She was born into wealth, yet had a difficult and peripatetic life. Before she was born, her father and mother had agreed to live separately, the one staying in New York where his newspaper office was, and the other, after travelling in Europe, settled in Paris. Jeannette’s mother, Henrietta Agnes Crean, born in Dublin, had married Bennett in 1840, aged about 23, as a recent Irish immigrant to New York. Her new husband, having left Scotland in 1819 with very little money in his pocket, was – by the time of his marriage – a wealthy man and about twice her age. The reason why she was determined – so soon after her marriage – to live away from New York, was the hostility (and notoriety) that Bennett had consistently brought upon himself by his published attacks on politicians and other newspapers, and by his intrusive investigative journalism into the lives of the social elite, not to mention his lurid reporting of crime, seen by the puritan social elite as in very bad taste. This hostility had spilled over into attacks on Henrietta and her family. One physical attack on Bennett in the street with his family beside him (after ten years of marriage) ended all possibility of Henrietta coming back to America for the children’s education. At the time, her eldest, young ‘Jamie’, was nine years old. Certainly by the time Jamie’s formal education was begun in Paris in 1851 or 1852 there appeared no turning back.
Bennett senior spent the next 6 or 7 or more years mainly in New York, but travelling to Paris to see the family for 2-3 months every year, with one or two trips of much longer duration. Such was the situation when Jeannette was born in Paris in the summer of 1854. Her father came across in June earlier than usual, presumably to be present at the birth.
Jeannette was unlucky in life, or so it appears in retrospect, in that members of her family kept moving away and/or dying. Her younger brother Cosmo died before his 6th birthday, when Jeannette was not yet 2. Her brother James (Jamie) thirteen years older than she was, moved to New York city to live with his father from the age of 16 (1857). For the next ten years he appears to have – reluctantly – devoted a few hours a week to his hands-on learning of the job of newspaper editor, but more often drinking, gambling, sailing, sowing his wild oats and getting a reputation as a wild rich boy, while his young sister was being educated privately and quietly, mainly in France, with a governess and servants. She and her mother sailed back to New York city most years for short stays around Easter and her father sailed in the other direction to visit them usually towards the end of the year. Growing up, Jeannette did see something of her father and brother, but usually not for long. There is no evidence either way that she and her mother set foot in America during the Civil War (1861-65), whereas Jamie, in the early part of the war spent ten months on his boat, the ‘Henrietta’ (after his mother), patrolling up and down the coast in the Coast Guard service, so on the Unionist side, ultimately under the command of President Lincoln.
Jeannette probably saw her brother in Paris on his way home from winning the Great Ocean Race in December 1867, which, out of the blue as far as she and most other people were concerned, gave him international recognition as a yachtsman, and grudging admiration from his father. We pick up a mention of her in 1868, when on June 23, after the usual Easter trip to New York with her mother she is on the steamship Allemania “bound for Southampton, [Le] Havre and Hamburg.” Among the passengers named are “Mrs. James Gordon Bennett and servants, Miss Jeannette Bennett and governess.”1 ‘Passengers sailed’, New York Times, June 24,1868. Jeannette was soon to be fourteen. One source suggests that she was educated privately in France from the age of 4 to 14 (1868), where she and her mother enjoyed the friendship of the Orleans family (the royal family deposed in 1848) and where she had a large circle of friends.
She may well have known the Jerome girls, Clarita and Jennie; she would certainly have known of them. Jeannette’s brother had been part of their father Leonard Jerome’s crowd since the late 1850s and a financial backer of horse racing and founding member of Jerome and Belmont’s Coaching Club (founded in 1865). The Jerome girls were at boarding school near Paris for at least a couple of years at the end of the Second Empire. Jennie was of similar age to Jeannette, Clarita slightly older. Both Jerome parents, but especially their father, had a strong belief in the benefits of a good all-round education for girls in writing, classical music (concert level piano for Jennie) and horse riding (side-saddle – ‘en amazone’), as well as learning French2. Elisabeth Kehoe cites a letter from Leonard to Jennie at her boarding school in 1868 (from her memoirs) in The Titled Americans Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into Which They Married, Grove Atlantic 2004. (Excerpt from https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-titled-americans/) The mention of Jeannette’s governess suggests that Henrietta had also been taking her daughter’s education seriously. No doubt the governess could act too as chaperone. It also suggests that she might have sent Jeannette to a good school at some point in the late 1860s, but not necessarily a boarding school since Paris was both mother’s and daughter’s home at the time.
