A Tale of Two Murders: The Manhattan Well Case as Source Material for Charles Brockden Brown's "The Trials of Arden"

Political rivals Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Brockholst Livingston strode into a New York City courtroom on March 31, 1800, determined to gain an acquittal for their client Levi Weeks. The defendant was accused of murdering his supposed fiancee by throwing her down a well, and though Weeks denied the accusation, the residents of New York had already tried and convicted him in the court of public opinion. Referred to variously over the years as the Manhattan Well Case, the Manhattan Well Tragedy, and the Manhattan Well Murder Mystery, The People v. Levi Weeks attracted a tremendous amount of local attention, arguably becoming the first trial in the United States to become a media circus, and it contained all the drama of an episode of Perry Mason. Nearly all the major players in the trial possessed or would shortly possess national reputations, seventy-five witnesses (twenty-four for the prosecution) testified in court, and the trial lasted some forty-four hours with only a single break during the first night. The trial took place in Federal Hall, the site of George Washington's inauguration. Spectators thronged the courthouse, and the overflow crowded the surrounding streets, all expecting at any time the pronouncement of a verdict of guilty. By the end, the state prosecutor was falling asleep from exhaustion, and Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston had done their best to raise reasonable doubt. Only the jury's verdict awaited.

In another part of town, Charles Brockden Brown was working furiously to turn out yet another issue of the Monthly Magazine and American Review, the periodical his associates in the Friendly Club encouraged him to edit. The magazine had been alive for a year by the time the Weeks trial began, but Brown's early expectations for grand financial success had proven elusive. ¹ His readers apparently did not pay for their subscriptions, and by the end of the year, Brown would be announcing that the Monthly Magazine's run had come to a close for lack of funds. His associates in the Friendly Club compounded his problems, for when they encouraged him to undertake editing the literary periodical, they offered him the empty promise of multiple submissions to help Brown fill the magazine's pages. In place of these, Brown had to rely on the inconsistent number of publishable submissions he received and on his own pen. Sometimes he wound up writing all eighty pages of an issue, and since Brown was producing his novels concurrently with the magazine, this was truly the most prolific period of his career. ² Though seemingly unrelated, Brown's editorship of the Monthly Magazine and the trial of Levi Weeks, I contend, intersect in the form of the short story "The Trials of Arden." Written by Brown and published in the July 1800 issue of his periodical—only three months after the trial—the story's plot contains striking similarities to the circumstances surrounding the Weeks trial and its outcome. Moreover, use of the Weeks trial is consistent with Brown's authorial method, and he also had personal connections with several of the trial's major players. I argue that even though "Trials of Arden" diverges from a strict adherence to the historical events of the Manhattan Well Tragedy, Brown used the case's circumstances as heretofore unacknowledged source material for his story. By making the events of his tale recognizable enough for his audience to recall the recent trial but manipulating the details so as to create an original piece of fiction, Brown presents his readers with a story line calculated to instruct them in the dangers of harboring preconceived notions of guilt and innocence and in the necessity of subduing mob violence and maintaining an orderly society governed by a sound justice system. Set in this context, the story anticipates Brown's increasing conservative Federalism but continues his self-proclaimed quest to be a "moral painter." ³

The Murder of Gulielma Sands

On the night of Sunday, December 22, 1799, Gulielma Sands left her Manhattan boarding house...