by Paul Collins
Go fetch some ropes, they told him.
Thick coils of hemp were hurriedly procured from the nearest house, and another man now joined in—Lawrence Myer, a fellow teamster of Mr. Blanck’s. With a half dozen men gathered around the hole, the poles and ropes were rigged into a makeshift net and lowered to gently snag the inert mass in the water.
Ready—one, two, three—lift. Even with the muscle of two teamsters and an ironmonger among those pulling, the mass was sodden and heavy; it rose slowly under the cradling ropes, breaching the surface and ascending into the cold winter air, streaming water back into the dark well.
A body.
The sickening sag of weight tightened against the ropes as the corpse rolled over, as if inexorably drawn back to its hiding place within the earth. The men righted it and then hauled it up, laying the lifeless form out on one of the well’s planks. This had been a woman, once: Her head lolled to the side, and her hair hung in her face; her feet were bare and her dress torn. A comb and a white ribbon still hung in the disheveled mass of her wet hair.
The horsebreaker paused to stare at the terrible unblinking face—and then, turning away, strode purposefully across the meadow to find a constable.
THE CONSTABLE ARRIVED TO FIND A CROWD MILLING ABOUT THE supine figure laid out on a plank. Levi Weeks is to blame, one man insisted to the growing crowd, and the mutterings passed among the gathering citizenry—he’s who she was last with.
Determining the claim’s truth was hardly the business of a constable, or indeed of any officer of the law. Policing largely existed to guard property along the docks, and to maintain a night watch on the poorly lit streets. The watchmen, known as Leatherheads for the leather helmets that they varnished to ironlike hardness, spent their nights manning guard boxes. If a Leatherhead was unwise enough to doze off, drunk students amused themselves by tipping the boxes over.
Their daytime counterparts were even less prepossessing. The city’s seven wards generally had only two constables apiece for waking hours, and they neither walked a beat nor stirred themselves for much of anything else unless a crime victim came to City Hall and asked them. Even then, they were only to fetch or search whoever the victim accused. Constables were not to investigate anything on their own or even ask a suspect any questions; that was a magistrate’s job.
But murder was different. There was no living victim to lodge a complaint, after all, and there was the added danger of a suspect fleeing such a heinous crime. Communication between authorities across the states remained so crude that a murderer allowed to slip away might reinvent himself altogether in another city. So the constable had to act, even on mere hearsay and reasonable suspicion. He set off for Levi’s workshop with a few men from the crowd in tow. When the group reached the shop, Weeks didn’t even notice their arrival; indeed, the constable walked right up behind him and tapped the carpenter on the shoulder.
Yes?
Weeks hardly seemed violent. In fact, he appeared surprised to see an officer of the law. And yet he was the one person—the only one—to have any rumors attached to him, claiming that he’d gone out with Elma when she was last seen. But to James Lent, it was hard to believe that the fellow before them might be a murder suspect.
“Is this the young man?” he asked the constable.
“Yes,” said the officer, nodding.
The horsebreaker ventured closer and peered at him.
Well, he finally said—I am very sorry for you.
Levi looked at the men gathering about, and read the expressions in their faces.
“It is very hard to accuse—” he began indignantly, and then stopped. He dropped his head. “Is it the Manhattan Well she was found in?”
Come with us, they told him.
The streets were busy; the city was again open for business after one day of mourning and a second day of merriment. The carpenter followed the constable down the snow-covered streets in silence, and then northward across the meadows. Levi was led to the front of the gathering crowd.
“Weeks,” Lent demanded, “do you know that young woman that lies there a corpse?”
Levi gazed upon the body: It was in a horrible state, with sodden stockings fallen about the ankles, and scratches over the hands and feet. The arms and legs had gone stiff, but the head still lolled to one side, its reddened face half glancing skyward—“like a person walking against the wind,” one member of the crowd mused.
“I think I know the gown,” Weeks replied quietly.
“My young friend, that is not the question I ask you,” Lent said, pressing closer. The horsebreaker guided Levi’s gaze back to the body that lay upon the ground, where well water was now freezing stiffly into the folds of her dress.
