Duel with the Devil

by Paul Collins

  The tale is balderdash, but it derives its mythical potency from a simple fact: Many people in the Weeks case did come to a bad end. Hamilton’s bereaved family was, for a time, left nearly destitute by his chaotic personal finances. Burr, after serving the brief and awkward remainder of his term as vice president, became a stateless and bankrupt shadow of a man. It would be years before he dared to return to New York.

  But if anything sealed the popular notion of the Quakeress’s Curse, it was the strange fate reserved for the trial judge, John Lansing. Though he retired to take a respectable position as a university regent, his most lasting fame would come from the day he left a hotel room to post a letter, and then … vanished. Decades later, political kingmaker Thurlow Weed claimed he’d heard a confession about Lansing, but that he kept silent to avoid embarrassing the respectable descendants of the judge’s assassin. If so, then Weed took the secret to the grave. Judge Lansing’s disappearance remains unsolved to this day.

  Some of the key witnesses in the Levi Weeks trial probably wished they could also disappear. Elias Ring, cursed with a infamous boardinghouse now associated with a murder and a rape, lost his home within a year of the trial. The upstart inventor who had once proposed an entire water system to Aaron Burr was now reduced to humbler quarters and work as a mechanic. Ring’s name shows up in debtor and bankrupt notices for decades afterward, and the Friends finally ejected him in 1816 “for the continued intemperate use of intoxicating spirits.” Set adrift, he moved his family to Mobile, Alabama, where he was swiftly mown down by yellow fever. His widow, Catharine, and sister-in-law Hope soon moved back to rural New York, far from the baleful reach of cities.

  Their fellow accuser in the boardinghouse, Richard Croucher, proved more fortunate—at first. Though convicted of rape, he had been wise in his choice of Brockholst Livingston as his defense counsel. Less than three years into his life sentence, Croucher was granted a pardon from Governor Clinton, on the condition that he leave the country at once. It was the same conditional pardon that Livingston had secured for a previous client, the crazed Portuguese murderer John Pastano. Since Croucher had employed an insanity defense before in Britain, it was clearly a fine strategy for his lawyer to have pursued again.

  And then—just as he had in London—Croucher escaped justice.

  Instead of honoring his pardon agreement to emigrate, Croucher fled to Virginia. There, mingling among Richmond merchants, within months he had insinuated himself into the city’s respectable society—and promptly robbed them. Soon Virginia bounty notices sought a “villain”: “R. D. CROUCHER, about six feet high, very thin, sallow complexion, with grey hair, genteelly dressed but ill-looking large eyes and long nose.”

  After his arrest in Norfolk, it was said that Croucher returned to England. There, apparently, his luck ran out at last—and, one of Hamilton’s sons later recalled, “he was executed for a heinous crime.”

  NOT EVERYONE succumbed to ill fortune. William Coleman, the court clerk and the great chronicler of the Levi Weeks trial, had been a brilliant choice by Hamilton to lead his new newspaper, the New-York Evening Post—Coleman would become, as one competitor put it, “the generalissimo of Federal editors”—and the Post has proven far more long-lived than the major general himself. In the decades that followed, Coleman championed such reforms as better municipal sanitation: He was the sworn enemy of pigs running free in the streets. His special editorial umbrage, though, was reserved for New Yorkers who bought lottery tickets. “The stranger that walks through this street,” he wrote of Broadway, “might almost imagine that the city was one great lottery shop, and that one half of the citizens, at least, got their living by affording the opportunity of gambling to the rest.”

  Coleman’s unlikely new friend from the trial, Ezra Weeks, also continued to prosper. He became one of the city’s great hoteliers and developers, and his respectability was such that he served without incident on an 1806 jury where the defense counsel was none other than Cadwallader Colden. The hotelier was so clearly trustworthy that Colden did not use a peremptory dismissal on the man—even though it was Ezra who, just a few years earlier, had been key in destroying his case against Levi Weeks.

