Duel with the Devil (17 page)

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye!
he called out.

William Coleman’s deep timbre carried authority;
he towered over most of the crowd, and bore the robust frame of a young man famed for having skated twenty miles up the Connecticut River in a single evening. Spectators in the courtroom were wise to quiet down quickly.

All manner of persons
, he continued,
that any have business to do at this circuit court and court of oyer and terminer, held in and for the county of New York, let them draw near and give their attendance and they shall be heard
.

Coleman knew these proclamations by heart, for he had once been on the other side of the counsel’s table himself. From an unlikely start as
an abandoned child at a Boston poorhouse, Coleman had risen as a young lawyer to build one of the finest mansions in Massachusetts—and was then promptly bankrupted by a bad land deal. Fleeing debts to reassemble his life in Manhattan, he’d
worked briefly as Aaron Burr’s law partner before falling under Hamilton’s sway as a Federalist—and it was to Hamilton that the grateful and destitute Coleman owed the coveted patronage job of clerk of the court.

Sheriff
, he intoned,
return the writs and precepts to you directed, and delivered and returnable here this day, that the court may proceed thereon
.

Behind Coleman, as was the customary for the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the assembled might of Manhattan’s political and judicial establishment entered and seated themselves. At the highest chair was the presiding judge, the Right Honorable John Lansing—the chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, the presiding judge for circuit court cases in this district, and a member of the state assembly’s crucial Council of Revision. He was a stout Republican—as one of New York’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention,
he’d virtually walked out in disgust at its model of a strong central government. And yet he was also a eminently fair-minded man. During debates over the Manhattan Company charter in 1799, it was Lansing—not any Federalist—who
publicly questioned the curious provisions buried in Burr’s bill.

By his side sat Mayor Richard Varick—former speaker of the assembly, former city recorder, and Aaron Burr’s predecessor as state attorney general. He was a war veteran with much in common with Brockholst Livingston and Alexander Hamilton: Like Livingston,
he’d served as an aide to Hamilton’s father-in-law, General Philip Schuyler; and like Hamilton, he’d gone on to serve as General Washington’s aide. Nearby sat Varick’s second-in-command, Richard Harison, the city recorder. He, too, was close to Hamilton—he was
the general’s former law partner, in fact—and yet by virtue of his office, he was
now also a board member of Burr’s new water company.

This room, filled with the most distinguished legal eminences in the state, might have seemed a Gordian knot of tangled conflicts of interest: Burr’s company owned the murder scene, had employed the defendant, had rejected a bid by a relative of the deceased, had financial relationships with the court recorder and the clerk, and had political alliances and rivalries with his fellow counselors, the mayor, and the judge. In any other time or place, all this might have at least raised an eyebrow. But in Manhattan in 1800, it was just how business was done.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye!
Coleman called out again.

The city’s greatest political foes—the very men whose reputation jurors would be weighing at the ballot box in a month’s time—now sat before the crowd, united in this case of murder. And now, in the middle of this group of men—these war heroes and skirmishing politicians, these bitter rivals and old comrades in arms—there stood the young carpenter whose life lay in their hands.

A
PPROACH THE BAR
, the clerk instructed Weeks. The crowd got their first good look at the man:
a respectable-enough-looking fellow, the murmur went.

Weeks’s presence was a quiet and subdued one—not least because in a capital trial, it was still
the custom to not let the accused testify, as their hopeless bias against conviction created a “disqualification of interest.” Until 1701, British and American defendants
didn’t even have the right to counsel or to call witnesses, because holding trials was considered necessary only when there was already overwhelming proof of wrongdoing. That Weeks could retain the talents of Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston, and call witnesses on his own behalf, was the great advance of the eighteenth century. But even now, at the dawn of nineteenth century, defendants remained almost mute during their trial. One of the few times Weeks could speak was during jury selection.

“Simon Schermerhorn!” the clerk called out.

Here
.

“William Miller!”

Here
.

One by one, Coleman called out thirty-four members of the jury pool, and then turned to the accused.

“
Levi Weeks, prisoner at the bar, hold up your right hand,” he commanded. Weeks placed his left hand on the court’s Bible and raised his right; in the tense silence there was the scratching of pencils in the gallery as competing
local hacks took rapid notes, hoping to beat the clerk himself to writing the story that was about to unfold.

“
Hearken to what is said to you,” Coleman continued. “These good men who have last been called, and who do now appear, are those who are to pass between the people of the State of New-York, and you, upon your Trial of Life and Death. If, therefore, you will challenge them, your time to challenge is as they come up to the book to be sworn, and before they are sworn, you will be heard.”

The clerk steadily called up each potential juror to the stand:
Garrit Storm. Robert Lylburn. George Scriba
.

Weeks immediately cut some of the jurors short as their names were called out:
They are not fit to judge me
. So many New Yorkers had already spoken publicly against him that soon nearly a dozen rejects were sent back. Others excused themselves even as they walked up to the bar.

