Duel with the Devil

by Paul Collins

  “Is he a man of decent situation in life?” the court asked.

  “Very respectable indeed.”

  “He has a wife, daughters grown up?”

  “Yes,” the musician replied, before adding, “I think, from some circumstances in the last four or five years, he has not been collected in his mind.”

  He recounted how the accused would suddenly fling his store’s money till upon customers’ heads, and how the man had cruelly abused his wife and daughters until they received a court order of protection against him. Another neighbor testified that “he is at times deranged,” and recalled that “he has threatened to buy a pair of pistols, insisting that I should fire at him, or he would fire at me, for no reason upon earth.”

  Atop the court docket is the name of this homicidal lunatic:

  RICHARD DAVID CRUTCHER, OTHERWISE CROUCHER.

  His neighbors knew him by a different name, though.

  “I was coming down Holborn, and met the waggoner,” another witness testified. “I asked him if he knew Mr. Croucher, and he said—what, Mad Croucher!”

  Croucher never denied stealing the boots, and indeed the court was scarcely interested in that question; the man was clearly insane. As such, Croucher was found not guilty. Yet instead of occupying a cell in the Bedlam asylum, he had managed to flee and secure a passage to Manhattan.

  Nobody in the Rings’ boardinghouse—or in the courtroom at Levi Weeks’s trial—had any idea of the true nature of their new boarder. But had the jurors or lawyers known the Bowery a bit better, they’d have seen right through Croucher’s alibi for the night of Elma’s disappearance. He’d been at a birthday party at the house of Ann Ashmore, he said. But who was Ashmore? Why, she ran a brandy-making firm in her house: Croucher’s alibi was a party in a distillery. It was no wonder that the attendees couldn’t even remember what month they’d seen him there.

  Croucher’s old neighbors in London could have warned of what was liable to happen next. “I have seen him very often in liquor, and look as wild as he possibly could,” one testified. “In fact, he was not bearable when he had any liquor.”

  If Croucher or anyone else had told Elma about the party that evening—and, though he held back from using it in the trial, Burr claimed that Elma was known to sneak out at night sometimes—then an encounter between her and Croucher could have been disastrous. Burr and Hamilton already had their suspicions about Croucher, and after the trial one newspaper pointedly warned “those who have been instrumental and active in misleading public sentiment, and stirring up public indignation … Suspicion at length may fall on them.” But the task of Levi Weeks’s defense team had been to free their client, not to convict someone else. And so it was that Croucher was free after the trial to prepare to set up house with his new American bride—and her thirteen-year-old daughter.

  Soon enough, New Yorkers would learn just how dangerous Croucher truly was.

  COME HELP me scrub my old room clean, so that I may move here, Croucher told his new stepdaughter on the evening of Wednesday, April 23, 1800. Just three weeks had passed since the stunning Weeks verdict, but it was time for the cloth merchant to move on from his old life at the boardinghouse. A forty-year-old man such as Croucher could hardly hope for much assistance in packing from a slight, slender girl like Margaret Miller; still, it was not her place to object to a cleaning job. Her mother had already been upbraiding her for sauciness, though others hardly discerned much impertinence in the meek young girl. She dutifully followed her new stepfather out into Ann Street, and the two made their way toward Croucher’s old lodgings on Greenwich Street.

  FALSE SHAME! cried the ads for that evening’s theatrical production, while over at the street corner in Rhinelander’s brew house, the Federalist and Republican faithful argued over the following week’s election. Peter Schermerhorn had just that day announced his withdrawal from the local Federalist slate; it was obvious that Hamilton’s party was now a sinking ship. Those tired of arguing politics had the competing accounts of the Weeks trial to discuss; Coleman’s had been out for scarcely a week.

  I was there—at the trial, Croucher boasted to the girl. Shall I tell you how the young woman died?

