The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (3 page)

She told her story matter-of-factly:

After my Sister Removed from Providence, I then went out and lived with John Brown Riger, and from thence I went and lived with Abraham Whipple, and from thence I went to Dwell with James Lovet, and from said Lovets I went and lived with John Nash, and from thence back to said Lovets again and now I live at David Wilkinsons.
²⁹

Phebe spoke these words at a meeting of the town council in the then-brand-new statehouse on September 29, 1769. She was fourteen, impoverished, illiterate, and pregnant.
³⁰

The purpose of that audience was to determine her place of residence. In early America, people who could not support themselves became the responsibility of the town in which they had legal residence, gained by birth, marriage, purchase of real estate, or completion of an apprenticeship.
³¹
To save money, nonresidents who committed crimes or appeared likely to need financial support were “warned out” of the municipality to which they had migrated, with the threat of fines or corporal punishment if they returned. Often they were escorted to their town of origin, whose officers would be obliged to take on their care.
³²

Phebe, born in Massachusetts, had no claim to the benevolence of the authorities of Providence. Oddly, however, although she was rejected from being an inhabitant of the city, the council did not order her escorted back to Taunton. Perhaps her pregnancy was sufficiently advanced to make travel inadvisable.

Another solution was available, and Phebe grasped it. On Wednesday, November 1, in the meeting house of the First Congregational Society of Providence, she married her child's father, a sailor named John Bowen.
³³
A married woman took her residency from her husband, and crucially John was a local man.
³⁴
The right to live in Providence—for as long as he lived—may have been the most meaningful gift John ever gave Phebe.

Another sort of gift—namely, the infant John Thomas Bowen—arrived before the end of the year.
³⁵
Two more children followed. Mary—always called Polly as a child—entered the world some two and a half years later, in 1772.
³⁶
Betsy, the youngest—officially, Elizabeth—was born on April 2, 1775; she would joke many years later to her great-niece “that she had come near being an April fool.”
³⁷
The opening salvos of the Revolutionary War were fired less than three weeks after her birth: at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.

2

T
he war disrupted the American economy, halting trade between the colonies and Britain. Food shortages were common in Revolutionary Providence, and life was difficult when Betsy was a child.
¹
Given that she and her mother were lodging in a brothel by 1782, it is unlikely that John Bowen provided much financial support for his family. Even had he wanted to help them, sailing was one of the worst-paid trades.
²

The Bowen children would have to contribute to their own maintenance. John Thomas and Polly, unmentioned during the inquiry that followed the brothel riot, may have been “working out” already from time to time, at the ages of thirteen and ten, respectively. John Thomas was old enough to plow and plant on one of the farms surrounding Providence, if he were not already serving an apprenticeship.
³
Polly could have obtained temporary, live-in jobs doing housework and spinning.
⁴
Betsy, the youngest child, was still with Phebe, but the riot had left her and her mother homeless.

Three bills submitted to the Providence Town Council in 1784 hint at the Bowen family's precarious financial situation.
⁵
From February 7 to April 27, Betsy and her sister Polly lived in Providence's workhouse, boarded at the expense of the town. The reason for their
stay is unknown, but the workhouse was a last resort. New England town officers preferred to support needy families with inexpensive “outside relief” consisting of small gifts of food or wood.
⁶

Institutionalization was reserved chiefly for the “unworthy” poor—as alcoholics, vagrants, and the lazy or shiftless were defined.
⁷
These individuals would be forced to work for their room and board, relieving the town of the expense of their support.
⁸
Men and women arrested for minor misdemeanors (such as a drunken spree or violating an order to leave town) were funneled into the workhouse too, confined in a secured area known as “the cage.”
⁹

To some extent, however, the name “workhouse” was a misnomer. The building in Providence was referred to originally as a “Work house
or
[emphasis added] Alms house,” and retained the supplemental function of providing short-term relief for the destitute.
¹⁰
Surviving bills for board, such as those for Betsy and Polly, reveal that a handful of desperately poor townspeople swelled the institution's population each winter.
¹¹
These unfortunates—chiefly women and children unable rather than unwilling to earn a living—seem to have been placed in the workhouse as the most cost-efficient option to shelter them during the coldest months of the year. For Betsy and Polly, then, the institution—as lonely and desolate as it may have been—would have functioned as a refuge rather than a punishment. Perhaps Phebe had a broken bone or serious illness in 1784 and could not care for her children.

