by Paul Collins
Perhaps. Burr had his own suspicions about the case and about the motives of those who had raised the loudest fuss over it. As a cryptic anonymous notice in the New York Weekly Museum shot back, “Those who are incapable of great crimes won’t readily suspect others of them.”
For Burr understood murder well. True, his earliest legal work was of the dreariest commercial variety: Like his old war comrades Hamilton and Brockholst Livingston, he’d leaped into the profession in 1782, when much of the state’s legal talent was disbarred for Loyalism. Burr and Hamilton set up law offices on Wall Street within months of each other; the instant demand for new lawyers hit just as the upheavals of the Revolution created a bonanza in property dispute cases. Their clientele tended to follow their political inclinations, with Burr representing the radical and ascendant Whigs and Hamilton often defending the now much-abused Tories.
But soon Burr had his eye on higher offices: In 1789 he accepted the job of New York’s state attorney general, where his dockets included prosecuting a slave named Pompey for robbery, pursuing a rape suspect called Titus, and indicting the hot-tempered proprietor of a glassworks for murder. Though he left the office to serve terms in the state assembly and the state senate, his private law practice continued to thrive throughout the decade. Dealing with judges was like addressing family to him—quite literally, as his brother-in-law and an uncle both sat on the bench. Burr thoroughly understood lawyering, and he probably knew Cadwallader Colden’s job even better than the prosecutor himself did.
Aaron Burr was not modest about his abilities. In the previous few months, New Yorkers had been circulating a fine example of lawyer humor, which imagined an irate tailor hitting his attorney with a monstrously itemized bill, spelled out in pounds, shillings, and pence:
Measuring and taking orders for a full suit of clothes
£0 6 8
Warrant and instructions to my foreman for executing same
£0 6 8
Going three times to the woolen draper
£4 4 0
Writing to the button merchant
£0 6 8
Filing his declaration of 16 sheets
£0 16 0
Fees to button merchant
£0 18 0
And so on, for dozens of line items. The jest might as well have been at Burr: His clients were left with no doubt that they’d received the services of New York’s finest attorney, because he promptly and enthusiastically billed them for it. As part of the defense team behind a huge settlement that he was now litigating for the French trader Louis Le Guen, he even billed his client twice as much as had fellow top counsel Alexander Hamilton.
Burr was one of the finest lawyers in town, and he knew it. But as to his being one of the finest men—on this, there was far less agreement.
ALONG THE LOWER REACHES OF GREENWICH STREET, SOME FIVE or six blocks from the Ring boardinghouse, the buildings turned more mercantile and oriented toward the shipping businesses on the Battery. By Number 40 you reached the office of Nicholas Cruger, one of the city’s wealthiest West Indies merchants. It abutted an icehouse, where thirsty sailors and clerks would stop by for ice cream, milk punch, and “syrup of raspberries.”
At the next building, a passerby in the aftermath of the murder case might well have spotted Cruger’s most famous import from the West Indies: Major General Alexander Hamilton, Esq. Cruger had personally hired this illegitimate son of a St. Croix merchant as his clerk, and shipped the promising young boy off to America for an education; three decades and one revolution later, Hamilton could be seen through the windows of 36 Greenwich Street, sometimes late into the night, writing court briefs by candlelight.
It was the kindest light in which to view Hamilton’s law office: His own son described the place as “rather a shabby affair.” But then, the major general always treated his offices as a sort of glorified field tent. With his weapon of choice, a quill honed by slices of his penknife, Hamilton would come to draw sharply slashing lines of attack into the sheet of Britannia stationery before him:
These things are to be admitted, and indeed cannot be denied, that he is a man of extreme and irregular ambition; that he is selfish to a degree which excludes all social affections; and he is decidedly profligate.
The spartan furnishings of the law office stood in mute rebuke to such men: Hamilton was prone to furnishing a space with a plain pine desk and chair, and kept his files stored on planks laid over blocks. Among his papers was a case for which, after receiving a generous fee from his client, he sent the check back with a simple notation: “Returned as being more than is proper.”
Hamilton took up the quill again and kept writing.
He is far more cunning than wise—far more dexterous than able.
He had to steady himself: his angry underlining and cross-outs could pierce straight through the paper. But he felt compelled to keep writing, page after page.
The truth is, with great apparent coldness he is the most sanguine man in the world. He thinks every thing possible to adventure and perseverance: although I believe he will fail, I think it almost certain he will attempt usurpation, and the attempt will involve great mischief.
After a few more pages of invective, he would set his quill down. He had other work to attend to, and he could not spend any longer on his political grievances. Yet he could hardly help it, for the most curious legal case ever to pass through his office was the defense of Mr. Levi Weeks, and his fellow counsel was Mr. Aaron Burr, Esq.—the very man about whom he had just written.
IT WAS not always thus between them. Hamilton and Burr still dined together on occasion, as did their wives and daughters. But they were the worst of friends—or, perhaps, the best of enemies.
“Little Burr,” Hamilton once mused. “We have always been opposed on politics but always on good terms. Burr beckoned me to follow him, and I advised him to come with me; we could not agree.”
