Fallen Founder

by Nancy Isenberg

  The Federalists were able to claim a victory in the assembly elections. The ticket headed by Burr lost, though not by the margin predicted. The Republicans won the Sixth Ward, known for its large number of mechanics, Irish and French immigrants; the Federalists registered their largest gains in the Second and Third Wards, the conservative and merchant base of the city. All went as expected, except that the Manhattan Company did not remain a permanent liability for the Republicans, as many Federalists hoped. Its liberal banking policies gained it partisans, whereas the Federalists who opposed it appeared reactionary and elitist. Burr had established a Republican-friendly financial system without excluding Federalists from its daily operations. By 1800, the bank was a commercial success, and even Virginians were bragging that the bank would make Jefferson president.34

  “THE THOUSAND TONGUES OF RUMOUR”

  Burr may have lost his platform in the assembly, but he did not depart the limelight. Two court cases commanded unprecedented attention, in both instances placing him side by side with his old nemesis, Alexander Hamilton. The first case, Le Guen v. Gouverneur and Kemble, was the culmination of several proceedings making their way through the labyrinth of the New York court system. It entailed eight different suits and five years of litigation. The final appeal was heard before the Court of Errors, the eighteenth-century equivalent to a modern court of appeals. This battle between two prominent New York merchants and one French trader—Louis Le Guen—came to a close in Albany during the winter of 1799–1800.

  Le Guen was a French citizen who came to New York in 1794, looking for buyers to purchase his large cargo of cotton and indigo. He made an arrangement with Isaac Gouverneur and Peter Kemble to store his goods, and eventually the two New Yorkers signed an agreement to become Le Guen’s partners in a venture to sell the goods overseas. It was this contract that triggered the dispute. To represent his interest, Le Guen settled on three of the best attorneys in town: Burr, Hamilton, and Richard Harison, all of whom remained on retainer from 1795 until 1800.35

  The legal maneuvering in the Le Guen case reflected the high stakes involved, as the French trader demanded an unparalleled $119, 915 in damages. The case gained added notoriety once the sparring became public, spilling over into the press. Courtroom antics centered on Hamilton’s unpoliceable mouth. He attacked the defendants, witnesses, and opposing counsel with a peculiar viciousness, causing even his devoted admirer Robert Troup (in this instance, one of the opposing counsel) to remark upon his “utmost animosity & cruelty.”36

  Gouverneur and Kemble retaliated, speculating about Hamilton’s purposes. They argued that the suit was specious to begin with, benefiting the lawyers more than Le Guen. But their tactic backfired. It fueled Hamilton’s ire, and the case became a war of words they were unlikely to win. The astute Brockholst Livingston, counsel for the New York merchants, warned his client Gouverneur: “I much fear you are marked out as a victim to the reputation of Mr. Hamilton.” He meant that the case had become more about Hamilton than Le Guen, and that Hamilton was intent on winning at all costs, even if he had to trample on his friends along the way.37

  Eventually, Gouverneur aired his complaints in print. While the case was before the state supreme court in early 1798, he published in the New York newspapers the opinions of three Pennsylvania attorneys who refuted Hamilton’s argument. He also attacked Hamilton for having compared him to the “odious character of Shylock.” At the same time, Gouverneur tried to find something negative to say about Burr, but he could find nothing to criticize in Burr’s conduct during the Le Guen hearings. Instead, he made reference to an earlier case. Burr had insulted the principals of an insurance company, comparing the president and its directors to “the Pope and 39 Cardinals.” The president had whispered, “What a blackguard.” Burr overheard him, and responded coyly, “Not so loud.” Both Hamilton and Burr were adept at sarcasm, but their styles were noticeably different. Burr had a lighter touch, and he never let his emotions get the best of him.38

