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.
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.
There really ends the career of Madame Jumel. But she lived through
the Mexican and the Civil wars. Here and there in the city, now at
Saratoga, once in Europe, she “lived around” with relatives of sorts,
but most of the time she spent in the great house. Its corners grew
less and less neat as age crept over her. Still, however, the active
physique her sea-faring father and her tomboy mother had given little
Betsy Bowen held on grimly to life and activity, and the social mania
which had consumed her thoughts lighted up her memory with fantasies,
as a sputtering lantern creates half-authentic figures among the
shadows of a dusty, neglected stage. Outside the house she had no
friends except those who wanted her money or stole her firewood and
livestock, indoors life was a perpetual pageant. For twenty years a
feast table, fully set, with dust in the crystal wine glasses, and
mould on the petrifying candies, stood in a closed room: this, she
related, was the table at which she had entertained Joseph Bonaparte
when he came over to marry her and her riches and had to climb over the
back wall to gain entrance. She took pity on him then, she said, for
it didn’t look just right to have the King of Spain in the kitchen.
The truth is that she never entertained Joseph Bonaparte (though she
offered him the estate in 1820); nor did the Duke of Palermo offer
to marry the “Vice-Queen of America” as she styled herself (although
she inspected the ducal palace in Palermo); she was in Paris when
Lafayette visited America in 1825, but she honestly believed that she
had been his hostess on the Heights. Some recollection of a name, a
face, a romantic anecdote out of her vivid past popped up, or she ran
across one of the dingy, pathetic dance favors or trinkets or ribbons
of a dead affair, and presto!--her feverish mind whirled away in a
jumbled drama, unlimited in its romantic action, and delicious in its
inaccuracy.
If the public saw her it was under circumstances that magnified
all the erratic tales that were--and still are--current about her
history. One winter she took a group of penniless Frenchmen under
her wing, quartered them in the barn, which had once held American
prisoners, armed them from the arsenal she kept in the house, organized
them into a military outfit, and would ride proudly at their head
over her estate. From France she brought home green livery for her
postilions--though she had no postilions, and when taunting reached her
ears she dressed the gardener and his boy in the livery and rode to
town with them. Her face to the world was as haughty and as tinctured
with rouge as if she were Eliza Brown of Whitehall Street, her dress
as shabby-genteel as she fancied it was fashionable, her intellect
as tragically aflame with the mad dance of Might-Have-Been as it was
fixed, cold, and shrewd in financial matters. _Grande dame_ she had
set out to be, _grande dame_ she had become, and mercifully to the
poor little shrunken creature with the powdered cheeks and the soiled
finery who was finally carried upstairs to the Washington room to die,
_grande dame_ in her mind she died.
It was a signal for the jackals. No less than twenty law-suits sprang
up to break the will and seize the property. Some of the claims seem
just, others less so, and all of them, in the course of fifty years,
have gone through the mill of the courts and been ground exceeding
fine. Of them all, the most interesting fragment is the attempt made by
George Washington Bowen, Betsy’s deserted baby in Providence, to own
his mother’s home. For thirteen years the old man pursued his case,
even to the Supreme Court, lost it, and died, though the claim is still
cherished by his own connections. The estate could not hold out long
against the march of the city, and parcel by parcel it was split up,
until in 1894 the house and its dooryard came into the hands of General
F. P. Earle.
The city owns it now, and four capable chapters of the Daughters
of the American Revolution have formed the Washington Headquarters
Association, and have brought the mansion out of neglect and oblivion.
They opened the windows Madame Jumel kept sealed and let in air and
sunlight; they consigned the Eastlake-and-gimcrack whatnottery of its
most recent tenants to the exceedingly efficient ash-removal department
of the City of New York, which is equipped to handle just such
situations, and from the four corners of our country they assembled
and installed in the house as much of its historic equipment as they
could find. There is much of it, of course, which has no special
significance, and there is so great a quantity of relics there that the
house is in no sense a home, but rather an interesting and valuable
museum. Next best of all, they opened the doors to the public in a city
where sorely-needed Americanization may well begin at home. And best
of all, they installed as curator William Henry Shelton, as gracious
a story-teller as the humble history-seeker may ply with questions.
It is to him largely that the excellent administration of the house
is due. It is he who can bid you close your eyes, make a few passes,
and translate you into the presence of Mary Philipse, or bring you to
attention before George Washington, or open a secret panel that you may
peep at Madame Jumel. In his book, “The Jumel Mansion,” he has done
just this, and it is from that source with his permission that the
greater part of this story is drawn, and so, gratefully acknowledged.
MOUNT VERNON
[Illustration:
© D.McK
MOUNT VERNON
Here on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, we may catch glimpses of
the man George Washington liked to be.]
MOUNT VERNON
The First President once wrote a letter to a Charleston gentleman named
Thomas Pinckney, who was then American ambassador at the British court.
