by Paul Collins
CAPTAIN RUTGERS WAS ACCUSTOMED TO HEARING STRANGE IMPORTUNING requests as he took his strolls up Greenwich Street. As warden of the port, he wielded a certain power over all the incoming and outgoing merchant vessels, and could make life difficult indeed for any captain or wholesaler who neglected to pay the right dock fees or file the correct papers. But while Elias Ring was not quite an unknown fellow, the boardinghouse keeper was not the usual sort to stop him in the street.
Have you heard of a muff turning up anywhere? Ring asked.
Today, of all Sundays, should have been a respite from what would be a busy week—and certainly from interruptions like this. New Year’s was just three days away, with all the new regulations that the turn of both the year and the century would bring, and there were new traders coming into port from New Orleans and outward bound for St. Thomas to deal with. Captain Rutgers sized up his inquirer.
“It’s an odd question,” he finally said.
Ring’s high-pitched voice turned confidential; he explained that he was not so much looking for the missing garment but its wearer.
“A young woman,” he explained hesitantly—a relation of his wife’s. “Gone a week.”
“What became of her?”
Well, that was just why he’d come to Captain Rutgers; Elias thought that one of the merchants or dockworkers might have spotted the muff. He had reason to believe—impious as the notion was—that the young girl might have drowned herself.
“A love fit,” he added mournfully. In the muttered opinion of some in the boardinghouse, the fit was over Levi. Rutgers considered the matter for a moment, his breath hanging in the cold and still December air.
“Employ Mr. George Wallgrove,” the captain said finally. “An expert at sweeping the river on—such occasions.”
The need for such services arose often enough that the captain did not need to elaborate. It had not been so long since port workers by Norton’s Wharf found a despairing man floating facedown in the Hudson, his hat and shoes left quietly on a nearby rock, awaiting an owner who would never return. Such acts of self-destruction were, at least, somewhat less alarming than the gentleman who had recently stood in Bowery Lane and applied a pair of pistols to his own head.
But where in the river were they to start looking?
“The nearest dock,” Mr. Ring reasoned, and he considered Greenwich Street carefully. There was a dock within a couple blocks of the boardinghouse—right down their cross street of Barclay, in fact. The girl might have almost walked a straight line from his front door and into the freezing river itself.
“Rhinelander’s Battery,” he mused grimly. “The handiest place—the most likely.”
Wallgrove was fetched and set to work. Grizzled by his years of work around the docks, George was a jack of all trades; though trained as a cooper, he’d risen through the ranks to the appointed office of Culler of staves and hoops, a wood inspector whose oath of office left no doubt as to his importance in a port’s economy. And when he wasn’t making inspections around the docks, George was just as ready to man the local fire pumps whenever the alarm was sounded. His fearlessness would serve him well that day: Dragging the river at this time of year was hard and dangerous work that few could handle well. The heavy load of a recovered body meant that capsizing or falling in was always a danger. Most men couldn’t last long in the Hudson’s waters even on the best of days, let alone a freezing one like this—for swimming was still so little taught that even many sailors scarcely knew a single stroke.
Ice was forming in the river, and it bumped at the sides of Wallgrove’s launch as he made his way around the foot of Rhinelander’s Wharf; the decrepit old fortifications at the dock gave the search an even more melancholy air. Long, rakelike tongs served like hands in the chilly water, as did a “creeper,” a line dragging a claw of four hooks fastened together. In shallower water, Wallgrove might have even been able to resort to a favorite tool of river men: a long tube with a glass bulb on the end, which served as a sort of telescope under the surface of the water. It was a fine instrument in the shadier pursuits of the sea, when recovery men were hired by smugglers to recover the loads tossed overboard when revenue cutters bore down upon them. But the deep and freezing currents of the Hudson would require painstaking and bone-numbing work with drag lines.
Hours later, George came ashore in defeat: He was no closer to an answer.
