Duel with the Devil (2 page)

The famed
Musical Concert Clock is for sale
, visitors were mournfully informed.
That is, should you wish to buy it
.

They did not: They were ready to leave. It was a shame, the passing of the old curator—but that summer in New York, deaths were no surprise at all.

S
IGNS HUNG
along the streets, creaking slightly whenever the breeze stirred, each proclaiming where its shopkeeper had come from:

It was a tradition peculiar to Manhattan. Shopkeepers mentioned their hometowns in the hope of landing customers from their newly arrived countrymen; for everyone here, it seemed, hailed from somewhere else. Manhattan was where you went to reinvent yourself, whether you were slightly fractured nobility from Paris, a rabble-rousing radical from London—or, like Elma and Hope, young Quaker women from an upstate farm, simply looking to find better prospects in life.

The city swelled with such arrivals, and its population of sixty thousand made it the largest city in the young republic. Greenwich Street, once a rustic lane running through riverside meadows, was now sprouting fashionable brick houses and storefronts at a stunning rate. After a visit to widow Baker’s museum, you could stop into
William Maxwell’s, Distiller & Tallow Chandler, for a good dose of his vaunted rum, and thus fortified, go to the
next shop over for some godless tract such as Palmer’s
Principles of Nature
. If you were feeling a bit testy, there were “well-finished Hair-Trigger Pistols” from
gunsmith Joseph Finch, as he kept several cases on hand for Manhattan’s querulous gentlemen. Or, if a quiet weekend indoors was what you had in mind,
tinsmith Tom Eagles could supply a table’s worth of “egg codlers,” hammered teapots, and “coffee biggins”—the last being the latest fad from France, involving the
boiling
of coffee rather than merely drinking it as a dissolved powder.

Getting from one shop to the next was not the easiest task. Manhattan’s muddy cobblestone streets were so badly paved that longtime residents acquired a cautious gait;
Ben Franklin claimed you could spot visiting New Yorkers on Philadelphia’s smooth streets by the way they shuffled. They had to, for old New York buildings were built in the Dutch style,
with elevated first stories and stoops that jutted out into the street, ready to trip up the unwary on dark nights. Even the few streets with unobstructed brick sidewalks were comically narrow—just wide enough, as one chronicler put it, to accommodate “
two lean men to walk abreast or one fat man alone.”

Yet for the three museumgoers, it was still a pleasant afternoon’s walk. It had not always been thus: Great swaths of the city had been destroyed by fire in the Revolution, and what wasn’t burned out of spite was burned for survival. When he reconnoitered the British-occupied island in 1781, George Washington had found it “
totally stripped of trees,” with the old woods and orchards chopped down after a series of brutal winters. It was only now, a generation later, that the city had truly recovered.

Except, perhaps, in one matter: the water.

On a hot July day, water gushed from the
shining brass pumps installed along the thoroughfare; the rills that splashed out were good for cooling off, as well as for putting out fires or washing up. But few people were foolish enough to
drink
from the public pumps. For Manhattanites, as it happened, boiling coffee in a tin biggin was an excellent idea—because otherwise, a cup of the stuff might kill you. The destruction and deforestation of the war had once
nearly caused local wells to run dry, and the explosive growth of the recovering city had only made matters worse.

“
The water is very bad to drink,” lamented a teetotaling English traveler who unwisely quenched his thirst from Manhattan’s public pumps—“before I found this out, and suffered sometimes sickness, with very severe pains in the bowels.”

If you were walking down Greenwich on a hot summer day, you were far better off going into David Forrest’s grocery for some of the local spruce beer—or better still, into the tavern on the corner. When a man in New York valued his health, he also valued a stiff drink.

T
HE TAVERN
wasn’t the usual place for Hope, not if she were to follow Quaker principles of moderation. While her
more free-spirited cousin Elma hadn’t fully devoted herself to the sect yet, it was not quite a fit place for her, either. But for a young carpenter, on a hot day in July, the tavern near the corner of Greenwich and Barclay was a fine place to slake a thirst for drink or local news.
For the former there was cherry bounce, a sweet dram of cherry brandy spiked with extra sugar; or rum fruit punch; or blackstrap, a witches’ brew of rum, molasses, and herbs; or the benign old favorite bogus, which was just rum mixed with beer.

