Alexander Hamilton (125 page)

The corpse of Gulielma Sands was mottled and swollen and badly bruised around the face and breasts. The public was riveted by these gory details, and handbills insinuated that she had been impregnated and then murdered by Weeks. Elias and Catherine Ring egged on this speculation, with Elias recalling that when Weeks came home on the evening of Sands’s disappearance “he appeared as white as ashes and trembled all over like a leaf.”
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The Rings even engaged in some macabre showmanship at their boardinghouse. They displayed Sands’s body in a coffin for three days and then placed it for a day on the pavement outside, allowing people to gratify their ghoulish curiosity and decide whether she had been pregnant. (The inquest said she had not.) As the uproar against Levi Weeks reached a crescendo—“Scarcely anything else is spoken of,” said one local diarist—gossips whispered of ghostly apparitions at the Manhattan well.
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The prosecution of Weeks assumed the vengeful mood of a witch-hunt. The indictment said that, “not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil,” Weeks had “beat[en] and abused” Sands before murdering her and stuffing her down the well.
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The People v. Levi Weeks
began on March 31 at the old City Hall on Wall Street, the Federal Hall of Washington’s first inauguration. Such a huge throng showed up that constables had to empty the courtroom of “superfluous spectators.”
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Levi Weeks could hear crowds outside chanting for his blood: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
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The case holds a special place in Hamilton’s legal practice because William Coleman, a court clerk and later editor of the
New-York Evening Post,
provided an almost complete stenographic transcript—a novelty in those days. Unfortunately, Coleman did not specify which defense lawyer spoke at any given moment, though we can make some educated guesses. For instance, the grandiloquent lawyer who opened the defense case spoke in a florid style reminiscent of Hamilton rather than the more succinct Burr.

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…. We have witnessed the extraordinary means which have been adopted to inflame 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?…In this way, gentlemen, the public opinion comes to be formed unfavourably and long before the prisoner is brought to his trial he is already condemned.
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It seems mystifying that Levi Weeks could have assembled a team composed of the three preeminent lawyers in New York. Hamilton could scarcely have warmed to Burr after the Manhattan Company sham and was likely motivated by his friendship with Ezra Weeks, Levi’s brother, whom he had hired to construct a weekend home north of the city. Another likely reason why Hamilton collaborated with Burr is that the trial occurred on the eve of local elections that were to have profound national implications. None of the three lawyers could afford to miss a chance to publicize his talents in a spectacular criminal case.

The trial unfolded with a speed that seems unimaginable today. Fifty-five witnesses testified in three days, each day’s testimony lasting well past midnight. The rigorous defense team established a credible alibi for Levi Weeks, claiming that he had dined with Ezra on the night in question. During that dinner, John B. McComb, Jr., the architect hired for Hamilton’s new home, arrived and found a cheerful Levi stowing away a hearty dinner. From medical experts, the defense elicited helpful opinions that the marks on Gulielma Sands’s body might have been produced by drowning or by the autopsy itself, opening up the possibility of suicide. (The coroner’s inquest had established drowning, not beating, as the cause of death.) The defense lawyers also discredited the testimony of Elias and Catherine Ring, showing that Elias Ring had probably slept with Gulielma Sands and that Sands, no innocent damsel, had a little weakness for laudanum. The image of the Ring household evolved from a scene of violated gentility into something closer to a sedate brothel.

As the trial proceeded, the defense cast suspicion on a Richard Croucher, a shady salesman of ladies’ garments, who had zealously stirred up malice against Levi Weeks. Croucher had arrived from England the year before and was yet another raffish lodger at the steamy Ring premises. As principal witness for the prosecution, he seemed too eager to retail stories about sexual liaisons between Levi Weeks and Gulielma Sands. The defense lawyers damaged Croucher’s credibility by getting him to confess that he had quarreled with Weeks.

