27 
27 On June 19, 1834, Eliza saluted an old acquaintance on the street. It was William Dunlap, the impresario of the Park Theatre, where she had trod the boards so many years before. If he had planned to pass her by in silence, she outfaced him by addressing him directly. “You don’t know me, Mr. Dunlap?” she said.
“Oh yes, Mrs. Burr,” he replied. “How does Colonel Burr do?”
“Oh, I don’t see him anymore,” Eliza replied brusquely. “He got thirteen thousand dollars of my property, and spent it all or gave it away and had [no] money to buy him a dinner. I had a new carriage and pair of horses cost me one thousand dollars; he took them and sold them for five hundred.”
Dunlap was appalled at her frankness. “What confidence can be placed in the words of such a woman it is hard to say,” he wrote in his diary, “but Burr’s marrying her makes anything told of him credible.”1
Bluntness shocked in nineteenth-century America when it came from a woman—especially when it was a commentary on her husband. Even a woman who managed her own lands and investments would be expected to show outward deference to her spouse.2 But that was not Eliza’s way.
If money had brought Eliza and Aaron together, it was also what tore them apart. Although Eliza knew that her money would attract Aaron, she cannot have suspected how fiscally irresponsible he was. Without contacts in the upper echelons of New York society, she lacked access to the informative gossip that circulated among the elite.3
The marriage barely celebrated, Burr began to lay claim to Eliza’s money—now his money by virtue of the matrimonial laws of the day. In her bill of divorce, Eliza detailed his depredations. She had given him money (probably the proceeds of the shares in the Hartford Bridge Company) to pay down a mortgage on real estate held in trust for her. He had promised that he would do so, but kept the money for himself.4 Eliza wouldn’t be able to pay off the mortgage for another two years.5
Nor was that all. Burr’s creditors had seized some personal property that Eliza had purchased since the marriage (including the carriage and horses she lamented to Dunlap, perhaps?). To save the items from being sold, she was forced to pay off her new husband’s creditors herself.6 Given Burr’s usual state of chronic indebtedness, this tale rings sadly true.
Still more: Burr had been trying to obtain the rents and profits from real estate held in trust for her, and had even threatened to sell the property in Saratoga Springs that she had purchased shortly after Stephen’s death.7 This last was a particularly serious threat to Eliza. Burr would have had difficulty obtaining approval from her trustees to sell property in which Eliza held only a life estate, but as her husband the rest of her real estate was his.
In his answer to the bill of divorce, Burr admitted the truth of most of Eliza’s charges, although he slanted the narrative to place his conduct in a more favorable light. He conceded that he had spent the money from the Hartford Bridge stock, but said he had paid out two thousand dollars of it on debts that Eliza had contracted before and after their marriage (although no records of any such debts can be found). Part of the rest went “for the support of himself and family,” and the remainder he spent “for his own uses and purposes, as he had full and lawful authority to do.” Moreover, he said, without his legal expertise, Eliza wouldn’t have received the money for the stock at all.8
Nor, he stated, did he try to seize any of the profits on the real estate held in trust for her—although at the same time he conceded that he had forbade one of her trustees from paying her the rents without his own consent.9 It is clear from Burr’s words that he’d been exercising his rights as Eliza’s husband to control her assets. Legal? Yes, except for meddling with the rents from the trust. Acceptable to Eliza? No.