“Is there no mark in the countenance that you know?” he asked.
Yes, the carpenter finally nodded.
“There is,” he said.
ACROSS THE street from the jail, the cries had been ringing out in the cold air that day.
Port wine! Cognac! auctioneer Jimmy Smith yelled. Capers and olives! Herring and shad!
Along with the business from the horse sales and stables on his stretch of Broadway, Smith had an impressive array of food and drink on offer that Thursday afternoon. There were twenty boxes of capers to get rid of, 252 gallons of fortified brandy to unload, and heavy crates of earthenware to move.
Mackerel!—he called to bidders, for he had ten pungent barrels of the stuff—Mackerel!
Across the street, a group of men walked onward, unmoved by the auctioneer’s calls. The great door of Bridewell swung open to them, and constables led their suspect in. Manhattan’s jail was a looming, cheerless building of gray stone, whose feints toward architectural pretension somehow made it all the more gloomy. Bridewell had been designed just before the war by Theophilus Hardenbrook, an architect more at home creating country manors; this might have explained why he’d included an ornate wooden cupola atop the middle of its three towers, but neglected to provide an open yard for the prisoners. The unfortunate inmates of his building could be seen pacing the dizzying parapets around the cupola at all hours of the day, desperate for air and sunshine. Its one saving grace was that the prisoners, perpetually staring out over the city rooftops, were almost always the first to spot fires; they’d even been given a bell in the cupola to sound warnings.
This way.
They passed through the central tower of the building—where the jail keeper, Alexander Lamb, kept his family and maintained a watch over a commons and booking area. This keeper’s tower was flanked on either side by the wings where the prisoners were quartered. When new arrivals mounted the stairs into the prisoners’ wing, the history of the place pressed down upon them. Soon after opening, it had been seized by the occupying British, who promptly starved American prisoners to death—and, some even claimed, dosed inmates with poison. The infamous place hadn’t been dismantled after the war, because it was simply too useful. On any given day one could find a hundred men within its walls, and perhaps half as many women.
Get in.
The key turned in the lock, and the footsteps receded.
BEFORE LEVI stretched a dark and bitterly cold room, its dirty straw floors crowded with the wretched of the city: pickpockets, shoplifters, prostitutes. His jail mates included Bib and Gilbert, two young black men in for petty larceny—which meant they’d stolen less than $12.50 in goods. They were a typical pair. Bridewell was always the home of the drunken and pathetically scheming of the island, the ones in for pocketed silverware and filched handkerchiefs, or for drunkenness and vagrancy. Scattered among them one could also find newly captured runaway slaves and apprentices. In such a crowd, a promising and respectable young artisan like Levi Weeks stood out.
He might have been unique, were it not for one other young man staring out from Bridewell’s barred windows that afternoon. David Frothingham was neither a drunkard nor a thief. The son of an upstanding Massachusetts family, he’d established himself as one of the first prin
ters on Long Island, and as a promisingly fiery voice among Republicans. Frothingham’s Long-Island Herald decried slave auctions as a “disgrace to humanity,” and issued one of the island’s first books—a forward-looking address titled The Rights of Animals. Aaron Burr shrewdly recruited him as the print foreman at his strongest political ally in the city, Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser. The job required that Frothingham move into Manhattan, and it paid a mere eight dollars a week; he had to mortgage the Long Island newspaper and leave behind his wife and six children. But to serve alongside the most inspiring and dashing Republican in the city—how could he say no?
Perhaps he should have.
Frothingham’s troubles began on November 6, 1799, when Greenleaf’s reprinted a report about the Aurora, a zealously Republican newspaper in Philadelphia. “An effort was recently made to suppress the AURORA,” the article claimed, “and Alexander Hamilton was at the bottom of it. Mrs. Bache was offered 6,000 dollars down, in the presence of several persons.” And where might Hamilton have gotten the kind of cash to buy off his opponents? “British secret service money,” the writer helpfully suggested.
