by Paul Collins
ALSO BY PAUL COLLINS
Banvard’s Folly:
Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World
Sixpence House:
Lost in a Town of Books
Not Even Wrong:
A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism
The Trouble with Tom:
The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
The Book of William:
How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World
The Murder of the Century:
The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars
Copyright © 2013 by Paul Collins
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95647-7
Map by David Cain
Jacket design by Albert Tang
Jacket illustrations: [House of Representatives] Encyclopaedia Britannica/
Universal Images Group/Getty Images; [Burr] MPI/Stringer Collection/Archive
Photos/Getty Images; [Hamilton] Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images
v3.1
To my brother Peter,
whose room was my first library
[CONTENTS]
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map of the City of New York, 1798
Prologue
PART I
THE VICTIM
1. THE GREAT SICKNESS
2. A BOARDINGHOUSE BY CANDLELIGHT
3. THE YOUNG QUAKER
4. THE BLACK VEIL
5. THE MYSTERY IN THE MEADOW
PART II
THE ACCUSED
6. SOME PERSON OR PERSONS AS YET UNKNOWN
7. THE GLOOMS OF CONSCIOUS NIGHT
8. WHATEVER IS BOLDLY ASSERTED
9. A PERFECT MONSTER
10. THE SILENT SLEIGH
PART III
THE TRIAL
11. THE AMERICAN PHENOMENA
12. BY THE HOLLOW STAIR
13. THE COLOR OF A HORSE IN THE NIGHT
14. ASLEEP, SEEMINGLY
15. THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
PART IV
THE VERDICT
16. LOOK UPON THE PRISONER
17. THE CATCHPENNY CONTRIVANCE
18. EVERY MARK OF A VILLAIN
19. DUEL AT DAWN
20. A COMPLICATED EVIL
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
About the Author
DUEL WITH THE DEVIL
PROLOGUE
[January 2, 1800]
ANDREW BLANCK HAD JUST BEEN SITTING DOWN TO LUNCH WITH a horsebreaker when Elias Ring and Joseph Watkins showed up and battered on his door. It was a bitterly cold day, and it took a fairly tough sort to live out in Lispenard’s Meadow—but the boardinghouse owner and his neighbor, an ironmonger, were not to be trifled with.
Where did you get it?
The well, Blanck replied. One of Aaron Burr’s new municipal wells was out in the meadow, and Blanck’s son had found a muff, for covering the hands in cold weather, floating in there more than a week before. On Christmas Eve, in fact—just as the bells were tolling for the death of General Washington.
I went to the well the next day and looked in, he explained, but I saw nothing.
Joseph and Elias marched out to the meadow, followed by the horsebreaker. The men threw off the wooden cover and ran a long pole down into the dark hole. Mr. Ring could feel an object in the water, a heavy and inert mass, but he couldn’t hook it. The local boys were now gathering to look, and one was sent back for some rope, with which they created a simple net. This time the mass came up.
There was a tangle of hair floating in the water—a wet shoulder—and a face looking upwards …
[Six Months Earlier]
IT WAS A FINE DAY FOR WONDERS. GIANT LOBSTER CLAWS, A LITTLE pagoda, some unburnable asbestos paper—these were the peculiar riches of a collection that the late Gardiner Baker had begun for his museum nearly a decade earlier, during General Washington’s triumphant first term in office. But in July 1799 the museum wilted in the drowsy Manhattan summer, its hush scarcely broken by the arrival of two young women in plain Quaker dress. Accompanying them was a strapping young man in the simple garb of a carpenter on his day off.
Elma?
The younger of the two women fell all too readily into morbid reverie, and sometimes her cousin Hope had to rouse her. But in a such a place as this, how could one not stop to gaze in wonder? Towering above them was Gilbert Stuart’s grand oil portrait of Washington—the great man looked out over the museum, a reminder of when the country and the museum itself were both still new and wondrous. Back then, Manhattan was the infant country’s capital, and Baker’s Museum was still housed down on Wall Street in a lovely sky-blue antechamber of the Stock Exchange. Customers paid two shillings to view an immense and intricate clock that waltzed through an entire concert, get shocked by one of Baker’s splendid Electrical Machines, and stand in awe of a marvelous work of glass sculpture—“a TRANSPARENT MONUMENT,” the ads promised. A figure of Christopher Columbus, it was lit to a fiery glow by a cunning arrangement of lanterns and chandeliers.
But now the glow was fading.
The sounds of commerce from Greenwich Street filtered into the new quarters that the old curator’s widow had been reduced to. Not so long ago, the museum had been wildly awake with Gardiner’s latest scheme—a menagerie of “Living Animals”—including everything from a pair of wolves and a bald eagle to a monkey and a “Mongooz, a beautiful animal from the Island of Madagascar.” Now they had lapsed into silence. Elma’s cousin, Hope Sands, wandered past the nailed-shut storage boxes—filled, perhaps, with old Mr. Baker’s hundreds of volumes of philosophy and natural history—and their fellow boarder Levi Weeks could pause before the wax figures of the great boxers Mendoza and Humphries, still posed as if ready to clobber each other. Nearby, a figure of Ben Franklin gazed impotently among waxworks of once-titillating feminine “beauties of New York, Annapolis, Salem, and New Haven.”