  Margaret had been learning her lessons at school, where pious and edifying readings were the usual fare, and hadn’t looked at any of the books about Levi Weeks. It was hardly proper reading for a child. And at that time of evening, with the sun already down, there was little reading to be had anyway. The two stopped in front of the darkened boardinghouse at 208 Greenwich Street, and Croucher ushered her in through the crooked front door, through which, just a few months earlier, Elma Sands had last departed.

  We shall pack and clean in the morning, he explained, and they walked past Mr. and Mrs. Ring’s bedroom by the foot of the stairs, and then up the creaking steps. Tonight, you’ll sleep in the servant girl’s room—it’s on the third floor.

  Margaret walked up obediently, and into the darkened hallway that locals had idly imagined to be haunted. There was scarcely any light at all up here, it seemed. Margaret walked into a room and heard the click of the lock on the door behind her.

  Hands seized her in the dark, pulling her clothes off.

  If you scream, Croucher’s voice hissed, I will kill you.

  TWO MONTHS later, Margaret Miller peered anxiously from the same witness stand where so many others had testified against Levi Weeks back in the spring. Before her stood the very man who had questioned her predecessors: Cadwallader Colden. At the defense table there was another familiar face: Brockholst Livingston. But next to him sat a new prisoner: Richard David Croucher.

  How old are you? the prosecutor asked Margaret.

  “Thirteen,” she said.

  Her faced flushed with embarrassment, and she began crying, the tears coursing uncontrollably down her cheeks. She scarcely looked her age to begin with, and now the grave gentlemen of the court found themselves flustered by an altogether unaccustomed sight in the City Hall courtroom: a terrified, weeping girl.

  I know that it is difficult, the judge comforted her. But you must tell us what happened next.

  “He took me and undressed me and put me on the bed,” she said haltingly, regaining some composure. “Then he undressed himself, and came to bed …”

  She burst into tears again. To face her stepfather across the courtroom while testifying had simply become too much; Croucher, one spectator remarked, bore “every mark on his face of a crafty, unprincipled villain.” He seemed not at all discomposed that he was being tried for rape.

  “He used force,” the girl continued. “He did what he would, and hurt me very much, so that I could hardly get home the next morning. After he had done, he fell asleep, and I got up and sat on some wood till I could see to find the door.”

  In the weeks that followed, Croucher had abused her terribly, calling the girl a whore in front of her mother. “He whipped me, and turned me out of doors,” the girl testified, and finally broke down altogether into sobs.

  Striding before the jury, defending lawyer Brockholst Livingston seemed as confident as ever: He was now a state assemblyman-elect, thanks to a Republican sweep of the elections back in the spring. And Colden, sitting grimly across the courtroom—well, he had lost. This rape charge against Croucher, Livingston genially announced, was just like the Henry Bedlow rape trial all over again … which Livingston had also won.

  “If any thing of an improper nature has passed between them, I am inclined to believe it has been with her consent,” he mused thoughtfully. “It is said, her youth renders it impossible she should have been a lewd girl. Who that is acquainted with the dissolute morals of our city does not know that females are to be found living in a state of open prostitution at the early ages of 12 and 13 years?”

  Perhaps, he added helpfully, the real culprit behind her wantonness was “our ill-judged mode of educating the sexes together in our public schools.”

  This time, Colden was ready for him in his closing argume
nt. Consent was legally impossible in a girl her age, he pointed out; and what was more, Croucher had plainly threatened her with Elma’s fate.

  “She knew that a young woman had been cruelly murdered,” he reminded the jury. “She learned the particulars of that trial from this prisoner. The threats of the prisoner to murder her if she was not silent, must have had a greater influence than they would have at any other time.”

  It took the jury just five minutes to find Croucher guilty.

  A MONSTER, read headlines announcing his sentence of life with hard labor, and the word spread quickly to other cities as well. “Every one must rejoice that the community is freed from a demon so artful and unfeeling,” the Philadelphia Gazette announced. And while Croucher’s threats to his stepdaughter stopped just short of a confession of Elma’s murder, they were enough for the Gazette and other newspapers to revive distrust of a witness “who was absent at a suspicious place that very evening, and pursued the suspected young man with the utmost malignity.” The brilliant and unlikely pairing of Hamilton and Burr in the defense of Levi Weeks had, it seemed, almost certainly saved the life of an innocent man after all.