To counter Eliza’s claim that some of her property was seized by his creditors, forcing her to spend her own money to redeem it, Burr embellished his answer to the divorce bill with an implausible tale designed to make his wife look vindictive and unbalanced. Eliza, he claimed, had run up a bill before the marriage for repairs to her mansion; he and she were subsequently sued jointly for payment and lost.10 Consequently the creditors were given the right to seize some of their possessions, including “two horses, one carriage, and harness” purchased with part of the money received for the Hartford Bridge Company stock. Eliza, Burr said, then made a secret agreement with the officer sent to carry out the seizure. She helped the official remove certain items from the house after they had been advertised for sale. These were taken to a place that “was difficult to access by persons inclined to purchase” to ensure that there would be no competing bids. She planned to have the possessions purchased cheaply by a confederate “to be clandestinely disposed of without [Burr’s] knowledge so as to leave [him] personally liable for the residue of the amount due on the said execution.” According to Burr, this ingenious plan failed because he had learned of it by chance and arranged for someone to attend the sale and purchase the items for a fair price. At that point Eliza, “discovering that her artifice was detected, forthwith directed one of the trustees of her real estate … to pay the amount due on said execution.” But furious that her plan had been thwarted, she “then threatened to burn and destroy the carriage and shoot the horses which formed a part of the said personal property” that had been at risk from the execution.11
To further fix the image of his wife as an uncontrolled and irrational woman, Burr added a claim that Eliza, before their marriage, had defamed the character of a neighbor, Isabella Geagan. Isabella and her husband, he said, were now suing Aaron and Eliza for five thousand dollars in damages. But Burr himself had instigated the action for slander, Eliza said, and the suit was “discontinued by judgment as in case of nonsuit.”12 No record of any such legal action survives, suggesting that the case was indeed dismissed.
Strictly speaking, none of these charges and countercharges had any legal weight in a bill of divorce. In New York in 1834, the grounds for dissolving a marriage were few. An annulment could be granted if one or both parties were underage, mentally incompetent, married by force or fraud, physically incapable of consummating a marriage, or had a former spouse who was still alive.13 Otherwise the only possibility of freeing oneself was divorce—permitted for but one reason: adultery.14 That Burr was laying waste to Eliza’s fortune was unfortunate but not illegal. That she had unleashed her temper against him was understandable, but irrelevant. Unless she could prove that he had committed adultery, Eliza was stuck with the marriage.
Luckily the details of Burr’s private life provided the ammunition she needed to end their short-lived union. The smoking gun was a relationship Burr had enjoyed immediately before their marriage with a woman named Jane McManus. A dark-eyed beauty with a failed early marriage in her past, Jane Maria Eliza McManus was born in 1807 in Rensselaer City, New York. Married to a law student at eighteen, by 1832 she had moved to New York City and was raising a young son on her own.15 McManus had become acquainted with Burr when they had both lived on Reade Street.16 The acquaintance-ship had ripened into friendship, if not more. Hannah Lewis, Burr’s Reade Street landlady, testified during the divorce proceedings that McManus had called on Burr as often as four or five nights per week, beginning in October or November 1831. She had spent her visits alone with Burr in his rooms, staying until one or two o’clock in the morning.17
By fall 1832 McManus had obtained a position as bookkeeper at the New York offices of the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company.18 Probably Burr, whose friend Samuel Swartwout was an investor in the company, had suggested her for the position. The Galveston sold scrip to parcels of land in Spanish-ruled East Texas—papers that gave investors the right to settle in specific areas and claim the lands after occupying and surveying them.19
McManus and her brother Robert soon purchased or were given scrip for some of the company’s holdings. In November 1832 they headed south to lay claim to their acres.20 Burr wrote a glowing letter of recommendation to introduce McManus to an old friend, Judge James Workman, who was organizing immigration into Texas. Praising her courage and perseverance, Burr assured Workman “that she will be able to send out one or two hundred settlers in less time and with better selection than any man or half-a-dozen men who I this day know.”21
By May 1833, as the marriage of Eliza Jumel and Aaron Burr approached, McManus was back in New York, signing up German immigrants to work her land in exchange for a meager salary and transportation to Texas.22 But in late September she faced a setback. She had planned to share the costs of chartering a ship to Texas with another investor, but he withdrew from the arrangement at the last minute.23 Desperate for funds, McManus reached out to Burr, asking him for an advance of two hundred and fifty dollars “for a year or even six months.” She offered any quantity he demanded of her Texas lands as security. In the undated letter to him, sent to his and Eliza’s home in upper Manhattan, Jane wrote breathlessly, “My plans are so far advanced that with that [the money] it seems I cannot fail of success – Heaven knows I have not spent a dollar of money or a moment of time for my own amusement – heart and soul has [sic] been devoted to this business – do not let me sink … I have delayed sailing until Wednesday morning[.] If you cannot lend me this money inform me let me know the worst – This suspense will drive me wild in three days more.”
