Duel with the Devil

by Paul Collins

  But whether Miss Sands had kept her virginity, and willingly or not, was not of particular concern to Dr. Prince and Dr. McIntosh. The signs of virginity that their texts relied upon had been obliterated by long immersion in water. Yet the presence of a fetus could suggest a clear motive, either for suicide by the mother or murder by the father. It might explain her death away with a single line in the coroner’s rolls. And so Dr. McIntosh carefully sliced into the uterus, opening it to the unsteady light of his laboratory’s lanterns and windows. He was looking for a white and pink pulpy mass inside, a sign of life sometimes scarcely identifiable to the untrained eye. The jury stared intently at the body on the table as the two doctors examined and then puzzled over what they found.

  The mystery of Elma’s death, it seemed, was about to deepen.

  “A report prevailed injurious to her honor,” the new editor of Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser reported dryly of the autopsy. “For the satisfaction of lovers of virtue it is mentioned that this appeared totally groundless.”

  So there was no fetus. But if seduction was not the reason behind her death, then what was? As prisoners and their keepers alike warmed themselves with rum against another freezing evening, the coroner’s jury solemnly departed from the almshouse. Elma’s family and neighbors at last received the coroner’s assessment.

  “A verdict of WILFUL MURDER,” one newspaper printed, “by some person or persons as yet unknown.”

  THE WAGON MADE ITS WAY WESTWARD TOWARD GREENWICH Street, the jostle of each rut and cobble passing unnoticed through the lifeless body of its passenger. For anyone who watched it roll by, the body laid out inside was well-known indeed—and the identity of her killer was no mystery at all.

  HORRID MURDER! announced one paper, BY HANDS OF A LOVER!

  The story ricocheted across the city, and then beyond the mere bounds of the island in outbound carriages and mail; in a matter of days it would be up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Elma Sands seized the imagination of writers, who conjured a forbidden romance: The beautiful young girl dressed in bridal clothes, taken by a fatal love into the fields beyond the snowy streets of the city; the muff, found floating in the water by an innocent child and given as a gift; the body, hidden mere feet beneath Lispenard’s Meadow, suspended in the cold and dark well that was to have brought new life to New York.

  “She was that evening to be privately married to Mr. Weeks,” Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser breathlessly related to Philadelphians. “The young Lady dressed as a bride; but alas! Little did she expect, that the arrangements she had been making with so much care, instead of conveying her to the Temple of Hymen, would direct her ‘to pass that bourne, from which no traveller returns.’ ”

  Levi had been wise to surrender to the constable; had the young carpenter sought refuge in his brother’s home, the place might have come as near to being torn down by crowds as Mrs. Murphy’s house had the summer before. “The city,” one local judge warned a relative in Albany, “is much agitated.” So agitated, in fact, that one of the great writers of the Revolution, Philip Freneau, was moved to write something that in recent days only the death of George Washington had coaxed from other Americans: tragic poetry.

  Could beauty, virtue, innocence, and love

  Some spirits soften, or some bosoms move.

  If native worth, with every charm combined,

  Had power to melt the savage in mind,

  Thou, injured ELMA, had not fallen a prey

  To fierce revenge, that seized thy life away;

  Not through the glooms of conscious night been led

  To find a funeral for a nuptial bed,

  When by the power of midnight fiends you fell,

  Plunged in the abyss of Manhattan-well …

  But now her body was being moved more gently among the mourning men and women of the boardinghouse. The front door of 208 Greenwich, still creaking unevenly, groaned open: Her coffin bearers carried her in and set the body down upon the cold plank floors. Elias Ring and Richard Croucher gazed at the cold and ashen features that would not be hidden beneath a nailed-down wooden lid for another two days. The warm glow of lantern light in the sitting room hinted at the life that she had left behind—the living presence that had disappeared just thirteen days before through that very same front door.

  Elma had finally come home.