  Saving their own lives, however, was a different matter.

  [Four Years Later]

  FOR THE MAN WHO HAD TRIUMPHED IN THE 1800 ELECTION, THE next would prove far less kind.

  “AARON BURR … is using every wicked art to promote his own election,” the New-York American Citizen warned in April 1804. “Degraded as he is, beyond contempt in the opinion of all good men. Vain dotard! Does he aspire to public honor? Let this hint suffice—Let it shew what I could relate—I know the rottenness of their character, and could torture the marrow of their very bones.”

  A hint was all that was needed, for the rumor was already afoot: The newspaper’s editor claimed that he had had assembled a list of “upwards of twenty women of ill-fame with whom [Burr] has been connected.” For good measure, the editor then ran a letter claiming that the colonel was actually a British secret agent.

  And this was in a Republican newspaper.

  Engineering his party’s victory in 1800 had been curiously unrewarding to Aaron Burr. He’d spent four years as an unwelcome vice president, spurned by President Jefferson through internal feuding; once it was clear that Jefferson would prefer New York’s Governor Clinton on his 1804 reelection ticket, Burr returned to run for Clinton’s vacated post. There was just one problem: The judge from the Levi Weeks case, John Lansing, was already tipped for the Republican candidacy. Ambitious as ever, Burr dodged a looming loss with a simple solution: He’d run to the middle and seize both Republican and Federalist voters. The opposing party’s disarray, he realized, had left many of their voters his for the taking.

  Hamilton, not surprisingly, was appalled.

  “I had rather seen Lansing governor & the [Federalist] party broken to pieces,” he wrote in despair.

  General Hamilton traveled around the state, lobbying to keep Burr from capturing the Federalist Party—his party. Hamilton had already hired William Coleman, the chronicler of the Weeks trial, to head his newly founded Evening Post; it now joined Republican papers in attacking this monstrous Republican-Democratic-Federalist candidate. This time Hamilton’s tactics worked. Burr lost the resulting election by a crushing margin, and retreated in humiliation to his mansion—dodging friends, his own family, and—above all—his creditors.

  He was a ruined man, and he wanted revenge.

  “I send for your perusal a letter,” Burr began in a terse note to Hamilton dated June 18, 1804. It contained an account of a Federalist dinner where Hamilton had heaped scorn on Burr; in it, one Dr. Cooper claimed he could quote “still more despicable” opinions from Hamilton. “You must perceive, Sir,” Burr wrote, “the necessity of a prompt and unqualified acknowledgement or denial.”

  The account of the slander was undated and gave no direct quotes. How could Hamilton acknowledge or deny anything so vague? And, Hamilton added in a reply—“Tis evident that the phrase, ‘still more despicable,’ admits of infinite shades, from very light to very dark.”

  “The question is not … grammatical accuracy,” Burr shot back.

  For two weeks the pair reprised their roles as a trial team: Burr as the wily exploiter of formalities and Hamilton as the rigorous cross-examiner. Burr demanded respect, and Hamilton demanded evidence. But what Burr really wanted was a fight—a duel—one that would return him to political power. Hamilton, ever the lawyer, asked to finish his current cases first: “I should not think it right in the midst of a Circuit Court to withdraw my services from those who have confided important interests to me.”

  When the two finally met on a New Jersey shore in the early morning of Wednesday, July 11, 1804, it was with all the attention that two legal minds could bear upon the task. They’d crossed the river to a state that had not outlawed dueling; they were taken over by bargemen who were not to look up, so as to witness nothing; they were refereed by judges who would look away at the appropriate moment of firing, and would then depart with their duelist under cover of an umbrella, so that nobody could witness the entire fight.

  But this much is known: Hamilton shot into the trees. Burr, leveling his pistol at his foe, did not.

