,” said the town. “It looks bad. It probably is. If not, it ought to be. In any case, Providence shall be appeased.” Betsy’s mother was presently arrested and thrown in jail, and Betsy, with her sister Polly, then a child of fourteen, was first locked up in the workhouse and later sent to live with a more respectable family. John Bowen, the father, was knocked overboard by the boom of a sloop and drowned; his widow and her second husband were allowed out of jail long enough to be ordered out of town; they returned and were shortly expelled at the expense of the town, to carry on a wretched existence in a hut on the Old Warren Road. As the daughters matured they moved to a less respectable family. In 1794 a son was born to Betsy Bowen, and its father’s name being either unknown, undesirable or Jones, the baby was christened George Washington Bowen. Three years later her mother and her step-father, once more expelled from Providence, made their way to the North Carolina mountains, got sufficiently acquainted with their neighbors to start a lawsuit, and then were shot by a squirrel rifle in the hands of one or more of the defendants. Providence the town had forgotten them, Providence the power had accomplished a tour de force.
The divine lightnings were apparently spent. Betsy Bowen left her baby in the hands of a friend and fled from the mockery of her native city. She began six obscure years of adventure as Betsy Bowen, reappeared in New York for a fleeting glimpse as Madame De la Croix, and emerged as Eliza Brown, the mistress of the wealthy Stephen Jumel. From 1800 to 1804 she occupied this prosperous French merchant’s house at the corner of Whitehall and Pearl Streets, near the lower tip of Manhattan. He came home one day to find her apparently on her death bed, explaining faintly, through the medium of her physician, that she wanted nothing more than to leave a sorry world as his wife. To Jumel, who was deeply touched, it was an irresistible appeal, and the clergyman who had come to pray for her married the pair. No hypodermic has since been discovered by a vaulting medical science which ever had such magical powers of restoration, for two days later Betsy Bowen-de la Croix-Brown-Jumel was riding out behind Stephen Jumel’s smart horses as Stephen Jumel’s lawful, gleeful, wedded wife. Her program, after a bad start, was fairly begun.
She craved social prominence. She wanted to hob-nob with such folk as the Philipses, the rich Astors, the Van Cortlandts, the Lows, and the Livingstons, none of whom would have much to do with her. The leverage of owning one of the great estates evidently did not occur to her just yet, though there was one to be had. In a letter from Aaron Burr to his daughter Theodosia, then married and living in the Pringle house in Charleston, he wrote: “Roger Morris’s place, the large handsome house on the height beyond Mrs. Watkins, is for sale. I can get it for Richmond Hill with four acres. Shall I exchange? R. M.’s has one hundred and thirty acres. If I leave Richmond Hill, however, had I not better buy in town, that you may have a resting place here?”
He evidently rejected the idea. He could not foresee that within a few months he would retire from the vice-presidency of the United States, bully Alexander Hamilton into a duel on the Palisades, kill him; nor that he would then organize an invasion of Mexico and a revolution in the new Louisiana Purchase only to be caught in the act and be tried for treason; nor that the year 1810 would find him abroad, disgraced, and still plotting to capture Mexico.
In that year Stephen Jumel, who had taken his wife’s trick-marriage in good part, bought the Roger Morris house and transferred his family to the heights, to install his wife in a style of living to which she hoped to become accustomed. Nothing was nearer her heart than the social prestige which her position as the chatelaine of a fine estate would afford, nothing farther from her mind than a lonesome ex-vice-president who had once speculated on buying this very house. The God of Coincidence made a mental note of this, and laid his plans.
Although frequent changes of ownership and lack of care had tarnished the house, it was intrinsically the same fine honest mansion that Roger Morris built, with two-foot outer walls lined with English brick, and supporting timbers of enduring oak. Madame Jumel entered her new home through a lofty portico to a main hall which runs through the center of the building from front to rear. This hall leads, as at Monticello, to an octagonal annex which is the only departure from a rather simple Georgian plan. To her left a reception room, to her right the dining-room, ahead in the octagon, a drawing-room which commanded nearly the full circle of that far-reaching panorama. Here had been held the Revolutionary courts-martial. The room north of the reception room had been the commander-in-chief’s office; the southeast bedroom had been his, and from its window he could see the smoking embers of the fire set by his troops when they evacuated the city in ’76—the night Nathan Hale was caught there as a spy.