  A STRANGE business to be attending to, a murder mystery: strange, at least, along the mercantile stretch of brokers and brick stables in the neighborhood. Before Cadwallader Colden had set up offices at 47 Wall Street, the building had served as a coffee merchant. On one side of his office was a shop selling hogsheads of rum and porter. On the other side, Major Leonard Bleecker—a distinguished patriot who’d witnessed Cornwallis surrendering at Yorktown—was busily opening a stockbroker office.

  Amid the bustle of old soldiers and new business, Colden cut a curious figure. The namesake grandson of a much-respected but Loyalist former governor, and scarcely seven years old when the Revolution broke out, Cadwallader had been spirited off to London for his education; upon his return, he’d wisely dispensed with the old man’s politics, but kept the elder Colden’s scientific and philosophical curiosity. At the founding meeting of the local Tammany Society—a salon that Aaron Burr was now commandeering into a political brotherhood—the young Colden had raised a startling question for the debate portion of the evening. Were people, he wondered, inherently barbaric or noble?

  “Is there implanted in the human breast by the Supreme Being,” he wondered aloud, “such a thing as innate affection?”

  Colden’s job of late had certainly given him reason to consider the alternate possibility of innate depravity. His law practice, first set up a few years earlier, had involved fairly ordinary jobs of conveyancing and notarizing. But soon the new attorney shared office space with the attorney general—his own brother-in-law—and when the post of assistant attorney general came up in 1798, young Cadwallader got the nod. Instead of scrutinizing property lines and wills, he was now confronted with prosecuting every variety of thieving, banditry, dishonesty, and depravity that New Yorkers could offer.

  They had certainly kept him busy that winter. After some “tolerably well executed” counterfeit ten-dollar notes had been found in circulation—the coarser quality of the paper was the tip-off—forgers had raised the stakes by circulating genuine five-dollar bills altered to look like twenties. Some miscreants preferred acquiring goods without any cash at all; a respectable-looking shoplifting duo had been hitting fabric merchants along Pearl Street, usually by entering shops separately at nightfall, with one man distracting the merchant while the other stuffed chintz and cambric under his cloak. When the two were finally seized—they made the mistake of hitting the same store twice in one week—they proved to be an incorrigible pair known as Rap and Baker.

  Others were harder to catch: A swindler named Jacob Weiser had been making the rounds, leaving his marks sputtering that he was “a monster in human form.” The pugnacious French proprietor of the finest bookshop on Broadway promised a five-dollar bounty for “the damn’d villain guilty of the theft … of a double-barrelled GUN” from behind his counter. Even Brockholst Livingston paused from arguing cases to advertise a reward for over $1,200 worth of stock certificates that he had stashed in a trunk of clothes—a trunk which, alas, was then burgled from a house in Brooklyn.

  It was the murder cases, though, that haunted Colden. Days before he and Livingston had faced off over the libel claim against David Frothingham, there’d been another legal battle between the lawyer and the attorney general’s office—this one over what anyone would once have assumed to be the most appalling homicide case of the winter. In that same courtroom in City Hall, a bewildered-looking Portuguese immigrant was brought shuffling up to the docket, under the gaze of an immense crowd that filled the court and street outside to watch him. John Pastano, the jury was informed, had been a boarder in the home of Benjamin and Mary Castro, a pair of Portuguese c
igar makers, only a few blocks away at 190 William Street. The two had taken him in for free, pitying their penniless fellow countryman. His time there went reasonably well, at first; thanks to the recommendation of a local pastor, the young man was set up in a job with a Broadway wine merchant. But soon Pastano got it into his head that Mr. and Mrs. Castro were whispering things about him, bad things—that he was a thief, a robber, that he was no good. He yelled at the frightened couple over dinner, where their denials only enraged him more: He knew they were out to get him.

  At about three o’clock on the afternoon of October 1, 1799, while Mr. Castro was out of the house, John Pastano crept up behind Mrs. Castro in her kitchen and stabbed her three times in the neck.