  For despite the doomed Elma Sands case, and the hapless Federalist candidacy that followed, Cadwallader Colden’s fate had hardly been sealed. He returned to private practice, even serving as a defense counsel to a man charged with aiding Alexander Hamilton at the duel—and he lost that case, too. But over time his reputation grew, and he steadily rose in the Federalist ranks to become mayor of New York in 1818. In his later years he was a tireless advocate for his best friend, the steamboat inventor Robert Fulton—and when not fulminating over canals and steam engines, Colden helped found the state’s first formally chartered scientific society.

  New York’s elite could hardly keep from crossing paths, particularly in a grand intellectual enterprise such as a new scientific society. And, in fact, there were two other curiously familiar names among the founding officers of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York: Brockholst Livingston and David Hosack.

  Having quietly worked on the Weeks case in the shadow of Hamilton and Burr, Livingston proved to have the most durable career by far. In time he rose to the state supreme court and, in 1807, earned an appointment by Thomas Jefferson to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served as a justice until his death in 1823.

  The career of Dr. David Hosack, the physician to Hamilton and Burr and one of the most prominent witnesses of the Weeks trial, was no less distinguished. Along with helping to found Bellevue Hospital and leading vaccination drives across the city, he joined Livingston as one of the eleven founding members of the New-York Historical Society. Their first meeting was in the Portrait Room of City Hall—and there, where years earlier the sequestered Weeks jurors had spent a restless night, the men who had witnessed history now began the great task of preserving it.

  HISTORY, THOUGH, was something that Levi Weeks wished only to escape.

  Even with the vindications of his trial and Croucher’s conviction, the young carpenter never could settle easily into his adopted city. After a couple of years of living in his brother’s home, he gave up and moved back to Deerfield, Massachusetts, to the inauspiciously named neighborhood of Bloody Brook. Here, at least, he lived among people who trusted him, though he had to leave his old carpentry trade to work in selling liquor and dry goods.

  But like many a city dweller since, he found returning to his parents’ home was not an easy burden to bear.

  “Son,” his pious father lamented, “I wish I knew whether any topics on religion are agreeable to you.”

  Levi was no longer cut out for sleepy rural western Massachusetts; he was restless. And, perhaps understandably with his history, he found himself still a bachelor as he approached his thirtieth birthday. For someone chafing against his home and his past, there was just one place to go. In 1805, he ended his dry goods partnership, packed his belongings, and struck out for the western frontier.

  The Appalachians and the lands out to the Mississippi were still wild, barely settled lands. For a while he tarried in Cincinnati, and from there moved on to Kentucky, whose residents he did not care for—“they were brought up among slaves,” he explained to a friend, “and their manners especially of the lower class is very disgusting.” Soon he left yet again, pushing farther westward, all the while recording his travels in a diary that he had brought along.

  Even this was not fated to last; as he forded a tributary of the Mississippi with his horse, Levi and his belongings went toppling into the water. He barely escaped with his life—and his diary vanished into the muddy waters. Disappearing into the hinterlands of the West, he truly was becoming a man without a past.

  “Ultimately,” his hometown chronicler in Massachusetts recorded in 1838, “he became a vagabond.”

  But that’s not quite what happened.

  FOR A MAN LOOKING TO START OVER AGAIN, IT WAS HARD TO find anyplace farther away
from Manhattan—in distance or in temperament—than the river city of Natchez, then the capital of the Mississippi Territory. It had been only a decade since the last Spanish garrison had left and ceded the port to the United States. Even as its citizens grew wealthy on a burgeoning flatboat traffic of cotton and sugar, the place still had the wild feel of a frontier outpost.

  “Its vicinity is very uneven,” Levi marveled in a letter to a friend back east. “You are constantly ascending and descending as you pass through in any direction.… The houses are extremely irregular and for the most part temporary things.”

  It was, in short, perfect for an aspiring architect looking to make his mark. Toppling with his supplies into the river had been nearly a disaster for Levi, but it had also been a kind of baptism: He’d lost his past, but kept the skills he’d honed back in New York as Ezra’s trusted foreman. In a new city that had plenty of cash but few architects, he brought a trained eye for fashionable Georgian and Federalist neoclassical design—and he’d arrived at just the right time.