The famed Musical Concert Clock is for sale, visitors were mournfully informed. That is, should you wish to buy it.
They did not: They were ready to leave. It was a shame, the passing of the old curator—but that summer in New York, deaths were no surprise at all.
SIGNS HUNG along the streets, creaking slightly whenever the breeze stirred, each proclaiming where its shopkeeper had come from:
STEPHEN DANDO,
FROM LONDON,
HATTER.
LAW AND BUTTE,
FROM GLASGOW,
BOOT MAKERS.
ANTOINE ARNEUX,
A LA PARIS,
MARCHAND TAILLEUR.
It was a tradition peculiar to Manhattan. Shopkeepers mentioned their hometowns in the hope of landing customers from their newly arrived countrymen; for everyone here, it seemed, hailed from somewhere else. Manhattan was where you went to reinvent yourself, whether you were slightly fractured nobility from Paris, a rabble-rousing radical from London—or, like Elma and Hope, young Quaker women from an upstate farm, simply looking to find better prospects in life.
The city swelled with such arrivals, and its population of sixty thousand made it the largest city in the young republic. Greenwich Street, once a rustic lane running through riverside meadows, w
as now sprouting fashionable brick houses and storefronts at a stunning rate. After a visit to widow Baker’s museum, you could stop into William Maxwell’s, Distiller & Tallow Chandler, for a good dose of his vaunted rum, and thus fortified, go to the next shop over for some godless tract such as Palmer’s Principles of Nature. If you were feeling a bit testy, there were “well-finished Hair-Trigger Pistols” from gunsmith Joseph Finch, as he kept several cases on hand for Manhattan’s querulous gentlemen. Or, if a quiet weekend indoors was what you had in mind, tinsmith Tom Eagles could supply a table’s worth of “egg codlers,” hammered teapots, and “coffee biggins”—the last being the latest fad from France, involving the boiling of coffee rather than merely drinking it as a dissolved powder.
Getting from one shop to the next was not the easiest task. Manhattan’s muddy cobblestone streets were so badly paved that longtime residents acquired a cautious gait; Ben Franklin claimed you could spot visiting New Yorkers on Philadelphia’s smooth streets by the way they shuffled. They had to, for old New York buildings were built in the Dutch style, with elevated first stories and stoops that jutted out into the street, ready to trip up the unwary on dark nights. Even the few streets with unobstructed brick sidewalks were comically narrow—just wide enough, as one chronicler put it, to accommodate “two lean men to walk abreast or one fat man alone.”
Yet for the three museumgoers, it was still a pleasant afternoon’s walk. It had not always been thus: Great swaths of the city had been destroyed by fire in the Revolution, and what wasn’t burned out of spite was burned for survival. When he reconnoitered the British-occupied island in 1781, George Washington had found it “totally stripped of trees,” with the old woods and orchards chopped down after a series of brutal winters. It was only now, a generation later, that the city had truly recovered.
Except, perhaps, in one matter: the water.
On a hot July day, water gushed from the shining brass pumps installed along the thoroughfare; the rills that splashed out were good for cooling off, as well as for putting out fires or washing up. But few people were foolish enough to drink from the public pumps. For Manhattanites, as it happened, boiling coffee in a tin biggin was an excellent idea—because otherwise, a cup of the stuff might kill you. The destruction and deforestation of the war had once nearly caused local wells to run dry, and the explosive growth of the recovering city had only made matters worse.
“The water is very bad to drink,” lamented a teetotaling English traveler who unwisely quenched his thirst from Manhattan’s public pumps—“before I found this out, and suffered sometimes sickness, with very severe pains in the bowels.”
If you were walking down Greenwich on a hot summer day, you were far better off going into David Forrest’s grocery for some of the local spruce beer—or better still, into the tavern on the corner. When a man in New York valued his health, he also valued a stiff drink.
THE TAVERN wasn’t the usual place for Hope, not if she were to follow Quaker principles of moderation. While her more free-spirited cousin Elma hadn’t fully devoted herself to the sect yet, it was not quite a fit place for her, either. But for a young carpenter, on a hot day in July, the tavern near the corner of Greenwich and Barclay was a fine place to slake a thirst for drink or local news. For the former there was cherry bounce, a sweet dram of cherry brandy spiked with extra sugar; or rum fruit punch; or blackstrap, a witches’ brew of rum, molasses, and herbs; or the benign old favorite bogus, which was just rum mixed with beer.
Sooner or later, in any case, you’d be having some rum.
In newspapers, there was considerably more choice at hand: the literary-minded New-York Weekly Museum; Federalist broadsheets, including Noah Webster’s New-York Commercial Advertiser; and Republican rags like Greenleaf’s New-York Journal. Newspapers were still expensive enough that only the more respectable men in town had them delivered at home; others shared copies in local coffeehouses and taverns. The latest news was of the riotous mob who’d tried for three nights to pull down a local brothel just two blocks away, on the corner of Greenwich and Murray. Some in the tavern had, perhaps, firsthand knowledge of the shocking particulars of Mrs. Murphy’s establishment, but what went on there was hardly enough to whip up a riot. No, it took a murder to stir this kind of anger—in this case, that of a man who’d disappeared into Mrs. Murphy’s house of ill fame one night, only to be found the next day out by the docks—quite dead.