Jeannette’s mother, a good linguist herself, decided, just as she had for Jamie in 1850 in France, that Jeannette needed a formal education away from New York in Europe. Among the skills that young ladies needed in order to make a good marriage were, not only musical and dancing skills and riding, but also a working knowledge of French and German and the ability to converse on European countries, their history, art and architecture.3See Anne de Courcy, The Husband Hunters – Social Climbing in London and New York, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2017, p. 30. Taking a boat to Europe in 1868 due to call at Le Havre – but also going on to Hamburg – gave Henrietta the opportunity to take Jeannette to explore something of the German-speaking world and to improve her German and familiarity with central European history, life and culture, just as Henrietta herself had enjoyed doing during the extended trip with her husband in 1843. How long they might have stayed is not recorded. Their whereabouts until 1872 has left no trace. The most likely, as we shall see is that mother and daughter spent time in Germany, France and Britain. What we do know is that Henrietta’s husband, Jeannette’s father, died in his late seventies on June 1st of that year in New York. Jeannette was not yet 18 and still living in Europe with her mother, and they could not be informed in time for them to return home for the funeral.
It is most unlikely that they were in Paris at that time, indeed it was highly unlikely that they had set foot there since the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 or the battle of Sedan at the latest. Both French and Prussian armies had mobilised in mid-July 1870, which would have been after the end of term if Jeannette had been at school there, so why stay? Reports of the first French defeats on the eastern border in Lorraine reached Paris on 7 August, and were greeted with disbelief and dismay. By September 4th, when news of the Emperor’s capture and surrender at Sedan reached the capital, it was interpreted as leaving the route to Paris open to the invading armies. Even the Empress had fled Paris for Deauville, from where, on 7 September, she was taken to England on the yacht of a British official. By the end of the month a whole swathe of France was occupied – from the German border beyond Paris to the Normandy coast (including Deauville and Le Havre) and south of Paris down to the Loire.
Those foreigners living in Paris who left in July headed for a northern port – Henrietta and family were used to leaving via Le Havre (where the river Seine enters the sea in Normandy), with the option of going on to London or direct to New York or Boston (or indeed to Hamburg). In other circumstances Henrietta might have taken refuge in Germany, but that was probably out of the question at the beginning of the war, since Hamburg and the state of Hanover were, since 1866-7 part of the North German Federation, dominated by Prussia. Those who delayed the decision to leave until news of defeat reached Paris, on the 3rd and 4th September, found themselves in the middle of a Republican uprising. Some Parisians headed south-west towards Bordeaux and Spain. Those still dithering until 19th of September found that Paris was completely besieged and, by late September, what was left of French forces had withdrawn to south of the Loire.
Parisians defended their city until January when a severe shortage of food forced the killing of horses, even resorting to eating rats and animals from the zoo. Finally, the German forces shelled the city and Paris surrendered on 28th January 1971. Thirty thousand German troops entered the city in a victory parade down the Champs-Elysees, followed by train-loads of food, and two days later withdrew to a safe distance from the city. What happened next did little to encourage outsiders to return to Paris, as the German army sat by at a safe distance and watched the Parisian insurrection – really a civil war – against the national government’s authority, calling itself the Commune de Paris, from 18 March to the end of May. It culminated in the ‘semaine sanglante’, when French national government troops (‘les Versaillais’) entered the city massacring at least an estimated six or seven thousand Parisian insurgents, including captives. Paris’s infrastructure was damaged in the shelling during the war, and very badly damaged in the subsequent fighting and by the many fires lit during the savage repression of the Commune.4Symbols of the Imperial regime were pulled down (the Place Vendome column with its statue of Napoléon 1st, the Bastille column), or destroyed by fire (Napoléon III’s Tuileries Palace, including the Imperial Library, the Palais de Justice with its police records, the Finance Ministry, part of the Palais Royal, the entire Hotel de Ville [City Hall]), and across the river the Palais d’Orsay housing the Conseil d’Etat and the Cour des Comptes), the Caisse des Dépots (state investment bank) on rue de Lille; large residential and commercial buildings destroyed in street fighting and artillery fire from either side (on the right bank on rue Royale, rue de Rivoli, boulevard Voltaire, place de la Bastille, the department store Magasins réunis, place de la République, a number of theatres, incl. Chatelet and Porte St Martin, on the Left Bank, rue de Lille, home of famous writers and historians Mérimée and Michelet, part of the Gobelins Tapestry works and so on. (Wikipedia).
