Duel with the Devil

by Paul Collins

  Really now?

  Yes, and here was the peculiar thing. It had no bells upon it.

  This was news indeed. The pleasant jingling of sleigh bells was no mere wintertime fancy; it was a basic courtesy of the road, particularly at night, so that others might hear the vehicle’s approach. True, some complained of the racket from drunks careening homeward from taverns in the wee hours—“When you hear sleigh bells jingling along the road, about two o’clock in a winter morning, you hear many a curse from the driver,” one contemporary observed—but not to mount bells on a sleigh seemed downright secretive, even dangerous.

  The strangest thing, Susannah added, was that it was scarcely gone for long at all. My son and daughter came home from their congregation meeting soon after eight, and I do believe the sleigh had already come back before they turned in for bed.

  What hasty mission had Weeks’s sleigh so quietly embarked upon that night?

  ALL OF February 1800 passed as the prosecutor painstakingly gathered leads for his assault on Weeks’s alibi. By the time Aaron Burr found himself ready to return from Albany in early March to arrange a defense, though, he was stymied by an unexpected problem: even more criminals.

  “I sent to take passage for to-morrow,” he wrote to his daughter, Theodosia. “And lo! The stage is taken by the sheriff to transport criminals to the state prison. I should not be much gratified with this kind of association on the road.”

  There had been no lack of crimes to occupy the sheriff or gossiping New Yorkers, and one of them presented a grim reminder of the fate that might await Weeks. At the same time that John Pastano’s plea of insanity had been laid out to the assembly and the governor, another case had been brought to them for appeal: the murder conviction of Benjamin Holmes, who stabbed a good Samaritan that intervened as Holmes beat a child with an iron-tipped ox goad rod. The victim left behind a widow and five children of his own; when the whole grisly affair was recounted to the legislature, not only did they not stop Holmes’s execution, they also made a point of passing an act demanding it.

  In fact, the death of Elma Sands wasn’t even the only Manhattan Company crime. At least one enterprising soul upstate was already counterfeiting Manhattan Bank currency. Another one made off with a $350 check drawn upon the Manhattan Bank account of Washington Irving’s brother Dr. Peter Irving—something so infuriating to the Broadway pharmacist that he offered the full amount of the check itself in reward for information about the theft. As a close ally of Aaron Burr’s, Dr. Irving may have been as troubled by the defrauding of the bank as he was about his own loss.

  But for Cadwallader Colden, patiently building up a line of witnesses, his work led him far from the intrigues and transactions of City Hall, Broadway, and the local courts—all the way north, inexorably, into the frozen streams and tracts of Lispenard’s Meadow itself.

  Yes, said Arnetta Van Norden, who lived in the rough terrain about halfway between Broadway and the well. I heard it that night. A young woman yelling: Lord have mercy on me! Lord help me!

  That’s right, her husband added. I heard it, too. I looked out over the field, and … I glanced out the window and could see a fellow out by the well. Yes, walking about it. It was dark out, and I could see the stars that night—but I could make out a man’s shape out there.

  And yet they did nothing?

  Well, the husband explained, we gathered the commotion came from one of the houses in the neighborhood.

  The point was plain enough: It was the reason, perhaps, that Benjamin Holmes’s victim had been killed. It was not someone’s business to interfere in other people’s family affairs. A number of cartmen lived around the meadow—hard physical laborers, like Mr. Van Norden himself, whom it would be unwise to confront in the middle of a beating.

  A week before Elma’s disappearance, though, one of the other cartmen who lived out in meadow had proven a bit more inquisitive.

  The Sunday before, Matthew Musty recalled, I saw a young man out there—working on the well, it seemed like. He said he was a carpenter.

  The young carpenter was with a crew contracted to build the well, the cartman said, and he had thrown off the wooden cover and fastened some poles together in order to sound the dark waters of the now-abandoned hole. The reason he gave when asked was a chillingly simple one. The man was assuring himself, Musty said, of the Manhattan Well’s depth.

  TEA, TEN SHILLINGS a pound. Spearmints, nine shillings a pound.