It has become part of Hamiltonian legend that when Croucher testified, Hamilton placed candles on both sides of his face, giving his features a sinister glow. “The jury will mark every muscle of his face, every motion of his eye,” Hamilton is said to have declaimed. “I conjure you to look through that man’s countenance to his conscience.”
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Croucher supposedly confessed on the spot. Oddly enough, Aaron Burr later claimed that
he
had grabbed two candelabra from the defense table, held them toward Croucher, and declared theatrically, “Behold the murderer, gentlemen!”
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Traumatized by this exposure, the guilty Croucher was alleged to have bolted in terror from the courtroom. Coleman’s transcript shows when the famous moment may have occurred. One witness was testifying to Croucher’s unsavory character when, Coleman noted, “
here one of the prisoner’s counsel held a candle close to Croucher’s face, who stood among the cro[w]d and asked the witness if it was he and he said it was.
”
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Hamilton or Burr may have flicked the candle toward Croucher in a rapid gesture that made him appear to cringe guiltily in the glare of a burning taper. The lodger never confessed to the crime. The likelihood that Croucher, not Weeks, was the culprit increased three months later when he was convicted of raping a thirteen-year-old girl at the racy Ring boardinghouse.

The protracted case ended at 1:30 in the morning on April 2, 1800. The bleary-eyed prosecutor had not slept for forty-four hours, and Hamilton noted that everyone was “sinking under fatigue.” Hamilton therefore waived the right to a summation, saying he would “rest the case on the recital of the facts” by the bench. Hamilton felt confident that the case required no “laboured elucidation.”
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He and his colleagues had convincingly shown that Levi Weeks had a watertight alibi, that the evidence against him was circumstantial, and that he possessed no motive for butchering his fiancée. The jury agreed. William Coleman ended his transcript: “
The jury then went out and returned in about five minutes with a verdict
—NOT GUILTY.
”
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It was a triumph for the defense and a hideous embarrassment for Elias and Catherine Ring. As Hamilton strode from the courtroom, Catherine Ring waved a fist in his face and shouted, “If thee dies a natural death, I shall think there is no justice in heaven.”
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While Hamilton and Burr bestrode the Wall Street courtroom, they knew that local elections for the state legislature in late April might affect much more than New York politics: they might determine the next president of the United States. With John Adams certain to run strongly in New England and Thomas Jefferson equally so in the south, the election would hinge on pivotal votes in the mid-Atlantic states, particularly New York, which had twelve electoral votes. The Constitution gave each state the right to choose its own method for selecting presidential electors, and New York picked its by a joint ballot of the two houses of the legislature, both now with Federalist majorities, yet with the upstate counties evenly split between Republicans and Federalists. The New York City elections that spring could tip the balance of the legislature one way or the other. Thus, as New York City went, so went the state, and possibly the nation.

Jefferson realized this and advised Madison in early March that “if the city election of N[ew] York is in favor of the Republican ticket,” then the national winner might be Republican.
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Within Hamilton’s Federalist coterie, the April elections arose as the best chance to blunt John Adams’s reelection bid and substitute a more congenial Federalist candidate. Robert Troup wrote to Rufus King, “This election will be all important…and particularly so as there is a
decided and deep rooted disgust
with Mr. Adams on the part of his
best old friends.
”
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The centrality of the New York City elections presented an unprecedented opportunity for that most dexterous opportunist, Aaron Burr, who knew that the Republicans wanted to achieve geographic balance on their national ticket by having a northern vice presidential candidate. If he could deliver New York into the Republican camp, he might parlay that feat into a claim on the second spot under Jefferson. In the polarized atmosphere of American politics, Burr knew that a northern renegade aligned with southern Republicans could provide a critical swing factor. This was Alexander Hamilton’s recurring nightmare: an electoral deal struck between Virginia and New York Republicans.

