by Paul Collins
The bitter cold of the January afternoon was stiffening Elma’s dead body as it lay by the busy avenue. Thousands had gathered to view her remains; the scene was one of such shock and disarray that onlookers hardly knew what to think. One hour of the appalling affair passed, and then another—and another still—before the Rings lifted Elma’s coffin for its final journey.
The Friends Burying Ground was eight blocks away on Little Green Street, in the shadow of the Friends Meeting House itself. To see a funeral in that building was one of the most peculiarly affecting experiences in Manhattan. Friends and family might lay the coffin on a simple table with a white linen sheet upon it, the lid opened, and then sit in profound silence—sometimes for five or ten minutes, sometimes for the hour altogether—unbroken by speech or music. When a member felt moved to speak, they would stand, but mostly they sat in deep and penetrating silence. It was a silence that extended right up to the edge of the grave itself. With little but quiet weeping as accompaniment, the coffin would be lowered into the ground. The plot of a Friend was unmarked with any headstone, nor selected with much thought of being near family; for that, too, would speak of an overweening self-regard. All Friends were to be equal in death.
But this death was not like others.
As the final spadefuls of dirt settled over the grave and the sun set upon the city, an indictment was being drawn up in the attorney general’s office. Levi Weeks stood accused of murder—“being moved,” the charge read, “and seduced by the instigation of the Devil.”
THAT THURSDAY, A SINGLE VOICE OF REASON IN THE NEW-YORK Daily Advertiser sought to calm Manhattan’s fury.
“The public are desired to suspend their opinion respecting the cause of the death of a young woman whose body was lately found in a well,” an editorial pleaded. Yes, there had been “horrid imputations” cast upon “a certain young man”—but he was “sober, industrious, amiable.… He has no conceivable temptation to perform such an atrocious action.” The victim, on the other hand, most certainly did: “She had several times been heard to utter expressions of melancholy, and throw out threats of self-destruction, particularly the afternoon before.”
This was news to most in the city, though scarcely any other theory on the case had gone unheard by now; pamphlets were even circulating accounts of ghosts and “dancing devils” around the Manhattan Well. The handbills were anonymous, but their target was not, for they claimed that the wraith of the victim—incorporeal, lonely, terrified—had been spotted hovering in Levi’s bedroom.
“Handbills were generally distributed throughout the city,” marveled one local of the campaign against Levi, “either by the industry of those bent on his destruction; or, perhaps, by some unprincipled scribbler who could conjure up thousands of ghosts and goblins for the sake of raising a few pence to purchase a dinner.”
New Yorkers could still entertain such fanciful notions: The coldly rational and the wildly wondrous mingled together in the columns of their papers. In the same week that it gave notice of Elma’s burial, the New York Weekly Museum pointedly ran a New Jersey coroner’s claim that a murderer touching a dead man’s face caused blood to trickle accusingly from the corpse’s nose. Jostling with the announcement of a live “Beautiful African LION” exhibited on Broadway with “legs and tail as thick as a common size ox,” and a notice proclaiming THE NEWTONIAN SYSTEM OF ASTRONOMY REFUTED, one could also read of the splendid achievement of a pair of coin counterfeiters in an upstate jail. The public was informed that, working with nothing but a penknife and chunks of cedar, these enterprising gentlemen had a built a perpetual motion engine consisting of “30 cogs and spur wheels of various dimensions, and set in motion by various weights.” Instead of the crude horse-driven pumps the Manhattan Company relied upon, now “water might be brought into this city with trifling expense.” The public merely needed to let this pair of great benefactors out of jail.
It was not too difficult to fathom the motives behind the counterfeiters and their perpetual motion claim. As to who had been rash enough to rise to the defense of the infamous Levi Weeks, the answer—like the mysterious death itself—was likely hidden among the wilds of Lispenard’s Meadow. For while the editorial defending him was unsigned, a savvy reader might spot the masterful hand of Aaron Burr.