The article had already run in other cities, of course. To accuse Hamilton of suppressing the opposition press, or of being in the pocket of the British, was all typical mudslinging. And to be fair, the Federalists had tried to shut down the Aurora before, and Greenleaf’s as well—in fact, an indictment of Thomas Greenleaf under the Alien and Sedition Acts was interrupted only by the fellow’s inconsiderate death from yellow fever. Frothingham himself had shrugged off personal attacks by Federalists, who called him “a vile sans-culotte”—a disreputable Republican lover of all things French and anarchistic.
But Hamilton would not treat this particular accusation so lightly. “I have long been the object of the most malignant calumnies of the faction opposed to our government,” he complained to the attorney general. “In so flagrant a case, the force of the laws must be tried.”
Assistant Attorney General Cadwallader Colden soon marched into the newspaper offices to question the owner. But Thomas’s widow, Anne Greenleaf, claimed to have no authority over Greenleaf’s at all—and, when asked who did, produced David Frothingham. The bewildered foreman now found himself hauled into Bridewell for an article that he did not write, reprinted in a newspaper that he did not own. He was being made an example of—as a warning, perhaps, to any other mere underlings of Burr’s. And although he was given the defense counsel of Burr’s old friend Brockholst Livingston—a man he could never have afforded otherwise—when they faced the grim visages of a judge, the mayor, and Major General Hamilton himself, the case looked hopeless indeed.
“This is not a question that concerned the liberties of the press,” warned the judge, “but only its licentiousness.” Were these Republican papers, the judge asked Hamilton, in fact hostile to the United States government?
Affirmative! the major general’s voice rang out.
Livingston was reduced to pleading for the welfare of Frothingham’s wife and children back in Long Island. That hadn’t worked, either.
“He ought to have thought of them before he violated the laws of his country,” the judge snapped, and gaveled them off. Frothingham was sentenced to four months in Bridewell, in cold and dark cells scarcely yards from City Hall itself. But unlike Levi, at least he knew when he might be free again.
THE YOUNG carpenter miserably regarded his fellow inmates. Some had been confined for so long that nobody even knew why they were there anymore. One wild-looking blind and insane man known as “Paul from New Jersey” snored quietly on the floor, with only a block of wood as his pillow. When awake, he wandered around naked and filthy. An appalled visitor, asking why the man had been left naked, found the staff unconcerned: “The keeper explained that when furnished with a shirt, the rats soon eat it off.”
An inmate’s supper was hardly better than what the rats ate. The jail had managed to get the cost of feeding prisoners down to what it cost to feed horses in the auction stables across Broadway—about five or six cents a day. Keepers lugged in a tub of mush and set it down on the floor with a heavy thud: The cornmeal slop, darkened with a few dribbles of molasses, was a prisoner’s sustenance. Only a fortunate few had actual plates or utensils to eat it with; the rest used their fingers. Levi was arriving late enough in the day that he’d missed lunch, which was just as well. That meal was more mush and molasses; breakfast was even more molasses still, albeit with a hunk of rye bread and a draft of boiled cocoa shells—the latter being a sort of brewed warehouse sweepings. It was, one unfortunate recipient recalled, “a mean, insipid, and musty drink.”
A lucky few managed to get let out by their jailers to cross the street to Grenzeback’s grocery, where they picked up desperately needed rum. The laxity about booze runs led to the occasional embarrassment, as in the previous spring when a prisoner named Stagg was spotted near a polling station with money and a ballot in his hand. A Republican poll watcher charged that the jail keeper at the time, Mr. Michaels, was paying off prisoners to cast illegal Federalist votes in the local elections. Michaels shot back that it was the “French Bullies”—Burr’s Republican henchmen—who’d given Stagg a ballot, and that he’d been heroically pulling it out of the prisoner’s hands.
The money in Stagg’s hands, the jail keeper admitted, was for a rum run.