His words were for Thomas Pinckney, not for posterity, so posterity
finds it refreshing to see a president writing a specific letter to
his envoy under the pitiless light of publicity. Its chief interest
here is not his report of the Senate’s action on a proposed treaty with
Great Britain, nor his anxiety over Lafayette’s imprisonment in Olmutz,
though both are subjects upon which he dwells at some length. The
note for us is the fact that after long diplomatic instruction to his
ambassador, Washington says:
“Before I close this letter permit me to request the favour
of you to embrace some favorable opportunity to thank Lord
Grenville in my behalf, for his politeness in causing a special
permit to be sent to Liverpool for the shipment of two sacks
of the field peas, and the like quantity of winter vetches,
which I had requested our Consul at that place to send me for
seed, but which it seems cannot be done without a special order
from Government. A circumstance which did not occur to me, or I
certainly should not have given it the trouble of issuing one
for such a trifle.
“With very great esteem and regard
“I am, dear Sir,
“Your obedt. Servant,
“G. Washington.”
A treaty with Great Britain, Lafayette to be got out of prison,
two sacks of field peas and some winter vetch--and there is George
Washington. Our national heroes march down the ages without time
to change costumes. While they live we call them everything under
the sun; they die, and we endow them with a certain type-quality
which they must wear forever to the exclusion of other and equally
interesting qualities which they possessed in equal quantity. Unless
some circumstance rescue those qualities from oblivion, a large part of
the inspiration of their lives has been unnecessarily sacrificed. We
have seen the first manifestation of such a process with the death of
Colonel Roosevelt, and we wonder how frequently our children’s children
will think of Roosevelt on the tennis-court, at Sagamore, in Montana,
in Rock Creek Park, or facing death in Brazil. The nation loses a man,
to mourn a saint. So in a lesser degree with our lesser heroes: Hale
becomes the lay-figure of Loyalty, Franklin, of Common Sense, Grant,
of Military Patience. Here, on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, in
and about a great white house, we may catch glimpses of the man George
Washington liked to be--glimpses denied us in the popular Washington
legend.
He was a boy of three when his father first brought him there. He
was seven when his father’s house burned, and the discouragement and
loneliness of the wilderness plantation on the Potomac sent the young
family to Fredericksburg to live. He was fifteen when he came back to
live on the Potomac estate, now the property of his brother Lawrence.
Lawrence was of no mean importance in his young brother’s eye--a
veteran of the West Indian naval exploits of Admiral Vernon, and so
full of them that he named the estate after his chief--altogether a
rare big brother. And there were rare neighbors to be cultivated: like
Lord Fairfax, an Oxford graduate and contributor to Mr. Addison’s
_Spectator_, who took a fellow riding, and now and then rode after a
fox.
As the boy broadened into self-reliance in such company as Lawrence’s,
and into a degree of education by association with Fairfax, he fell
heir to certain of their responsibilities. Fairfax sent him to survey
his vast holdings. Lawrence developed tuberculosis, and his military
duties devolved upon George. At twenty he was master of Mount Vernon,
at twenty-one a lieutenant-colonel and fighting for the English against
the French on the Ohio. Thackeray has pointed, in this episode,
the caprice of fate: “It was strange that in a savage forest of
Pennsylvania a young Virginian officer should fire a shot and waken up
a war which was to last for sixty years, which was to cover his own
country and pass into Europe, to cost France her American colonies, to
sever ours from us, and create the great Western Republic; to rage over
the Old World when extinguished in the New; and, of all the myriads
engaged in the vast contest, to leave the prize of the greatest fame
with him who struck the first blow!”
The next year he was a part of Braddock’s disastrous expedition, and
news went home that he had been killed. John Augustine Washington made
alarmed inquiries, to which George replied with a wit equal to Mark
Twain’s under similar circumstances: “As I have heard, since my arrival
at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I
take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring
you that I have not as yet composed the latter.” He became a member of
the legislature, and then, when he was twenty-six and a full colonel,
he married Martha Dandridge Custis, who was by all odds the most
accomplished and probably the wealthiest young widow in Williamsburg.
It was time now to renew his neglected acquaintance with Mount Vernon.
During the period of their engagement, while Washington was absent
at the frontier, and later, while he was attending the session of
the House of Burgesses at Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, which had
been so long neglected, was taking on a new dress. The activity on
the plantation was contagious. It spread down river, to Belvoir, to
Gunston Hall, and through the countryside to the other estates where
Washington was intimately known, and where his earlier and generous
attentions to attractive daughters did nothing to dampen their interest
in his bride. Their swift coach-ride homeward bound from Williamsburg
was like a triumphal entry. She added to his holdings of twenty-five
hundred acres at Mount Vernon, and as many over the mountains, some
fifteen thousand acres of her own. She found the house rebuilt, its
exterior strengthened by new brick burned on the estate, new boarding
and sheathing, new windows and a new roof; inside was new plaster, new
flooring, and plenty of new closet-room, which probably touched her
woman’s heart as inexpressibly thoughtful.
