The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel ─ A Story of Marriage and Money in the Early Republic

Born Betsy Bowen into grinding poverty, the woman who became Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life, “Madame Jumel” was one of America’s richest women, with servants of her own, a New York mansion and Saratoga Springs summer home, a major art collection, and several hundred acres of land. During her remarkable rise, she acquired a fortune from her first husband—a French merchant—and almost lost it to her second—notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr amid lurid charges of adultery, Jumel lived on to the age of 90, astutely managing her property and public persona. After her death, a titanic battle over her estate went all the way to the United States Supreme Court—twice. Family members told of a woman who earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Claimants to her estate painted a different picture: of a prostitute, the mother of George Washington’s illegitimate son, a wife who defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. Eliza Jumel’s real story—so unique that it surpasses any invention—has yet to be told, until now.

Margaret A. Oppenheimer holds a PhD in art history from New York University. A writer, copy editor, and docent at New York’s Morris-Jumel Mansion, she is the author of The French Portrait: Revolution to Restoration. Her articles on French art have appeared in Apollo, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, and other publications. She lives in New York City.