I am a Friend
, they explained, and the judge waved them off—for he knew they were not friends of the accused, but rather members of the Society of Friends—and thus forbidden by the tenets of Quakerism from swearing of oaths, let alone accepting a trial that involved capital punishment. Just one Quaker, James Hunt, was willing to bend his theology.

Place your hand upon the book
, the clerk told Hunt.

“
Juror, look upon the Prisoner; Prisoner, look upon the Juror.”

The two men locked eyes.

Observing carefully from the defense table, Burr could only be pleased by this choice: Hunt was an old Republican running mate of his, and
they’d served in the assembly together.
So had the father of juror Garrit Storm. Another juror, Robert Lylburn, was a
tobacco and beeswax merchant best known for
organizing local Irishmen for the Republicans.

And yet above all, these jurors were reasonable businessmen: Of the twelve men agreed upon, all were merchants, grocers, or provisioners. Not only did the jury box contain John Rathbone—a merchant of
everything from shawls to gunpowder, who maintained what was admiringly described as “
immense operations” in salt manufacturing—it also contained a
former president of the city’s chamber of commerce, Boss Walton, known as a lavishly generous
and civic-minded “Prince of Merchants.” The overwhelmingly mercantile jury was no coincidence. Jurors had to be men between the ages of twenty-one and sixty, and be taxpaying
landowners holding property worth at least $250—
nearly a year’s wages for a common laborer. The jury box was what women and the poor faced, not what they sat in.

And so the jury, like everything else in the room, was a curiously and intimately local affair. Not only did jurors cross paths with the contestants of the trial, they also knew
one another
well: Just a few years earlier, James
Hunt and his fellow juror Jasper Ward had even run a grocery store together.

Swear
, the clerk said to Hunt, “
You shall well and truly try, and true deliverance make, between the People of the State of New-York, and Levi Weeks, and a true verdict give according to evidence, so help you God.”

Levi looked at the grocer who would help to decide his fate. The day before, the man had been judging apples and weighing plugs of tobacco.

So help me God
, the juror said.

G
ENERAL
H
AMILTON
considered his carefully written notes.
It was his habit to divide his papers into two columns, the left side with the points of his case, and the right with the legal precedents and citations.
Hale’s Plea of the Crown
—yes, that would come into play. For all the new laws and rights that Hamilton’s generation had been developing for this new country, he and his fellow lawyers were still deeply dependent on the usages of the colonial era and the old country. A country scarcely a decade old had few legal precedents to draw on, so if there was one place where the king and the crown still received respectful mention in America, it was in its courtrooms.

Hamilton had served the defense many times before, had some small experience with murder cases, and had even served alongside Burr in the past, but this—a murder defense with Burr? It was
altogether unique. And yet for all the strangeness of the affair, many eyes in the courtroom were also upon the clerk. For Coleman to keep this patronage job would depend on the Federalists’ holding on to City Hall in the next election, of course—Colonel Burr, sitting with his usual unnerving calm, would try to sweep Coleman and the rest out at the first opportunity. But for now, Hamilton’s young protégé was confidently holding forth in the center of the courtroom.

“
Gentlemen of the Jury,” the clerk began. “The prisoner at the bar stands indicted in the words following, to wit.”

Coleman peered down at the densely written parchment. The indictment, as was the custom, was a serpentine tangle of flawlessly penned, endlessly redundant clauses.

Coleman took a breath—for the first sentence was not yet even finished.

A second sentence, at twice the length, went on to say much the same as the first, and in nearly the same words. After carefully navigating through this ornamental maze of verbiage, Coleman turned to the jury and addressed them more plainly—as fellow citizens and neighbors, all puzzling over a mysterious crime.

“
Upon this indictment the prisoner at the bar hath been arraigned,” he explained gently. “And on his arraignment, hath pleaded not guilty. Your charge is, gentlemen, to enquire whether the prisoner at the bar is guilty or not.”

Out in the hallways the scores of witnesses awaited; inside, the young carpenter sat ready for his fate.

“So sit together,” Coleman commanded the jury, “and hear your evidence.”

B
EFORE HE BEGAN HIS OPENING ARGUMENTS, THE ASSISTANT ATTORNEY
general pondered the eminences at the defense table. Just a few months back,
Colden had personally investigated and successfully prosecuted Hamilton’s libel action against local printer David Frothingham—and it was Brockholst Livingston that he’d prevailed over. Aaron Burr was no stranger to Colden, either: As a lawyer for the prosecutor’s own father,
Burr helped save Colden land from anti-Loyalist seizures after the war.

Today, though, all three men were arrayed against him.

“
The prisoner has thought it necessary for his defense, to employ so many advocates distinguished for their eloquence and abilities—so vastly my superiors in learning, experience and professional rank,” the young prosecutor began, as eyes turned toward the defense table. “But gentlemen, as a public prosecutor, I think I ought to do no more than offer you in its proper order, all the testimony the case affords, drawn from witnesses. All that they know—the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”