19 
19 In 1825 Europe’s financial systems failed. The London stock market peaked early in the year and then share prices dropped precipitously.1 Investors who had purchased stock in a host of risky ventures—mines, water companies, canals, and bridges—turned out, too often, to have been poorly informed and ill-advised.2
The effects of bursting speculative bubbles were apparent on both sides of the Atlantic. As the editor of Niles’ Weekly Register, an American financial paper, wrote in early September, “those who had [money], did not know how to employ it, and so they made mighty investments in the wildest and most visionary projects that ever had their day. These, in general, have returned little or nothing, and money has become ‘scarce,’ the prices of stocks have considerably fallen in both countries [i.e., Great Britain and United States], and no small pressure begins to be felt, which will probably increase and become very onerous on traders and dealers of all classes.”3
The collapse of the cotton markets added to the turmoil, as oversupply replaced fears of a shortage. “During the quarter which ended on the 30th June, nearly twenty-five millions of pounds of cotton were exported from New York,” reported the Weekly Register on September 24.
But it would have been better for New York, if none of her merchants had touched cotton at all. The fifty thousand, and hundred thousand dollars, that speculators in the article made in a day, while the bubble was floating, are dissolved—leaving behind only wrecks of fortune and bankruptcy, with the ruin of innocent persons … John Bull has got the cotton, the American merchants have lost a large part of the value of it, and the planters have been seduced into an extended cultivation to reduce the price, and bring themselves into trouble: and so endeth this chapter of iniquity.4
But it wasn’t the end. On December 3, the Weekly Register noted that the business climate continued to worsen:
The recent wild speculations in cotton, superadded to the various gambling projects of stock-jobbers, which built up various monied institutions without any money at all, the whole being puff and paper, has produced a very unpleasant state of things in several parts of the United States, and the demand for money far exceeds the usual supply, in several of our chief cities … And there is a shaking of confidence which is more injurious than the losses actually sustained … banks that are fully able to meet all their engagements in a regular way, merchants that can surely pay all their debts, if aided by their usual facilities, and mechanics that are ‘as good as old gold’ with the accustomed order of business—neither of these may be competent to meet a sudden derangement, and one goes on to break down another, until the ruin becomes general.5
In the second week in December, the collapse of the Plymouth Bank in Devon and two of the largest London banks spurred a run on banking institutions across England.6 Depositors demanded to withdraw their funds, and currency reserves were soon exhausted:
Expresses were hourly arriving at London to obtain gold. The people … lost confidence in paper, and assembled in great numbers about the banks to obtain money for it. At Plymouth, the uproar was dreadful. There was literally a whole population, with food in abundance staring them in the face, and yet without means of obtaining it, for … gold alone would the sellers take, and gold was not to be had. By break of day, all the banks were surrounded by mobs, and the civil power was mustered in front of them.7
By early 1826 nearly 10 percent of England’s banks had failed.8
Like other businessmen who depended on the London financial markets, Stephen felt the shortage of cash and credit, and had difficulty collecting money owed him by fellow merchants. On February 16, 1826, he wrote to his nephew-in-law Lesparre, “I am more than sorry not to be able to give to my sister what I used to give her.”9
Although the English banks were beginning to recover by early spring, ripples from the crisis spread across the channel and even across the Atlantic. France went into a recession.10 “The great merchants and bankers in Germany, Prussia, the Netherlands, &c. were giving way, and for enormous amounts. The like, perhaps, was never heard of before.”11 Bankruptcies of British merchants continued—1,827 for the half year ending June 1826, compared with 489 for the same period of 1825.12
French, German, and British exports to Latin America plunged because of the collapse of the credit markets needed to finance shipments.13 Funds for capital investments dried up, dooming manufacturing and mining ventures in Central and South America and destabilizing the economies of the newly independent countries they served. The governments of Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico fell into default on their sovereign debt.14
In May 1826, as the turmoil continued around them, Eliza, Stephen, and Mary packed their trunks in Paris. After a brief stop in Dieppe, they traveled on to Le Havre. On May 26, three days after their arrival in the busy port, Eliza and Mary sailed for New York.
Their departure on the ship Lewis, captained by Robert Macy, was as abrupt as Eliza’s previous retreat to the United States. “Mrs. Jumel made up her mind to sail as soon as the ship arrived,” Stephen wrote to Lesparre. “If my business had permitted me to do so, I would have sailed, but I hope to be able to do so in May next.”15
The exact reason for Eliza’s voyage—one might even say flight—remains unclear. On the face of it, she went to the United States to look into the condition of their investments and collect monies due to them. She took with her a power of attorney authorizing her to manage Stephen’s affairs in the state of New York and, at her discretion, sell any real estate he owned there.16 But there may have been other tensions that prompted the precipitous journey.
A letter she sent to Stephen in July 1826 is tantalizingly vague. “I am very flattered that you are thinking of me,” she wrote in French, the language she used in corresponding with her husband, “but at the same time troubled to know that you are suffering from repentance. You are wrong to stay at home so much, because that could harm your health, and if that was the case, judge my despair.”17 The question of what Stephen was repentant for remains unanswered. Did he regret poor business decisions that threatened their future … or a quarrel that culminated in Eliza’s departure?
