by Ron Chernow
It is difficult to separate this dark, vengeful letter from the setbacks in Hamilton’s recent political life. Under President Washington, he had grown accustomed to great power and deference. President Adams had destroyed this sense of entitlement, and Hamilton never forgave him. The bitter face-off with Adams at Trenton confirmed that Hamilton had lost all direct influence with the president. There had been the further humiliation of the Reynolds scandal, which had mocked Hamilton’s pretensions to superior private morality. He had also been greatly embittered by the pitiless censure of his enemies. His vision now appeared to be so steeped in gloom that one wonders how much depression warped his judgment in later years. The ebullient hopefulness of his early days as treasury secretary seemed to be in eclipse.
By contrast, in these final years of the century, the abiding respect between Hamilton and Washington had ripened into real affection. On December 12, 1799, Washington sent Hamilton a letter applauding his outline for an American military academy: “The establishment of an institution of this kind... has ever been considered by me as an object of primary importance to this country.”44 It was the last letter George Washington ever wrote. After riding in a snowstorm, he developed a throat infection and died two days later. Washington did not live to see the government transferred to the new capital that was to bear his name. Haunted by a fear of being buried alive, he left instructions that his interment in a Mount Vernon vault should be held up for a few days after his death.
Washington departed the planet as admirably as he had inhabited it. He had long hated slavery, even though he had profited from it. Now, in his will, he stipulated that his slaves should be emancipated after Martha’s death, and he set aside funds for slaves who would be either too young or too old to care for themselves. Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.
Washington’s death dealt another devastating blow to Hamilton’s aspirations. For twenty-two years, their careers had been yoked together, and Hamilton had never needed Washington’s sponsorship more urgently than now. Hamilton confided to Charles C. Pinckney after Washington’s death, “Perhaps no friend of his has more cause to lament on personal account than myself....My imagination is gloomy, my heart sad.”45 To Washington’s secretary, Tobias Lear, Hamilton wrote, “I have been much indebted to the kindness of the general....[H]e was an aegis very essential to me....If virtue can secure happiness in another world, he is happy.”46 Not wishing to intrude upon her mourning, Hamilton waited nearly a month before writing to Martha Washington: “No one better than myself knows the greatness of your loss or how much your excellent heart is formed to feel it in all its extent.”47 Hamilton’s heartfelt sadness over Washington’s death only thickened the shadows that surrounded him in his final years.
Briefly, the partisan squabbling ceased as the nation paid homage to its foremost founder. On December 26, 1799, Hamilton marched in a somber procession of government dignitaries, soldiers, and horsemen that escorted a riderless white horse from Congress Hall to the German Lutheran Church, where Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Virginia eulogized Washington as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”48 The members of Hamilton’s army would wear crepe armbands in the coming months. Though Vice President Jefferson presided over the Senate in a chair draped in black, he had been alienated from Washington and boycotted the memorial service. The envious Adams found excessive the posthumous glorification of Washington and later faulted the Federalists for having “done themselves and their country invaluable injury by making Washington their military, political, religious and even moral Pope and ascribing everything to him.”49
Adams was right about one thing: the Federalists had relied too much on Washington to heal the fratricidal warfare in their party, and this made them vulnerable after his death, especially with a presidential election in the offing. Many High Federalists around Hamilton wanted to discard Adams; Gouverneur Morris had drafted a letter to Washington right before he died, asking that he run again. Hamilton knew that Washington’s death could destroy the unstable Federalist coalition: “The irreparable loss of an inestimable man removes a control which was felt and was very salutary.”50 The Hamiltonian Federalists faced a knotty dilemma: whether to acquiesce in administration policies they detested or to risk a schism in the party.
Washington’s death left vacant the post of commanding officer of the army, and Hamilton thought he had earned the right to it. “If the President does not nominate” Hamilton, said Philip Schuyler, “it will evince a want of prudence and propriety . . . for I am persuaded that the vast majority of the American community expect that the appointment will be conferred on the general.”51 Hamilton had struggled tirelessly and at great personal sacrifice to create a new army with six cavalry companies and twelve infantry regiments. But having regretted naming Hamilton to the number-two position, Adams was not about to cede the top position to him, which therefore remained unfilled. Hamilton did succeed Washington as president general of the Society of the Cincinnati.