Sooner or later, in any case, you’d be having some rum.

In newspapers, there was considerably more choice at hand: the literary-minded
New-York Weekly Museum
; Federalist broadsheets, including Noah Webster’s
New-York Commercial Advertiser
; and Republican rags like
Greenleaf’s New-York Journal
. Newspapers were still expensive enough that only the more respectable men in town had them delivered at home; others shared copies in local coffeehouses and taverns. The latest news was of the riotous mob who’d
tried for three nights to pull down a local brothel just two blocks away, on the corner of Greenwich and Murray. Some in the tavern had, perhaps, firsthand knowledge of the shocking particulars of Mrs. Murphy’s establishment, but what went on there was hardly enough to whip up a riot. No, it took a murder to stir this kind of anger—in this case, that of a man who’d disappeared into Mrs. Murphy’s house of ill fame one night, only to be found the next day out by the docks—quite dead.

“
We understand (for we resort to no such place) that the mob assembled again the night before last in considerable numbers,” reported the
New-York Gazette
. At least a
thousand rioters had tried to smash apart Mrs. Murphy’s brothel, and Mayor Richard Varick had called out a regiment of mounted troops to disperse them. In the end, Mrs. Murphy proved the picture of fetchingly disheveled innocence. It seemed her customer had walked out of the brothel on his own and simply expired in the night—as young men sometimes did in Manhattan.

“
The plea is, the necessity of
correcting
abuses, or
avenging
crimes,” the
Gazette
warned the next day. “But what rectitude of judgment can be expected from a mob, composed of the lowest, most illiterate, ignorant, and inflammatory parts of a community? It acts upon
report
, commonly
false
reports—and vents its rage as frequently upon the innocent as the guilty—for, real innocence or guilt
cannot generally be decided by them. If they strike the
culpable
, it is merely the effect of
chance
.”

Levi Weeks, at least, could expect to work, make his name, and stay clear of these numberless mobs and snares of the city. The boardinghouse he lived in on Greenwich was a respectable one, and it had the pleasant distractions of his landlord’s sister-in-law Hope and her cousin Elma. To be a carpenter and a foreman in his brother’s upstanding construction firm—and a boarder in a respectable Quaker boardinghouse, with the chaste favor of two of the proprietor’s unmarried relatives—it was a fine thing, really.

T
HE NEWSPAPERS
were not as reassuring. There was the usual cacophony of notices, including an enigmatic dockside offer of “
BRANDY
Exchanged for
PORK
,” and a ten-dollar reward for the return of “
a Negro
MAN
, named Henry.” But amid these ordinary items, a column in the
New-York Spectator
pierced like a needle: “
A letter received in town yesterday by a reputable mercantile house, from Philadelphia, has the following painful sentence. ‘The Fever is, we are sorry to say, now actually here, and has made some considerable progress.’ ”

Nobody needed to ask which fever it was. Along the Atlantic coast, there were two illness that everyone feared each year. In the winter it was the slow and crippling terror of smallpox, and in the summer, it was the swift-moving fire of yellow fever. The latter had plagued cities
along the Atlantic seaboard for nearly a century, though for most of that time it had appeared only every decade or so. Since the end of the Revolution, however, the scourge had been returning with increasing frequency—and nobody was quite sure why.

Noah Webster had his own theory. He’d just published a new book,
A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases; with the Principal Phenomena of the Physical World, Which Precede and Accompany Them, and Observations Deduced from the Facts Stated
. After elaborately charting the occurrences of comets, earthquakes, volcanoes,
and various plagues, the great grammarian was convinced: They were all somehow
connected
. Clearly some sort of invisible electrical fluid bound the earth to its inhabitants; to Webster, natural convulsions such as the eruptions of Mount Etna were like a tidal wave crashing through that electrical fluid. “
Those periods, in general, have been most distinguished for sickness over the world, in which the fire of the earth has exhibited the most numerous and violent effects,” he theorized. “It is probable that the invisible operations of the electrical fluid produce more effects than those which are seen.”