There were earlier signs that problems may have been simmering between them. In January 1825 Stephen had changed the legal status of the mansion in New York and the thirty-six acres of land immediately surrounding it. Since 1815 the property had been governed by a trust that gave Eliza the use of the estate after his death and would return it to his heirs when she died. But at the beginning of 1825, he revised the trust to give her immediate possession of the house and acreage. Although a trustee would need to sign off on her business decisions, the property was effectively hers from that time onward—to manage as she wished for the rest of her life and leave to her heirs after her death.18
The precipitating factor for the transfer of ownership might have been Stephen’s purchase of the Dieppe house. Far less enthusiastic about life in France than he, Eliza may have insisted on having the option of an independent life in the United States. Or if he planned to leave his new property to his French relatives after his death, she might have prodded him to give the New York mansion to her.
Another trust, set up a year later, on January 18, 1826, settled the Broadway and Liberty Street houses on Eliza as well. Their rents would be hers, free from any debts her husband might owe, although, unlike the mansion, the two downtown properties would revert to Stephen or his heirs after her death.19 Given that Stephen was cash-strapped by this point, it seems likely that this second transfer was made to protect these assets from his creditors rather than with the intention of providing more lavishly for his wife.
Regardless of the underlying reasons for the conveyances, by midsummer cash was Stephen’s immediate need. Eliza began trying to collect it as soon as she arrived in New York. She attended first to the downtown houses, which had been rented out at below-market rates by their American agent, Frederick Brunel. Even though rents had begun to drop because of the currency shortage, she persuaded the current tenant of the Broadway store, a Tyrolean-born shopkeeper named Michael Werckmeister, to take a seven-year lease at $2,100 per year—“and if I had been here a year ago, I would have had at least twenty-five hundred,” she added in a letter to Stephen.20 As for the neighboring house on Liberty Street, she gave notice to its undesirable tenants. “It is in very bad condition, I mean excessively dirty,” she told Stephen, “ and before I will be able to offer it for rent, I will be obliged to paper and paint it, and without any other expense, I will make it look as it should, and there isn’t any doubt that I will have double the present rent.”21
In August Eliza traveled to Cherry Valley, about fifty miles west of Albany, where she and Stephen had lands that had been transferred to them in payment of a debt. Their title to the properties—owned previously by Cadwallader D. Colden, a politician and land speculator—was problematic, Eliza discovered. “We don’t have the deeds,” and because of that “no one wants to buy [the farms] from us,” she told Stephen. The paperwork had been managed poorly by Benjamin Desobry, with bonds and mortgages remaining on the lands. “We are presently at the mercy of Colden,” Eliza explained, “because he can foreclose the mortgage on us whenever it seems good to him; voilà the manner in which Desobry arranged it.”22
Their agent in Cherry Valley, who managed the properties and collected the rents, was a prominent lawyer, James O. Morse. He was also “a rascal,” according to Eliza. “Mr. Morse does everything for his own interests [and] is continually in litigation with those who live on our lands, [who] being poor and not being able to pay, all the expense falls on us. He renews [the leases of] the farms every year, and being a lawyer, he arranges everything himself, and all our interests fall into his hands.”23
While in Cherry Valley, Eliza tried to collect on debts owed to Stephen by a local firm, Hoffman and Glass. When she presented her husband’s bills of exchange, Hoffman opened his books and showed her records indicating that he had already paid them. “He told me that you and he had the habit of exchanging your bills,” she wrote Stephen, “and there were several of yours that he found not long ago and burned. In saying that, I tried to stop him, but he tore yours in pieces, saying that, supposing he owed them, they were outlawed—that is to say, six years having passed, they could no longer be used to claim the debt.” Eliza was powerless against Hoffman, and her frustration is palpable. “It seems that everything conspires to prevent me from being able to procure money to send you,” she wrote.24
She complained too about the integrity of their New York City agent, Brunel. Stephen should keep track of any payments Brunel sent, Eliza told him, because whenever she asked about money, the agent told her, “I just sent it the other day” (i.e., to Stephen).25 Yet in their absence Brunel had been retaining large sums of money. Three years before, he had foreclosed on a mortgage on one of their farms in Cortlandt, in Westchester County, netting eight hundred dollars that should have been sent to the Jumels. He didn’t tell Eliza about the foreclosure until she was leaving to inspect the land and would have discovered it for herself.26 Frustrated by another instance of this type, Eliza told Brunel that she “was going to demand from him the interest on the money that he had kept so long.” As she reported to Stephen, “He responded that if I demanded the interest, he would raise his commissions.” Would Stephen tell her whether or not she should insist on the interest? she asked.27
Brunel also had a collusive arrangement with a farmer leasing some of the Jumels’ land on Harlem Heights: “Mr. Naudine [i.e., Nodine], not knowing the arrangements that Mr. Brunel had made for him, told me that he was giving one hundred dollars per year, while Mr. Brunel, to show good faith, put in his book of arrangements that he was receiving only fifty dollars a year from Naudine, without even warning him about it.”28 She gave notice to Nodine and also to a Mr. Parsons, who was leasing their forty-acre lot on the west side of the Kingsbridge Road.29
It is not clear whether Brunel cheated Eliza and Stephen persistently or whether some of the problems were misunderstandings or the result of Eliza’s eagerness to find someone to blame. The latter tendency is clear in a letter in which she mentions two ladies who were tenants in their downtown houses. They told me “they paid everything,” she told Stephen, except for the quarter when there was a yellow-fever epidemic. They said “that Mr. Bernard had been to see them several times, showing [a] paper from Brunel that authorized him to receive those rents, and that they have several receipts from Bernard, who doubtless kept the money for his own use. But Mr. Brunel must be responsible,” she concluded.30 She presented herself to Stephen as the only person he could trust: “Thus you see that everyone betrays us, even those who have the reputation of having probity, so don’t have confidence in anyone except”—here she switches from French into English—“your Eliza, who is and will be forever your true and faithfull [sic] and aff[ectionate] Wife.”31