Duel With the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins [Collins, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307956477
Google: URlT2MaoRpsC
Amazon: B00ALBR7A4
Barnesnoble: B00ALBR7A4
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2013-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

AARON BURR WAS NOT IMPRESSED BY THE CASE AGAINST HIS client.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he began, as he arose and solemnly paced the packed courtroom. “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.”

Everyone there knew Burr was no stranger to attacks on reputation himself—attacks, in fact, that sometimes came from his fellow counsel Alexander Hamilton. But after the raking fire of General Hamilton’s cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, it was now Colonel Burr’s duty to begin the defense’s counterattack. Their strategies could not be more different: Unlike the passionate and eloquent Hamilton, Burr was known for speaking slowly and precisely in the courtroom, each word considered and emphatic, each sentence like a line of silk in a spider’s patient, ensnaring web.

“Extraordinary means have been adopted to enflame the public against the prisoner,” Burr continued. “Why has the body been exposed for days in the streets in a manner most indecent and shocking? Such dreadful scenes speak powerfully to the passions: They petrify our mind with horror—congeal the blood within our veins.”

Burr’s defense table was scattered with his careful notes and volumes of Pleas of the Crown—the very emblems of enlightenment and reasoned thought over bloody terror that stood in mute contrast to the multitudes outside who had rushed to judge the prisoner guilty.

“Notwithstanding testimony of an intimacy between the prisoner and the deceased, we shall show you that there was nothing like a real courtship,” Burr emphasized. And the tales of nighttime sleigh rides, of marks upon Elma’s body, of guilty signs by the prisoner afterward? These, he assured jurors, would all fall apart under close scrutiny. The very slowness and care of Burr’s speech seemed to mark him apart from the prosecutor, with his wild barrage of accusations. “The story, you will see,” the colonel remarked scornfully, “is broken, disconnected, and utterly impossible.”

And that was just the problem: Through an almost malicious sloppiness in prosecution, a good name could already be damaged. Everyone there knew too well how justice could catch the innocent and unwary in its gears.

“Even in this city a case had occurred, not many years ago—a young man had been charged with the crime of rape,” Burr mused in grim recollection of the Harry Bedlow case. “It is yet fresh in the minds of everybody. The public mind was there highly incensed, and after the unfortunate man had been acquitted by a verdict of the jury, so irritated and enflamed were the people, that they threatened to pull down the house of the prisoner’s counsel.”

The attention of the crowd turned to Brockholst Livingston at the defense table; they knew about his narrow escape, as well as his client’s destitution after the civil trial that followed. The gravity of this example had just the effect Burr had hoped for—“it was one of the most eloquent speeches we have ever heard” one onlooker

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