Duel with the Devil (11 page)

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.

T
HAT
M
ONDAY
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 hundreds—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.”

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.”

T
HAT
T
HURSDAY, A SINGLE VOICE OF REASON IN THE
N
EW
-Y
ORK
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.

P
ERHAPS 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.