  Many locals had been accustomed to using British currency right alongside American coinage, and in a port city like Manhattan, a grocer had to know the plethora of wildly fluctuating currencies liable to grace his till. There wasn’t much William Dustan hadn’t seen pass through his neighborhood by now: He had lived and worked in his store off the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street for years, watching these tracts north of City Hall evolve from stinking tanneries and abattoirs to the beginnings of homes that could almost be described as respectable. Even the local Negro Burial Ground, stretching out for blocks behind his property, had been covered over with a thick layer of dirt and was now platted out for new residences. Dustan’s family name was prominent among Manhattan grocers, and William was known to chair meetings of his professional brethren when it met to argue over such matters as the price of bread.

  Soap, ninepence. Turnips, sixpence a bunch. Cabbage, threepence.

  In March, as the morning sun slanted into the grocery shop, Dustan’s first customers of the day were arriving and exchanging the usual gossip: word that ice shipped out from Philadelphia had yellow fever in it, a rumor that Bonaparte had hired Thomas Paine and paid him with all the brandy he could drink. And, of course, the election—there was always that to talk about. The local electors hadn’t even been picked yet, and one of the previous night’s newspapers was already laying into likely presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson: “His household is French—his language, his dress, his manners, his associates are French—and his library and Philosophy are French—Such a number of French dishes might be unpalatable to the American taste.”

  Apples, fourteen shillings a barrel.

  And, inevitably, there was crime to discuss. From Westchester County, there’d come news of a duel between two bickering watchmakers. And Benjamin Holmes was finally scheduled for hanging and dissection—word of that would come on the next incoming coaches, no doubt. But here in Manhattan, new cases were about to come to trial; with the city council session just having concluded the day before, Mayor Varick and Recorder Harison were now ready to sit in on the weightiest cases to demand their attention. Just a couple of days earlier, on March 26, they’d announced that the circuit court was to commence the following Tuesday. But which cases would it hear?

  Sugar candy, five shillings a pound.

  The door to the store swung open, letting in the morning air, still brisk from a crackling electrical thunderstorm during the night—and a customer stalked in, excitable in his movements, and low and quick in voice.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said hurriedly. The man took no notice of the sacks and barrels of goods around him; he could scarcely contain his news.

  “Levi Weeks,” he blurted out, “is taken up by the high sheriff.”

  THE PEOPLE vs. LEVI WEEKS

  COURT OF OYER & TERMINER, CITY HALL, CITY OF NEW-YORK

  MARCH 31ST—APRIL 2ND, 1800

  His Hon. Mr. Justice John Lansing, Jr.

  Chief Justice of the New-York Supreme Court

  William Coleman, Esq.

  Clerk of the Court

  His Honor Richard Varick, Esq.

  Mayor of New-York

  attending His Honor Richard Harison, Esq.

  Recorder of New-York

  attending

  Levi Weeks

  Defendant

  COUNSEL FOR THE PRISONER

  Aaron Burr, Esq.

  Alexander Hamilton, Esq.

  Brockholst Livingston, Esq. PROSECUTOR

  Cadwallader D. Colden, Esq.

/>   Asst. Attorney General

  MEMBERS OF THE JURY

  Richard Ellis

  James Hunt

  Robert Lylburn

  William G. Miller

  John Rathbone

  Simon Schermerhorn (Foreman)

  George Scriba

  Garrit Storm William Walton

  Jasper Ward

  Samuel Ward William Wilson

  MONDAY MORNING DAWNED BRIGHT WITH PROMISE OVER THE Ring boardinghouse—“a very clear day, but very blustery,” one neighborhood resident noted in his journal entry for March 31, 1800. Windows rattled in the panes, and Manhattanites outside gamely clutched for their hats. But for all the freezing nights and scouring winds of the previous week, Spring was surely arriving to the island. Just the night before, one of the boarders—Richard Croucher, the cloth merchant—had aptly marked the new season by marrying one of his customers, the widow Mrs. Stackhaver. The happy occasion still faced certain practicalities; Croucher hadn’t moved out just yet to the widow’s house on Ann Street, though her teenaged daughter was to come over later to help him pack his belongings. Still, the wedding marked what should have been the first ray of light to pierce the gloomy recesses of 208 Greenwich in many weeks.

