Famous Colonial Houses

by Paul M. Hollister

In that year Stephen Jumel, who had taken his wife’s trick-marriage in good part, bought the Roger Morris house and transferred his family to the heights, to install his wife in a style of living to which she hoped to become accustomed. Nothing was nearer her heart than the social prestige which her position as the chatelaine of a fine estate would afford, nothing farther from her mind than a lonesome ex-vice-president who had once speculated on buying this very house. The God of Coincidence made a mental note of this, and laid his plans.

Although frequent changes of ownership and lack of care had tarnished the house, it was intrinsically the same fine honest mansion that Roger Morris built, with two-foot outer walls lined with English brick, and supporting timbers of enduring oak. Madame Jumel entered her new home through a lofty portico to a main hall which runs through the center of the building from front to rear. This hall leads, as at Monticello, to an octagonal annex which is the only departure from a rather simple Georgian plan. To her left a reception room, to her right the dining-room, ahead in the octagon, a drawing-room which commanded nearly the full circle of that far-reaching panorama. Here had been held the Revolutionary courts-martial. The room north of the reception room had been the commander-in-chief’s office; the southeast bedroom had been his, and from its window he could see the smoking embers of the fire set by his troops when they evacuated the city in ’76—the night Nathan Hale was caught there as a spy.

With Roger Morris a fugitive in London and the house in debatable ground, Polly Philipse Morris had resorted to the Manor at Yonkers for safety. When Washington was driven out, and the house became British headquarters, the army paid rent, but when the Revolution ended, the families of Morris and Philipse, their properties confiscated, went back to England. The mansion was sold and resold, but no one held it for long. It failed as a tavern, and was doubtless expensive to run as a home.

Jumel was a great admirer of Washington, as well as a man of taste, and he combined the two qualities to restore the house implicitly to its earlier condition. It meant a lot to him that Washington, the president, had dined a brilliant company there in 1790, when New York was the national capital, and he equipped the room with fine furniture brought from France in one of his packets. He had the wall-paper in the octagon copied and rehung, respected the simplicity of the mantels, and chose his decorative “remarks” with a nice eye. When his work was done we may fancy that he rubbed his hands and said to his pretty wife: “Voilá! A house worthy of its guests. Let them come, my dear.”

They didn’t come. Everything domestic a woman could crave Betsy Jumel had, even the company of her step-sister’s little daughter, to take the part of the daughter she never had. It was not enough. Five years of it made her despise the place. So the Jumels packed up and sailed for France.

It was no expeditionary force against a new stronghold of society, but an innocent visit to relatives, and perhaps that is why her luck turned. Family tradition has it that in Bordeaux they met the fleeing Napoleon, and offered him the Jumel ship. In return he gave them his carriage, for which he had no further use, and they drove in it to Paris.

Such credentials opened every door of the Bonapartist royalty. Everything Madame Jumel would have wished to be in New York she became in Paris—a turn of fortune which has come to many a socially ambitious American woman since. New avenues of association opened, and she tried to cajole Louis XVIII into giving Stephen a title. What Stephen would have liked better was money for two ships the French government stole from him, for the demands of his expensive establishment in the Place Vendome and a few strokes of ill luck in trading were reducing his funds. When his position grew embarrassing his wife left him and returned to New York.

Two years later—in 1828—Stephen Jumel followed her. Dark rumor says that it was very late when he drove out from town, and that as he approached the mansion he passed Aaron Burr, who was leaving it. He entered, and found that his wife, with the expert legal assistance of Alexander Hamilton, Jr., had transferred the property from her name to his. Four years later he fell from a hay-cart, and in a few days died of his injuries, and whoever took the bandage off those injuries and let him bleed to death will answer for that crime elsewhere, for it is not known in this world.

On a midsummer night of 1833, presided over by the God of Coincidence, Aaron Burr came to the mansion to play whist with the widow. “Madame,” he said, “I offer you my hand; my heart has long been yours.” If you will believe her own version of this proposal from a veteran of seventy-eight, she made no reply. He came the next night, with a priest. She fled upstairs. He overtook her at the landing, “saying the priest was old, and it was nearly midnight, and I must not detain him—and he was so handsome and brave and I allowed him to keep my hand and I stood up there ... and like a fool was married to him! The wretch, but he did not stay here long.”

A few days he stayed, and left her, after a wedding trip in the course of which she sold some stock in Hartford and scornfully bade the purchaser “pay the money to my husband.” Months later he was persuaded to rejoin her, but it could not last. A divorce ensued, and Aaron Burr died.