PERHAPS IT was inevitable that the top lawyer in Manhattan would become entangled in the case: Circumstances had almost guaranteed it. Levi Weeks’s brother Ezra was a leading architect and contractor with a finger in nearly every major construction project in the city—including, as it happened, the plumbing for the Manhattan Well. Burr, of course, was the chair of the Manhattan Company. With a body in his own water company’s well, and his contractor mixed up in the alibi, Aaron Burr could hardly avoid this case even if he had wanted to. Yet anyone looking for the founding father after the ad ran would have encountered yet another mystery: He’d quite suddenly left town.
His Richmond Hill mansion still bustled with the presence of his longtime slaves Harry and Peggy, who remained at the call of Colonel Burr’s daughter, Theodosia. At seventeen, Theo was something of an intellectual debutante; she was so at ease with classical languages that in time she would ponder composing a book of mythology rewritten “in the form of amusing tales for children.” There was even gossip that the young Washington Irving was nurturing some affection for his fellow prodigy. If Irving had recognized a kindred intellect, it was little wonder: Since Burr had become a widower in 1794, his familial attentions had been devoted to educating his daughter. The late Mrs. Burr’s intellect was, one observer noted, “the equal of her husband”—and, having stayed up all night to read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he promised his ailing wife that their daughter would be as learned and accomplished as any male scion in the city.
“I yet hope, by her,” he pledged, “to convince the world what neither sex appear to believe—that women have souls!”
Theodosia had grown into a young woman capable of hosting visitors during her father’s long absences on business and legislation. Even at fourteen, with her father away, she had charmed a Mohawk chief who had unexpectedly arrived at the house with an entourage of clergy and politicians. But on quieter days like these, humbler visitors were still welcomed into the great reception hall, where they passed through the side door to the right, and ascended the grand staircase with its mahogany railings to the equally grand dining room on the second floor.
Through the Venetian windows and out on the balcony, they could see Burr’s dominion: Sweeping down several hundred feet from the mansion, there stretched a broad lawn, ranks of ancient oaks and basswood, and the wintry outline of a fine flower garden enclosed by hedges; beyond that lay Lispenard’s Meadow. On a clear and cold winter’s day, one could see out to the Hudson River. The more modest creek curling around the north side of the hill, Minetta Brook, was an ancient boundary line that Dutch settlers had dubbed Bestaver’s Killetje. For grounds that still appeared unspoiled, Richmond Hill looked over a long history indeed.
Colonel Burr had his own past with this mansion, long before he’d purchased it. He’d first set foot in Richmond Hill as a liberating soldier, scarcely twenty years old. Once the estate of a Loyalist, it was seized in 1776 as Washington’s headquarters for the New York campaign—and in it, an impetuous young Burr served alongside Alexander Hamilton as one of Washington’s aides-de-camp. Like Hamilton’s, Burr’s promise as an officer was immediately apparent. The orphaned grandson of powerful revival preacher Jonathan Edwards, he’d inherited the old man’s fierce intelligence and magnetism, and he arrived at Richmond Hill already a war hero. He made his name at just nineteen in the doomed Battle of Quebec; before the war was over he would winter at Valley Forge with Washington and have his horse shot out from under him at the Battle of Monmouth. In the years since, he’d risen to great prominence, able to buy the mansion that he’d once so admired as a young soldier. It was at Richmond Hill that young Burr and Hamilton first surveyed the grea
t expanse of Manhattan and wondered how to wrest control of the country from the British. Now—as rival lawyers and politicians—they wondered how they might wrest that control from each other.
Burr seemed curiously preoccupied that year, though, with the prosaic question of municipal water—with the very creeks and wells that his mansion overlooked.
“Pipes for the conveyance of Water have been laid in different streets to the extent of a Mile & upwards,” he explained to one stockholder. As chair of the Manhattan Company, Burr oversaw the efforts back in the summer to find a usable spring. The Manhattan Well had been a promising candidate—until they tried to use it. “The Machine for raising Water performs perfectly what was promised,” he explained, “but we are embarrassed with quick sand which is drawn up in such quantities as to choak the pumps every hour.”