  By the time the case came before the Court of Errors, in February 1800, Robert Troup, long Hamilton’s toady, was now Hamilton’s punching bag. Writing to a friend, the abused Federalist observed of Hamilton that he had never been “on any occasion so heated and wound up with passion.” Troup pathetically hoped he might survive his barbs, and “escape the General’s pistols as well as his sword.” When the trial ended, however, Troup could not so easily turn the other cheek. “I ought to forgive,” he admitted to Rufus King, but “my friends will not permit me as yet to bury [his insults] in oblivion.” For his part, Hamilton recorded notes that he probably never expected would see the light of day: “Robert Troup—a creature it is almost a vice to name—”39

  The Albany hearing lasted over a week, and involved eight lawyers: Hamilton, Burr, Harison, Troup, and Brockholst Livingston were all there. Gouverneur Morris’s diary offers insight into the forensic arts on display that week. Morris was a relative of Isaac Gouverneur’s, and at the final hearing before the Court of Errors, he was added to the team of lawyers in a desperate attempt to salvage the case for his kinsman. Morris (America’s minister to France under Washington) had not been in a courtroom for a dozen years. Still, his talents were considerable; in Troup’s words, he supplied “bursts of sublime eloquence.”40

  Though Morris was Hamilton’s good friend, he too found his behavior appalling. “Hamilton is desirous of being witty,” he confided to his diary, “but goes beyond the Bounds and is open to a severe Dressing.” That “Dressing” was, in Federalist-era parlance, a good beating—the treatment due a social inferior. Had Hamilton’s insults risen to the notice of a proper gentleman, their recourse would have been to the dueling field. Rather contemptuously, then, Morris dismissed Hamilton’s antics as evidence of his lowly origins.41

  Though Burr, as U.S. senator, had attacked him, demanding Morris’s recall from France in 1794, the New York Federalist recorded: “Col. Burr is very able & has I see made considerable Impression.” Burr was not the principal presenter at the hearing, but his influence was decisive, and Morris was not too peevish to acknowledge this. Both Burr and Hamilton gave closing arguments, yet it was Burr’s summary that most impressed Morris.42

  Burr was not a lightning rod in the Le Guen case. He was, rather, the voice of reason amid a public spectacle. It was Hamilton who made himself the butt of gossip—and, significantly, not among his political enemies, but among his close friends and allies. Gouverneur and Kemble felt that Hamilton had thoroughly abused them. Gouverneur died less than a month after the final verdict was handed down. His “unfortunate exit,” to use Burr’s words, moved the public, and colors on the commercial vessels sitting in New York Harbor were lowered to half-mast. As pillars of the merchant community, and friends to the mechanics, Gouverneur and Kemble were just the sort of men that Hamilton needed to rally to the polls at election time. Unwisely, Hamilton had undermined his influence as a party leader in his own state, and alienated many of his key supporters—men he would need in the upcoming assembly election.43

  While the Le Guen hearing captivated the merchants in the city, another trial, involving a crime “of so atrocious a nature,” became the talk of the town. Levi Weeks, a young man of twenty-three, was accused of murdering Gulielma Sands, a young Quaker woman. She was found dead at the bottom of a Manhattan Company well, in Lispenard Meadows.44

  Gulielma had gone missing on December 22, 1799, and her relatives were certain that she had last been seen in the company of Weeks. Suspicion fell on him because the two lived at the same Greenwich Street boardinghouse, and Weeks and the victim were thought to be on intimate terms. On the night of her disappearance, Gulielma had confided to her cousin that she and Levi planned to be secretly wed that evening. On January 4, 1800, two days after the body was found in the well, a local newspaper printed an accusatory story, intimating that her lover was the last person to see Gulielma alive: “Strong suspicions are entertained that she has been wil
lfully murdered.”45

  Though he was described as a laborer in the indictment, Levi Weeks had powerful friends. His brother, Ezra, was a prominent builder in New York who quickly assembled a first-class defense team consisting of Burr, Hamilton, and Brockholst Livingston. At the time of the trial, Ezra had been commissioned to build Hamilton’s country mansion, and Burr had business dealings with him as well: it was Ezra Weeks who had supplied the wood for the pipes laid by the Manhattan Company. Levi (a carpenter) and his brother were technically “mechanics,” but they were also prosperous, well-educated men.46