It took a few years to rebuild much of central Paris, mostly on the Right bank of the Seine from Concorde to the Bastille, but also on the Left Bank from Quai d’Orsay and the rue de Lille. And in the eyes of those who had left France before the war, judging when they might feel not only comfortable but also safe to come back to live in Paris meant also taking account of the time it took the German troops to remove its soldiery completely from the part of France stretching from the river Marne to the eastern border, which was not complete before September 1873.5The German occupying army began to withdraw upon the signing of the Treaty of Frankfort on 10 May, but most of the occupied territory was not free of troops until autumn 1871 at the earliest, and it was not until July 1873 that the départements of the Ardennes, Marne, the Haute-Marne and the Vosges were liberated, and not until September 1873 for the Lorraine départements of Meurthe, Meurthe-et-Moselle, plus the Territoire de Belfort, that is once the war reparations and indemnities were fully paid off. The Lorraine département of the Moselle and the département of Alsace were lost to France and integrated into the new German Empire. Occupation meant locals suffered not merely censorship of newspapers, but requisition by the occupying army of lodging, food, even clothing, and animals, not to mention reprisals for sabotage or acts of resistance. However, the conditions of occupation should not be seen as at all comparable to what happened in the two World Wars of the 20th century. It is nonetheless likely, in the light of the situation, that neither Jeannette nor her mother came back to Paris after the Franco-Prussian war before going to New York in the second half of June 1872, in the wake of the funeral of Jeannette’s father.
With their father dead, Jeannette’s brother inherits the business, and in the terms of the will he becomes Jeannette’s guardian regarding her finances and Trustee of the property left to her. Less than a year later, her mother was dead. She died on 31 March 1873, aged about 55, in Königstein, Saxony, in the far east of Germany, on the river Elbe, “where she is buried”. She is said to have cabled her son that she was dying of cancer, that she had not wanted her children to know before she set out, since she wanted to face death in solitude. Jeannette must have felt all the more alone, betrayed even, not to be told directly by her mother. The death of both her parents meant that Jeannette’s wayward brother became legally solely responsible for his sister’s support and education until she reached the age of 25 years, when she could manage her own inheritance. Jeannette was to feel increasingly strongly that her brother mismanaged the inheritance she was due from her father – even after she had attained her majority. Indeed, the related legal dispute over what she was owed by her brother went on until after Bennett Junior’s death6See, for example, the legal dispute between Bennett Jnr and his sister Jeannette (Mrs. Bell) and her family over the sale of property left by their father half to Bennett Jnr and he was made Trustee of the other half, the income of which he was to pay to his sister. After her death the property was to go to her children. Jeannette was claiming that the income she had been receiving did not equate to a fair amount and that her brother’s plan to sell the properties infringes their father’s will. New York Times, April 20, 1882, p. 8.. In the United States, fathers usually left equal portions to daughters and sons. By 1850 most US states gave women an individual legal identity and the right to own property (in England the latter became legally possible only in 1870). In certain US states women had the vote.
