Duel with the Devil (26 page)

I
N FACT
, the court clerk had been writing like a man possessed. And when curious New Yorkers arrived in John Furman’s shop on
Monday, April 14, 1800, what they found on offer for
thirty-seven and a half cents almost defied description, even as the title gamely tried to cover it:
A Report of the Trial of Levi Weeks: On an Indictment for the Murder of Gulielma Sands, on Monday the Thirty-First Day of March, and Tuesday the First Day of April, 1800. Taken in Short Hand by a Clerk of the Court
. Transcribed and set entirely by hand in just under two weeks, the ninety-nine-page book was easily the longest murder trial account ever published in New York, not to mention the most painstakingly created.

“
When it was promised at an earlier day, it was not foreseen what degree of labor or painful attention would be required to render it correct,” Coleman explained. Rather than the customary summary of testimony with a few scattered quotes, Coleman had one-upped his competitors by including
everything
. The testimony, the cross-examiners’ questions, the scoffing interjections, the collaring of Mr. Ring from the courtroom and the candle held up to identify Richard Croucher—it was all there, in direct quotation.

It was the first such transcript ever published in the new republic—the first fully documented murder trial in U.S. history. Without meaning to, his rivals had goaded William Coleman into pioneering a new genre. But there had been competing catchpennies for past murder trials as well; why had this trial created something new?

One clue lay in the publication date: 1800. In past centuries,
before the adversarial system of trials allowed defendants to have lawyers, a murder trial was effectively a ceremony of laying out a person’s guilt and punishment. The form of literature followed the trial’s function: crudely inked confessions and dying words on the scaffold, and execution sermons that hectored readers not to act like the woeful, condemned sinners. This remained a thriving genre, and readers could still amuse themselves with such gratifyingly moral and exhaustive titles as
The Reprobate’s Reward; or, A Looking-Glass for Disobedient Children, Being a Full and True Account of the Barbarous and Bloody Murder of One Elizabeth Wood, Living in the City of Cork, by Her Son, as She Was Riding, upon the 28th Day of July, to Kingsdale
Market. How He Cut Her Throat from Ear to Ear; as Also How the Murder Was Found Out by the Apparition of Her Ghost; the Manner of His Being Taken; His Dying Words at the Place of Execution: With a True Story of Verses Written with His Own Hand in Cork Jail, Being a Warning to All Disobedient Children to Repent, and Obey Their Parents
.

The adversarial trial system created an argument—a space for uncertainty in the unfolding of the story—and a narrative tension to take the place of old-fashioned sermonizing. It was a subtler form of storytelling, and one not unfamiliar to readers of the burgeoning new genre of novels. The era’s desire for vivid narrative also encompassed the use of quoted dialogue, which found its own curious reflection in another important clue within Coleman’s title:
Taken in Short Hand
.

Court transcription was still a new art. Though
stenographic systems had been around for two centuries, it was only within the past generation that they had found widespread use. The method of abstract geometric shapes that
Coleman favored—known as Byrom’s New Universal Shorthand—had initially been
developed by a brilliantly deceitful courtier as a method of writing in code. Now it served to reveal rather than conceal, as courtrooms and legislatures began adopting stenography.
Full transcripts were published of Harry Bedlow’s rape trial in 1793, and readers had become accustomed to seeing complete parliamentary and congressional speeches in newspapers.

The nearest precursor to Coleman’s achievement—a 1798 transcript of the
Pennsylvania trial of four murderous conspirators against one Francis Shitz—also showed a level of detail that likely relied on shorthand. But unlike Coleman, that account’s author hadn’t thought to include the questions asked of witnesses, only their answers. In creating his account of the Levi Weeks trial, Coleman understood the electrifying effect of including both sides of such transcribed speech to create actual dialogue.

With stenographers ready to take down dialogue, and an adversarial trial system to fuel the drama of the trial, all that was needed for the first true-crime mystery was, in fact, an unsolved
murder—and the Elma Sands case had been the final key element needed to create an explosive new form of literature.

N
OT EVERYONE
was happy with Coleman’s literary invention. Rival pamphleteer James Hardie pointed out in an open letter that Coleman’s book was riddled with misspelled names for the witnesses—a jab at the clerk’s pride that hurt all the more for being entirely true. Hardie’s harshest criticism, though, cut to the heart of the case itself: “
Let me ask, what strict regard to the truth could be expected from a reporter who, though clerk of the court, has shewn himself to be actuated by prejudice against Levi Weeks, as to have repeatedly said that if he had been on the jury, he would have starved before he acquitted him!”

Hardie was not alone in this suspicion. Coleman’s rumored antagonism toward Levi so worried Ezra Weeks that the
builder had quietly tried to bribe the author into making America’s first complete trial transcript a little
less
complete, offering $500 to sweeten it or $1,500 to suppress it entirely.

“Mr. Weeks,” Coleman rebuffed him. “You are not worth money enough, neither is the City of New York, to buy me.”

Ezra Weeks was so impressed—an incorruptible writer in Manhattan!—that he and Coleman became fast friends. In fact, Ezra found he had little to fear from the clerk’s studiously noncommittal rendition of the facts. Coleman invited Ezra to read the manuscript before it went to press—and
in a response to his critics, Coleman revealed that he’d consulted “Mr. Ezra Weeks, and the prisoner’s counsel, to whom the proof-sheet was
particularly submitted
.” Waiting for Ezra Weeks and Alexander Hamilton to read the transcript was part of what had delayed his release date, he explained. The revelation was a startling one, not least because it confirmed what everyone likely suspected: that Ezra was the real client behind Levi’s powerful defense team.