With Roger Morris a fugitive in London and the house in debatable ground, Polly Philipse Morris had resorted to the Manor at Yonkers for safety. When Washington was driven out, and the house became British headquarters, the army paid rent, but when the Revolution ended, the families of Morris and Philipse, their properties confiscated, went back to England. The mansion was sold and resold, but no one held it for long. It failed as a tavern, and was doubtless expensive to run as a home.
Jumel was a great admirer of Washington, as well as a man of taste, and he combined the two qualities to restore the house implicitly to its earlier condition. It meant a lot to him that Washington, the president, had dined a brilliant company there in 1790, when New York was the national capital, and he equipped the room with fine furniture brought from France in one of his packets. He had the wall-paper in the octagon copied and rehung, respected the simplicity of the mantels, and chose his decorative “remarks” with a nice eye. When his work was done we may fancy that he rubbed his hands and said to his pretty wife: “Voilá! A house worthy of its guests. Let them come, my dear.”
They didn’t come. Everything domestic a woman could crave Betsy Jumel had, even the company of her step-sister’s little daughter, to take the part of the daughter she never had. It was not enough. Five years of it made her despise the place. So the Jumels packed up and sailed for France.
It was no expeditionary force against a new stronghold of society, but an innocent visit to relatives, and perhaps that is why her luck turned. Family tradition has it that in Bordeaux they met the fleeing Napoleon, and offered him the Jumel ship. In return he gave them his carriage, for which he had no further use, and they drove in it to Paris.
Such credentials opened every door of the Bonapartist royalty. Everything Madame Jumel would have wished to be in New York she became in Paris—a turn of fortune which has come to many a socially ambitious American woman since. New avenues of association opened, and she tried to cajole Louis XVIII into giving Stephen a title. What Stephen would have liked better was money for two ships the French government stole from him, for the demands of his expensive establishment in the Place Vendome and a few strokes of ill luck in trading were reducing his funds. When his position grew embarrassing his wife left him and returned to New York.
Two years later—in 1828—Stephen Jumel followed her. Dark rumor says that it was very late when he drove out from town, and that as he approached the mansion he passed Aaron Burr, who was leaving it. He entered, and found that his wife, with the expert legal assistance of Alexander Hamilton, Jr., had transferred the property from her name to his. Four years later he fell from a hay-cart, and in a few days died of his injuries, and whoever took the bandage off those injuries and let him bleed to death will answer for that crime elsewhere, for it is not known in this world.
On a midsummer night of 1833, presided over by the God of Coincidence, Aaron Burr came to the mansion to play whist with the widow. “Madame,” he said, “I offer you my hand; my heart has long been yours.” If you will believe her own version of this proposal from a veteran of seventy-eight, she made no reply. He came the next night, with a priest. She fled upstairs. He overtook her at the landing, “saying the priest was old, and it was nearly midnight, and I must not detain him—and he was so handsome and brave and I allowed him to keep my hand and I stood up there ... and like a fool was married to him! The wretch, but he did not stay here long.”
A few days he stayed, and left her, after a wedding trip in the course of which she sold some stock in Hartford and scornfully bade the purchaser “pay the money to my husband.” Months later he was persuaded to rejoin her, but it could not last. A divorce ensued, and Aaron Burr died.
