Susan May Williams
Susan May Williams Bonaparte (April 2, 1812 – September 15, 1881) was an American heiress and the wife of Jérôme Napoléon Bonaparte, a French-American nephew of Napoléon I, Emperor of France, who lived as a farmer in Baltimore. Although nominally a princess, by virtue of her father-in-law being first King of Westphalia then Prince of Montfort, she and her descendants are not normally considered part of the Bonaparte dynasty. Susan was the daughter of Benjamin Williams, a native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who became a prominent Baltimore merchant; and his wife, Sarah Copeland, widow of Nathaniel  Morton. In 1827, Williams helped found the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first railroad company in the United States, in response to the opening of the Erie Canal and its competition with the port of Baltimore. In November 1829, Susan married Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte-Patterson, the son of Elizabeth Patterson, an American heiress, and Jérôme Bonaparte; their marriage had been annulled after three years on the orders of Napoléon himself, so that his brother could make a more advantageous marriage. Jérôme Napoleon-Patterson too had been offered an arranged marriage, but rejected the idea in favour of the $200,000  fortune that Susan had inherited. In the following year, the groom's maternal grandfather, William Patterson, one of the wealthiest men in Maryland, gave the couple Montrose Mansion as a wedding gift. Their sons were the soldier Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte II (1830-1893) and the lawyer and government official Charles Joseph Bonaparte (1851-1921). General Lew Wallace described Susan as:...staunchly Union, a tall, handsome, black-eyed, Franco-American woman, decidedly masculine in mind, but true to her woman's place