Elias Ring morosely made his way back to the boardinghouse, where a gloom was settling more deeply over his wife. Despite some whispers that perhaps Elma had gone out with Levi that night, he still insisted that she hadn’t and that he didn’t know where she was now.
“Levi,” his wife asked their boarder, “give me thy firm opinion from the bottom of thy heart. Tell me the truth—what thee thinks has become of her.”
The young carpenter regarded a city still so deeply in mourning for the loss of a president that it seemed almost entirely unaware of the young woman vanished from its midst.
“Mrs. Ring,” he finally replied, “it’s my firm belief that she’s now in eternity.”
THE NEXT morning they awoke to the sound of gunfire. It was the report of sixteen rifles, marking the dawn of New Year’s Eve, and the shots were to ring out every half hour until sunset, echoing over the empty streets. Most businesses were closing early or not opening at all, and carriages had been barred altogether, so that residents might journey through the snowy streets to one of the greatest spectacles the city had ever seen: a memorial parade for General Washington. Even with the gloomy spirits inside the boardinghouse, Levi could hardly ignore what was to happen outside.
“Hope,” he asked between the cannonades. “Will you accompany me to the procession?”
She had little desire to stroll through a city that could indulge in extravagant grief for an aged president, and yet scarcely stir itself to find her cousin.
“I have seen processions enough,” she replied bitterly.
He would go without her, then—but he would not go alone, for it seemed as if everyone else in the city was attending that morning. As ten o’clock approached, the streets thronged with thousands of New Yorkers, all lining a route that proceeded by City Hall and down Wall Street, and along Broadway to St. Paul’s Chapel. In the park by the almshouse, marchers congregated and took their assigned formations for the grand funeral of the late president.
It was not the actual funeral for Washington, of course—that had been held in Virginia days earlier, with its details covered minutely in newspapers across the land, right down to woodcut diagrams of the positions of Washington’s pallbearers. Here, though, America’s largest city would give the new country’s most solemn and impressive expression of national grief.
At ten o’clock, the muffled bells struck and rifles crackled, and a grand column moved forward in a dead march through the snow. Leading the grand procession were regiments of dragoons pulling prize pieces of artillery seized from the redcoats—a minor slight to the British consul in attendance, perhaps, but forgivable at an old general’s funeral. They were followed by cavalry and militia, and ranks of aging war veterans—many now in their forties and fifties, their uniforms fraying but dignified. Walking behind them, accompanied by his aides, strode the familiar form of a fellow veteran and political giant newly appointed as head of the army: Alexander Hamilton.
The erstwhile lawyer was resplendent in his major general’s uniform, made somber by the black crepe tied around his arm. It had been on his orders, issued on the occasion of “this great national calamity,” that the procession was organized—Hamilton had planned the whole thing, every step and flourish, right down to the rifle shots and banners. Deeply trusted by Washington and grudgingly accepted by President Adams, Hamilton walked at the symbolic midway point in the procession: Here was the man who united its military vanguard and the civilian ranks that followed.
Behind him, in their peculiarly martial formations, marched the city’s fraternal organizations. There was the Tammany Societ
y, with its political elite dressed in black as sachems and warriors, with bucktails pinned to their caps; the Mechanics Society, marching en masse for the first time since the funeral of “our late brother mechanic” Ben Franklin; and most impressive of all, the city’s Freemasons. The old president had been a member from his youth, reaching the rank of master mason, and lodges now marched the streets in formation, headed by the ambitious young assistant attorney general Cadwallader Colden. In his hands, Colden gripped a Masonic black-and-white banner that bore the emblem of an emptied hourglass and sickle, its words snapping in the frigid wind:
BROTHER WASHINGTON—THE GREAT—THE WISE—THE VIRTUOUS.
Behind the lodge brothers came the city’s own great and wise: the boards of its banks, insurance companies, and chamber of commerce. At their head walked the principals of the newly formed Manhattan Company, led by the one man who could draw as many whispers as Major General Hamilton. More than just the person in charge of newly dug wells and water lines, he was a lawyer and politico constructing a Republican network in the city—one aimed squarely at Hamilton and his reigning Federalists. The company chairman was none other than Hamilton’s fellow war veteran, brother lawyer, and political opposite: Colonel Aaron Burr, Esq.