They’d turned to the old Colles Well nearby instead, and the Manhattan Well quietly disappeared into obscurity. To have any of his wells associated with a murder was the last thing Burr needed for his new company, or as a respectable squire of the meadows. He had trouble enough already. While his home was a magnificently bombastic Ionic marvel from the outside—“one of those Grecian temples built of two-inch pine planks,” as one visitor put it—all was not well within.
Just a few months earlier, the colonel had quietly inserted a notice into Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser:
RICHMOND HILL.
TO BE LET, and immediate possession, the House and Farm, adjoining Lispenards, formerly the property of Mr. Abraham Mortier; any quantity of land, from five to fifty acres, will be let with the house. The Garden is in complete order, and great forwardness, and the 16 room house well filled. Enquire at 221, Broadway.
A. BURR.
He found no takers. It was not for lack of prestige: Between Washington’s and Burr’s tenancy, the house had been occupied by then–vice president Adams; his wife, Abigail, adored the home, calling it “a situation where the hand of nature has so lavishly displayed her beauties that she has left scarcely anything for her handmaid, art, to perform.” Yet for all of Abigail’s praise and the promise of Burr’s newspaper ad, any visitors coming to view the mansion found it rather less richly appointed than in years past: Gone were the Brussels rugs, the pianoforte, the fine china service, and the costly silvered mirrors that had once graced the halls.
There was something else they could not see, and that was the letters crowding the absent colonel’s desk. When Burr was away, his slave Peggy was careful to observe two tasks: to retrieve the ink bottles so that they would not freeze in his unheated office and to lock up his papers. Left in open view, they would have raised the eyebrows of any visitor. “The extreme wrong I have suffer’d from a person in whose candour & integrity I had placed implicit confidence, and by much art and management have been basely defrauded by him, is a lesson of care and caution in my future steppings,” accused Henry Drinker, a Philadelphia correspondent. The letter was now nearly a year old and still unanswered. Instead, there was a note in Burr’s hand to an impatient uncle: “I do not as yet perceive any resource from which I can raise a Dollar.… You constantly address me as if it required only an exertion of Will on my part to raise money.” What money he had raised was of the worst sort: In late November 1799 he’d written out a promissory note for $1,500 to a pair of local merchants.
No, what a casual visitor to this fine mansion could not see was what a great many creditors and business partners had come to suspect about their old comrade and founding father: Aaron Burr was broke.
THAT SUNDAY in Philadelphia, the Drinker household received a sharp knock at the front door of 110 North Front Street.
Burr?
The statesman was waiting outside on the cold stone steps, brisk and desirous of meeting the master of the house. It could not exactly be called an impromptu visit, for the two-day journey from New York down to Philadelphia entailed taking a ferry past the perilous chunks of ice in the East River, and then coach service from Paulus Hook, all while limited by the coach company to a paltry fourteen pounds of luggage. The timing of his arrival was not good: Henry Drinker was one of the most prominent local Quaker merchants and a longstanding clerk of the local meetinghouse; Sunday afternoon was hardly a fit time for him to be conducting business. But Burr had been avoiding Drinker for months—and now urgently wished to speak to him.
The colonel was ushered inside and warmed his hands as he admired the house. Where New York homes were wooden and Dutch, Philadelphia’s were brick and British—and this one was a splendid three-story mansion on a double lot, placed squarely amid the new fortunes and lively mercantile activity of North Front Street. A few doors down, at the back of a chocolatier’s shop, horses walked in endless circles to drive the mill wheels for grinding cocoa; beyond that, there were the lathes and lumber piles of a cabinet workshop. Henry’s own home was fittingly known among the locals as “Drinker’s Big House,” the monument of a lifetime of canny trading and debt collection by the old man.
As his guest settled in, Henry Drinker walked in gingerly on his corns, showing some of the frailty of a man of sixty-five. Yet his rectitude and crisp manner remained, and he bore the plain clothes and the double chin of a successful Quaker merchant. Burr, a generation younger at forty-three, was as small and wiry as the merchant was portly; with his warm brown eyes and tousle of black hair just beginning to gray, the colonel still possessed the energy and quick bearing of a field officer.
There were pleasantries to observe and news to exchange—terrible case up in New York, was it not? Burr remained an old and honored guest in Drinker’s house. As a new widower some six years before, he’d even brought his young Theodosia for a visit once. But this particular call was still a shock.