Ruddy and red-haired, vocal where his rival was reserved, Hamilton was as easy to distinguish from Burr in person as he was in print. Where Burr exercised a near-surreptitious magnetic influence over idealistic young liberals, Hamilton was a loud advocate for the propertied classes; as the author of most of the Federalist Papers, he’d argued for ratifying the stronger central government of the U.S. Constitution, but against the Bill of Rights. Both men had known each other from the Revolution, when Hamilton left his staff work with General Washington to lead a bayonet charge at Yorktown. But after the war, with a family to support, he’d taken to—as he drolly put it—“rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbors.”
It was difficult for him to maintain his law practice. As Washington’s trusted protégé, he served as the new nation’s first secretary of the Treasury—a job that, ironically, paid rather poorly, even as Hamilton almost single-handedly founded the U.S. Mint and the First Bank of the United States. He continued serving in the embattled Adams administration as a major general, charged with preparing for a brewing war with France—all the while battling insurance companies from his law office over French privateer raids on merchant vessels. He was immensely proud of his government service, but he needed the scruffy law office to pay his bills.
Their profession meant that Hamilton and Burr couldn’t avoid each other even if they had wanted to. As the best lawyers in Manhattan, they were on one side or the other of the leading cases of the city. On Monday they might be on opposite sides of a property line dispute, and on Wednesday on the same side of an insurance settlement for lost crew and cargo. On Friday they’d be on opposite sides again over a different lost ship.
But a murder case?
It was not Hamilton’s usual line of work at all. His reputation was as a mighty courtroom orator in commercial law cases; his criminal defenses could be counted on his fingers. His first such case was representing a client accused in 1786 of dueling, and had ended inauspiciously in defeat. In two decades at the bar, he’d defended a single murder case, one rape case, and a few s
hoplifting charges. But Hamilton owed the Weeks family—quite literally.
During fever season, the major general and his family had rented a home in the sylvan uptown hinterlands of Harlem Heights; charmed by the views over the river, he was now planning on building a family manor there. The thought pleasantly occupied him in his travels: “I remark as I go along everything that can be adopted for the embellishment of our little retreat,” Hamilton told his wife, “where I hope for a pure unalloyed happiness with my excellent wife and sweet children.”
He envisioned the Grange, as he dubbed it, as a handsome edifice of classical columns and balconies, with fashionable octagonal dining and parlor rooms, and surrounded by ornamental beds of tulips. It would, at last, be a mansion worthy of their social station—one, not coincidentally, just as fine as Aaron Burr’s. While building it, Hamilton plunged tens of thousands of dollars into debt—and had hired none other than Ezra Weeks as his contractor.
“My country estate, though costly, promises, by the progressive rise of property on this island and the felicity of its situation, to become more and more valuable,” he reasoned.
If it was a distinctly optimistic line of reasoning, a paper debt was still of less concern to him than the good home he owed to his long-suffering wife, Elizabeth. When not fishing on the Harlem River or hunting with his dog Peggy, the major general had been known for his rather less sporting pursuits. Nobody needed to ask why Martha Washington had nicknamed her house’s tomcat Hamilton. Later, when he was caught in some questionable transactions with an embezzler, Hamilton had to resort to a closed cabinet meeting and an audit of the Treasury’s books to explain the payments. It was his own money being paid out to the fellow for blackmail, and not part of any fraud, he explained—“My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife.” The revelations were leaked, and it was a mark of Hamilton’s formidable reputation as a patriot, and his equally formidable reputation as a cad, that even his political opponents found adultery an entirely believable explanation.
It was hard to say what was more galling in the aftermath: Aaron Burr’s decision to serve as the mistress’s divorce lawyer, or that very same Colonel Burr intervening to save Hamilton from dueling with James Monroe over the scandal. To owe Burr both his life and his worst public humiliation was grating—but Burr’s new utility scheme was worse still. The much-vaunted waterworks had been a scandal even before the murder, for the Manhattan Company itself was not at all what it appeared to be. Hamilton scratched down a final angry note into the margins of his letter on Burr. “He has lately by a trick established a bank,” the major general wrote, “—a perfect monster.”
THE WELL that Elma Sands was found in belonged to no ordinary water company: It was part of the most shadowy and roundly vilified business in all of Manhattan. To Hamilton and other Federalists, perhaps the only real surprise of the case was that a murder hadn’t been discovered on Manhattan Company property before.
Granted, the board of respectable gentlemen who assembled every Monday and Thursday at 23 Wall Street saw nothing sinister in their duties. The body in the Manhattan Well was a shocking matter, of course. But the water had to keep running, as indeed it would continue to do, with shifts of team horses turning endless circles to power the pumps that fed Manhattan homes. Piped water was now to be a part of the city’s life; New York’s first commercial plumbing-supply outfit, situated on the aptly named Water Street, had even begun placing ads in the newspaper to trumpet its selection of “Lead Pipes to convey the Water from the logs in the street, into the houses … fixed in such a manner, as not to freeze on the coldest days.”
