Free Duel with the Devil by Paul Collins

zealously Republican newspaper in Philadelphia. “An effort was recently made to suppress the AURORA ,” the article claimed, “and Alexander Hamilton was at the bottom of it. Mrs. Bache was offered 6,000 dollars down, in the presence of several persons.” And where might Hamilton have gotten the kind of cash to buy off his opponents? “British secret service money,” the writer helpfully suggested.
    The article had already run in other cities, of course. To accuse Hamilton of suppressing the opposition press, or of being in the pocket of the British, was all typical mudslinging. And to be fair, the Federalists
had
tried to shut down the
Aurora
before, and
Greenleaf’s
as well—in fact, an indictment of Thomas Greenleaf under the Alien and Sedition Acts was interrupted only by the fellow’s inconsiderate death from yellow fever. Frothingham himself had shrugged off personal attacks by Federalists, who called him “a vile sans-culotte”—a disreputable Republican lover of all things French and anarchistic.
    But Hamilton would not treat this particular accusation so lightly. “I have long been the object of the most malignant calumnies of the faction opposed to our government,” he complained to the attorney general. “In so flagrant a case, the force of the laws must be tried.”
    Assistant Attorney General Cadwallader Colden soon marchedinto the newspaper offices to question the owner. But Thomas’s widow, AnneGreenleaf, claimed to have no authority over
Greenleaf’s
at all—and, when asked who did, produced David Frothingham. The bewildered foreman now found himself hauled into Bridewell for an article that he did not write, reprinted in a newspaper that he did not own. He was being made an example of—as a warning, perhaps, to any other mere underlings of Burr’s. And although he was given the defense counsel of Burr’s old friend Brockholst Livingston—a man he could never have afforded otherwise—when they faced the grim visages of a judge, the mayor, and Major General Hamilton himself, the case looked hopeless indeed.
    “This is not a question that concerned the liberties of the press,” warned the judge, “but only its
licentiousness
.” Were these Republican papers, the judge asked Hamilton, in fact hostile to the United States government?
    Affirmative!
the major general’s voice rang out.
    Livingston was reduced to pleading for the welfare of Frothingham’s wife and children back in Long Island. That hadn’t worked, either.
    “He ought to have thought of them before he violated the laws of his country,” the judge snapped, and gaveled them off. Frothingham was sentenced to four months in Bridewell, in cold and dark cells scarcely yards from City Hall itself. But unlike Levi, at least he knew when he might be free again.
    T HE YOUNG carpenter miserably regarded his fellow inmates. Some had beenconfined for so long that nobody even knew why they were there anymore. One wild-looking blind and insane man known as “Paul from New Jersey” snored quietly on the floor, with only a block of wood as his pillow. When awake, he wandered around naked and filthy. An appalled visitor, asking why the man had been left naked, found the staff unconcerned: “The keeper explained that when furnished with a shirt, the rats soon eat it off.”
    An inmate’s supper was hardly better than what the rats ate. Thejail had managed to get the cost of feeding prisoners down to what it cost to feed horses in the auction stables across Broadway—about five or six cents a day. Keepers lugged in a tub of mush and set it down on the floor with a heavy thud: The cornmeal slop, darkened with a few dribbles of molasses, was a prisoner’s sustenance. Only a fortunate few had actual plates or utensils to eat it with; the rest used their fingers. Levi was arriving late enough in the day that he’d missed lunch, which was just as well. That meal was more mush and molasses; breakfast was even more molasses still, albeit