So what is to be done?
Surely the colonel could see the difficult position he placed Mr. Drinker in—how could he not? Burr had signed a contract back in ’94 to purchase some eighty thousand acres of Pennsylvania land from Drinker, and—well, matters had gone awry from there. The land was nearly a fifth of Drinker’s holdings in Pennsylvania and New York, and yet the Quaker merchant was still without his promised money. His papers overflowed with five years’ worth of apologetic letters, all filled with delays and excuses from Burr. “The Purchase if made will be made with a View to Settlement in the Spring,” read one from 1795, adding: “Payment uncertain.”
It simply had to stop.
What was more, state property taxes had been accumulating on the land—taxes that Drinker initially refused to pay, as they were rightly owed by Burr. He had been mailing Burr for months, years now, to have this matter resolved—rarely with any satisfactory response from Richmond Hill. Surely Burr could see that he must honor the contract.
Drinker was accustomed to bargaining hard: He still underwrote cargo ships from Britain and ran a busy iron mill. He was a canny enough businessman that he’d managed to support the Revolutionary patriots in one early boycott campaign, and then turned around to secure a commission to sell British tea during another. Even if those business instincts sometimes backfired—at one point in the Revolution his vague allegiances earned him an exile from the state—they’d served him well enough that he now controlled some half-million acres of land in New York and Pennsylvania.
Burr considered Drinker’s requests carefully.
No.
It was simply impossible. Burr had been under terrible burdens for years now: After a 1796 land speculation had gone bad, a business partner left him holding the bag for immense debts. Burr did not like to talk numbers, for he was a gentleman, but those knowledgeable of such matters said that he was on the hook for at least $80,000. It was an astounding sum. But if Drinker wished to continue his pursuit—why, then—what Burr no longer possessed in money, he still possessed in wile. And it would be a shame for the good merchant to expose his business interests to legal difficulties.
The damnable truth dawned on Drinker: He was trying to get money out of a lawyer.
�
�I am not aware of any cause of litigation subsisting between us,” he assured his visitor. “Save one.”
That hardly mattered to Burr. The justness of the old merchant’s complaint was irrelevant: He could tie up Drinker in endless litigation anyway. Burr had a reputation for harrying foes with blizzards of appeals and motions, and when the occasion called for it, the colonel’s attitude toward legal processes could possess a marvelous flexibility. The law, he once explained, “is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained.”
Burr pressed the merchant relentlessly through the day, wearing the old man down. We must come to an agreement, he insisted.
By the time they adjourned, the elderly merchant had missed his Sunday meeting at the Friends meetinghouse, an almost unheard-of lapse for him. And as darkness fell, the old man miserably contemplated another face-to-face stalemate with Burr scheduled for the very next day.
On January 14, 1800, Drinker wearily informed one of his business partners of what had happened next.
“I have had to pay a large demand made on me by Aaron Burr Esq.,” he wrote, chagrined. “And tho’ it was directly opposite to what of right should have been my situation with him … I foresaw he was disposed to perplex & spin out the matter to considerable length.”
Colonel Burr, returning to Richmond Hill with some $12,000 in bonds and bills strong-armed from his own creditor, promptly talked yet another $1,500 out of his local merchants. His creditors staved off—however briefly—Aaron Burr was now ready to get down to business.
He had a man to save from the gallows.
ELMA’S FAMILY and friends had not suffered in silence while Burr was away. The defense’s whispering campaign had prompted an unsigned counterattack in the New-York Mercantile Advertiser:
To insinuate suspicion that the ill-fated girl was herself the perpetrator, is such an outrage on probability, that all who are acquainted with the circumstances must hear the remark with indignation. Miss Sands, so far from shewing signs of melancholy, was uniformly cheerful and serene; and, on the day previous to the murder, was remarkably so. Her expectation of becoming a bride on the morrow was the natural cause of her liveliness. Alas! How soon the gay prospect blackened with the shades of death! Her murderer yet lives; but let him tremble with horror at the vengeance that inevitably awaits him.