  Before the trial began, Gulielma’s relatives worked assiduously to persuade the public of the young man’s guilt. Handbills about the crime were distributed around the city to stir up public outrage, and the mangled corpse was displayed on the street before thousands of curious onlookers. Speculation and gossip circulated among the beau monde and lowly cartmen alike. On the first day of the trial, a large crowd gathered at Federal Hall; citizen-volunteers guarded the defendant as he entered the packed courtroom, and angry spectators shouted: “Crucify him, Crucify him!”47

  In the absence of eyewitnesses, the case rested on the reputation of Levi Weeks. Aware of the mounting hostility against him, his defense attorneys issued their own press release. The defense published what amounted to a preview of its case in the Daily Advertiser. This piece may in fact have been written by Burr, anticipating what he would say during the trial. Weeks hardly fit the profile of a murderer. The article described him as a “moral, sober, industrious, amiable man.” The secret marriage was dismissed as unsubstantiated hearsay; the autopsy proved that the victim was not pregnant. Given that the evidence was circumstantial, why, then, was the public jumping to conclusions? Only the “unprejudiced voice of an impartial jury” should decide the defendant’s fate.48

  The trial opened on March 31, and went on for over forty hours, considerably longer than the average criminal trial of this era. It would be at three o’clock in the morning two days later that the jury rendered its verdict. Supreme Court Justice John Lansing presided, and Assistant Attorney General Cadwalader David Colden served as prosecutor. Colden, only thirty-one, bore sole responsibility for the case. In opening remarks, he deferred to his distinguished opposing counsel, describing the defense team as “so vastly my superiors in learning, experience and professional rank.”49

  Before Aaron Burr was even able to deliver his opening statement, Colden paraded twenty-four witnesses before the court. He staked his case on two arguments. First, that the defendant had seduced the young woman, and then murdered her to avoid marriage. Second, that the couple surreptitiously left the boardinghouse together on the night Gulielma disappeared. The victim’s two female cousins gave strong testimony that they knew about the secret romance. When Gulielma did not return home, they noticed that Levi was behaving uncomfortably, which they interpreted as a sign of his guilt.50

  The prosecution suffered as a result of credibility issues. Colden’s witnesses tended to obscure rather than focus: one woman, “aged and very infirm,” was so confused that her testimony made his case look uneven, his evidence unreliable. Another witness, a man who took his meals at the boardinghouse, seemed all too eager to condemn the defendant. And his morose and sadistic appearance caused some jurors to suspect him of involvement in this—or at least some—crime. Finally, the ungainly co-owner of the boardinghouse, a Quaker, struck the jury as foolish. He wore baggy clothing and a broad-brimmed Quaker hat, and his unconvincing answers, under the aggressive questioning of the defense team, led jurors to think that he might have had sexual designs on Gulielma.51

  Who was the jury to believe? The clownish Quaker? The dark and surly lodger whose “unfortunate physiognomy,” according to Brockholst Livingston, helped to convince another jury, later that year, that he raped his own stepdaughter? Or would they settle on Levi Weeks? That young man had reputable connections, and (as one pamphleteer put it) a “face [that] appeared the index of a virtuous and benevolent heart.” Appearance swayed the jury—then as it does now.52

  On day two, Burr mesmerized the court with his brilliant presentation. “Mr. Burr opened the defence with such perspicacity and force,” wrote the reporter from the Daily Advertiser, “as disentangled every circumstance of perplexity; tore away the suspicion that had obstinately hung in the public mind; and shed such luminous evidence on every part of the subject, as dispelled all the distraction of doubt.” He made it perfectly clear that Levi Weeks was “an injured and innocent man.”53

  Fortunately, Burr’s speech was recorded, allowing us to evaluate what the newspaper saw fit to acclaim. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began, thanking his hearers for their patience and perseverance in adopting an unprejudiced stance. Indeed, overcoming prejudice was a key to his purpose in defending Levi Weeks:

  You have relieved me from my greatest anxiety, for I know the unexampled industry that has been exerted to destroy the reputation of the accused, and to immolate him at the shrine of persecution without the solemnity of a candid and impartial trial. I know that hatred, revenge, and cruelty, all the vindictive and ferocious passions have assembled in terrible array and exerted every engine to gratify their malice.