  But, instead, the sunny morning found the mood in the house curiously dark. Arrayed around the table for breakfast, the boarders were not dressed in their usual work aprons, or shouldering their shipwright and masonry tools. They were dressed respectably, but not to mark the occasion of Croucher’s new marriage: Nearly every one of them had been subpoenaed to appear in that day’s trial. Instead of a honeymoon, Richard Croucher would be spending his first day of married life in the courthouse.

  Then again, the trial of Levi Weeks was where most New Yorkers wanted to be that day—“Scarcely any thing else is spoken of,” one socialite wrote in her journal. It was a spectacle, as surely as the two-shilling show in the side parlor of the City Hotel. There New Yorkers beheld “The American Phenomena,” a single cage containing the improbable menagerie of “A Fine Little Bird, A Beautiful Flying-Squirrel, & A Rattle-Snake”—all living, gawkers were assured, in confounding harmony. Weeks’s trial would feature Major General Hamilton, Colonel Burr, and Colonel Livingston—all on the same side, peaceably—a veritable American Phenomenon themselves. How could any New Yorker resist? It would be, as the sideshow’s own ad rhapsodized, “one of the most extraordinary occurrences that has been yet exhibited to gratify the curiosity of the Public”—a splendid, awful wonder.

  BY THE time the Rings and their boarders reached City Hall, it was almost impossible to get in. Hundreds had crowded outside at the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets—thousands, even—“the concourse of people was so great,” one observer wrote, “as was never before witnessed in New York.” The only event to compare was the founding of the country itself. City Hall had once served as the place of George Washington’s presidential inauguration, and for the first few years of the republic, Congress itself had been held in its grand halls. Weighty matters of the fate of the nation had been decided here, but on the morning of the trial, the mood outside was less deliberative.

  “Crucify him!” voices yelled out.

  The block around the building was usually a more amiable place. It was here that you might hear an anvil ring from Mr. Babb’s shop as he wrought iron into his famed specialty, birdcages—“to confine tame birds in a free country,” as one local patriot put it. The block had what was long the city’s only hosiery shop, though many New Yorkers still remained so poorly dressed that, to earn extra pennies, the proprietor had resorted to offering cheap shaves with castile soap and rainwater. For those needing neither cages nor hosiery, at the corner was an old buttonwood tree, a shady spot traditionally staked out by slaves and servants as their refuge on sunny days.

  Today, though, the tree was valued for another purpose: for climbing, in order to see over the crowd.

  “Crucify him!” they yelled again.

  From up the street, in the direction of Grenzeback’s grocery and the gloomy Bridewell jail, there came a stirring that parted the crowd.

  Make way, make way for the prisoner.

  Blinking against the sunlight and worn from his long weekend in jail, Levi Weeks was marched through by a phalanx of constables and a citizen volunteer guard. The baying crowd had been well primed by the handbills; New Yorkers knew that Weeks was already as good as convicted by the ghosts and dancing devils seen out by the Manhattan Well. They followed him into City Hall, only to find the way blocked.

  “Though that room in which the court was held is very large,” wrote one witness, “not one fourth of those who attended could procure admission.”

  Inside, City Hall was so packed that it was almost impossible even to lead the defendant up to the courtroom’s bar. Cadwallader Colden took one table; the defense team of Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston took another with their defendant. Outside the room, filling the hallways and antechambers of City Hall, there waited scores of subpoenaed witnesses. Constables shoved the overflow of spectators out of the room, a task they tackled with relish; they had real power that morning, one reporter mused, and were “disposed to exercise it in its amplest extent.”