The decision to pipe this water from around the Collect, though, was controversial. Stirring up the “five acres of putrid mud,” one critic charged in the New-York Commercial Advertiser, was “an idea most monstrous, and capable of producing effects the most pernicious … the death of thousands of useful citizens might arraign their carelessness.” And the danger, he charged, was hardly justified by the desire to quickly head off summer epidemics.
“The yellow fever may possibly be prevented by such a measure, but I am afraid it would be by substituting in its place the plague itself,” fretted the correspondent. “It is like a person eating garlic to take away the taste of onions.”
To the Manhattan Company, these were the mere quibbles of the small-minded. Founding board member Aaron Burr already had bigger ideas on his mind. As water reports were dutifully read and filed, the colonel was pondering splendid plans for the betterment of his fellow citizens in Manhattan. Plans that might, say, involve some highly inventive financing schemes. Why not build a toll bridge? Why not indeed: They had already begun building one across Lake Cayuga. And, he suggested, they might sell “a Tontine for raising Capital by small quarterly subscriptions to be divided among the survivors at the expiration of seven Years”—with his company, of course, taking its fee first. And insurance! Ads would be placed with the local newspapers for life insurance, with premium tables going all the way down to one year of age; between the annuity it would pay out on their survival, or the takings from other insured siblings dying—“suicide and the hands of justice always being excluded”—one might plan quite sensibly for the far-off adulthood of one’s offspring.
“Parents,” their ad copy explained, “by assuring the lives of their children from infants, until they attain a given age, may secure for them such sums of money as may be required to secure them apprenticeships … or to marry.” With rates starting at an annual payment of $2.57, it seemed a fair enough deal.
But why was a water company selling bridges, tontines, and infant insurance?
It was a question that nettled Hamilton to no end. Initially promoted as a great public good by Aaron Burr, just a year earlier the private water company had won the support of no less than Major General Hamilton himself. Burr, in his final months of a one-term stint in the state assembly, had gone out of his way to secure his rival’s backing, for Hamilton knew the awful privations of yellow fever well—“We die reasonably fast,” he wrote drolly to a friend during one outbreak. The notion of a private company running the effort, rather than the government, also flattered Hamilton’s Federalist ideals; though he often lobbied for more defense funding, he tended to regard other government projects with suspicion.
Hamilton’s support for any Burr plan would come at a price, of course: namely, a key role for the Federalist-dominated city government, through a board of six appointed by the city; a permanent spot for the city recorder; and one-third of the company’s shares going to the city. Also, surely by coincidence, Hamilton’s undistinguished brother-in-law John Church was now to have a seat on the water board. With these assurances in hand, Burr left with a powerful endorsement for his bill.
Curiously, however, this was not the bill Burr presented to the state legislature.
Passed in the wee hours of the session—Colonel Burr had cannily waited until many lawmakers had already left to journey home from Albany—Burr’s final bill provided for an astounding $2 million in capitalization, a board twice as large as originally planned and to be dominated by Republicans, and a piddling one-tenth of the stock to be owned by the city. One friend of Hamilton’s snorted that Burr had “begotten it on the body of the Legislature when it was lulled into a profound sleep by his arts and misrepresentations.” Exactly what they sleepwalked into was hidden deep inside the bill: a perpetual clause that empowered the Manhattan Company to use any “surplus funds” however it saw fit. For anyone who did not understand what that meant—and few did, at first—a member of Burr’s entourage was happy to later elucidate.
“His object,” he explained, “was a bank.”
Digging the Manhattan Well never had anything to do with water at all, and everything to do with politics. And now the curious thriftiness of all the company’s projects—digging out a half-soured old well, employing horses instead of steam power, using hollowed logs instead of iron pipes—began to make sense. Burr was hoarding the
money to buy the next election.
It was a tactic Hamilton understood all too well. He had clinched Federalist power in years past with the long-exclusive charter of the Bank of New York—the party was almost printing its own money. But with a Republican-run bank, not only could the disenfranchised acquire property and qualify to vote, but previously reliable Federalist merchants could now switch parties without fear of financial retribution.
The power of Federalist banks, a Burr aide happily reported, “is now totally destroyed.”
Federalists were apoplectic, and with good reason. The electoral college members to be chosen in the April state elections meant that Burr’s bank was no local matter. New York was the swing state in the upcoming presidential election—and Manhattan was the swing district in New York State. Control the city, and you controlled the 1800 presidential race.
“All will depend on the city election,” Thomas Jefferson confided bluntly to his fellow Virginia politician James Monroe.
In this, if nothing else, the Federalists were in full agreement with him. To them, the venture was nothing less than Burr’s own Trojan horse for enriching himself and spreading his rabble-rousing populism. “The Collect is made the foundation of a Bank—the Bank is to overflow you with a deluge of notes … to make the fortune of Mr. Burr,” charged one editorial. The writer conjured a Burrite landscape of godless French radicalism, with “Jacobin fish women” jeering at the wealthy, or worse: “Your lives and properties will be the sport of licentious foreign tyrants and ferocious mobs.”