  As he proceeded, his oratory resembled nothing so much as a work of literature:

  The thousand tongues of rumour have been steadily employed in the fabrication and dissemination of falsehoods, and every method has been taken to render their slanders universal. We have witnessed the extraordinary means which have been adopted to enflame the public passions and to direct the fury of popular resentment against the prisoner. Why has the body been exposed for days in the public streets in a manner the most indecent and shocking?—to attract the curiosity and arouse the feelings of numberless spectators. Such dreadful scenes speak powerfully to the passions: they petrify the mind with horror—congeal the blood within our veins—and excite the human bosom with irresistible, but undefineable emotions. When such emotions are once created they are not easily subdued.54

  These last lines bear an uncanny resemblance to Thomas Jefferson’s much-lauded first inaugural address, delivered one year later. Jefferson, too, used violent imagery to characterize a society wrought by powerful passions: “the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty.” Jefferson was wishing to “restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.” Burr was appealing for impartiality toward an accused murderer; but the vocabulary was equally an effort to replace excitability with compassion.55

  He cautioned the jury to be wary of circumstantial evidence: “all the fabric must hang together or the whole will tumble down.” He claimed that the storyline in the prosecution’s case was “broken, disconnected, and utterly impossible.” There were too many holes in the fabric, especially, Burr claimed, when the jury was being asked to jump to conclusions in linking presumed sexual behavior to a motive for murder:

  Notwithstanding there may be testimony of an intimacy having subsisted between the prisoner and the deceased, we shall show you that there was nothing like a real courtship, or such a course of conduct as ought to induce impartial people to entertain a belief that marriage was intended.

  Levi had a solid alibi—except for “15 minutes,” too little time to commit the crime. He had been dining with his brother some distance from where the murder took place. Burr asked the jury to consider another possibility: that the “melancholy” young woman might have taken her own life. Until rumors had begun to circulate, the defendant’s morals had been held to be irreproachable: “That such a character should be impelled,” Burr stressed, “without motive, to the commission of so horrid a crime, cannot be believed.” Burr gave several examples of mistaken verdicts, and then appealed to the jury: “What remorse of conscience must a juror feel for having convicted a man who afterwards appeared to be innocent.” Levi Weeks, he insis
ted, was the wrong man.56

  By the end of the trial, the defense team had grown so confident that it agreed to forego closing arguments. Judge Lansing gave his charge to the jury, largely echoing Burr’s summary of the case. The jury returned in less than five minutes with a verdict of not guilty. The courtroom audience broke into applause.57

  Reporters praised the verdict as a “Triumph of Innocence.” Yet a cloud of suspicion still hung over Weeks, and two years later, unable to escape the stigma of the trial, he left town for good. Though it is impossible to know with any certainty, the jury’s verdict could have been wrong. Gulielma Sands had been murdered, and Burr’s alternative theory of suicide, in historical perspective, appears unpersuasive. Gulielma’s lover, described in one pamphlet as “prudent, discreet and amiable,” remains the only viable suspect. Burr no doubt believed his client, and he rallied to Weeks’s cause, because he understood the deadly force of gossip, based on his own experience as a public man. Was he, perhaps, thinking of Hamilton, who sat next to him, when he righteously refuted the “unexampled industry that has been exerted to destroy the reputation of the accused”? The Weeks trial afforded Burr a rare opportunity to rebuke the powerful engine of slander. Never again would he have this chance, amid the onslaught of abuse he was fated to endure.58