Duel with the Devil (29 page)

Coleman’s unlikely new friend from the trial, Ezra Weeks, also continued to prosper.
He became one of the city’s great hoteliers and developers, and his respectability was such that
he served without incident on an 1806 jury where the defense counsel was none other than Cadwallader Colden. The hotelier was so clearly trustworthy that Colden did not use a peremptory dismissal on the man—even though it was Ezra who, just a few years earlier, had been key in destroying his case against Levi Weeks.

For despite the doomed Elma Sands case, and the hapless Federalist candidacy that followed, Cadwallader Colden’s fate had hardly been sealed. He returned to private practice, even serving as a
defense counsel to a man charged with aiding Alexander Hamilton at the duel—and he lost that case, too. But over time his reputation grew, and he steadily rose in the Federalist ranks to become
mayor of New York in 1818. In his later years he was a tireless advocate for
his best friend, the steamboat inventor Robert Fulton—and when not fulminating over canals and steam engines,
Colden helped found the state’s first formally chartered scientific society.

New York’s elite could hardly keep from crossing paths, particularly in a grand intellectual enterprise such as a new scientific society. And, in fact, there were two other curiously familiar names among the
founding officers of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York: Brockholst Livingston and David Hosack.

Having quietly worked on the Weeks case in the shadow of Hamilton and Burr, Livingston proved to have the most durable career by far. In time he
rose to the state supreme court and, in 1807, earned an appointment by Thomas Jefferson to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served as a justice until his death in 1823.

The career of Dr. David Hosack, the physician to Hamilton and Burr and one of the most prominent witnesses of the Weeks trial, was no less distinguished. Along with
helping to found Bellevue Hospital and
leading vaccination drives across the city, he joined Livingston as one of the eleven founding members of the New-York Historical Society.
Their first meeting was in the Portrait Room of City Hall—and there, where years earlier the sequestered Weeks jurors had spent a restless night, the men who had witnessed history now began the great task of preserving it.

H
ISTORY, THOUGH
, was something that Levi Weeks wished only to escape.

Even with the vindications of his trial and Croucher’s conviction, the young carpenter never could settle easily into his adopted city. After a couple of years of living in his brother’s home, he gave up and
moved back to Deerfield, Massachusetts, to the inauspiciously named neighborhood of Bloody Brook. Here, at least, he lived among people who trusted him, though he had to leave his old carpentry trade to
work in selling liquor and dry goods.

But like many a city dweller since, he found returning to his parents’ home was not an easy burden to bear.

“
Son,” his pious father lamented, “I wish I knew whether
any
topics on religion are agreeable to you.”

Levi was no longer cut out for sleepy rural western Massachusetts; he was restless. And, perhaps understandably with his history, he found himself still a bachelor as he approached his thirtieth birthday. For someone chafing against his home and his past, there was just one place to go.
In 1805, he ended his dry goods partnership, packed his belongings, and struck out for the western frontier.

The Appalachians and the lands out to the Mississippi were still wild, barely settled lands. For a while he tarried in Cincinnati, and from there moved on to Kentucky, whose residents he did not care for—“
they were brought up among slaves,” he explained to a friend, “and their manners especially of the lower class is very disgusting.” Soon he left yet again, pushing farther westward, all the while
recording his travels in a diary that he had brought along.

Even this was not fated to last; as he forded a tributary of the Mississippi with his horse,
Levi and his belongings went toppling into the water. He barely escaped with his life—and his diary vanished into the muddy waters. Disappearing into the hinterlands of the West, he truly was becoming a man without a past.

“
Ultimately,” his hometown chronicler in Massachusetts recorded in 1838, “he became a vagabond.”

But that’s not quite what happened.

F
OR A MAN LOOKING TO START OVER AGAIN, IT WAS HARD TO
find anyplace farther away from Manhattan—in distance or in temperament—than the river city of Natchez, then the capital of the Mississippi Territory. It had been only
a decade since the last Spanish garrison had left and ceded the port to the United States. Even as its citizens grew wealthy on a burgeoning flatboat traffic of cotton and sugar, the place still had the wild feel of a frontier outpost.

“
Its vicinity is very uneven,” Levi marveled in a letter to a friend back east. “You are constantly ascending and descending as you pass through in any direction.… The houses are extremely irregular and for the most part temporary things.”

It was, in short, perfect for an aspiring architect looking to make his mark. Toppling with his supplies into the river had been nearly a disaster for Levi, but it had also been a kind of baptism: He’d lost his past, but kept the skills he’d honed back in New York as Ezra’s trusted foreman. In a new city that had plenty of cash but few architects, he brought a trained eye for
fashionable Georgian and Federalist neoclassical design—and he’d arrived at just the right time.

“
The brick house I am now building is just without the city line, and is designed for the most magnificent building in the territory,” he reported. “This is the first house in the territory on which was ever attempted any orders of architecture. The site is one of those peculiar situations which combines all the delights of romance—the pleasures of rurality and the approach of sublimity.”

His client was a
fellow Massachusetts native, Lyman Harding, a wealthy attorney whose presence in Natchez was invaluable to Levi. As it happened, Lyman was an old and
trusted army friend of Aaron Burr’s. He’d even served as Burr’s defense counsel after some frontier adventurism saw Burr unsuccessfully tried in 1807 for treason after trying to foment a Mexican revolution. And like Levi, Harding had made his fortune after arriving penniless in Natchez; the two men, in short, were admirably matched.

Colonel Burr had saved Levi’s life. Now his comrade would help him start a new one.