A
MID THE
dueling trial narratives, locals had plenty else to distract themselves after the trial. A huge crowd watched
the launch of a new frigate, the USS
President
, and loudly celebrated with newly penned songs such as “
Huzza for the President.” For those less patriotic in their entertainments, the local theater was offering
Ground & Lofty Tumbling, Posture and Equilibriums
, in which a Signor Joseph Doctor would “go through a
HOOP
, with a
PYRAMID
of thirteen Glasses of Wine on his Forehead.”

The lawyers, too, remained busy. Within days,
Livingston and Hamilton were on one side of an insurance suit, with Burr on the other—while in another lawsuit, it was
Livingston and Burr versus Hamilton. Their work was a lucrative courtroom waltz, though the stunning victory for Levi Weeks had not profited them. Instead,
Burr took out another $1,500 loan, and Hamilton received a politely humiliating note from a cashier at the Bank of New York—the bank that Hamilton himself had founded—reminding him that his “
account, by the former ones being charged, is now overdrawn $5300.” Yet Hamilton in particular was wise not to bill Weeks; he already owed so much to Ezra that he could be thankful simply for keeping out of debtor’s prison.

More vexing to Hamilton was another mighty contest that led inexorably back to Lispenard’s Meadow, and to the sly banking scheme that Aaron Burr had slipped into the municipal water supply. With Thomas Jefferson the likely Republican presidential nominee, Burr was positioned to become vice president—and his new bank’s influence would pay off in Republican electoral votes for the country’s most crucial swing district.

“
It is universally acknowledged,” admitted a Federalist writer signing himself
Marcellus
, “both by Federalists and Jacobins, that the election of the President on either side, depends on the city of New-York—that is, if the Federal ticket for the state legislature is carried, a Federal President will be chosen; if the Jacobin ticket succeeds, Mr. Jefferson will be President.” Savvy New Yorkers could spot the
pen name of the president’s ambitious son, John Quincy
Adams, in Marcellus’s editorials—and they could also spot the increasingly dire rhetoric of the Federalist Party: “Mr. Jefferson, and of course the Jacobins at large, wish to destroy the Constitution of the United States.”

Federalists, though, apparently wished to destroy
themselves
. By the time they
caucused in the Tontine City Hotel on April 15, 1800,
they were weakened by the party’s unpopular Alien and Sedition Acts, and by incessant bickering between General Hamilton and President Adams. Their resulting local slate landed with a thud: The list, one Republican aide smirked, consisted of “
two grocers, a ship chandler, a baker, a potter, a bookseller, a mason, and a shoemaker.” The most prominent man willing to run was Cadwallader Colden; his fame, alas, was now for bungling the Elma Sands case.

When advance word of the slate was delivered to Burr, he calmly slipped Hamilton’s list of hapless loyalists into his pocket.

“
Now I have him all hollow,” the colonel said coolly.

Two days later he hit Hamilton with the most assuredly solid slate in New York political history: The Republican candidates included former four-term governor George Clinton and a raft of war heroes ranging from Major General Horatio Gates to none other than Brockholst Livingston. After campaigning as a party of law and order, Federalists now found themselves facing a wall of bona fide soldiers and prominent politicians.

“
What means these gigantic figures?” one Federalist editorial complained weakly. “Why this parade of Governors, Generals, and Senators for the lowest civil office?”

Hamilton knew all too well why. The Republican faithful that he’d denigrated as mere anarchists had been whipped by Burr into a disciplined force—and the colonel’s Richmond Hill mansion had become an election war room, roiling with constant planning and sifting of voter information from each ward. “
Committees were in session day and night during the whole time at his house,” one local merchant marveled. “Refreshments were always on the table, and mattresses were set up for temporary repose in the rooms. Reports
were hourly received from sub-committees—and in short, no means left unemployed.”

Burr had virtually invented modern electioneering—canvassing across the city, he fought Federalists house to house through the Sixth and Seventh Wards, which encompassed both the Ring boardinghouse and Lispenard’s Meadow. Even when the import of an election was nationwide, the impracticality of a traveling campaign in the far-flung nation meant that this savvy local groundwork was crucial. Yet Hamiltonians were bewildered that reputable men such as Aaron Burr and Brockholst Livingston would lower themselves to such vote scrounging. “
Many people wonder that the ex-Senator and would-be Vice President can stoop so low as to visit every low tavern that may happen to be crowded with his dear fellow citizens,” puzzled one Federalist newspaper.

But among those men in the taverns were grateful Bank of Manhattan customers—men whose votes could now reward their great benefactor.

“
The leaders of the aristocratic faction bewailed the establishment of the Bank of the Manhattan Company, as an institution whose well-timed liberality secured to the merchants a free exercise of their political principles,” one Burr editorialist explained. Not only had the bank allowed merchants to vote Republican without fear of reprisal from a monopolistic Bank of New York, it had also allowed the “middling classes” to start acquiring enough property to qualify as voters. “Merchants, mechanics, cartmen, men of all grades,” the editorial claimed, “are interested in preserving this important source of independence and prosperity.”

The project that began in the hidden waters of Lispenard’s Meadow was ending happily for Burr. It was ending quite well, in fact, for a great many people—but not for the unfortunate young woman whose name was now so inextricably and mysteriously tangled up with its history. And for her mourners, a mystery remained to be solved.