Jeannette, we can imagine, had been kept on a reasonably tight leash during her adolescence by her mother and governess, from whom she had never really been separated. Daughters more than sons could increase the social status and the fortune of the family by a good marriage. Henrietta would appear to have been determined to have a daughter, having lost one daughter and then had a second son, since she had become pregnant again after 13 years of marriage. Jeannette was brought up in a cosmopolitan environment, like her mother. Henrietta knew what skills and virtues young women needed, and what roles they had to play in the different cultures. Anne de Courcy, in The Husband Hunters - Social Climbing in London and New York, sums up the position of young women like Jeannette: Compared to the subordinate position of an English wife, who could own no property, enter into no legal contracts, keep no salary for herself, or indeed obtain an education without her husband’s say so, American women were brought up to demand respect from their men, whom they treated as equals. American middle-class marriages were more mutually supportive, almost a partnership. They made many kinds of decisions within the marriage, from building a house and furnishing it to where in Europe to visit in the spring. De Courcy adds a quotation on this from John Morgan Richards, a marketing and advertising specialist during the Gilded Age: “In all matters of pleasure making, amusements and travelling the American woman sets the pace.” We can see Henrietta start to do this in the early-to-mid-1840s. She had learned to take more trouble over her looks and her clothes, and not wearing too much make-up. Young American women also learnt how to talk to young men, who unlike in the British upper classes were generally not sent away to boarding school. Women were expected to be able to converse on current social and political issues, as well domestic topics or the arts. In New York teenagers in society learnt social skills, playing parlour games indoors or going on picnics or driving out. They always expected to be chaperoned. This upbringing gave an ease of manner and quickness of repartee, that was absent from English girls, who, as de Courcy describes (pp. 29-35), would have hardly spoken to a young man before ‘coming out’. Consequently, American girls, when in Britain, seemed to have more energy, vitality and charm. “They start their social progress unhampered by caste or tradition.”7A de Courcy, The Husband Hunters, p. 35, quoting Frederick Martin, socialite. And for the wealthy, the cosmopolitanism gained from travelling all around Europe with one’s parents gave insights into how to interact in different cultures.
The above freedoms were not necessarily carried over into social and moral spheres in Mrs. Astor’s elite high society, especially by daughters. Mothers were at pains to maintain their daughters’ purity and reputation, as American puritanism still demanded. Once married, society was ruled by women of blameless morality; there was far less leeway for discreet liaisons or brief affairs, such as were turned a blind eye to in the Prince of Wales’s circle in England and Paris, on the Mediterranean or in European spas and sporting circles. That said, as the century drew to a close in Newport and New York, and as Mrs. Astor’s dominance began to be challenged by ‘new money’ and looser values from the late 19th century to the Great War, some very wealthy American women from less respectable origins brought back hard-up British aristocratic husbands and a title as a calling card to unlock the door to high society; official mistresses began to be seen in Worth gowns and Tiffany necklaces on yachts or alighting from the coach of a Morgan, a Goelet or a Jerome at Delmonico’s.
To give Jeannette Bennett the best chance of a good marriage, Henrietta – used to spending time with her daughter in Paris, and London, New York and Newport, and travelling through Europe – could reasonably accept an upper-class son-in-law from any one of these countries. Jeannette needed to understand the different cultural backgrounds to choose her models carefully. She would have met, for example, members of her brother’s set of similar age, such as Jennie Jerome, who could turn on her sexy charm at the blink of an eyelash, but who also realised the need, in England or indeed in a Paris salon, to read the papers for an hour a day to be able to stay in the room with the men after dinner to lead the conversation on the issues of the day. Jennie Jerome had lived in Paris and in a boarding school nearby during the last years of the Second Empire, the age of Offenbach and flirtatiousness, where the three Jerome girls learnt that affaires were accepted and sex could be enjoyable (de Courcy, pp. 48-49).
Marriage becomes urgent
Within a few years of his taking over the newspaper, James Gordon Bennett junior had become a big name in his own right as a major player in the New York press and further afield, having made a huge scoop by sending the explorer Stanley to find the famous missionary-explorer Dr. Livingstone in darkest Africa. However, in 1877 – Jeannette was 22 – her brother was humiliated in a lurid social scandal which broke his engagement to be married. As the story broke he was horsewhipped by Frederick May, brother of his no longer bride-to-be, with whom he then fought an illegal duel with pistols, neither adversary sustaining injury. Young Bennett sought to avoid legal complications by rushing off to France, taking with him his humiliated sister for whom he was still responsible. They both feared permanent exclusion from New York society.