There would be no debate today, no fiery rhetoric, no ripostes delivered from atop a hogshead in the square: just the slow, inexorable march of mourning. The procession turned onto Broadway, revealing a final great mass of the city’s professionals: the city council, the students and faculty of Columbia in full academic dress, and the assembled lawyers, surgeons, and doctors of Manhattan. Of the latter, the great personage was the brilliant young Dr. David Hosack—both the leading physician and leading professor of medicine in the city. At thirty, he had not one fleck of gray in his dark and wavy locks, and yet had in just four years already risen to chair of materia medica at Columbia. He could only bow his head before that inexorable defeat of his profession: Sometimes even a president could not be saved.
With the mournful clamp of soldiers’ boots, an empty symbolic urn for General George Washington arrived. Borne on the shoulders of the mayor and seven veterans of the Revolution, it shone atop a burnished symbolic bier, surmounted by an eagle of gilt and black lacquered wood. Among the pallbearers walking stiffly beneath it was Henry Brockholst Livingston, once the aide-de-camp to Benedict Arnold and now a great courtroom rival to Hamilton and Burr. Having come of age just as the Revolution began—in 1799, Hamilton and Livingston were both forty-two years old, and Burr was forty-three—these three men belonged to a group of Americans peculiarly marked out for history, and they now faced the passing of their mentors among wise generals and elder statesmen.
The crowd and ranks of marchers parted as Livingston and the other pallbearers pressed forward through the opened doors of St. Paul’s. Before them scampered twenty-four children—girls dressed in white robes—clutching baskets and dropping laurel leaves in their path. Their small voices sang out into the echoing chapel:
Bring the laurels, strew the bays; Strew his hearse, and strew the ways.
“Its appearance was really splendid,” one judge in the crowd noted approvingly. If the day was a final tolling of the bell for General Washington, it might as well have also been a mighty salute to General Hamilton. The procession he’d arranged had brought out the entire city—from the mayor to majors, from bankers to mechanics, from callow students to aged doctors—the present and future of the city alike. Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston were all veterans of the war and part of a generation that had firmly consolidated its influence in the newly born government, while Dr. Hosack and Cadwallader Colden were part of the rising next generation. Nearly born during the war itself, they were the nation’s younger cousins among these founding fathers.
Levi Weeks had worked at times on contracting projects for Hamilton and Burr; such great men were not unknown to him. New York was still small enough that any citizen could easily cross paths with the founders of the young nation. But watching them all gravely walking in procession was to behold the assembled might of the reborn city and nation before one’s eyes. These were ambitious and brilliant men—powerful men—the sort who might hold a simpler man’s life in their hands.
INSIDE THE confectioner’s shop on Pine Street the next morning was a grand spread: platters of gilt gingerbread stamped with the figures of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; blancmange molded in bas-relief of French officers dueling each other in cocked hats; and marzipan modeled into a grand and beautiful facade of the Palais des Tuileries. The proprietor, in his former life as a French nobleman, had barely escaped the guillotine; forced to learn a trade after arriving penniless in New York, he’d discovered an almost magical skill at conjuring sweets. Monsieur Singeron outdid himself with his New Year’s plum cake, rich with candied oranges and mace and lashings of brandy, topped with a frosting unaccountably patterned into Cupids hiding among rosebushes and hearts shot through with arrows. To begin the year with such romantic sentiment was so unexpected and delightful that Singeron had turned it into a Manhattan fashion.
The rather more tiresome New Year’s traditions, of course, remained unchanged.
“Some think it is the first year in the Nineteenth century,” one local reported of January 1, 1800. “And others, the last year of the Eighteenth.”