In the New York City elections that spring, Hamilton and Burr descended from the lofty heights to spar in the grit and bustle of lower Manhattan ward politics. On April 15, Hamilton met with his Federalist adherents at the Tontine City Hotel and drew up a largely undistinguished slate of candidates for the state Assembly. It was composed of an atypical (for the Federalists) cross-section of New Yorkers, with a potter, a mason, a ship chandler, a grocer, and two booksellers. This may have been a strategy to outflank the Republicans, or it may have reflected the reluctance of many wealthy Federalists to put in time as poorly paid state legislators, especially with the state capital now transferred to Albany. Burr, with his customary craft, waited for Hamilton to present his slate before revealing his own. When Burr scanned a sheet naming the Federalist candidates, he “read it over with great gravity, folded it up, put it in his pocket, and…said, ‘Now I have him all hollow,’” said John Adams.
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The suave Burr packed his slate with gray eminences. He cajoled the perennial ex-governor, George Clinton, out of retirement and added the aging Horatio Gates, still feeding off his wartime victory at Saratoga, as well as Brockholst Livingston, his recent cocounsel. An early master of the art of coalition politics, Burr made common cause with Clintonians and Livingstons to present a redoubtable united front. Hamilton thought Burr had engaged in deceptive window-dressing by padding his slate with luminaries who had no real intention of serving in the state legislature and cared only about the selection of Republican electors in the presidential race.

Unlike other contemporary politicians, Burr enjoyed the nitty-gritty of such campaigns and embraced the electioneering they disdained. No other member of the founding generation would have explained his fondness for elections by stating that they provided “a great deal of fun and honor and profit.”
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That spring, Burr ran a campaign that, with its exhaustive toolbox of techniques, previewed modern political methods. Federalists had benefited from a requirement that voters needed to own substantial real estate. To bypass this, Burr exploited a legal loophole that enabled tenants to pool their properties and claim that their
combined
values qualified them to vote. He sent German-speaking orators into German-speaking areas. Burr also infused his passionate young followers with uncommon zeal at a time of haphazard campaigning. They drew up lists of voters in the city, with long columns of names accompanied by thumbnail sketches of the voter’s political bent, finances, health, and willingness to volunteer. With his campaign workers knocking on doors to solicit funds, Burr dispensed canny tips about potential donors. “Ask nothing of this one,” he would say. “If we demand money, he’ll be offended and refuse to work for us…. Double this man’s assessment. He’ll contribute generously if he doesn’t have to work.”
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However aristocratic his lineage, Burr was a proponent of the hard sell and shrewdly sized up his targets. He also scented victory on several topical issues, denouncing the Alien and Sedition Acts and the unpopular taxes levied to finance Hamilton’s army. “Burr’s generalship, perseverance, industry, and execution exceeds all description,” Commodore James Nicholson told Albert Gallatin. He was as “superior to the Hambletonians as a man is to a boy.”
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That April, New Yorkers out for a stroll could have stumbled upon either Alexander Hamilton or Aaron Burr addressing crowds on street corners, sometimes alternating on the same platform. They treated each other with impeccable courtesy. Neither seemed to have any hesitation about soliciting voters individually or in small groups. One Republican paper could scarcely believe Hamilton’s strenuous campaigning as he rallied the faithful like a general marshaling men for battle: “Hamilton harangues the astonished group. Every day he is seen in the street, hurrying this way and darting that. Here he buttons a heavy-hearted fed[eralist] and preaches up courage, there he meets a group and he simpers in unanimity…. [H]etalks of perseverance and (God bless the mark) of virtue!”
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The Federalist papers professed similar shock at seeing the patrician Burr working the Manhattan sidewalks, one paper asking how a would-be vice president could “stoop so low as to visit every corner in search of voters?”
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Burr opened his home to his workers, serving refreshments and scattering mattresses on the floor to allow quick naps. One New York merchant recorded in his diary: “Col. Burr kept open house for nearly two months and committees were in session day and night during that whole time at his house.”
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