“We understand (for we resort to no such place) that the mob assembled again the night before last in considerable numbers,” reported the New-York Gazette. At least a thousand rioters had tried to smash apart Mrs. Murphy’s brothel, and Mayor Richard Varick had called out a regiment of mounted troops to disperse them. In the end, Mrs. Murphy proved the picture of fetchingly disheveled innocence. It seemed her customer had walked out of the brothel on his own and simply expired in the night—as young men sometimes did in Manhattan.
“The plea is, the necessity of correcting abuses, or avenging crimes,” the Gazette warned the next day. “But what rectitude of judgment can be expected from a mob, composed of the lowest, most illiterate, ignorant, and inflammatory parts of a community? It acts upon report, commonly false reports—and vents its rage as frequently upon the innocent as the guilty—for, real innocence or guilt cannot generally be decided by them. If they strike the culpable, it is merely the effect of chance.”
Levi Weeks, at least, could expect to work, make his name, and stay clear of these numberless mobs and snares of the city. The boardinghouse he lived in on Greenwich was a respectable one, and it had the pleasant distractions of his landlord’s sister-in-law Hope and her cousin Elma. To be a carpenter and a foreman in his brother’s upstanding construction firm—and a boarder in a respectable Quaker boardinghouse, with the chaste favor of two of the proprietor’s unmarried relatives—it was a fine thing, really.
THE NEWSPAPERS were not as reassuring. There was the usual cacophony of notices, including an enigmatic dockside offer of “BRANDY Exchanged for PORK,” and a ten-dollar reward for the return of “a Negro MAN, named Henry.” But amid these ordinary items, a column in the New-York Spectator pierced like a needle: “A letter received in town yesterday by a reputable mercantile house, from Philadelphia, has the following painful sentence. ‘The Fever is, we are sorry to say, now actually here, and has made some considerable progress.’ ”
Nobody needed to ask which fever it was. Along the Atlantic coast, there were two illness that everyone feared each year. In the winter it was the slow and crippling terror of smallpox, and in the summer, it was the swift-moving fire of yellow fever. The latter had plagued cities along the Atlantic seaboard for nearly a century, though for most of that time it had appeared only every decade or so. Since the end of the Revolution, however, the scourge had been returning with increasing frequency—and nobody was quite sure why.
Noah Webster had his own theory. He’d just published a new book, A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases; with the Principal Phenomena of the Physical World, Which Precede and Accompany Them, and Observations Deduced from the Facts Stated. After elaborately charting the occurrences of comets, earthquakes, volcanoes, and various plagues, the great grammarian was convinced: They were all somehow connected. Clearly some sort of invisible electrical fluid bound the earth to its inhabitants; to Webster, natural convulsions such as the eruptions of Mount Etna were like a tidal wave crashing through that electrical fluid. “Those periods, in general, have been most distinguished for sickness over the world, in which the fire of the earth has exhibited the most numerous and violent effects,” he theorized. “It is probable that the invisible operations of the electrical fluid produce more effects than those which are seen.”
That was one way to look at it: but another, and far more gratifying, was to blame foreigners. The first known outbreak of yellow fever had occurred in 1703, before its malignancy even had a name. It was simply called “the great sickness.” The blame that first summer fell on a shi
p from St. Thomas that arrived in Manhattan peculiarly close to the beginning of the outbreak. Ever since, suspicion attached itself to these “vessels from one of the sickly ports of the West Indies.” One epidemic was even blamed on a load of rotten coffee that an exotic trader had dumped unsold on a Philadelphia wharf. And for believers in contagion theories, this introduction of the fever to one city from the next had a logical conclusion: the need for a quarantine.
But others hazarded that there might be more local causes—“exhalations from the ground,” as local scholar James Hardie put it. The origin of such exhalations was not hard to guess at; the prominent physician David Hosack later estimated that fully one-twelfth of Manhattan’s inhabited area was occupied by privies. Down by the sunken elevations near the docks, stagnant pools of brackish water gathered in what one writer termed “an almost innumerable number of cellars and back yards … many of them stowed with large quantities of putrid beef, in the neighborhood of filthy sewers.” Manhattan’s rapid growth aggravated matters; one doctor complained that “in all the streets where buildings were going forward, the workmen were allowed to restrain the course of the water, in the gutters, by forming little dams, for their convenience in making mortar.”
Curiously, one reader in Philadelphia had noticed something surely coincidental—mosquitoes appeared at about the same time as the fever did. “The late rains in the city will produce a great increase of mosquitoes in the city, distressing to the sick, and troublesome to those who are well,” he wrote to the editor of Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser. “Whoever will take the trouble to examine their rain-water tubs, will find millions.” The letter writer—who signed himself “A.B.”—gave advice so modest that scarcely anyone even noticed it. Pour in “any common oil,” he wrote, “which will diffuse over the whole surface, and by excluding the air, [it] will destroy the whole brood.”