Duel with the Devil (25 page)

The question involves considerations of great moment
, he warned them,
regardless of the consequences attached to your determination
. There could be riots yet again—and if they hadn’t recalled that from the riots last summer at Mrs. Murphy’s brothel on their own, then Aaron Burr’s opening argument had refreshed their memories of that danger. Still, the judge remained unequivocal.

You must find the prisoner guilty if in your conscience you believe him so from the evidence—and to acquit him if you find him innocent
, he added.
The obligation incurred when you became jurors limits you to the evidence produced by the trial
.

Some of that evidence, Judge Lansing reminded them, did not exactly flatter the prosecution’s case.
If
the testimony of the defense witnesses was true, then Levi’s movements that fatal evening were accounted for, save for one gap that left Levi about
ten minutes
to run one mile from Ezra’s house to the Manhattan Well and back, and to commit the murder—all without becoming the least bit discomposed.
If
the testimony of the prosecution witnesses was true, none of them had actually sighted Elma or Levi together outside of the boardinghouse. In fact, aside from the allegation by Mrs. Ring about the two being engaged, the only link between the prisoner and that night’s events was what one old and confused widow had seen out of her window.

Regarding the widow Susannah Broad
, the judge reminded them,
if the account that the sleigh was taken out of the lumberyard of the prisoner’s brother on or about the time Gulielma Sands disappeared does not satisfy you, then it must be evident that the accounts of the other witnesses respecting a sleigh, or cries of distress heard near the Manhattan Well, have no application to the prisoner
.

It just depended on whose word they believed. To the judge, the matter was simple: While in the previous decade the notion of
“beyond a
reasonable
doubt” had started to gain currency as a legal concept, men of Judge Lansing’s generation had been trained to believe that jurors were in danger of mortal sin if they convicted on insufficient evidence in a capital case. And so, the judge added, as for himself, the mayor, and the recorder
—we are unanimously of the opinion that the proof is insufficient to warrant a verdict against the prisoner
.

Whether that unanimity would be shared with other New Yorkers was a different matter. The crowds that might gather outside—as well as the accounts of the pamphlets, the hauntings, and the body in the street—could not be far from the merchants’ minds. With a state primary coming up in a few weeks’ time, half of Manhattan was already convinced that the other half was about to lead the nation to ruin. If they couldn’t trust their government to prosecute a man nearly everyone was
certain
was guilty of murder, whom could they trust?

By the time the jurors left the room, it was crawling toward 3
A.M
. A chill had settled into the air, and the spectators and legal teams had scarcely sunk back down into their chairs with exhaustion, huddling together for warmth in the dimly lit room, when the door to the courtroom swung open again.

Some said afterward that it had taken
ten minutes; others said it was
four
or five; another still was quite sure that it was “
less than two.” But what everyone remembered, after the longest murder trial in the city’s history, was how little time it had taken the jury to reach their verdict.

William Coleman stood up and gravely
called a final roll of the jury’s members: “Jasper Ward,” the court clerk’s voice rang out. “Garrit Storm. John Rathbone …” It was
Simon Schermerhorn, though—the most humbly employed of the group, and bearing one of the oldest names from the city’s Dutch past—that the jurors had chosen as their foreman.
He raised his right hand, dutifully following the instruction of the clerk.

Look upon the prisoner, you gentlemen of the jury
, Coleman commanded.
How say you? Is he guilty or
not guilty?

The young carpenter stood at the bar, knowing as he gazed back at the jury that it had all come down to this moment. All Hamilton and Burr could do now was watch—and hope.

“Not guilty,” the foreman said, and the courtroom erupted into
shouts and applause as the judge gaveled loudly for order.

Levi Weeks walked out into the night air of Manhattan unshackled—a free man.

N
OT GUILTY
?

After all the vitriol expended upon Levi Weeks—the darkly insinuating handbills, the scores of witnesses summoned from around Lispenard’s Meadow, the ill-wishers outside the courthouse that one chronicler numbered in the “
many hundreds, perhaps thousands”—it seemed inconceivable before the trial that the fellow could be anything but guilty. The city’s Court of Oyer and Terminer did not have a reputation for leniency, after all: In one of the cases after Levi’s an unfortunate miscreant drew
four years of hard labor for stealing a black mourning cloth from a local church.

But for those watching closely, Levi’s verdict was not entirely a surprise. “
Although some circumstances point to him as the perpetrator of the horrid deed,” one local judge had written privately after his arrest, “there has not yet been sufficient proof to convict him of the fact.” And as far as the reporters attending the trial were concerned, nothing in Colden’s case for the prosecution changed that damning assessment.