  Hamilton crumpled to the ground almost instantly. Burr’s assistant saw the colonel step forward, a seeming expression of apology flickering momentarily across his face, but he then turned away and departed without a word, in keeping with the code duello. Dr. David Hosack—a key witness in the Weeks trial, and still the physician to both men—was the first to aid the fallen General Hamilton. The veteran soldier already knew just how badly he’d been hit.

  “This is a mortal wound, Doctor,” he gasped.

  VICE PRESIDENT Burr now found himself at the middle of the most shocking homicide case in America since—well, since the last one that he’d also been at the center of. New York was in mourning, and no matter how much he insisted that Hamilton had brought it on himself, many believed that it was Burr’s fault.

  “The streets were lined with people,” reported William Coleman of Hamilton’s funeral that Monday. “Doors and windows were filled, principally with weeping females, and even the house tops were covered with spectators.”

  Nobody had seen anything like it since George Washington had died—doctors and lawyers and judges were all out on Broadway, marching gravely and attired in black; so were local politicians, veterans, merchants, diplomats, the students and faculty of Columbia—everybody, in short, except for Aaron Burr. It was a mark of just how much a part of the city’s fabric he and General Hamilton were that, in ordinary times, the two men might have reasonably chosen from at least five different places to march in a city funeral procession: with the veterans, with the bar association members, with the bankers, with the civic associations, or among the pallbearers.

  Now Hamilton had been torn from the city he’d helped rebuild, and the populace was in shock. They boiled with such anger at Burr that, as Gouverneur Morris gave the eulogy in Trinity Church, he feared setting off a riot—“their Indignation amounts almost to a frenzy already,” he warned.

  Where had it all gone so wrong for the vice president?

  To Burr, the cause of his troubles remained none other than General Hamilton himself. “The last hours of Genl H (I might include the day preceding the interview) appear to have been devoted to Malevolence and hypocrisy,” he wrote bitterly a few days after the funeral. In particular, the general had devoted the day before the duel to composing a lengthy farewell note. Carefully enumerated in the same neat hand as his court briefs, it explained that he disapproved of duels, and planned to “throw away my first fire” all along.

  “I have thoughts even of reserving my second fire—and thus giving a double opportunity to Col. Burr to pause and reflect,” he piously added.

  Burr was flabbergasted: Hamilton had been in far more duels than he had, and it was Hamilton who had attacked Burr’s reputation in the first place. For Hamilton to
posthumously present himself as the victim beggared belief. Nor did Hamilton’s throwing away his shot have the sanction of proper dueling. Yet General Hamilton had perfectly designed his letter, by sincere intent or calculated design, for the possibility of a loss—and to loft himself into sainthood. He now looked like a martyr, while Burr appeared to be a cold-blooded killer.

  Outrage poured forth from newspapers and pamphlets, not least from William Coleman, who published the exchange of letters between Burr and Hamilton, decrying “the shocking catastrophe which deprived America of its most useful citizen.” Dueling was certainly a subject Coleman knew well: Earlier that year, he’d killed New York’s harbormaster in the middle of a snowstorm, and then trudged back to the Post and “got the paper out in good style, though half an hour late.” But now that dueling had claimed Hamilton as a victim, the editor was utterly grief-stricken—and like so many others, he found his opinion of dueling had been upended.

  “Dueling,” he approvingly quoted one newspaper, “is now looked upon with something like the detestation it deserves.”

  Instead of securing Burr’s political future, his victory on the dueling field had turned the country against him. With a murder charge being mulled, the vice president fled the state, abandoning his mansion and all his possessions to his creditors. For days he kept off main roads and used a false name; what money he had in his pocket had been borrowed at the last moment.

  At one time Aaron Burr had battled to defend New York’s most notorious accused murderer. Now the notorious killer he’d have to defend was himself.

  DECADES LATER, a popular tale arose about the Levi Weeks murder trial: that as his triumphant defense team left City Hall, they were accosted by Mrs. Ring. Shaking her fist, the boardinghouse mistress yelled at Hamilton, “If thee dies a natural death, I shall think there is no justice in heaven!”