  The case seemed a straightforward one: The prosecutor brought forward just four witnesses and read Sir William Blackstone’s definition of murder to the jury. Livingston tried rather harder: Because Pastano spoke little English, the attorney had as an interpreter Rabbi Seixas, himself the native-born son of a Portuguese family. Like Livingston, Rabbi Seixas carried the quiet advantage of being considered a great patriot—one so dedicated that he’d moved his entire synagogue out of occupied Manhattan and down to rebel-held Philadelphia for the Revolution. For witnesses, Livingston called a respectable merchant and a local priest; both testified that Pastano behaved erratically. The man, Livingston argued, could not be held responsible for his actions.

  The jury deliberated for just minutes—so quickly, in fact, that they did not even leave their benches: guilty. In the first week of January 1800, Cadwallader Colden could assure himself that Pastano was to die—to be hanged that coming Tuesday, in fact—sentenced, in the judge’s declaration to the packed courtroom, to hanging and dissection.

  Corpo pendurado, Rabbi Seixas had patiently explained to the defendant. Anatomização.

  And yet something unsettling remained about the notion of John Pastano as a willful murderer: the recollection, perhaps, that after murdering Mary Castro, he had filled his hat with her blood and wandered out into the street with it. When he was collared over by the Tea-Water Pump, broken English had spilled out from the man.

  “Why you catch me?” he asked innocently. “Me not do it.”

  HAD JANUARY 5, 1800, been a normal day, the morning’s gossip would have been about the conflagration that Greenwich Street narrowly avoided the night before, after a servant had placed a scorching hot brick in her bed to warm herself against the bitter cold. But it was Elma that the neighbors thought of that Sunday. Her body had been on display in the boardinghouse the entire day; the house residents could hardly avoid her sightless stare even if they had wanted to. Nor, it seemed, could anybody else in the neighborhood: Elias Ring had been simmering with anger, and steering passersby into the house to see what had been done to his cousin. Her breasts, where chastely exposed, showed dark bruises.

  “Her fingers appear to have been scratched from the knuckles down,” one visitor observed. “There were many dislocations.”

  To the crowd, it looked like Elma Sands had put up a fight. But with whom?

  If Mr. Ring ever became too overcome to talk, an equally enraged Richard Croucher was ready to. This is young Levi’s doing, the cloth merchant hissed to visitors, his graying locks shaking in indignation. And as the proprietor of the boardinghouse brooded nearby, the gentle teachings of his Quaker faith gave way to a bottomless despair.

  If I should meet Levi Weeks in the dark, he muttered—I should not think it wrong to use a loaded pistol—if I should not be found out in it.

  As bad as Bridewell was, Levi was safer with Assistant Attorney General Colden keeping him in jail. Dueling had stubbornly remained a menace to Manhattanites ever since Colden had taken office. It was now far from its origins in the European “field of honor”—where noble swordplay had served to ward off the more ancient plague of chaotic revenge and honor killings—and transplanted to the brawling wilderness of America, where more deadly pistols had replaced rapiers. The very first duel in America, fought within a year of the Mayflower’s arrival, had been between two servants. But now dueling was largely practiced by those members of society most likely to give or take offense: journalists, politicians, and military officers.

  It hardly took avenging a murder to set a duel in motion. One mocking newspaper letter that year proposing a “dueling club”—it was jocularly signed by a Mr. William Blood and Charles Bullet—listed an only half-joking set of fatal offenses: “any interruption of conversation—differing from any opinion given in the club—refusing to drink a toast—not taking off a heel tap—not clapping a song—a glum look—indifference while one is speaking—treading on the toe—accidentally brushing against one in the dark …”

  In fact, dueling had long been notorious for its pettiness. One chronicler marveled at a fight that began when “two French nobles could not agree whether a certain letter on some embroidery was an X, or a Y.” In another infamous case, an army colonel and a navy captain dueled after their dogs became entangled in a park. The dogs survived that quarrel; the naval officer did not. It was not even unknown for the two referees in a duel—the “seconds”—to also take offense with each other and arrange themselves into a firing line perpendicular to the primary combatants.