“
Mr. Burr opened the defense with perspicuity and force, as he disentangled every circumstance of perplexity; tore away the suspicions that had obstinately hung upon the public mind.… If the deceased was murdered, this at least was not the man,” the
New-York Daily Advertiser
weighed in. The fact that Hamilton had forgone closing arguments also impressed the paper: “By the evidence of the facts alone is this young man’s innocence completely established. Not a single doubt remains on the mind of any person who was
present at the trial.… Every one had come more or less impressed with the idea that he was
GUILTY
 … [but] were, as soon as the verdict
NOT GUILTY
was given, just bursting into involuntary and exulting acclamations.”

Within hours of the acquittal, a new pamphlet was on sale:

It was an admirably theatrical title, and that suited its publisher just fine.
David Longworth was known for publishing plays and possessed a impresario’s pragmatism in offering any fare that would sell. He also hawked a city directory,
sentimental prints of the late General Washington being lofted heavenward, and
now this hastily assembled account “Taken in Short Hand by a Gentleman of the Bar.” In his race to trump the competition, Longworth
set the type even as his “Gentleman” wrote it and handed him the sheets.

The sixteen-page trial summary completely left out Mr. Ring’s affair and Richard Croucher’s machinations. Few witnesses were even identified by name. Still, it was the first, and it found quick sale among crowds eager for an account of the trial. Longworth was
unabashed in his motives: “
The narrative I published was too hastily written to be anything but a ‘catchpenny,’ ” he cheerfully admitted.

The “Gentleman of the Bar” he hired confessed as much himself: “
The careless and inelegant style in which these are recited, we account for on three principles,” the writer said unapologetically. “First is, the excessive fatigue we have undergone in attending this trial, which has deprived us of two nights rest, and rendered us unfit for any occupation. The second is, the extreme haste.… The third is, our complete indifference to whether our readers are pleased with our style or not.”

One reader was certainly not pleased: William Coleman. The publisher’s ads that John Furman had bought throughout the trial—promising that “
he had procured the clerk of the circuit court to take down in short hand the particulars of the evidence”—had instead only stoked demand for this flimsy knockoff by “a Gentleman of the Bar,” released before Coleman could even get his own started. Infuriated, the court clerk marched down to Noah Webster’s office to place an ad in the next morning’s issue of the
New-York Commercial Advertiser
.

“
The miserable shift of trying to put off this catch-penny contrivance under the insinuation of a falsehood, render it fit and proper to say implicitly that this is not the report promised to citizens by Mr.
FURMAN
,” he sputtered. Anyone wanting the genuine article, he added, would have to wait at least another four days.

David Longworth was gleefully unrepentant: Catching wind of Coleman’s ad, he immediately paid for a notice to run underneath it, mocking the very accuracy and dogged stenography that Coleman laid claim to.
His
pamphlet, Longworth promised, could “
gratify the public curiosity … without entering into unnecessary detail of the tedious and unimportant part of the testimony.” The publisher jeered at Coleman’s self-importance: “
By what privilege does this man insult me for printing an account of a trial, of which the whole world has a right to publish narratives? By what privilege but that of unending, insolent and vindictive
prejudice
?”

Coleman’s temper had gotten the better of his commercial judgment. By revealing the earliest possible publication date of his account, he’d put rival printers on notice that they still had four more days to leap in with their versions of the Levi Weeks trial. And so it was that the next morning, Coleman awoke to find
another
pamphlet.

His catchpenny rival was right: The trial did belong to the public, and the latest member to seize this opportunity was James Hardie.
As a brilliant young Scottish scholar, Hardie came to New York after the war with the hopes of becoming a professor at Columbia—a dream that slowly dissolved in a sea of drink. For years he’d boozily turned to anything at all to support himself. One year he was a tutor, teaching “
Greek, Latin and English languages grammatically, writing, arithmetic, bookkeeping, geography and navigation”; the next he was
running a Literary and Intelligence Office that professed to offer everything from drawing up indenture documents to a servant employment board to a real estate service. This particular year, he was a court reporter … of a sort.

“
Not being acquainted with the art of stenography, I am incapable of giving verbatim what was said upon this solemn and awful occasion,” Hardie explained, before adding that his haste was all in the service of seeing justice done to Levi Weeks. Yet
An Impartial Account
, as he titled it, was indeed a serious work. Twice as long as Longworth’s “catchpenny,” it featured every major witness from the trial, identified all the members of the court and jury, and delved into the sordid revelations of Ring’s adultery and Croucher’s slanders. Hardie’s account was such an improvement on Longworth’s that when four days had passed without any sign of the court clerk’s long-promised book, few were likely surprised. The rest of the week passed with no sign of anything new in the window of Furman’s shop; surely Coleman had simply given up and dropped the idea.