Time ran out on Hamilton’s military ambitions. By February 1800, Congress halted enlistments for the new army that he was assembling and that had monopolized his valuable time. That same month, Americans learned that Napoleon Bonaparte had eliminated the Directory in November and pronounced himself first consul, in precisely the turn to despotism that Hamilton had long prophesied for France. The fulfillment of his prediction, however, left him stranded in an awkward situation. Napoleon’s coup marked the end of the French Revolution and thereby weakened the case for military preparations against a country that the Federalists had identified with Jacobinism.52 Hamilton saw his vision of a brand-new army evaporate: “It is very certain that the military career in this country offers too few inducements and it is equally certain that my present station in the army cannot very long continue under the plans which seem to govern,” he told a friend.53
But as spring arrived, Hamilton still could not surrender his daydreams for the American military. With his hyperactive mind, he drafted a bill for a military academy encompassing the navy as well as the army and another for an army corps of engineers. He refined his guidelines for infantry training right down to the correct pace for marching—75 steps per minute for the common step, 120 per minute for the quick step. Hamilton was spinning his wheels. When Congress gave Adams the power in mid-May to disband most of the new army, he quickly exercised it. By this point, Adams thought Hamilton’s army an abomination and later recalled that it “was as unpopular as if it had been a ferocious wild beast let loose upon the nation to devour it.”54 Adams quipped grimly that if the venturesome Hamilton had been given a free hand with the army, he would have needed a second army to disband the first.55
Hamilton tried to keep up a brave face, but he was heartbroken over his ill-fated corps. He told Eliza that he had to play “the game of good spirits but . . . it is a most artificial game and at the bottom of my soul there is a more than usual gloom.”56 He was unaccustomed to failure, and here he had devoted a year and a half of his life to an aborted army. On May 22, 1800, he emerged from his tent at Scotch Plains to review his troops one last time before they were demobilized in mid-June. Abigail Adams was present and, despite her dislike of Hamilton, was impressed by his troops. “They did great honor to their officers and to themselves,” she told her sister.57 At the beginning of July, Hamilton shut up his New York headquarters, notified the secretary of war of his departure, and ended his military service. The taxing, dispiriting episode was over in every respect but one: he had not yet discharged his full store of bitterness against the president whom he held responsible for this inglorious end.
THIRTY-FIVE
GUSTS OF PASSION
Even while carrying out his duties as inspector general of a nascent army, Hamilton made time for the occasional legal case. He had seldom gravitated to criminal cases, preferring civil c
ases with substantial constitutional issues
or commercial cases that generated adequate fees. On those infrequent occasions when he took criminal cases, he usually defended the underdog on a pro bono basis—evidence that once again challenges the historic stereotype of Hamilton as an imperious snob. Such a case arose in the spring of 1800 when he thought a likable young carpenter named Levi Weeks was being unjustly accused of murder. As in the postwar Loyalist cases, Hamilton was disturbed whenever public opinion howled for bloody revenge.
In the annals of New York crime, the Levi Weeks case is often called the Manhattan Well Tragedy, and it forms yet another chapter in the convoluted relationship of Hamilton and Aaron Burr. At first glance, the case seemingly involved an innocent maiden betrayed by an unfeeling cad. On the snowy evening of December 22, 1799, Gulielma Sands, about twenty-two, left her boardinghouse on Greenwich Street, which was operated by her respectable Quaker relatives, Catherine and Elias Ring. It was believed that she had gone off to marry her fiancé, Levi Weeks, who was also a tenant and was seen chatting with her before her departure. Later that night, Weeks returned to the Ring household alone, inquired if Sands had gone to bed, and was shocked to discover that she was not there. On January 2, her fully dressed corpse was fished from a wooden well owned by the Manhattan Company. Perhaps because he had founded the company, Aaron Burr joined with Hamilton and Brockholst Livingston to defend Levi Weeks against a murder charge.
The corpse of Gulielma Sands was mottled and swollen and badly bruised around the face and breasts. The public was riveted by these gory details, and handbills insinuated that she had been impregnated and then murdered by Weeks. Elias and Catherine Ring egged on this speculation, with Elias recalling that when Weeks came home on the evening of Sands’s disappearance “he appeared as white as ashes and trembled all over like a leaf.”1 The Rings even engaged in some macabre showmanship at their boardinghouse. They displayed Sands’s body in a coffin for three days and then placed it for a day on the pavement outside, allowing people to gratify their ghoulish curiosity and decide whether she had been pregnant. (The inquest said she had not.) As the uproar against Levi Weeks reached a crescendo— “Scarcely anything else is spoken of,” said one local diarist—gossips whispered of ghostly apparitions at the Manhattan well.2 The prosecution of Weeks assumed the vengeful mood of a witch-hunt. The indictment said that, “not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil,” Weeks had “beat[en] and abused” Sands before murdering her and stuffing her down the well.3
The People v. Levi Weeks began on March 31 at the old City Hall on Wall Street, the Federal Hall of Washington’s first inauguration. Such a huge throng showed up that constables had to empty the courtroom of “superfluous spectators.”4 Levi Weeks could hear crowds outside chanting for his blood: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”5 The case holds a special place in Hamilton’s legal practice because William Coleman, a court clerk and later editor of the New-York Evening Post, provided an almost complete stenographic transcript—a novelty in those days. Unfortunately, Coleman did not specify which defense lawyer spoke at any given moment, though we can make some educated guesses. For instance, the grandiloquent lawyer who opened the defense case spoke in a florid style reminiscent of Hamilton rather than the more succinct Burr.