  Such madness was strictly prohibited in New York, but not in New Jersey. Quietly arranged barge trips across the river provided a legal cover for dueling. Within the last few months of 1799, a pair of French immigrants—who still preferred the traditional choice of swords—had met in the storied dueling ground of Hoboken. The fight ended when one fatally ran the other through. Soon afterward, a local merchant had dueled with pistols not once but twice in a single week; but not before none other than Aaron Burr himself had dueled with John Barker Church, a member of his own Manhattan Company water board. The only casualty was a button shot off Burr’s coat.

  Were Levi Weeks to be let out of jail at that moment, virtually any New Yorker could take it upon himself to gun him down and quite possibly get away with it. Colden could hardly prosecute such fights, even if he wanted to—not when, scarcely a month earlier, a prominent man had publicly taken bullets in both legs during a duel in Paulus Hook, a field in what was coming to be known as Jersey City. The wounded party in the duel was Colden’s namesake cousin, the gentleman horse breeder Cadwallader R. Colden. And the victor? John Provost—the assistant attorney general’s other brother-in-law.

  THAT MONDAY afternoon, Elma began her final journey through Manhattan. Any Quaker coffin was a plain one; local carpenters found they could keep their brass fittings and fine rubbed mahogany aside, for orders from Friends were rarely for much more than a raw pine box with iron handles. Elma was dressed in the same clothes she wore in life, as were the mourners—Friends considered all funeral garb to be just another form of vanity. Such simplicity was almost provoking in Manhattan, a place where elder burghers were still known to show off silver coins as coat buttons, and where any fashionable youngster would sooner walk into street posts than wear spectacles. In such a vain city, the Quakers’ plain life was never more evident than in how they met death.

  The unsteady front door of the boardinghouse creaked open, and the coffin slid out under the guidance of many hands on both ends. And then—the cold air hitting them, and a crowd gathering in Greenwich Street—the Ring family had a notion.

  Open the coffin, they ordered.

  It was common for Quakers to keep a body within a parlor or bedroom for viewing by family and friends, but the Rings had decided the frozen sidewalks of Greenwich Street were their parlor, and the city the outraged and grieving family. The coffin was laid down and the lid removed to reveal the lifeless visage: Elma Sands, staring upward toward the cold and clouded sky; the curious eyes of Manhattan staring down upon her corpse. This was hardly part of any Quaker ceremony. A dead body displayed on a Manhattan street in this age was like nothing any New Yorker had ever seen, an act so plaintive and primitive as to be shocking. Dozens of onlookers came—then hundr
eds—and then more.

  With her battered body before their eyes, the crowd seethed.

  “Mr. Weeks will no doubt speedily meet the rewards of his demerits,” snapped one correspondent—a reward that would be found on the scaffold.

  Amid the bluster and anger, a young man strode up to the roiling scene, his demeanor more dispassionate than the rest. James Snedeker was a surgeon and physician, not yet out of his twenties, his practice still newly established in town. He’d been Elma’s doctor, helping to nurse her through her many complaints in her final months; in passing by Greenwich Street that day, he found himself confronted by her corpse for the first time. The young woman he had once helped keep alive now lay before him, utterly lost to his arts. But as her physician, Dr. Snedeker had one last dispensation to look more closely and searchingly than most, and so, amid the stares of onlookers, he carefully turned her head and examined her neck and chest. The skin that had been pale and warm was now cold and in the strange second flush of incipient decay; and yet he could still make out markings on it. He then placed his thumbs on her chest and, moving them forward in tandem, pressed down firmly.

  Click. A dislocated clavicle: He could feel a bone, pressed down on one end by his thumb, rise up against his other finger from under her skin. Anyone in the crowd could make out what looked to be her final wounds: There were, one witness reported, “blows on her brow, chin, and breast.” But there were, her doctor mused, other mysteries here as well—ones hidden beneath the skin itself. The eminent Dr. Hosack, pressing to the front of the crowd, confirmed the grim finding. He deemed her death “a sudden extinction of life” caused by “violent pressure upon the neck.”