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.