Duel with the Devil (5 page)

And so Levi went to his brother’s without either woman by his side. A visit to Ezra’s house—where the contractor lived a steady married existence, building manors in the day and returning home to the hearth in the evening—was like a glimpse into a possible future for young Levi. And a prosperous future, at that, for his older brother had landed one of the most desirable contracts in the city.

To see it, one needed only to stand outside and look northward. Just a block away, at what would come to be called Leonard Street, the road and the city gave way to a marshy wilderness. This was the northern border of the city: Lispenard’s Meadow, an untrammeled and swampy tract of mud, gnarled wild apples and brambles, with Manhattan on one side and the enclave of Greenwich Village on the other. Crossing it was a fine trip for courting couples; on the Manhattan side lay a popular theater and a saloon, while on the other lay the route to Turtle Bay, where parties of dozens of young men and women would go with hampers for a “
turtle feast.”

For urbane dandies, the meadow in between was a trackless
waste so ill thought of that, one resident recalled, “
when one man offered to present the Lutheran Church with a plot of six acres … the gift was coldly declined because the land was not considered worth fencing in.” Those fond of the flintlock fowling piece and the pin-hook fishing rod were happy to let their fellow city dwellers hold such notions; they knew better. A small creek,
Minetta Brook, burbled through much of the length of Lispenard’s Meadow; there were fine trout to be had from it, and fat pheasants to be flushed out from the stands of goldenrod that leaned over the streamside.

But the real catch in the meadow was in wood and water: namely, in the bored-out logs that Ezra Weeks dragged there to carry the city’s new water supply. The Manhattan Company’s board had quickly decided they wanted wooden pipes—because iron ones were seven times as expensive. “Two wooden Cylinders, of five and six inches caliber, will be amply sufficient for the mains down Broadway,” they explained. These pipes, they assured themselves, would last twenty years before they needed replacing. But that still meant thousands of logs needed to be bored out and laid in a matter of months, before the ground froze. There was not much question as to who was up for that job:
Ezra Weeks had the contract from the Manhattan Company for some three miles of buried wooden piping, and he’d also secured the immense pile of
white and yellow pine logs needed for it. New Yorkers who complained the previous month when wood was six dollars a cord now found it going even more dearly.

“
People are paying the enormous fee of sixteen dollars for a single cord of hickory wood,” one local noted in amazement.

If they wanted to know where the timber had gone, they needed to look no farther than under their feet.

I
T WAS
a fine time to be in the Weeks clan, but after visits with his brother, Levi still found himself a bachelor living alone at Elias Ring’s boardinghouse.

Do you want to go the Charity Sermon?
he finally asked Hope one day.

A charity
sermon by the Bishop Prevoost had been announced for St. Paul’s Chapel on December 8, 1799—for the benefit, it was said, of a local school. Everyone knew that a charity sermon by the bishop was one of the highlights of the year at St. Paul’s; until moving back to Virginia a few years before, George Washington himself had been a regular presence at them.

This time, Hope said yes.

They stopped off first at Ezra’s, where the theater up the block had been displaying a double bill:
THE YOUNG QUAKER
, read the first listing;
THE AGREEABLE SURPRISE
, added the second. Even with its
bone-chilling lack of heat and its rather makeshift orchestra of fiddles and drums, the theater was a fine place to sit back, buy some oranges from concessions, and then eat them lasciviously until the women in the next gallery box blushed and snapped their fans open.

If the play was no good, the audience would entertain themselves by singing gibberish back at the stage:

There would be no such base entertainments for Levi or Hope, though. They instead made their way over to St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway and Fulton. Looking about a church darkened in the coming winter evening, its shadows cast long by candlelight, Levi observed an overflowing collection plate passed around, for St. Paul’s that evening was, one observer wrote, “one of the most crowded churches we ever witnessed.” He gazed upon the assembled great and the good of the city of Manhattan, dressed in the rich modesty of stiff brocades and satin linings; next to him on the bench, he
could see Hope, her garb plain but dignified by her Quaker dictates. But alas, no Elma;
he’d asked her to come, too, of course—and, naturally, she had begged off on account of physical strain.

“A father of the fatherless,” intoned the bishop, “and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.”

The city had plenty of both now. Just a few weeks ago, a fellow
carpenter had fallen off a scaffold on Water Street and died, leaving a widow and two children behind. Days later, some
live wolves on exhibit in the museum—the very one just up Greenwich Street, where they’d gone with Elma—had broken out of their pens and fallen upon a young boy, nearly killing him before the patrons’ eyes. But above all, mortality this year meant the fever. Announcements had been made by nearly all the city’s major congregations that the following week would have a day of
Thanksgiving, in gratitude to God for surviving “the destructive Disease with which we were visited the last season.”

The city felt more bountiful and generous now, and the evening had been a fine one for charity: As Levi and Hope left, it was found that
$138 had been collected. The air outside was cold and filled with the crunch of boots through
the first snow of the year, which had fallen just days earlier. For children, that meant the joyful
pelting of the house at Garden and Broad, an abode blessed with a crotchety owner who burst out like a jack-in-the-box, shaking his fist as boys fled. For courting couples, the snow meant
sleigh rides northward through Lispenard’s Meadow, across what was known as the Kissing Bridge.

Hope’s and Levi’s breaths were barely visible;
on moonlit nights like this, the city saved whale oil by not lighting the streetlamps. The streets bore the spectral cast of the moon and the snow, and the sounds about them were curiously muffled as they walked the block north from the chapel. But had they cleared away the drifts of snow on Broadway and set an ear to the ground, they might have been able to make out a new and unaccustomed sound beneath them, one running counter to their direction—a rush flowing south—the
sound,
three and a half feet underground, of piped water coursing down from the northerly meadows.

N
OTICES HAD
been appearing for days, signed by the board of the Manhattan Company:

The last point was a welcome one: Near the harbor was where the fever was always at its worst, and there was hope that—as one resident put it—the Manhattan Company might fulfill “
the wish of every citizen, to have the water conveyed, in the first instance, to those parts of the city most exposed to autumnal fevers.”

But for prosperous residents on the more fashionable interior streets, the water would be a boon as well. It was, the directors proclaimed, “
of a quality excellent for drinking and good for every culinary purpose”—and there was enough of it, they claimed, that every subscribing household could positively gorge itself on fifty gallons’ worth a day. And this, of course, was just the beginning: As soon as the frost came out of the ground, the
service was to be expanded another twofold across Manhattan. Ezra Weeks and his younger brother would have a busy new year indeed.

But as Hope and Levi returned to the boardinghouse that evening, one person there was not sharing in the Weeks brothers’ good fortune. For back in the springtime, the board had not adopted
Elias Ring’s plan—no, they’d gone with hollow logs carrying water out of a well in the me
adow, and
a primitive pump supplied by one Nicholas Roosevelt. Curiously, the water board’s president
knew
Roosevelt—
he’d sold Roosevelt thousands of acres in a rather scandalous land deal years earlier. And for the plum
$1,500-a-year position of water superintendent, the board had hired not Elias Ring or Christopher Colles, but none other than Joseph Browne—the engineering dilettante who had lobbied for the system to be built in the first place. That was quite a coincidence, too, for Dr. Browne happened to be a
business partner from years earlier with one of the board members. He
also
happened to be the
brother-in-law of the board’s president.

Elias Ring never stood a chance.

Hope and Levi, arriving home that night, could be forgiven if they didn’t notice a curious absence in any stray issue of that day’s
Greenleaf’s New-York Journal
. Elias Ring’s hopeful ad promoting the New Patent Water Wheel, after running for some two years, had quietly been withdrawn—and it was never to return.

T
HE INCOMING MAIL CARRIAGES FOR
D
ECEMBER
19, 1799,
ARRIVED
to a slumbering and
sodden city. As it was a day of prayer for delivery from recent fevers, many of the shops would stay closed that day. At the Merchants’ Coffee House, however, where deals were struck amid tables of appraisers, stockbrokers, and lingering Chamber of Commerce board members, it was an ordinary Thursday for the more determined men of business. But one newly arrived letter from Virginia, when carefully sliced open, contained a shocking announcement:

Word raced down Wall Street as another letter from Alexandria was opened to reveal the same stunning news about the sixty-seven-year-old statesman: “
He made his exit last night between the hours of 11 and 12 after a short but painful illness of 23 hours.… We are all to close our houses, and act as if we should do if one of our own family had departed.”

One man felt distinctly unmoved as he bustled about his business in the Insurance Room of the Merchants’ Coffee House. John
Shaw had a busy wine shop down on Pearl Street, and he was not about to waste time mourning the rebel whose war had stripped so many old gentry of land and business.

“
It is a pity General Washington had not died five and twenty years ago,” he snapped.

The country was still sharply politically divided. Tradesmen and farmers naturally gravitated toward the party of Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson in their tavern talk, while their merchants and masters just as naturally took to John Adams and Alexander Hamilton’s moneyed Federalists. After all, Federalist control of the banks meant that if they wanted a line of credit for business, they had to back the party of Adams and Hamilton. But among some merchants that supported Hamilton and his Federalists, there remained a hangover of Loyalism from the war—and while the past decade had nurtured a vociferous American nationalism, they still retained warm feelings toward the old country. For a few coffeehouse patrons such as Shaw, it went beyond that: A couple of years earlier, one of them had indignantly raised a
British flag over the Merchants’ before it got ripped down by an equally indignant patriot.

I said
, Shaw repeated,
it’s a pity General Washington didn’t die five and twenty years ago
.

No one rose to the provocation. Not everyone had loved the man, true, but he had led America through its darkest days. Now, after three years of bitter partisan battles under Adams, doubts were all that remained—and it was with a certain foreboding that publisher Charles Snowden hurried over to his
New-York Daily Advertiser
print shop to compose an elegy on the spot for his evening edition. “
WASHINGTON
was our pride, our guardian, and our defense,” he quickly wrote. “Amidst threatening storms of some violence, amidst the more dangerous convulsions of party rage, it was still our consolation that
WASHINGTON
lived.”

Now the country’s great unifier was gone. It seemed as if the partisans of Jefferson and Adams might crack the fragile republic apart by the following year’s election. For the British-leaning Federalists, there was the spectacle of France’s new democracy spinning
into frightening anarchy and ruin—while to French-leaning Republicans, the roundly condemned censorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts smacked of monarchy. And there were more subtle moral fissures slowly forming in this new country as well, the kind that could be seen right next to Washington’s death notice in the
New-York Gazette
, where there ran an ad headlined
A NEGRO MAN TO BE SOLD CHEAP
.