5 
5 On 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