  When those who managed to seize a bench seat sat down and opened the morning’s New-York Commercial Advertiser, they found a surprise waiting for them. John Furman, who ran a print shop across the street from City Hall, had already staked out his place at the trial. Fresh off a run of hawking door-to-door copies of “A Handsome Edition of George Washington’s Will,” he had hit upon his next great moneymaker:

  THE TRIAL OF LEVI WEEKS, FOR THE MURDER OF MISS SANDS, NOW PENDING IN THE CIRCUIT COURT, WILL BE PUBLISHED AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE—BY JOHN FURMAN, OPPOSITE THE CITY-HALL. IT IS TO BE PRESUMED THAT IT WILL BE MORE FULL AND CORRECT THAN ANY WHICH MAY BE MADE, AS IT IS TAKEN DOWN BY THE CLERK OF THE COURT.

  The trial had not yet even begun, but New Yorkers already knew they were about to become a part of history.

  FOR THE man who would be recording that history, they needed to look no farther than the center of the courtroom, where at ten o’clock the clerk of the court’s voice rose above the crowd.

  Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! he called out.

  William Coleman’s deep timbre carried authority; he towered over most of the crowd, and bore the robust frame of a young man famed for having skated twenty miles up the Connecticut River in a single evening. Spectators in the courtroom were wise to quiet down quickly.

  All manner of persons, he continued, that any have business to do at this circuit court and court of oyer and terminer, held in and for the county of New York, let them draw near and give their attendance and they shall be heard.

  Coleman knew these proclamations by heart, for he had once been on the other side of the counsel’s table himself. From an unlikely start as an abandoned child at a Boston poorhouse, Coleman had risen as a young lawyer to build one of the finest mansions in Massachusetts—and was then promptly bankrupted by a bad land deal. Fleeing debts to reassemble his life in Manhattan, he’d worked briefly as Aaron Burr’s law partner before falling under Hamilton’s sway as a Federalist—and it was to Hamilton that the grateful and destitute Coleman owed the coveted patronage job of clerk of the court.

  Sheriff, he intoned, return the writs and precepts to you directed, and delivered and returnable here this day, that the court may proceed thereon.

  Behind Coleman, as was the customary for the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the assembled might of Manhattan’s political and judicial establishment entered and seated themselves. At the highest chair was the presiding judge, the Right Honorable John Lansing—the chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, the presiding judge for circuit court cases in this district, and a member of the state assembly’s crucial Council of Revision. He was a stout Republican—as one of New York’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention, he’d virtually walked out in disgust at its model of a strong central government. And yet he was
also a eminently fair-minded man. During debates over the Manhattan Company charter in 1799, it was Lansing—not any Federalist—who publicly questioned the curious provisions buried in Burr’s bill.

  By his side sat Mayor Richard Varick—former speaker of the assembly, former city recorder, and Aaron Burr’s predecessor as state attorney general. He was a war veteran with much in common with Brockholst Livingston and Alexander Hamilton: Like Livingston, he’d served as an aide to Hamilton’s father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler; and like Hamilton, he’d gone on to serve as General Washington’s aide. Nearby sat Varick’s second-in-command, Richard Harison, the city recorder. He, too, was close to Hamilton—he was the general’s former law partner, in fact—and yet by virtue of his office, he was now also a board member of Burr’s new water company.

  This room, filled with the most distinguished legal eminences in the state, might have seemed a Gordian knot of tangled conflicts of interest: Burr’s company owned the murder scene, had employed the defendant, had rejected a bid by a relative of the deceased, had financial relationships with the court recorder and the clerk, and had political alliances and rivalries with his fellow counselors, the mayor, and the judge. In any other time or place, all this might have at least raised an eyebrow. But in Manhattan in 1800, it was just how business was done.

  Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! Coleman called out again.

  The city’s greatest political foes—the very men whose reputation jurors would be weighing at the ballot box in a month’s time—now sat before the crowd, united in this case of murder. And now, in the middle of this group of men—these war heroes and skirmishing politicians, these bitter rivals and old comrades in arms—there stood the young carpenter whose life lay in their hands.

  APPROACH THE BAR, the clerk instructed Weeks. The crowd got their first good look at the man: a respectable-enough-looking fellow, the murmur went.