Whatever the reason for her absence, it was transitory. A year later, she and her two daughters were living with forty-nine-year-old Patience Ingraham, a widow scraping out a life on the margins of society.
¹²
She had been “examined, cautioned, and reprimanded” two years before “for keeping a House of bad Fame.”
¹³
The atmosphere inside her home at night could not have been very different from what Betsy had known at the old jail.

At least Ingraham had several children under the age of fourteen who could offer Betsy companionship by day.
¹⁴
It might have been her daughters Sarah and Susannah who showed Betsy around the house, as James, the youngest child, toddled behind.
¹⁵
An inventory
drawn up in 1785, which lists the contents of the house although not the layout or number of rooms, suggests that it was a modest home containing several of the multipurpose rooms common in eighteenth-century New England.
¹⁶
Upstairs were five beds—some merely mattresses on the floor—probably divided between two bedchambers, as well as a candlestand and a flour barrel filled with odds and ends. There were two spinning wheels, one broken. A small stock of linen and woolen yarn testified that the other still functioned.
¹⁷

The layout of the first floor is conjectural, but it appears that there was at least a parlor—a room that combined the functions of best bedroom and place to entertain guests—and a family room, typically called a keeping room or hall, that could be used, like the parlor, for cooking, eating, and sleeping. Two or three beds were divided between these rooms. Several trunks and a maple desk contained clothing and bedding. Tinware, crockery, and iron cookware, described summarily in the inventory, would have been arranged near the fireplaces. A lean-to kitchen may have been attached to the back of the house; if not, all of the cooking would have been done in the parlor and keeping room.
¹⁸
The contents of the home—old-fashioned furniture and well-worn linens—were valued at barely £10.
¹⁹

At night, guests would have gathered in the small downstairs rooms. With her new lodger, Phebe Bowen, Ingraham continued to ply the only trade she knew.

On June 25, 1785, the two women were brought before the town council “for keeping a Disorderly House.” Theodore Foster entered a summary of the hearing in the town record book:

Whereas it is Represented and made to appear to this Council that Patience Ingraham, Widow of Joseph Ingraham Deceased, hath for considerable Time Past, and Still Doth behave, in a very Disorderly Manner by keeping a Bad House of Evil Fame to the Disturbance of the Peace of the Neighborhood in which she lives; and although she hath been called before this Council and Admonished to good
Behavior, she still doth so conduct herself as to disquiet the Good People of the Town.

It is therefore Resolved as the Opinion of the Council that it be and is Recommended to James Arnold and John Dorrance Esq.
^r
, Two of the Justices of the Peace, to take cognizance of the Matter of the bad conduct of the said Ingraham and that they proceed with her according to Law.
²⁰

The meeting had frightening repercussions for Betsy. Her mother, Phebe, and Ingraham—the two were apparently complicit in running the “Disorderly House”—were arrested two days later and committed to the county jail.
²¹
The children of the two women were left to the mercies of the town council, which provided for them in the manner of the day: “It is therefore Ordered that the said Children be sent to the Work House under the direction of the Overseers of the Poor.”
²²

Once more Betsy and Polly entered the institution, spending three and a half weeks there while their mother was in prison. A little comfort was provided by town sergeant Henry Bowen (no known relation of Phebe and her daughters), who had been charged with caring for the family's belongings, “Saving that he furnish them with such necessary Bedding, Cloathing &c. as may be suitable for them in their present Condition.”
²³
The sergeant interpreted his orders liberally. The day after Phebe's arrest, he delivered her most valuable possession to the jail: a looking glass fitted with a little drawer containing a comb, a thimble, and six shillings.
²⁴
This object was what antique dealers call a dressing glass, consisting of a small, pivoting mirror hung between two posts, affixed to a base that housed a drawer for storing jewelry or other valuables.

About ten days later, Bowen made further deliveries to jail and workhouse: a glass decanter, a “small loose gown”—the size perhaps identifying it as belonging to Betsy—and some additional, unspecified clothing. Touchingly, there was also a spelling book.
²⁵
Illiterate Phebe had scraped together the means to purchase it, envisioning a brighter future for her children.