Salon.com > Alexander Hamilton

“Duel With the Devil”: Murder in Old New York

Sun, 26 May 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Crime and punishment: Dostoyevsky was far from the only writer to recognize how much a society reveals about itself in the way it handles both. For novelists, a detective can serve as a roving eye, licensed to peer into the secrets of every social stratum, while a trial, with its pitched adversaries and high stakes, becomes a dramatic way to decide not only what happened but who, if anyone, is to blame.

That's how Paul Collins uses the famous real-life murder mystery at the center of "Duel With the Devil." This sensational crime took place in Manhattan in December, 1799, on the very brink of a new century (or not quite, if you're the sort of pedant who insists that the millennium didn't really turn until New Year's 1801 -- and yes, those people were around back then, too!). The body of a young Quaker woman, Elma Sands, was found at the bottom of a well in Lispenard Meadows, a swath of marshy, undeveloped land that separated New York City proper from Greenwich Village, approximately where the neighborhood of Soho stands today. The guy almost everyone liked for the killer was Levi Weeks, a carpenter who lived in the same boarding house as Sands, an establishment run by Sands' cousin, Catharine Ring, and her husband, Elias.

Less than a few good men

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:00:00 +0000

You’ll find lurking in every media-maximized sex scandal a man who feels himself in one way or another above the law. Look up “smug” in the political dictionary, and if the first entry isn’t Herman Cain, it will probably say Newt Gingrich, who eagerly pursued Bill Clinton concerning morals charges that may have paled in comparison to his own contemporaneous straying problem. Oops.

Now, let’s compare the other headline-grabbing sex shocker of the week: the concealment by Penn State University of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged fifteen-year rampage, in sexually abusing young boys. There is a common thread between the sordid Sandusky business and Herman Cain’s outrageous behavior when confronted with charges of serial sexual harassment: Power and the belief in one’s invincibility make for a dangerous elixir.

The question that these stories of sexual misconduct raise is a peculiarly American one: Why do our people handle such episodes so badly? The answer lies in the public’s inability to reconcile an admiration for powerful men and powerful institutions with its inevitable consequence of corruption. Blind trust and unalloyed admiration create the atmosphere for abuses of power, for covering up misconduct, and even excusing it when it is revealed.