The American Bonaparte

On several occasions, I have written about the various Napoléons.  Even if you discount Napoléon I, the rest of the family is still fascinating for how they changed the rest of the world.  When Napoléon put his brother on the throne of Spain, it destroyed the Spanish Empire, driving most of the Latin America into revolutions for independence.

Napoléon III established a French colony in Cochin China that eventually led to the Vietnam War, and his invasion of Mexico eventually spawned the Mexican Revolution that is still reverberating along America’s southern border.  There was a Napoléon IV who while an officer in the British Army, died fighting the Zulus when he cleverly caught a spear in his eye. 

Napoléon I was one of eight children, and his youngest brother was Jerome Bonaparte.  While serving in the French Navy, Jerome came to the United States and fell in love with Elizabeth Patterson, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder.  Well, Jerome was in love with Betsy.   Or maybe he was in love with the $200,000 dowry Betsy’s father, one of the wealthiest men in the state, was offering.  Married Christmas Eve, 1803, they lived in America briefly before attempting to return to France.  Napoléon I, furious that his youngest brother had married without his permission, refused to allow them to land in French-controlled Europe.

Desperate for his pregnant wife to deliver their child on French soil, Jerome landed in neutral Portugal, traveling overland to Paris in an attempt to convince his emperor brother to allow his wife to join him.  Napoléon I rarely changed his mind, and unfortunately, this was not one of those times.  Poor Betsy finally landed in England, and Napoléon I's nephew, Jerome Napoléon Bonaparte, was born in England.  Eventually, poor Betsy took the baby back to Baltimore.

Napoléon I attempted to have the Pope annul the marriage, but the proceedings were complicated by the arrival of the child, so he promptly changed French law, first allowing Roman Catholic divorces and then civil divorces, but various military campaigns delayed the legal (or perhaps regal) proceedings.  Undeterred by technicalities, Napoléon I promptly arranged a marriage between his brother and Princess Catharina of Württemberg, thus making the young bigamist the King of Württemberg.

A decade later the legal mess was finally all sorted out when the Maryland General Assembly at last granted Elizabeth a divorce by decree.  If her unfinished portrait at right seems familiar, it is because the artist, Gilbert Stuart, also painted the unfinished portrait of George Washington currently used on the $1 bill.

A dashing beauty in Washington and Baltimore, Betsy created something of a scandal, wearing her revealing French fashions in Washington. She was frequently seen traveling the streets in her carriage bearing the Bonaparte coat of arms.  A close friend of Dollie Madison, she was also a keen businesswoman and died with a personal fortune of $1.5 million. 

Her son, Jerome Napoléon Bonaparte, called ‘Bo’ by his friends, went to Harvard and studied law, but never practiced.  His potential claim to the throne of Napoléon I worried Congress, prompting it to propose the Titles of Nobility Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting United States citizens from inheriting foreign titles.  Though the bill passed Congress, it failed to be ratified by a sufficient number of states.  In the end, French courts decided that Bo’s younger half brother was the rightful royal claimant.  (In French politics, who knows what might happen.)

We are not quite done with the American Bonapartes, however.   Bo had two sons, the eldest of whom, Jerome Napoléon Bonaparte II, went to West Point and served as a cavalry lieutenant in Texas before resigning from the Army to move to France.  By then, his cousin was the President of France, and a few years later would become Napoléon III, Emperor of France.  Rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel of Dragoons, Bonaparte served, well,...everywhere.  He fought in Crimea, Italy, Algiers, and Prussia, retiring from the army after the Siege of Paris.

Bo’s youngest son, Charles Joseph Bonaparte was born in Baltimore in 1851.  Like his father, he, too, went to Harvard to study law.  Returning to Baltimore, he championed education for women, and led a political reform movement that ended, briefly, the corrupt political machine that ran Baltimore.  Charles was something of a Luddite—an eccentric who hated technology.  When he hired a prominent architect to construct a mansion in a fashionable neighborhood of Baltimore, he insisted that the new dwelling be constructed without telephone or electrical wiring installed.  He continued to use a horse-drawn carriage until his death in 1920.

A staunch Progressive Republican, Charles Bonaparte was appointed the Secretary of the Navy by President Roosevelt, despite the fact that the only naval experience in the family had occurred a century earlier for a different country.  A year later, he was appointed the Attorney General of the United States, where he served until the end of the Roosevelt administration.  Called ‘Charlie the Crook Chaser’, it was Bonaparte who broke up the tobacco monopoly.

What Charlie the Crook Chaser—the American Bonaparte—should be remembered for, and sadly, is not, is for one of his last acts as the Attorney General.  Taking a small team of investigators who worked directly under the Attorney General, he reorganized them under a separate director into a semi-autonomous Bureau of Investigation.  A few years later, the department would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  So, in fact, if it hadn't been for the incredible cruelty of Napoléon I towards his own brother, we wouldn’t have the FBI.

Poor Betsy Patterson’s family seemed to be permanently linked to Napoléon I

Her sister-in-law married the brother of the Duke of Wellington—the same Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoléon I at Waterloo.  But that’s a story for another day.