Harding’s trust in Weeks was amply repaid. His new architect created all the comforts of a classic home for his client, with grand
Ionic columns along the front of the house, topped by Corinthian entablature; inside, Weeks fashioned a dramatic black walnut helix staircase that spiraled up from the front entranceway toward the sleeping quarters. The mansion, dubbed Auburn, became
the inspiration for other grand mansions in the region—and for Weeks,
commissions for Natchez’s new city hall and college building would follow.

Levi flourished in his new land: He married at long last, and in short order fathered four children. His buildings—and his many descendants—live on to this day.

“C
OLONEL
B
URR
has been here,” Ezra wrote from New York to Levi Weeks in 1812, “and is at his old profession of the law.”

It had taken nearly a decade for the former vice president to even dare setting foot again in Manhattan; the man behind one of the first recorded murder trials in the United States had by then gone through many personal trials himself. After narrowly escaping a murder charge in the East, and then a charge of treason in the West, he’d drifted through Europe until he eventually found himself nearly penniless in Paris.

Just a few years earlier Burr had risen to the vice presidency and had been the proud owner of one of Manhattan’s grandest
mansions; now he found himself living in
a ten-by-ten rented room, desperately
dodging petty debts to Parisian shopkeepers. He was in debt to the shoemaker who had patched his boots; he spent months evading an optician who wanted payment for a pair of spectacles.

“
Had one sous left,” Burr wrote in a typical journal entry for December 1810, “and took one pound cheese on credit.”

His poverty, he knew, was positively dangerous. After he accidentally bumped a pane of glass with his umbrella one morning, Burr had the frightening premonition that he’d have been unable to pay had he broken it—and that “
I must, infallibly, have been taken before a
commissaire de police
.”

His modest quarters, Burr drolly noted, did possess one virtue: “
I can sit in my chair and reach every and anything that I possess.” His low point came when, after pawning nearly everything, he finally landed work translating a book into French—only to discover that it was
a volume containing “abuse and libels” about himself. He took the job all the same.

Burr did not find New York much more welcoming when he returned; one judge, recognizing the prodigal politician in the street, ran up to him and shouted: “
You are a scoundrel, sir! A scoundrel!” Burr doggedly resumed practicing law nonetheless. He had to—for the aging vice president and hero of the Revolution found his requests for a
military pension denied by a Congress that had still not forgiven him.

Burr would haunt New York’s courts for the rest of his long life; one Manhattanite recalled a genteel old man, “
very thin and straight, dressed in black, and his hair so profusely powdered that a superfluous portion adhered to his coat collar.” He took on cases that other great lawyers would not tangle with, becoming
one of America’s first specialists in family law—for if some respectable men still scorned the infamous Aaron Burr, women desperately seeking help in divorce cases did not. And after he died at the age of eighty in 1836, it was a curious realization among his friends that they’d
almost never heard him speak again of Alexander Hamilton.
But there was one tragedy that the old man had
sometimes mused over: the death of Miss Elma Sands.

T
HE
M
ANHATTAN
Well mystery lived on in the public’s mind as well. Within weeks of Croucher’s rape trial in 1800, Charles Brockden Brown—a brilliant Gothic novelist and
friend of William Coleman’s—published a short story based on the case, “The Trials of Arden.” In it, a tragic maiden is found strangled in a riverbank grotto, and her titular paramour is instantly suspected by a vengeful populace.

“
A recent instance has occurred, in which this state of mind was felt by almost every person within the precincts of the city,” Brown reminded his readers, before reflecting upon the destroyed reputation of the accused. “
Of all men his lot was most disastrous, the most intolerable! Such a complicated evil! A mystery so impenetrable, so fatal to fame, peace and life of one who merited a better fate!”

To drive home the timeliness of his story, the same magazine that ran Brown’s story also included
reviews of both Coleman’s trial transcript
and
the newly published transcript of Croucher’s trial. Just as in the Weeks trial, Brown’s central character of Arden is found innocent—to the fury of the crowds outside, who then
riot and attack Arden and then even the jury itself. It is only later that Mayo, a Croucher-like figure, proves to be the true culprit—“
Europe had been for a long time the theatre of his crimes,” Brown hinted presciently, “but at length he withdrew to America, as to a new scene.”

The Weeks case also attracted the pen of Philip Freneau,
an old Princeton classmate of Burr’s who had become America’s preeminent epic poet. His poem “The Reward of Innocence”—which included a long introductory footnote on “
Gulielma Sands—the unfortunate event alluded to in these lines”—went on to muse upon the Manhattan Well itself:

Freneau soon got his wish: a few years later
the city filled in and platted out Lispenard’s Meadow, and the crime scene vanished beneath the orderly, soaring brick blocks of an unstoppably expanding city. The blocks once occupied by Ezra Weeks and Aaron Burr were
bought by John Jacob Astor, and the waterworks that they’d created was itself passing into history. The Manhattan Company was turning into a full-fledged bank, just as Aaron Burr intended, with its old identity faintly evident in the middle name of a
modern descendant: Chase Manhattan Bank.

But for decades the memory of the crime still lingered, not least among the Ring family. When the anonymous 1870 novel
Guilty, or Not Guilty: The True Story of the Manhattan Well
appeared in bookstores, its rather ordinary artistry concealed an extraordinary connection to the case:
The author was Keturah Connah, the granddaughter of Mrs. Ring. The novel was virtually factual, she insisted, as it was
“our story, or rather,
history
, for we chronicle most faithfully things that have been.”