Duel with the Devil (14 page)

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.”

At the center of it all was a water company—and the murder that now haunted it.

B
ROCKHOLST
L
IVINGSTON
sat through the water board meetings, taking in the pleasant march of progress being made by their company. He was an unmistakable presence in any gathering: Balding and cerebral in appearance, he had a prominent nose that one contemporary deemed “
a regular Roman triumph.” Livingston had duly considered all the old Federalist complaints about their water company, and he wasn’t much bothered, not least because he was a founding board member and a close ally of Burr’s, as well as a probable Republican candidate in the upcoming state elections.

More improbably, though, he’d
also
been hired by the Weeks family to defend Levi.

For a criminal case to command the talents of the city’s top three lawyers was unheard of, and yet Livingston had much in common with his two fellow counselors.
He’d gone to school with Hamilton, and
to college with Burr; like Hamilton, he’d also been a wartime
aide-de-camp to George Washington—and like Burr, he was the scion of a powerful New York family. In the years since the war he’d built a law practice the equal of Hamilton’s and Burr’s, and become a trustee of Columbia College. But for all his respectable trappings, Livingston had always been known for
an explosive sense of humor and an equally unpredictable temper. The two had combined disastrously a year earlier, when
an editorial of his made a mild if careless jest about a local Federalist figure, James Jones. Incensed, Jones assaulted Livingston—beat him with a cane, in fact, while the lawyer was out promenading with his wife and children—and then grabbed him by his famous nose and yanked. It was the worst insult to the man’s vanity possible. Livingston immediately challenged Jones to a duel, in which he killed him with a single shot to the groin. A fuss was raised in the Federalist newspapers, but who would try a man publicly assaulted in front of his family—and who
would dare to prosecute a Livingston?
The constable had refused even to arrest him.

The duel with Jones haunted the lawyer, though. “
His best friends cannot lament his death more than Mr. Livingston does,” one acquaintance reported.

Perhaps it was regret over the killing of Jones, or maybe it was that during the war
Livingston had been held in the miserable prison ships the British kept in New York Harbor, but whatever the reason, and despite his formidable record in commercial law, Livingston had been more ready than his fellow lawyers to serve on some of the most clearly hopeless criminal cases on the docket. Just within the previous couple of months, he had defended Frothingham against the merciless libel charge by Hamilton, and represented the crazed John Pastano over the murder of his landlady.

Livingston knew better than anyone that even with the best defense lawyers, the state could exact swift and terrible retribution. Two years earlier, there’d been the case of
John Young, a bassoonist from the local theater’s orchestra pit. Young had run up some debts, and when a deputy sheriff came to arrest him for it,
the musician panicked and shot the man dead. Livingston tried to get Young’s charge knocked down to manslaughter, but the trial did not go well: The gallery was packed with a hostile crowd, and when the judge’s sentence of hanging and dissection was pronounced, the spectators broke into victorious jeers—“
an indecency,” one newspaper decried afterward, “which ought never to be tolerated before a tribunal.” Three weeks later, human body parts were found bobbing up against one of the local market piers in the East River. They proved to be the remains of Livingston’s late and very recent client.

“
This shameful exposure was not through the wantonness of the surgeons, as supposed,” reported the
New-York Journal
, “but of the porters employed to sink them, being contained in a bag, with weights for that purpose; it seems the porters conceived the bag was of value, and by this means the parts were set afloat.”

In a state so hard in its justice, it was little wonder that the Weeks family had hired the city’s best lawyers to defend the bewildered young carpenter. Together, they would be greatest criminal defense team New York had ever seen. And they’d need to be, for the noose around their new client was now drawing even tighter.

A
T ABOUT NINE O
’
CLOCK THAT
F
RIDAY, AN ELECTRIFYING YELL
broke the night.

“Fire!
Fire!
FIRE!”

Bridewell’s fire alarm clanged madly, and churches took up the alert as citizens scrambled to their upper windows and rooftops to find the source. Some began running northward, while others ran south, and it took some confused minutes to figure out why. On that winter’s night
two
fires had broken out simultaneously: one at a house in the northern reaches of the city, and the other down at the docks. The house was soon “
entirely consumed,” but the docks augured even worse. When fire crews raced down to the Battery, they found “the heavens illuminated from fierce devouring flames”—columns of fire shooting skyward from the
Admiral Duncan
, a British trader set to sail to Liverpool the next morning fully loaded with
$70,000 worth of cargo. It had gunpowder below decks, and as flames climbed up its masts and belched out from its portholes, another ship—the
Olive
—went up as well. The crew of the
Admiral Duncan
, out for one last night on the town, returned to find their vessel being desperately cut loose, and the burning hulk drifting into the East River. By the next morning, all that was left was smoke, and the smell of charred timber lingered in the air:
the work, it was murmured, of an arsonist.

But across the city, the defense team and the city’s recorder were pondering another, much more quietly mysterious evening. The
recorder carefully dated a document—“
Sworn, 18th day of January, 1800”—and listened as Levi’s sister-in-law made a sworn statement.

On Sunday, the twenty-second of December last, my husband and
I
were at home
, she began.

They’d been lucky to get Elizabeth Weeks to make this affidavit at all: It had not been long since
she’d borne Ezra a daughter, and these were perilous days for the health of a young mother. She was ready to testify, though, that John McComb, Jr.—Hamilton’s choice of an architect for his new Grange mansion—had come with Mrs. McComb to visit them on the night of Elma’s disappearance. And, crucially, there had been another visitor for that evening: Levi Weeks.

About candle light
, she continued,
or a little while after, Mr. John McComb and his wife came in. Levi Weeks was then in the room, and remained with the company till after the clock struck eight, and then went away. The McCombs left about twenty or twenty-five after; Levi Weeks came in, and remained
.

Had she seen anything unusual in his countenance?

No
, she replied.
He appeared cheerful—ate a hearty meal—and went off to his lodgings, about ten o’clock
.

It sounded like an entirely unremarkable evening, which was exactly what the defense team needed to hear. With respectable friends and family ready to testify to Levi’s alibi, and his bond easily backed by a powerful brother,
the young carpenter was released. A generation earlier Levi would not have been so fortunate, but bail laws had been considerably loosened after the war.

Ironically, the still-unreformed severity of debtor laws had likely helped to secure a fine defense team in the first place. Burr and Hamilton were both in the habit of running up the kind of debts that could put them at Ezra’s mercy, and debtor laws meant a contractor or architect could have them thrown into jail for any inability to pay a past-due debt. It was a threat that prominence gave little protection from: A few years earlier, even
New York’s attorney general had been confined for a debt while still serving in office.
Wisely, neither Hamilton nor Burr entered any fee into their ledgers for defending Levi Weeks.

But if bond money and the debts of prominent lawyers could keep Levi safe from the Bridewell jail, Elias Ring’s talk of shooting him meant that he was still well-advised to lie low. For that matter, his other witnesses and supporters needed to keep quiet as well. “
Those who dared to suppose him innocent,” one local observed, “were very generally considered as partakers in his guilt.”

Some hinted that Ezra Weeks himself was also involved in Elma’s death. In the newspapers, even the McCombs suddenly found themselves under scrutiny. “
Directly in the rear of Mr. McComb’s houses,” warned the New York
Commercial Advertiser
, “the lower beams of a very extensive wooden building have just been laid”—one so tall and close to the property lines, in fact, that it violated city fire codes, which the builder had outrageously circumvented by paying off some paltry fines. “Should an accident happen, the whole of Broadway would be endangered,” the paper complained. It was a stinging attack to make, especially after the devastating local fires of the previous week.