  “The brick house I am now building is just without the city line, and is designed for the most magnificent building in the territory,” he reported. “This is the first house in the territory on which was ever attempted any orders of architecture. The site is one of those peculiar situations which combines all the delights of romance—the pleasures of rurality and the approach of sublimity.”

  His client was a fellow Massachusetts native, Lyman Harding, a wealthy attorney whose presence in Natchez was invaluable to Levi. As it happened, Lyman was an old and trusted army friend of Aaron Burr’s. He’d even served as Burr’s defense counsel after some frontier adventurism saw Burr unsuccessfully tried in 1807 for treason after trying to foment a Mexican revolution. And like Levi, Harding had made his fortune after arriving penniless in Natchez; the two men, in short, were admirably matched.

  Colonel Burr had saved Levi’s life. Now his comrade would help him start a new one.

  Harding’s trust in Weeks was amply repaid. His new architect created all the comforts of a classic home for his client, with grand Ionic columns along the front of the house, topped by Corinthian entablature; inside, Weeks fashioned a dramatic black walnut helix staircase that spiraled up from the front entranceway toward the sleeping quarters. The mansion, dubbed Auburn, became the inspiration for other grand mansions in the region—and for Weeks, commissions for Natchez’s new city hall and college building would follow.

  Levi flourished in his new land: He married at long last, and in short order fathered four children. His buildings—and his many descendants—live on to this day.

  “COLONEL BURR has been here,” Ezra wrote from New York to Levi Weeks in 1812, “and is at his old profession of the law.”

  It had taken nearly a decade for the former vice president to even dare setting foot again in Manhattan; the man behind one of the first recorded murder trials in the United States had by then gone through many personal trials himself. After narrowly escaping a murder charge in the East, and then a charge of treason in the West, he’d drifted through Europe until he eventually found himself nearly penniless in Paris.

  Just a few years earlier Burr had risen to the vice presidency and had been the proud owner of one of Manhattan’s grandest mansions; now he found himself living in a ten-by-ten rented room, desperately dodging petty debts to Parisian shopkeepers. He was in debt to the shoemaker who had patched his boots; he spent months evading an optician who wanted payment for a pair of spectacles.

  “Had one sous left,” Burr wrote in a typical journal entry for December 1810, “and took one pound cheese on credit.”

  His poverty, he knew, was positively dangerous. After he accidentally bumped a pane of glass with his umbrella one morning, Burr had the frightening premonition that he’d have been unable to pay had he broken it—and that “I must, infallibly, have been taken before a commissaire de police.”

  His modest quarters, Burr drolly noted, did possess one virtue: “I can sit in my chair and reach every and anything that I possess.” His low point came when, after pawning nearly everything, he finally landed work translating a book into French—only to discover that it was a volume containing “abuse and libels” about himself. He took the job all the same.

  Burr did not find New York much more welcoming when he returned; one judge, recognizing the prodigal politician in the street, ran up to him and shouted: “You are a scoundrel, sir! A scoundrel!” Burr doggedly resumed practicing law nonetheless. He had to—for the aging vice president and hero of the Revolution found his requests for a military pension denied by a Congress that had still not forgiven him.

  Burr would haunt New York’s courts for the rest of his long life; one Manhattanite recalled a genteel old man, “very thin and straight, dressed in black, and his hair so profusely powdered that a superfluous portion adhered to his coat collar.” He took on cases that other great lawyers would not tangle with, becoming one of America’s first specialists in family law—for if some respectable men still scorned the infamous Aaron Burr, women desperately seeking help in divorce cases did not. And after he died at the age of eighty in 1836, it was a curious realization among his friends that they’d almost never heard him speak again of Alexander Hamilton. But there was one tragedy that the old man had sometimes mused over: the death of Miss Elma Sands.

  THE MANHATTAN Well mystery lived on in the public’s mind as well. Within weeks of Croucher’s rape trial in 1800, Charles Brockden Brown—a brilliant Gothic novelist and friend of William Coleman’s—published a short story based on the case, “The Trials of Arden.” In it, a tragic maiden is found strangled in a riverbank grotto, and her titular paramour is instantly suspected by a vengeful populace.