“I am now I believe fixd at this seat with an agreeable Consort for
Life,” he wrote to a friend in England. “And I hope to find more
happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and
bustling World.” Few realize how wide and bustling was the world
surveyed from Mount Vernon, nor to what extent he exerted himself to
make use of the talents he had been given. Remember that there were no
neighboring shops, no groceries, no service stations--not one, in fact,
of the multitude of helping hands which science reaches out today to
perform every conceivable task; and remember too that in his custody
were, and upon his wise management depended, not only the happiness of
his wife and her two children, but that of a company of several hundred
others on the estate.
Husband and wife shared in an informal copartnership not unlike that
of a manufacturer and a retail store-manager of today. It was her duty
to anticipate the living demands of the estate, his to supply them.
When she requisitioned cloth, he built a spinning-house and hired
labor which in one year spun fourteen hundred yards of textiles, from
broadcloth to bed-ticking. Convenient to the house, and flanking the
serpentine drive, were his little factories: a smokehouse for meats, a
laundry, a tailor-shop, a shoemaker’s shop, a carpenter’s, a smithy;
here he wrought his raw materials to the needs of his establishment.
And it was when he put on his “plain blue coat, white cassimer
waistcoat, black breeches and boots” to visit the fields and the mill,
his usual custom in the forenoon, that he was most truly the producer,
and most contented.
The estate he divided into five farms, each under an overseer
responsible to the manager of the estate, and each equipped with the
necessary complement of labor, buildings and stock. Through the manager
the reports of progress from the five farms were passed up to the
master in the big house every Saturday morning, and with scrupulous
precision he transcribed and classified them. Washington never heard
of a microbe, nor studied chemistry, yet in these reports and his own
conclusions will be found exhaustive experiments in inoculating the
soil and rotating crops. He balanced his cultivation so as to produce
sufficient food for his people and stock, and the utmost yield of
negotiable grains. “Our lands,” he wrote, “were originally very good;
but use and abuse have made them quite otherwise”--and so he sent
abroad for new seeds to try out. Selected quantities of his grains
he set aside for experiment upon the diet of his livestock. Although
he was a host of lavish hospitality within the house, every move he
made as a farmer was a lesson in conservation. His woodcutters got
explicit orders to select the timber they cut; his overseers were told
not to try to squeeze the land for high crop yield at the expense of
upkeep; each new herd of cattle must be better stock than the last; the
mill was re-engineered to grind more meal from each bushel of corn; a
stone deposit became a quarry; the waters of the Potomac gave up “a
sufficiency of fish for my own people” in the first catch, and beyond
that a great supply for salting and sale in the winter market; every
by-product of the estate was developed and applied. Jefferson sat at
Monticello above nature’s workshop as at a play; Washington took off
his plain blue coat and tinkered with the machinery to increase its
efficiency.
In his admirable work on Mount Vernon, Paul Wilstach has hit upon the
secret of its master’s enthusiasm:
“Mount Vernon was eventually brought to a state of high productiveness,
but the scale of life there was such that rarely did the farms show a
balance wholly on the right side of the ledger. Washington had to look
to his estate for other assets than appeared in the physical valuation
of its produce. He found its true and largest asset in the fulfilled
ideal of private life; in solving the interesting problems of the
planter; in mental health and physical strength; and in the enjoyment
of the easy and graceful social life of the colonial country gentleman,
of which Mount Vernon became a veritable example.”
A vigorous life is easy and natural to a man of Washington’s physical
power. He was six-feet-three-inches high, rose with the sun, and went
to bed at nine unless there were guests. His routine during the sixteen
years preceding the Revolution was varied on this day to ride “Valiant”
or “Ajax” after the hounds, on that to dine at Belvoir or Gunston Hall,
or Belle Aire; now up-river to a dance at Alexandria, now down-river
shooting ducks; this week to Annapolis and the races, next to
Williamsburg on affairs of the legislature. A never-ending procession
of guests arrived and departed, from parsons to British naval officers,
and found a uniformly perfect welcome--even extending to the gentleman
who “contrary to all expectation” held Washington motionless for three
sittings while he painted his first portrait, and charged him slightly
more than £57 for effigies of himself, Mrs. Washington, Martha and Jack
Custis.
To the refurnished home Mrs. Washington had brought many objects of her
own to add to its luxury, which was further enhanced from time to time
by orders upon his London agents for furniture and ornaments. On one
occasion he wrote for busts of Alexander, Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden
and the King of Prussia, fifteen inches high; Prince Eugene and the
Duke of Marlborough, somewhat smaller; and “Wild Beasts, not to exceed
twelve inches in height nor eighteen in length.” He received instead:
“A Groupe of Aeneas carrying his Father out of Troy, with four
statues, viz. his Father Anchises, his wife Creusa and his son
Ascanius, neatly finisht and bronzed with copper £3.3”
“Two Groupes, with two statues each of Bacchus & Flora, finisht
neat & bronzed with copper £4.4”
and “Two Lyons after the antique Lyons in Italy,” also “finisht neat,”
with the following apology: