War of Two : Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation (9780698193901)

by Sedgwick, John

  The French never did invade, confining themselves to the Atlantic and the Caribbean. That was the height of Adams’s tenure. Like all victories, this one bore the seeds of future defeat, for Adams decided to make use of his new political strength to go after a runaway Republican press that had pilloried him in the French crisis. He backed a congressional bill to imprison any newspaper editors convicted of publishing a “seditious libel,” meaning any “false, scandalous and malicious” statement against the Congress or the president. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the initiatives were called. They were a clear violation of the First Amendment, that great triumph of American liberty, and a nasty piece of politics besides, as they effectively criminalized dissent, and the Republicans, understandably, were apoplectic.

  Burr took political advantage when he loudly supported a judge in Cooperstown, New York, who’d circulated an appeal to repeal the acts—only to be “taken from his bed at midnight, manacled and dragged from his home.” But Hamilton was delighted by a law that would imprison the Scottish-born Callender, who’d revealed the Reynolds scandal. Speaking of other such editors, Hamilton asked, “Why are they not sent away?” Not that he hadn’t dashed off a few libels himself.

  Under the new law, the testy Republican congressman Matthew Lyon was sentenced to four months for criticizing Adams’s “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.” Another was jailed for two months for calling Hamilton’s planned army a “standing army,” which probably was not far off the mark. But the most memorable case involved The Argus, a cantankerous Republican paper in New York that had been owned by Thomas Greenleaf—no relation to the financier James—until his wife, Ann, took it over on his death. The Argus had run afoul of the New York district attorney for calling the government “corrupt and inimical to the preservation of liberty.” But things got worse when The Argus reprinted a charge that Hamilton had tried to join a group to buy Brache’s Republican paper the Aurora in order to kill it, claiming that Hamilton had obtained his six-thousand-dollar share from the British secret service. Hamilton demanded a criminal prosecution for this “audacious falsehood.” Ann Greenleaf claimed that she had merely reprinted the piece from another paper, but no matter: the editor responsible, David Frothingham, would be charged with the crime. Testifying, Hamilton made clear that his reputation was “dearer” to him “than property or life.” The court was sympathetic, sentencing Frothingham to four months in Bridewell Prison. The acts, however, did nothing to discourage Republicans. While two prominent Republican papers went under, many more sprang up. General Hamilton did not cleanse American soil of foreigners as he’d threatened, but he did keep his army on alert against any possible armed insurrection by Republicans who’d sided with the French against the government. Here he had Jefferson’s Virginia primarily in mind, since its legislature had moved to cancel the Alien and Sedition laws. “Put Virginia to the test of resistance,” he told Theodore Sedgwick, who had loyally backed the laws. Jefferson started calling Hamilton “our Bonapart.” When there was a mild stir over property taxes in western Pennsylvania, Hamilton crushed it by a massive show of force. The ringleader, John Fries, was arrested and convicted of treason. Adams thought Hamilton inclined to see a “hideous monster or phantom” in any crisis and likely to respond with “imprudent measures.” Adams pardoned Fries, seeing the uprising less a rebellion than a riot. Hamilton was determined not to allow his military to be reduced in strength as the French threat receded.

  ON THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, George Washington came down with a sore throat after a five-hour tour of his farms in a swirl of hail that left his hair wet and his clothes damp when he sat down for lunch with visitors he did not want to keep waiting. His chest grew heavy and his voice hoarse later the next evening, and, as he settled into bed his throat was inflamed. That night, Martha was troubled to hear his labored breath, and sent for doctors in the morning. An overseer, Rawlings, bled him heavily before the doctors arrived, Washington insisting on “More, more,” although the procedure was terrifically painful. The doctors drew five pints altogether, or half the body’s supply, from the nation’s founder, and then applied still more medieval remedies, including an enema and an extract of dried beetles. Washington could tell it was no use. Enervated, scarcely able to breathe or speak above a whisper, he told the doctors, “I feel myself going. Let me go off quietly. I cannot last long.” He reached over to take his own pulse, and then, reported Washington’s longtime secretary, Tobias Lear, “the General’s hand fell from his wrist.”

  FORTY

  The Lady in the Well

  WHILE THE CHURCH bells in New York were still chiming Washington’s death, a woman’s muff was found floating in an abandoned well owned by the Manhattan Company. It was in Lispenard’s Meadow, not far from Richmond Hill, where the wilderness began. After the muff was retrieved, it appeared that its owner, a Miss Gulielma Sands, lay below, in the icy depths of the well, one shoulder bare, her eyes up toward the light. Grappling hooks and then a net brought up the dripping corpse, the clothing tattered, head limp, hair in a snarl. Criminal investigations were unsophisticated, and the body was simply placed on a plank beside the well to wait for someone to identify it. That fell to Levi Weeks, a shy young carpenter and friend of Sands’s from the boardinghouse where they both lived, who knew her as Elma. From there, the body was hauled to an almshouse, where it was stripped and laid out on an examination table for the coroner to examine in the presence of a grand jury that directed his work. It was out of bounds to determine if Sands was a virgin, but not to see if she was pregnant. (She was not.) Examination complete, Sands was heaved into a coffin and taken by cart to her cousin’s boardinghouse, where the prosecutor’s doctors discovered enough bruises around her throat to determine that Elma had been killed by “a violent pressure upon the neck” and the body dropped into the well to hide the crime. And the prosecutors identified the culprit, Levi Weeks, the young man who’d identified her. People said he’d planned to marry her, but she must have jilted him, and he’d strangled her out of jealousy. For a murder investigation, as for so much else, rumor was fact. Weeks was clapped into the abysmal Bridewell jail to await trial for Elma’s murder while frenzied newspapermen spun out endless column inches with the tale of a free-spirited maiden strangled by her jealous fiancé. HORRID MURDER! BY HANDS OF A LOVER! declared The Independent Gazetteer of Worcester, Massachusetts. THE YOUNG LADY DRESSED AS A BRIDE, lamented Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser of Philadelphia. The state attorney general’s office drew up an indictment: Weeks had been “seduced by the instigation of the Devil.” Simple as that.

  Like everyone else in New York, Aaron Burr was caught up in the case, but for different reasons. He had a financial stake in the matter. As the creator and major backer of the Manhattan Company, he couldn’t let its name be contaminated by such a lurid murder involving one of its wells. Already, Levi Weeks’s brother Ezra had provided much of the contracting and design work for the Manhattan Company’s water project, and that was implication enough. Ezra had even constructed the very well where Sands had been found submerged. As it happened, he was now busy constructing Hamilton’s new house, the Grange, on the Heights.

  To defend his interests, Burr took on the Weeks case for free and enlisted Alexander Hamilton as his junior partner. As a director of the Manhattan Company, Hamilton had a stake in the outcome too. The trial was held in the former Federal Hall and presided over by John Lansing, the chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court and the one member of the review committee to object to the Manhattan Company. It was a sensation. Hundreds if not thousands of New Yorkers thronged Broad Street for a look at the prisoner, some of them climbing trees for a better angle, and many of them shrieked “Crucify him” when the hapless Weeks was escorted inside by a phalanx of constables. The luckier ones mashed their way into the visitors’ gallery.

  The trial went just two days, but very long ones that nearly reached morning. For the
prosecution, Cadwallader D. Colden, the London-educated assistant attorney general, detailed a lurid crime of passion, presenting witnesses who claimed that Weeks had pursued Sands in a “warm courtship” that had led to their being together in a “very intimate situation,” emitting sounds of a “rustling of beds, such as might be occasioned by a man and wife.” Near the well on the fatal night, someone heard the shriek of a woman “in distress” before the sound was “muffled.” There were tracks in the snow from Weeks’s sleigh, and the prosecutor’s doctors identified “several spots pretty much in a row around her neck,” proof of strangulation. An appraisal was affirmed by the celebrated Dr. Hosack, the Hamilton family physician, who had also examined the body and concluded that those indentations were the result of “violent pressure.” It all led to a gruesome scenario by which Weeks had rushed out by his sleigh one night to strangle her by the well, then hurried back before anyone noticed he was gone. When Weeks was told that Elma’s body had been discovered, he virtually admitted his guilt, blurting out, “Is it the Manhattan Well she was found in?”—well before he had reason to know the body’s location.

  True, all the evidence was circumstantial, Colden informed the jurors, but he begged them to remember the distinguished British legal commentator John Morgan’s Essays Upon the Law of Evidence: “Circumstantial evidence is all that can be expected, and indeed all that is necessary to substantiate such a charge.”

  At that, all of New York seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief that such a horrendous crime was resolved, and the murderer identified, to be expunged from the community. Burr had not yet spoken, leaving it to Hamilton to undermine the witnesses as best he could. Some of his line of questioning was harsh. He badgered one Quaker witness to explain what he meant by placing an event in the “ninth month”—even though Hamilton knew full well the answer, that Quakers regard a word like “September” as pagan. Hamilton also zeroed in on odd details like the nature of the material of the rooming house’s exterior wall by the blacksmith house, and whether it was thick enough to block the sounds of children.

  Having rushed down for the trial from the Assembly in Albany, and with the prospect of a frantic presidential campaign ahead of him, Burr could not have given the case his full attention, despite the financial implications. Even for him, the whole tawdry business of the corpse had to seem alien for a man who hardly specialized in criminal cases. But he may have identified with a client who was being attacked on all sides. And it was uncanny how quickly Burr was able to take hold of the matter.

  When Burr finally rose, he spoke slowly, meaningfully, drawing out the contrast with the peppery, accusatory manner of the assistant attorney general. “Extraordinary means have been adopted to enflame the public against the prisoner,” Burr began. “Why has the body been exposed for days in the streets in a manner most indecent and shocking? Such dreadful scenes speak powerfully to the passions: They petrify our mind with horror—congeal the blood within our veins.”

  With that, he started to swing the sympathies of the case toward poor Weeks and away from the lynch mob bent on hanging him. The only problem, Burr noted, with the prosecutor’s tale of a love match gone dreadfully awry was that it lacked any evidence. What signs were there that there had ever been a courtship? Who had ever seen the couple together? What evidence was there of a proposal of marriage? “The story, you will see, is broken, disconnected, and utterly impossible.” He ticked off the gaps: A strangling? The coroner had given the body a thorough going-over and found no such gruesome injuries—those were discovered only after the corpse had been well manhandled. Weeks’s midnight sleigh ride? No one saw it. The sleigh tracks in the snow? They could be anyone’s. Sexual relations? Who was to say Weeks was the man, and—he paused significantly—not someone else?

  One of Burr’s old law partners observed that Burr “delighted in surprising his opponents, and in laying, as it were, ambuscades for them.” It was Burr’s subversive streak. While the prosecution had tried to turn the circumstantial nature of the evidence in its favor, claiming that such facts never lied, Burr pointed out that every part of it had to hold up or “the whole must tumble down.” And, after testing all the underpinnings, Burr pulled out the beam that held everything up. He called the blacksmith, Joseph Watkins, to the stand. Colden’s premise was that Weeks had an exclusive call on Sands’s affection. But Watkins revealed that another man felt the same—the boardinghouse keeper, Elias Ring, who, while his wife was off in the country, had loud, rambunctious sex with Elma. Watkins could hear them through the wall, and he recognized Ring’s unmistakable voice, and told his wife. Watkins had confided what he’d heard to another boarder, a devilish man named Croucher, who had worried that his friend Ring’s adultery would be found out and went about spreading “improper insinuations and prejudices against the prisoner” to divert attention, generating the hysteria that led to Weeks’s prosecution.

  Now, where was this Croucher? Who was he? This was the moment that Hamilton finally had a chance for drama, as he was the one to snatch up a candle, push through the crowd of spectators, and hold it up in front of Croucher’s face, weirdly illuminating him. Is this the man? he demanded. Yes, the witness answered. It was he.

  After that, the prosecutors tried valiantly to resuscitate their case, but it was hopeless. It was nearly four in the morning, and Hamilton was the one to declare that the defense would not even bother with a summation. The exhausted jury took only five minutes to offer its verdict: not guilty. With just a few lines of argument, Burr had caused minds to pivot, drawing a sudden halt to a citywide crusade to hang Levi Weeks.

  WHEN THE CASE was over, the two lawyers returned to their accustomed roles. Hamilton opposed Burr on two insurance cases that followed, and they both sank deeper into debt. Burr had to take a fifteen-hundred-dollar loan, and Hamilton faced the indignity of being reminded by the Bank of New York, his Bank of New York, that he was overdrawn by fifty-three hundred dollars. He returned to savaging Burr with all the venom in his quill.

  These things are to be admitted, and indeed cannot be denied, that he is a man of extreme and irregular ambition; that he is selfish to a degree which excludes all social affectations; and he is decidedly profligate. He is far more cunning than wise—far more dexterous than able. The truth is, with great apparent coldness he is the most sanguine man in the world. He thinks every thing possible to adventure and perseverance; although I believe he will fail, I think it almost certain he will attempt usurpation, and the attempt will involve great mischief.

  FORTY-ONE

  The Fangs of Jefferson

  IT IS RARE for the turn of a century to bring in a new era. But 1800 yielded that for the young country, as it brought the first contested presidential election, one that pitted not just two rival candidates, but two rival parties against each other, both of which had evolved into warring entities that, by now, divided not just political life, but virtually all life, even the air itself, down the middle. Inevitably, the partisan newspapers only widened the divisions with their own wild bombast, the Federalists slamming Jefferson’s supposed atheism, adoration of blood-soaked Jacobins, determination to shred the Constitution, and highly suspicious interest in natural history; and the Republicans firing back with attacks on Adams’s supposed monarchism, slavish love of England, madness, and determination to jettison the rights secured by the glorious revolution.

  With the possible exception of Adams and Jefferson, the two presidential candidates themselves, no two people were more caught up in the political warfare than Burr and Hamilton, each determined to advance his party and so to improve his political standing, which was in danger of waning. The very intensity of the dispute, and the seriousness of the stakes, seemed to inflame their characters, making Burr even more guileful and Hamilton even more dictatorial.

  As Burr had divined some years before, the country’s electoral map in 1800 was divided so that not just New York State, but New York City, was inde
ed most likely to decide the matter, in the vote-rich wards on the populous tip of Manhattan. “If the city election of New York is in favor of the Republican ticket, the issue will be Republican,” Jefferson told Madison. “If the Federal ticket for the city of New York prevails, the probability will be in favor of a Federal issue.” Then he turned philosophical. “The election of New York being in April, it becomes an early and interesting object.”

  Despite Burr’s efforts in New York, the state’s electors would be chosen not directly by the people, but by a majority in the state Assembly, and they would vote as a bloc. Although the Federalists had held the Assembly for much of the decade, in 1800 their majority was thinning, and it was threatened by the wild unpopularity of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which had encouraged the Republican Party they had intended to stifle. The bitter Federalist infighting led by Hamilton had not helped matters, and the country seemed to be growing tired of Federalist rule.

  Everywhere, the Republicans could scarcely contain their excitement at the prospect of winning the presidency at last. Groaned the High Federalist Fisher Ames, “Every threshing floor, every husking, every part work on a house-frame or raising a building, the very funerals are infected with bawlers or whisperers against government.”

  In January, Burr had gone to see Jefferson in Philadelphia, where he was scheming how to depose Adams from the top spot, to let him know his plans for taking New York. Rather than rely on the usual incendiary speeches and inflamed newspaper articles to reach the voters, Burr told Jefferson he would try an entirely new approach. Even in 1800, candidates campaigned the way Washington had, relying on “friends” to put their name forward to the electorate in letters and statements to the newspapers, while they themselves professed disinterest. Now Burr proposed something far more personal. He wouldn’t rely entirely on others to advance his Republican cause; he would take to the streets himself, knocking on doors to appeal directly to voters in their houses. He and his associates would fan out through every ward in the city, canvassing every last voter, cataloging his interest in the Republican Party, his ability to offer his time or his purse to the cause, his previous votes, and his intention in this election, if any, to vote Republican this time around—and assemble a detailed political dossier on every one of the ten thousand eligible voters in Manhattan.