  “A recent instance has occurred, in which this state of mind was felt by almost every person within the precincts of the city,” Brown reminded his readers, before reflecting upon the destroyed reputation of the accused. “Of all men his lot was most disastrous, the most intolerable! Such a complicated evil! A mystery so impenetrable, so fatal to fame, peace and life of one who merited a better fate!”

  To drive home the timeliness of his story, the same magazine that ran Brown’s story also included reviews of both Coleman’s trial transcript and the newly published transcript of Croucher’s trial. Just as in the Weeks trial, Brown’s central character of Arden is found innocent—to the fury of the crowds outside, who then riot and attack Arden and then even the jury itself. It is only later that Mayo, a Croucher-like figure, proves to be the true culprit—“Europe had been for a long time the theatre of his crimes,” Brown hinted presciently, “but at length he withdrew to America, as to a new scene.”

  The Weeks case also attracted the pen of Philip Freneau, an old Princeton classmate of Burr’s who had become America’s preeminent epic poet. His poem “The Reward of Innocence”—which included a long introductory footnote on “Gulielma Sands—the unfortunate event alluded to in these lines”—went on to muse upon the Manhattan Well itself:

  Detested pit, may other times agree

  With swelling mounds of earth to cover thee,

  And hide the place, in whose obscure retreat

  Some miscreant made his base design complete.

  Freneau soon got his wish: a few years later the city filled in and platted out Lispenard’s Meadow, and the crime scene vanished beneath the orderly, soaring brick blocks of an unstoppably expanding city. The blocks once occupied by Ezra Weeks and Aaron Burr were bought by John Jacob Astor, and the waterworks that they’d created was itself passing into history. The Manhattan Company was turning into a full-fledged bank, just as Aaron Burr intended, with its old identity faintly evident in the middle name of a modern descendant: Chase Manhattan Bank.

  But for decades the memory of the crime still lingered, not least among the Ring family. When the anonymous 1870 novel Guilty, or Not Guilty: The True Story of the Manhattan Well appeared in bookstores, its rather ordinary artistry concealed an extraordinary connectio
n to the case: The author was Keturah Connah, the granddaughter of Mrs. Ring. The novel was virtually factual, she insisted, as it was “our story, or rather, history, for we chronicle most faithfully things that have been.”

  Connah took liberties nonetheless, not least by originating the popular story of Mrs. Ring’s curse on Alexander Hamilton. Not surprisingly, her grandfather’s adultery with Elma gets no mention; nor does the implication that Elma was a little fond of laudanum. Conveniently, in her account Levi is implicated in a melodramatic deathbed confession by an accomplice.

  If parts of Guilty, or Not Guilty are fanciful, there is still something strikingly suggestive about the book. Unlike the court accounts and the newspapers of 1800, it describes the boardinghouse residents. Connah’s preface reveals that her great-aunt—Elma’s cousin Hope Sands, a witness in the trial—was still alive in 1870. Out of print for more than a century and hidden in obscurity, Connah’s novel may be the closest we will ever get to an eyewitness description of the Rings, the Sands, and Levi Weeks.

  In it, Mrs. Ring is fair and blue-eyed, with “an abundance of light auburn hair plainly arranged” under a lace cap. Hope Sands has short, dark hair, and a mischievous expression from “small, piercing, black eyes that sparkled with intelligence and fun.” Levi’s charms are even admitted, albeit a bit grudgingly.

  “He was tall, and well formed—what the world would call good looking,” Connah writes. “His hair was dark and long, worn, in the fashion of the day, tied in a cue. A casual observer would have said his eyes were black, the lashes were so long and dark, but a second glance showed them to be blue.”

  Her most striking description, though, is reserved for Elma herself. In Connah’s account, we have a girl from upstate New York who arrives in the city to find herself behind others in her learning; her classmates dub her “the little mountain maid.” Yet she proves a quick study, and despite her illness—“she had been always a delicate child, unable to perform her share of household duties”—she retains a passionate fondness for listening to the piano.