I know the unexampled industry that has been exerted to destroy the reputation of the accused and to immolate him at the shrine of persecution without the solemnity of a candid and impartial trial....We have witnessed the extraordinary means which have been adopted to inflame the public passions and to direct the fury of popular resentment against the prisoner. Why has the body been exposed for days in the public streets in a manner the most indecent and shocking?...In this way, gentlemen, the public opinion comes to be formed unfavourably and long before the prisoner is brought to his trial he is already condemned.6
It seems mystifying that Levi Weeks could have assembled a team composed of the three preeminent lawyers in New York. Hamilton could scarcely have warmed to Burr after the Manhattan Company sham and was likely motivated by his friendship with Ezra Weeks, Levi’s brother, whom he had hired to construct a weekend home north of the city. Another likely reason why Hamilton collaborated with Burr is that the trial occurred on the eve of local elections that were to have profound national implications. None of the three lawyers could afford to miss a chance to publicize his talents in a spectacular criminal case.
The trial unfolded with a speed that seems unimaginable today. Fifty-five witnesses testified in three days, each day’s testimony lasting well past midnight. The rigorous defense team established a credible alibi for Levi Weeks, claiming that he had dined with Ezra on the night in question. During that dinner, John B. McComb, Jr., the architect hired for Hamilton’s new home, arrived and found a cheerful Levi stowing away a hearty dinner. From medical experts, the defense elicited helpful opinions that the marks on Gulielma Sands’s body might have been produced by drowning or by the autopsy itself, opening up the possibility of suicide. (The coroner’s inquest had established drowning, not beating, as the cause of death.) The defense lawyers also discredited the testimony of Elias and Catherine Ring, showing that Elias Ring had probably slept with Gulielma Sands and that Sands, no innocent damsel, had a little weakness for laudanum. The image of the Ring household evolved from a scene of violated gentility into something closer to a sedate brothel.
As the trial proceeded, the defense cast suspicion on a Richard Croucher, a shady salesman of ladies’ garments, who had zealously stirred up malice against Levi Weeks. Croucher had arrived from England the year before and was yet another raffish lodger at the steamy Ring premises. As principal witness for the prosecution, he seemed too eager to retail stories about sexual liaisons between Levi Weeks and Gulielma Sands. The defense lawyers damaged Croucher’s credibility by getting him to confess that he had quarreled with Weeks.
It has become part of Hamiltonian legend that when Croucher testified, Hamilton placed candles on both sides of his face, giving his features a sinister glow. “The jury will mark every muscle of his face, every motion of his eye,” Hamilton is said to have declaimed. “I conjure you to look through that man’s countenance to his conscience.”7 Croucher supposedly confessed on the spot. Oddly enough, Aaron Burr later claimed that he had grabbed two candelabra from the defense table, held them toward Croucher, and declared theatrically, “Behold the murderer, gentlemen!”8 Traumatized by this exposure, the guilty Croucher was alleged to have bolted in terror from the courtroom. Coleman’s transcript shows when the famous moment may have occurred. One witness was testifying to Croucher’s unsavory character when, Coleman noted, “here one of the prisoner’s counsel held a candle close to Croucher’s face, who stood among the cro[w]d and asked the witness if it was he and he said it was.”9 Hamilton or Burr may have flicked the candle toward Croucher in a rapid gesture that made him appear to cringe guiltily in the glare of a burning taper. The lodger never confessed to the crime. The likelihood that Croucher, not Weeks, was the culprit increased three months later when he was convicted of raping a thirteen-year-old girl at the racy Ring boardinghouse.
The protracted case ended at 1:30 in the morning on April 2, 1800. The blearyeyed prosecutor had not slept for forty-four hours, and Hamilton noted that everyone was “sinking under fatigue.” Hamilton therefore waived the right to a summation, saying he would “rest the case on the recital of the facts” by the bench. Hamilton felt confident that the case required no “laboured elucidation.”10 He and his colleagues had convincingly shown that Levi Weeks had a watertight alibi, that the evidence against him was circumstantial, and that he possessed no motive for butchering his fiancée. The jury agreed. William Coleman ended his transcript: “The jury then went out and returned in about five minutes with a verdict—NOT GUILTY.”11 It was a triumph for the defense and a hideous embarrassment for Elias and Catherine Ring. As Hamilton strode from the courtroom, Catherine Ring waved a fist in
his face and shouted, “If thee dies a natural death, I shall think there is no justice in heaven.”12
While Hamilton and Burr bestrode the Wall Street courtroom, they knew that local elections for the state legislature in late April might affect much more than New York politics: they might determine the next president of the United States. With John Adams certain to run strongly in New England and Thomas Jefferson equally so in the south, the election would hinge on pivotal votes in the mid-Atlantic states, particularly New York, which had twelve electoral votes. The Constitution gave each state the right to choose its own method for selecting presidential electors, and New York picked its by a joint ballot of the two houses of the legislature, both now with Federalist majorities, yet with the upstate counties evenly split between Republicans and Federalists. The New York City elections that spring could tip the balance of the legislature one way or the other. Thus, as New York City went, so went the state, and possibly the nation.