“For it is a peculiarity of these long-winded cases that they are as nearly immortal as anything mortal can be.”
—“The Jumel jumble,” New-York Tribune, April 4, 1877
In 1887 the Chases and the Caryls sold the Jumel mansion and the remaining acreage surrounding it.1 Eliza and Julius moved to Yonkers. They spent their summers in Saratoga Springs, occupying Madame Jumel’s former home.2
Nelson, Hattie, and Raymond relocated to Ridgewood, New Jersey, where Nelson died in 1890.3 Raymond fell into bad company. One of his friends was James Tynan, whose father claimed to have been complicit in the politically motivated assassinations of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke, the British secretary and undersecretary for Ireland.4 At seventeen, Raymond accused his widowed mother, Hattie, of adultery with his uncle, Lizzie’s husband, and claimed that his uncle had withheld Raymond’s share of the Jumel fortune.5 Two years later, Raymond died of Pott’s disease, a complication of tuberculosis.6
Eliza Caryl lived to be eighty years old, guarding her great-aunt’s relics and reputation until her own death in 1915.7 Her husband predeceased her, dying in 1911. He left all of his property to her—although one of his nephews challenged the will.8
Two years before Eliza Caryl’s death, her granddaughter Agnes Gourreau, one of four children born to Mathilde, came from Bordeaux to tend her.9 Eleven months after her grandmother’s decease, Agnes married Dr. J. Wade Hampton, the scion of a wealthy southern family.10
Jane McManus, Aaron Burr’s alleged lover in the Jumel divorce case, found her reputation permanently stained. In 1837 she was named the respondent in yet another divorce action.11 Her ill repute made her an easy target, but she was probably blameless in that particular case. Subsequently she became a journalist and author. In an 1845 article advocating the annexation of Texas to the United States, she coined the now-famous phrase “manifest destiny.” The fact that she was the first to use the term was only rediscovered at the end of the twentieth century.12
George Washington Bowen died in 1885 at the age of ninety.13 He assigned his claim to the Jumel fortune to John R. Vandervoort, a relative of the Anne Vandervoort who had borne witness for him.14 This newest aspirant to the fabled millions donated land from the estate to several philanthropic institutions in order to promote his supposed acquisition. But the coordinates of the plots proved difficult to pinpoint. Although they were located “in a part of the city where land is worth almost as much as good gold ore,” whether they were “below the ground, or … raised some two feet in the air,” the donor failed to say.15
Shortly before Vandervoort died in 1903, he sold his claim to James Wallace Tygard of Netherwood, New Jersey.16 Politely Tygard notified the mayor of New York City of his “title” to the Jumel property—including as-yet-unearthed Napoleonic relics that he claimed Eliza had buried on her lands.17 Six months later he and a friend were arrested in a sting operation, after contracting to sell a lot that was once part of the Jumel estate. It was already owned by someone else.18
Eliza’s old home became a museum in 1907.19 Today it is known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion, commemorating Roger and Mary Morris, the couple who built it, and Eliza Jumel, its most famous occupant. Eliza Caryl preserved the furnishings that her great-aunt and Stephen had purchased for the house. After she died in 1915, the most important pieces were acquired for the museum.20 They can be admired at the Morris-Jumel Mansion to this day.
Eliza’s reputation is not as well preserved as her furniture. The lies told by those who sought her fortune turned her into a prostitute, the mother of an illegitimate son, a cruel wife, even the murderer of her husband. She deserves better. 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. The affection of her niece and great-niece testify to her ability to form loving bonds.
Her contemporaries would have been less disturbed by her ascent into the upper middle 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, she achieved much: financial security, a certain social status, a landed estate, an elegant home staffed with servants. She rose far above the social class to which she was born, attaining the upward mobility thought to exemplify the American experience, but in reality so hard to achieve. The stories told about her are less dramatic in the end than the life she composed and acted for herself.