Duel with the Devil (16 page)

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.

T
EA, 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.”

M
ONDAY 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.

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

F
OR 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.