Michaels did not last much longer at Bridewell. Nor did his accuser emerge unscathed: Michaels crowed that the fellow was a deserter during the Revolution, and announced the man’s business address for anyone who wanted to harass him. Like Frothingham and so many others in the city, they were just bit players to be tossed about in the great partisan melee over the young country’s uncertain future.
It was Levi’s own future that concerned him now, though—and whether he might have any at all. He huddled against the cold as darkness fell outside, the shadow of his first evening in jail passing over him. The cell windows were barred but without glass, leaving him exposed to the elements. It was impossible to escape the cold. But as they shivered and stared out the darkened windows, the prisoners of Bridewell could discern a light in a building next door to the jail. Almost within sight of the suspect himself, a room was being prepared for the dissection and autopsy of Miss Elma Sands.
THE FOLLOWING morning, January 3, 1800, Benjamin Prince was making his way toward Broadway when he saw his colleague. Good morning, Dr. McIntosh!
The two physicians fell into step together. Prince and McIntosh had both been summoned from their practices by Charles Dickinson, the local coroner. Dickinson was no doctor himself; his post was a political one, a holdover from the days when it simply meant a “representative of the crown.” The inexperience of these coroners meant that municipal records were replete with such unhelpful causes of death as “horseshoe-head,” “twisting of the guts,” and the not particularly informative entry “bed-ridden.” But Dickinson, at least, knew that he was out of his depth on this case.
The two doctors made for a curious pair. Druggist and physician Benjamin Prince was growing into a leader among Aaron Burr’s faction around City Hall. He’d visited homes to battle sudden epidemics, and witnessed the ravages that yellow fever and smallpox could inflict on even the mightiest citizens in just a matter of days. For his part, William McIntosh was experienced in the ailments of poverty and neglect—the slow grind of consumption, alcoholism, untreated infections, and hunger. Born to a pauper family in the Bridewell almshouse, the young McIntosh proved to be a medical prodigy and was pressed into assisting in its infirmary as a child. The city council had been so impressed by the boy that they paid for his medical education. He was now the appointed almshouse physician to the very paupers whom he’d grown up among.
The men passed Grenzeback’s grocery and the livestock auction, where just recently a tamed deer had sprung free from its pen and trotted off down the street; they walked past the windows of Bridewell, where freedom was not so easily attained. At the almshouse, a coroner�
��s jury sat waiting for them, as the law decreed for the inquest; and on the operating table before them was spread the body.
Gulielma Sands, officials quietly noted in their records.
The external examination would come first. The whiteness of Elma’s skin would highlight any injuries, or at least any visible to the naked eye and to the magnifying glass. The inquest jury, empowered to interrupt and ask questions during the dissection, leaned in and watched with interest.
Is her neck broken? one of them asked.
Dr. McIntosh examined Elma’s head and neck, gingerly handling them for the telltale droop of broken vertebrae.
It is not, he replied.
There was a deeper suspicion, though, that always attended the death of a beautiful young woman—and rumors had been circulating about Miss Sands ever since her body had been found.
Is she with child? a juror called out.
It was the kind of question that haunted the entire field of medical jurisprudence. Criminal forensics scarcely existed yet: The first two books in English on the subject, barely adding up to two hundred generously margined pages, had only just been issued in the past few years. But both were overwhelmingly about infanticide and abortion, a subject that all too often verged into death for the mother as well. “It is murder in fact,” insisted one text, “and often a complicated crime of murder and suicide.”
Even among those intending no suicide at all, resorting to abortifacients like oil of tansy sometimes led to poisonings; doctors dissecting these perished women duly recorded irritated stomach linings, doughy and flaccid uteruses, and the unmistakable herbal aroma of tansy wafting over the room as the corpses were opened up. Other women, who instead chanced piercing a fetus with a crochet hook, ran even more serious risks from hemorrhage and peritonitis. Medical texts insisted such women could not claim rape as an excuse for having risked the procedure: Pregnancy was seen as a proof of willingness, for a number of doctors persisted in believing that a rape could not produce a child. Other jurists and doctors, perhaps wiser in the ways of the world, had long and pointedly disagreed with this notion.