Free Duel with the Devil by Paul Collins Page A

with a hunk of rye bread and a draft of boiled cocoa shells—the latter being a sort of brewed warehouse sweepings. It was, one unfortunate recipient recalled, “a mean, insipid, and musty drink.”
    A lucky few managed to get let out by their jailers to cross the street to Grenzeback’s grocery, where they picked up desperately needed rum. The laxity about booze runs led to the occasional embarrassment, as in the previous spring when a prisoner namedStagg was spotted near a polling station with money and a ballot in his hand. A Republican poll watcher charged that the jail keeper at the time, Mr. Michaels, was paying off prisoners to cast illegal Federalist votes in the local elections. Michaels shot back that it was the “French Bullies”—Burr’s Republican henchmen—who’d given Stagg a ballot, and thathe’d been heroically pulling it
out
of the prisoner’s hands.
    The money in Stagg’s hands, the jail keeper admitted, was for a rum run.
    Michaels did not last much longer at Bridewell. Nor did his accuser emerge unscathed:Michaels crowed that the fellow was a deserter during the Revolution, and announced the man’s business address for anyone who wanted to harass him. Like Frothingham and so many others in the city, they were just bit players to be tossed about in the great partisan melee over the young country’s uncertain future.
    It was Levi’s own future that concerned him now, though—and whether he might have any at all. He huddled against the cold as darkness fell outside, the shadow of his first evening in jail passingover him. The cell windows were barred but without glass, leaving him exposed to the elements. It was impossible to escape the cold. But as they shivered and stared out the darkened windows, the prisoners of Bridewell could discern a light in a building next door to the jail. Almost within sight of the suspect himself, a room was being prepared for the dissection and autopsy of Miss Elma Sands.
    T HE FOLLOWING morning, January 3, 1800, BenjaminPrince was making his way toward Broadway when he saw his colleague.
Good morning, Dr. McIntosh!
    The two physicians fell into step together. Prince and McIntosh had both been summoned from their practices byCharles Dickinson, the local coroner. Dickinson was no doctor himself; his post was a political one, a holdover from the days when it simplymeant a “representative of the crown.” The inexperience of these coroners meant that municipal records were replete withsuch unhelpful causes of death as “horseshoe-head,” “twisting of the guts,” and the not particularly informative entry “bed-ridden.” But Dickinson, at least, knew that he was out of his depth on this case.
    The two doctors made for a curious pair. Druggist and physician Benjamin Prince was growing intoa leader among Aaron Burr’s faction around City Hall. He’d visited homes to battle sudden epidemics, and witnessed the ravages that yellow fever and smallpox could inflict on even the mightiest citizens in just a matter of days. For his part, William McIntosh was experienced in the ailments of poverty and neglect—the slow grind of consumption, alcoholism, untreated infections, and hunger.Born to a pauper family in the Bridewell almshouse, the young McIntosh proved to be a medical prodigy and was pressed into assisting in its infirmary as a child. The city council had been so impressed by the boy thatthey paid for his medical education. He was now the appointed almshouse physician to the very paupers whom he’d grown up among.
    The men passed Grenzeback’s grocery and the livestock auction, where just recentlya tamed deer had sprung free from its pen andtrotted off down the street; they walked past the windows of Bridewell, where freedom was not so easily attained. At the almshouse,a coroner’s jury sat waiting for them, as the law decreed for the inquest; and on the operating table before them was spread the body.
    Gulielma Sands
, officials quietly noted in their