There really ends the career of Madame Jumel. But she lived through the Mexican and the Civil wars. Here and there in the city, now at Saratoga, once in Europe, she “lived around” with relatives of sorts, but most of the time she spent in the great house. Its corners grew less and less neat as age crept over her. Still, however, the active physique her sea-faring father and her tomboy mother had given little Betsy Bowen held on grimly to life and activity, and the social mania which had consumed her thoughts lighted up her memory with fantasies, as a sputtering lantern creates half-authentic figures among the shadows of a dusty, neglected stage. Outside the house she had no friends except those who wanted her money or stole her firewood and livestock, indoors life was a perpetual pageant. For twenty years a feast table, fully set, with dust in the crystal wine glasses, and mould on the petrifying candies, stood in a closed room: this, she related, was the table at which she had entertained Joseph Bonaparte when he came over to marry her and her riches and had to climb over the back wall to gain entrance. She took pity on him then, she said, for it didn’t look just right to have the King of Spain in the kitchen. The truth is that she never entertained Joseph Bonaparte (though she offered him the estate in 1820); nor did the Duke of Palermo offer to marry the “Vice-Queen of America” as she styled herself (although she inspected the ducal palace in Palermo); she was in Paris when Lafayette visited America in 1825, but she honestly believed that she had been his hostess on the Heights. Some recollection of a name, a face, a romantic anecdote out of her vivid past popped up, or she ran across one of the dingy, pathetic dance favors or trinkets or ribbons of a dead affair, and presto!—her feverish mind whirled away in a jumbled drama, unlimited in its romantic action, and delicious in its inaccuracy.
If the public saw her it was under circumstances that magnified all the erratic tales that were—and still are—current about her history. One winter she took a group of penniless Frenchmen under her wing, quartered them in the barn, which had once held American prisoners, armed them from the arsenal she kept in the house, organized them into a military outfit, and would ride proudly at their head over her estate. From France she brought home green livery for her postilions—though she had no postilions, and when taunting reached her ears she dressed the gardener and his boy in the livery and rode to town with them. Her face to the world was as haughty and as tinctured with rouge as if she were Eliza Brown of Whitehall Street, her dress as shabby-genteel as she fancied it was fashionable, her intellect as tragically aflame with the mad dance of Might-Have-Been as it was fixed, cold, and shrewd in financial matters. Grande dame she had set out to be, grande dame she had become, and mercifully to the poor little shrunken creature with the powdered cheeks and the soiled finery who was finally carried upstairs to the Washington room to die, grande dame in her mind she died.
It was a signal for the jackals. No less than twenty law-suits sprang up to break the will and seize the property. Some of the claims seem just, others less so, and all of them, in the course of fifty years, have gone through the mill of the courts and been ground exceeding fine. Of them all, the most interesting fragment is the attempt made by George Washington Bowen, Betsy’s deserted baby in Providence, to own his mother’s home. For thirteen years the old man pursued his case, even to the Supreme Court, lost it, and died, though the claim is still cherished by his own connections. The estate could not hold out long against the march of the city, and parcel by parcel it was split up, until in 1894 the house and its dooryard came into the hands of General F. P. Earle.
The city owns it now, and four capable chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution have formed the Washington Headquarters Association, and have brought the mansion out of neglect and oblivion. They opened the windows Madame Jumel kept sealed and let in air and sunlight; they consigned the Eastlake-and-gimcrack whatnottery of its most recent tenants to the exceedingly efficient ash-removal department of the City of New York, which is equipped to handle just such situations, and from the four corners of our country they assembled and installed in the house as much of its historic equipment as they could find. There is much of it, of course, which has no special significance, and there is so great a quantity of relics there that the house is in no sense a home, but rather an interesting and valuable museum. Next best of all, they opened the doors to the public in a city where sorely-needed Americanization may well begin at home. And best of all, they installed as curator William Henry Shelton, as gracious a story-teller as the humble history-seeker may ply with questions. It is to him largely that the excellent administration of the house is due. It is he who can bid you close your eyes, make a few passes, and translate you into the presence of Mary Philipse, or bring you to attention before George Washington, or open a secret panel that you may peep at Madame Jumel. In his book, “The Jumel Mansion,” he has done just this, and it is from that source with his permission that the greater part of this story is drawn, and so, gratefully acknowledged.