McManus closed the letter with an apology for her appeal: “Forgive me I entreat you for calling on you,” she wrote, “but I feel I know your answer will give a color to the rest of my life – I shall expect your answer with the deepest anxiety – Farewell.”24
Did Burr, now married, grant her request? Probably not. McManus’s biographer, Linda S. Hudson, discovered that Jane sold five hundred acres of land in Texas to a purchaser in Troy, New York, on October 2, 1833—land that she had no title to sell. She received two hundred and fifty dollars from the risky transaction, the same sum she had requested from Burr.25
Although it is unlikely that Burr loaned McManus the sum for which she begged, her letter may have dealt a death blow to his relationship with his new wife. It survives among the Jumel papers at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. Whether at the time of its delivery—probably in the second half of September 1833—or in the months thereafter, it must have fallen into Eliza’s hands. As the divorce filing makes clear, she and Aaron were already dueling over financial matters shortly after the marriage. By early fall, there was sufficient tension between them that Eliza was planning a solitary voyage as an escape, just as she had done when she was at odds with Stephen. On October 2, Nelson requested a passport for her from the State Department to travel from New York to France.26
Even if Burr refused to help McManus in September, the letter from her, if Eliza saw it at the time, could have increased tensions between the couple. Indeed, both parties stated in their divorce papers that Burr had left the mansion on Harlem Heights in “October or November” 1833—thus not long after the missive was received.27 Burr’s friend John Pelletreau was assisted into a carriage. Burr stepped in after him, followed by Maria Johnson, a servant of the colonel’s who had been attending the sick man.28 The three occupants of the carriage moved out of the mansion and into Burr’s law office at 23 Nassau Street.29
The ambiguity over the precise dating of Eliza and Aaron’s separation—“October or November”—is curious. The evidence suggests that Burr left Eliza, then returned temporarily to the mansion after suffering a disabling stroke, accounting for the absence of a single, specific departure date.
The medical crisis occurred in the autumn of 1833. Walking down Broadway with an acquaintance, Burr lost the ability to use one leg.30 The exact timing of the event is not recorded, but a female acquaintance sent a letter to his office on November 1, 1833, to ask after the colonel’s health, so the illness was probably a recent occurrence.31 In a letter of October 18, she had made only a routine inquiry on how he did—nothing more than politeness demanded in correspondence with a friend.32
According to Parton, Eliza visited Burr after hearing of the stroke. She took him back to the mansion to recuperate and nursed him for the following month.33 (Presumably her plans to travel to France were abandoned in the wake of this crisis.) Tending to confirm Parton’s account, Burr, in his answer to Eliza’s bill of divorce, claimed that she behaved “in a manner most undutiful, disobedient, and insulting, and particularly at a time when the defendant [Burr] was in a very low state of health and not expected to survive, which was in the month of October or November 1833, and that in consequence of such treatment this defendant did leave the house of the said complainant.”34 After this interlude in late fall 1833, Eliza and Aaron would not live together again.
Ultimately Eliza would use McManus’s letter to Burr to build a case to divorce her husband for adultery. But for the moment, with Burr gone from the house and in uncertain health, she played a waiting game. Although there must have been a certain awkwardness in the situation, her nephew-in-law Nelson Chase, admitted to the New York bar as an attorney in October, was still working in her estranged husband’s office.35 In the winter of 1833 to ’34, Burr, with Nelson’s assistance, was again attempting to collect veteran’s benefits for his army service during the Revolutionary War. By late December 1833 he had sent Nelson to Washington City, as the nation’s capital was then known, to advocate for him and gather information on his behalf.36 Letters to Nelson that Burr dictated to his secretary, John M. Lewis, show that the seventy-seven-year-old lawyer’s mind was sharp in spite of his physical infirmities. Often he found it necessary to rebuke his junior for inattentiveness. On February 5, 1834, with Nelson still in Washington, Burr complained:
No letter has been recieved [sic] since yours of the 31st. ult. which communicates nothing.