In Paris, in 1877-78, with time to reflect, Bennett conceived another grand plan – to send an expedition to find the north-west passage through the Arctic. At the price of paying all the expenses of the expedition, he persuaded the American government to make the expedition an official United States Navy venture. To Jeannette’s discomfiture, probably without even asking her permission, he re-names the expedition’s ship after his sister. She appears to have attended the re-naming ceremony of the Jeannette in Le Havre on July 4th, 1878, but she is not named in the press as the young lady who smashes the bottle of champagne over the ship’s bows. A matter of days later, after 18 months of exile, they leave Le Havre together on a liner bound for New York. On arrival Jeannette immediately announces to the press her engagement to Isaac Bell Jnr. – it is not clear when and how they had first met. One credible source claims they met in France around the time that Bell had retired to New York from active participation in the cotton trade in Savannah, Georgia, and when Jeannette found herself unexpectedly, as we have just seen, in France.8“[Bell] did so well [in the cotton trade] he was able retire after 7 years. By 1877 he seemed to have re-established himself in his own city of New York as a wealthy and eligible bachelor. At about this time he met Jeannette Bennett, probably in France.” Mosette Broderick, Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age, New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.
Isaac Bell was a New Yorker of good pedigree and “a cotton merchant, well-known in the trade, [inheriting] his father’s qualities of personal attractiveness and his love of business”, wrote the New York Times.9‘Miss Jeannette Bennett to wed Mr. Isaac Bell, Jnr’, New York Times, July 18, 1878. There is a suggestion he was also present with Jeannette at the ship re-naming ceremony in Le Havre. (M. Broderick, Triumvirate, 2010.) This competitor of the Herald, elaborated on the Bell family: her husband’s “father is President of the Old Dominion Steam-ship Company,10This shipping line connected New York with Norfolk, North Carolina. and a member of the Board of Education, and he formerly was a member of the Board of Charities. Mr. Bell the elder has in his lifetime held many offices of trust as one of the most active citizens of the Metropolis.” What is not said explicitly in the press, since anything to do with cotton obviously implies recent connections with plantations using enslaved labour, was that Jeannette was going to marry into a slaving family, even if at one remove – enslavement had been legally abolished at the end of the Civil War (1865), but it took a long time for plantation workers to feel they were truly free, let alone full citizens. However, there was an unspoken agreement among the establishment to maintain a certain discretion about the origins of much of its wealth. This no doubt suited both sister and brother as it did other prominent members of New York society like Bennett’s friends the Lorillards, whose fortune was tied up in the tobacco trade, also employing enslaved labour. The same credible (secondary) source as above-mentioned does elaborate on the Bell family’s connection to slavery, which goes back at least to his father: “He was the thirteenth member of the family with the name, and like his father had been involved in the cotton trade in Savannah Georgia. He used a new method to stimulate cotton growing after the civil War. He did so well financially that he was able retire after 7 years. By 1877 he seemed to have re-established himself in his own city of New York as a wealthy and eligible bachelor.”11M. Broderick, Triumvirate, 2010.
There followed an apparently hasty marriage for Jeannette and Isaac – not in New York, as had initially been predicted by the New York Times, but in Newport, out of season12‘Miss Jeannette Bennett to wed Mr. Isaac Bell, Jnr’, New York Times, July 18, 1878. “The wedding will probably take place in St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church and Rev. Dr. Preston will undoubtedly perform the ceremony.” But this is contradicted by “Married by Rev. Philip Grace Thursday 19 Sept 1878 at Newport (RI), Jeannette Bennett married Isaac Bell Jnr.” (New York Times, 22 Sept, 1878).. About 9 months later Jeannette had a baby boy, Isaac (“Ikey”) Bell the Third, and, in the next three years, two daughters, Norah and Henrietta. She had thus traded dependence on her brother for dependence on her husband, and started a family of her own including – in one fell swoop – a son and heir, the fourteenth Isaac Bell of the line, along with wealth and – despite the oppressive weight of the Bennett name and the origins of her husband’s wealth – expectations of being accepted as part of New York high society and living a quiet life. The Bells could, after all, trace their New York ancestry as far back as most of Mrs. Astor’s New England founding families.
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