But along with the passing of the century, the memorials to Washington had become impossible to avoid, and relentless. It wasn’t enough that a Mr. Greenwood had advertised himself as “Dentist to the Late President”—now there were also ads for mourning jewelry, and subscription announcements for everything from a portrait of Washington (guaranteed to “afford peculiar satisfaction”) to a portrait of Washington’s urn (“executed by the original designer of this much admired ornament”) to fancy-dress-ball tickets that promised the debut of “the Washington Minuet.”
But New Year’s Day, for Manhattanites, was always a respite from such cares, and it began, like any grand affair in the city should, in Mayor Varick’s house, as locals filed in at noon from the church service. “There,” recounted Mr. Thorburn, the local nail maker, “they broke the first cookie and sipped the first glass of cherry bounce of the season. From thence they went from house to house and broke their bread with merry hearts.”
This was a much-loved tradition from the Dutch. Local gentlemen made a circuit around the blocks, catching up on all the family news of the previous year while the women of the houses laid out the riches of the city—tureens of oysters pickled in white wine, cold jellied lamb, plates of macaroons, and glass after glass of brandy. Men staggered from one house to the next well into the night to pay increasingly merry tidings of the new century, the groups picking up revelers from each house and growing in mass and hilarity. “Before the moon sunk behind the blue hills of the Jerseys,” Thorburn marveled, “you might see twoscore of these happy mortals in one company.”
As the cold winter evening set in, a few households could sober up with coffee brewed from the wooden pipes that fed clear, cold water from the freshly dug well out by Lispenard’s Meadow. It was on the meadow, in fact, that local resident Mrs. Blanck heard the curiously offhanded piece of news that had been making the rounds that day: A young Quaker girl had disappeared almost without a word, and maybe the last to see her was the neighbor girl who had lent her a muff.
Mrs. Blanck reached among her winter clothing, and the eyes of her listeners widened.
This one? she asked.
ELIAS RING and his neighbor Joseph Watkins marched up to Andrew Blanck’s house on the Bowery the next day.
The muff, they demanded. Where did your wife find it?
Blanck was surprised: He’d just settled down to lunch with James Lent and a fellow named Page, men he’d brought to help him break a horse. Living on the fringes of Lispenard’s Meadow, there were always such matters to attend to: a horse—a good black trotter—had been stolen nearby back in the fall, while an ownerless steer had just turned up in an enclosure a few weeks a
go.
Where did she find it?
The well, Blanck blurted out.
Nearby, about midway between Broadway and Bowery, in the valley between the sandy hills at the top and bottom of the meadow, there was a well newly dug by the Manhattan Company. The grandly named Manhattan Well hadn’t been found suitable for the pipeline, though; another had been chosen, and this earlier attempt was now covered up with wooden planks. Ring and Watkins hoisted up poles to sound the disused well, and set off across the snowy meadow with Blanck and his guests alongside them.
His young son William had found the muff floating in the water more than a week ago, the cartman added—on Christmas Eve, in fact—and had brought it home and presented it to his mother.
“I went to the well the next day and looked in,” Blanck would later explain, “but I saw nothing.”
The men reached the well and tossed aside the snow-covered planks. Inside, the brick-lined walls descended into darkness, as clots of snow and pebbles trickled in from the surface above. Page gingerly lowered the tip of his pole into the well. The bottom was sandy and dark, and the frigid water that had once been meant for the city’s kitchens had risen unattended to nearly six feet in depth. He gripped the wooden rod and swept it gently through the water, then suddenly stopped.
There’s something down there.
James Lent tried it as well, and nodded—there was a mass deep in the water, but it was too big and heavy for the wooden pole to hook around. Elias Ring looked grimly on as his neighbor grabbed a set of nails and a hammer; the ironmonger banged irons into the wooden poles, preparing a crude set of grappling hooks. James tried levering the object out with just one, but it was simply too heavy; for a moment, though, a flash of calico cloth floated up near the surface—and then vanished back underneath.
James kept his weight on the pole, holding the burden in place just below the surface, and the men turned to a boy who had sauntered up.