That was one way to look at it: but another, and far more gratifying, was to blame foreigners. The first known outbreak of yellow fever had occurred in 1703, before its malignancy even had a name. It was simply called “the great sickness.” The blame that first summer fell on a ship from St. Thomas that arrived in Manhattan peculiarly close to the beginning of the outbreak. Ever since, suspicion attached itself to these “
vessels from one of the sickly ports of the West Indies.” One epidemic was even
blamed on a load of rotten coffee that an exotic trader had dumped unsold on a Philadelphia wharf. And for believers in contagion theories, this introduction of the fever to one city from the next had a logical conclusion: the need for a quarantine.

But others hazarded that there might be more local causes—“
exhalations from the ground,” as local scholar James Hardie put it. The origin of such exhalations was not hard to guess at; the prominent physician David
Hosack later estimated that fully one-twelfth of Manhattan’s inhabited area was occupied by privies. Down by the sunken elevations near the docks, stagnant pools of brackish water gathered in what one writer termed “
an almost innumerable number of cellars and back yards … many of them stowed with large quantities of putrid beef, in the neighborhood of filthy sewers.” Manhattan’s rapid growth aggravated matters; one doctor complained that “
in all the streets where buildings were going forward, the workmen were allowed to restrain the course of the water, in the gutters, by forming little dams, for their convenience in making mortar.”

Curiously, one reader in Philadelphia had noticed something surely coincidental—mosquitoes appeared at about the same time as the fever did. “
The late rains in the city will produce a great increase of mosquitoes in the city, distressing to the sick, and troublesome to those who are well,” he wrote to the editor of Dunlap’s
American Daily Advertiser
. “Whoever will take the trouble to examine their rain-water tubs, will find millions.” The letter writer—who signed himself “A.B.”—gave advice so modest that scarcely anyone even noticed it. Pour in “any common oil,” he wrote, “which will diffuse over the whole surface, and by excluding the air, [it] will destroy the whole brood.”

Back in Manhattan, New Yorkers like Levi Weeks and his fellow tavern idlers mused over A.B.’s letter, rolled up their newspapers to swat away the July mosquitoes, and wondered what on earth it could be that was killing Philadelphians.

B
UT THE
murmurs were getting louder. Unmarried young women like Elma and Hope who stayed in the city were, perhaps, courting death—and yet neither had the wherewithal to leave town. For a carpenter like Levi, there was simply too much work to be had during the summer months to leave—and, after all, the papers assured them that it was safe to stay.

“
Idle tales,” scoffed one newspaper at yellow fever reports. “Our citizens may rest easy about this fever at present.”

And if they could not rest easy? Then, the editors suggested, they should at least keep a discreet silence. “A false report on that subject,” they warned, “ought to be considered a calumny punishable by law.” Yelling “Fire!” in a theater was nothing compared to yelling “Fever!” in a crowded city: It crippled trade for months. In its disastrous epidemic of 1793, when a tenth of its population had died,
Philadelphia had misled other cities for weeks in a desperate bid to avoid quarantine. New York had done exactly the same in its own epidemics. And to stroll along Manhattan’s docks that July in 1799 was to see just what was at stake: Wharves packed with cargo
vessels, many named for the sturdy women the owners had left at home.
In the dock at that moment there was a ship named
Sister
, the brig
Two Sisters
, and the schooner
Four Sisters
; there was also a
Louisa
, a
Bertha
—and
Betsey, Abigail, Lydia, Charlotte, Cornelia
, and
Prudence
—and not one but three ships christened
Mary
. You could haggle over everything from six-pound cannons to a rather perilously matched cargo of a hundred crates of Bursley crockery and three thousand Stourbridge bricks.