That of the 30th informed me that you had made acquaintance with a gentleman of influence and consideration who was willing to assist you for a commission, the amount not named, but you are not pleased to give the name of that gentleman, nor any clue to, or indication of him.37
A week later Burr reproved Nelson for failing to provide any details on a Mr. Young and a Mr. Cox, nor even a progress report on the matters at hand.38
Nevertheless, Burr remained cordial to Nelson, typically closing his letters with “God bless you and speed you,” and occasionally dropping in bits of family news. On January 5, 1834, he noted, “Your wife was here yesterday for a few minutes merely to inquire if I had heard from you and when your return might be expected to which inquiry I could give no reply.”39 It seems that Nelson could not be bothered to write to his wife of less than two years.
On January 20, 1834, Burr dropped a nugget of information about his own wife into the middle of a letter otherwise focused on business: “Madame, of the heights, has been here today. I had not the honor to see her, though She [sic] passed an hour in the office of Mr. C. [Burr’s law partner, William D. Craft], who has not mentioned to me the visit, or the subject of it.”40 Had Eliza begun to consider the possibility of a divorce? Although she might have assumed—even hoped—in late 1833 that Burr’s death would resolve the differences between them, by the new year the old soldier was on the mend. On February 10, 1834, John Lewis wrote to Nelson that “the health of Col. B is rapidly improving, and his manner quite changed since you last saw him.”41 By March he was up to a forty-five-hour stagecoach trip to Albany “with only one break for a meal,” although the weather was cold enough that the coach was drawn on sleigh runners north of Peekskill and the wind whipped through the vehicle’s torn curtains.42
On May 17 Burr wrote to Nelson from Albany regarding the progress of his claim for veterans’ benefits, addressing him at their Nassau Street office.43 (Burr would soon learn that he had been awarded an annual pension of six hundred dollars, payable retroactively from March 1831.)44 He ended the letter with a courteous inquiry about his wife and Nelson’s: “How is Madame, and la belle pite [petite]—are you in town or Country [sic]?—and where—?”45
If Burr hoped to maintain a polite status quo with regard to his unsuccessful marriage, he would soon be disillusioned. On July 11, 1833, Eliza filed her bill of divorce. In it she described Burr’s financial depredations. She also accused him of adultery with Jane McManus. Date and place were carefully specified: the adultery occurred in Jersey City, New Jersey, in August 1833, a month after Eliza and Aaron’s marriage. For good measure, Eliza claimed that since their marriage, Burr had been “in the habit of committing adultery at divers times with divers females,” whose names Eliza did not know.46 The phrasing was standard terminology in a divorce suit.
Even if only the charge involving Jane McManus were true, Burr had violated the civil laws governing marriage in New York state. He had breached the obligations of the “matrimonial contract,” as Eliza wrote in her bill. The legal recourse for this breach of contract was divorce.
Eliza also requested—and received—an immediate injunction preventing Burr from selling, mortgaging, or otherwise disposing of any part of her personal property or real estate—a good indicator that her desire for divorce was driven by her need to protect the fortune built during her twenty-eight-year marriage to Stephen. In addition, she asked for alimony from the chronically broke Burr, raising the distasteful possibility that she had waited to file until his pension claim was decided in order to claim a share in that asset.47 But it is more likely that she and her lawyers simply followed the usual practice: asking for more than they could expect to get in order to maximize the eventual award.
Once the divorce proceedings commenced, Nelson Chase threw in his lot with Eliza. On July 10, a day before the bill of divorce was filed, he sued Burr for three hundred dollars in law books that Nelson owned, but Burr had kept in his own possession.48 To his mentor, Nelson’s defection must have felt like a betrayal.