Killer Colt Read online

  Even while providing moral and material support to his brother, Sam bent his efforts “towards getting an early action by the Navy Department on his submarine battery appropriation.”5 To one influential friend in Washington, he sent a letter expressing the urgency of the situation: “Circumstances of a nature too painful to relate have rendered it of vital importance that I should raise a som [sic] of money at once,” he wrote, urging the recipient to do everything possible to expedite the bill. He also wrote directly to the new secretary of the navy, Abel Upshur, describing the harbor defense system, suggesting “that the Naval ordinance appropriation was his by right and intent,” and conveying his “hope that matters would be permitted to continue in their original course.”6

  While Sam, however rattled by the crisis, remained characteristically dogged in pursuit of his goal, newspapers reported that the scandal of John’s arrest had produced a devastating effect on the family patriarch. According to a widely disseminated story, originally published in the Hartford Review, Christopher Colt, Sr., “the father of J. C. Colt, the supposed murderer of Samuel Adams,” had “become insane.” Pulling out the sentimental stops, the article described Christopher as “an aged man, whose years have been embittered by the folly of his son, and this last horrible act has ‘filled up the measure of sorrow’ which will soon lay him in his grave.”7

  As affecting as it is, the story is nothing more than empty rumor, typical of an era when the penny papers did not scruple to print colorful gossip as sober fact. However distressed Christopher undoubtedly was over his eldest son’s plight, he retained his sanity and lived another nine years, dying at the respectable age of seventy. What is perhaps most striking about this article is the fact that it was reprinted as far away as Wisconsin: testimony to the fascinated interest—the “excited curiosity,” as one newspaper put it—that, by early October, the Colt-Adams case had already generated.8

  • • •

  It was, in fact, from his local St. Louis newspaper that another member of the clan, James Colt, learned the shocking news.

  Like both John and Sam, the twenty-three-year-old James had traveled widely from an early age. At fourteen, he had left home and made his way to Washington, DC, in the hope of becoming a naval cadet. Failing to receive an appointment—and fearing that he was prone to the consumption that had claimed the lives of his mother and older sister—he proceeded south to Savannah, Georgia, where he was employed by a merchant named G. B. Lamar, a cousin of Mirabeau Lamar, future president of the Republic of Texas.

  In 1835, in the company of another Lamar relation, James traveled to Velasco, Texas. There he became acquainted with Colonel James Walker Fannin—a comrade of Jim Bowie and William Travis—whose botched attempt to bring a troop of reinforcements to the Alamo would cast serious doubts on his leadership. Impressed with young Colt, Fannin offered him a position as aide-de-camp and dispatched him on a mission to New Orleans. James had just arrived in the city when news reached him that Fannin and roughly four hundred of his men, after surrendering to an overwhelming Mexican force at the Battle of Coleto, had been marched back to Goliad and executed on the order of General Antonio López de Santa Anna.

  By the summer of 1836, James was back in Hartford, where he undertook the study of law. In the following years, he spent time in Philadelphia and New York City before being admitted to the bar in 1840. That fall, along with a partner named Alan Dodd, he headed west and settled in St. Louis, Missouri.9

  Of the four Colt brothers, James, the youngest, seemed the most concerned about maintaining close ties with his kin. Shortly after his move to Missouri, he sent Sam a letter expressing his dismay at the rifts that had developed among the siblings. With a mixture of anger and hurt, he complained that “John has not written me a friendly letter since heaven knows when—the same has been the case with Christopher.” Sam himself came in for some chiding. “In this respect,” wrote James, “you have done your duty better but not half so well as you should.”

  Invoking a story he had heard about a trio of lighthouse keepers who, out of some petty grievance, had lived together for more than seven months without ever exchanging a word, James made a heartfelt plea for familial harmony:

  I think it is unfortunate that four brothers should cease to keep up intercourse with each other when they can do so with so little trouble to themselves and when it can be productive of so much pleasure as well as good. This state of things is brought about among ourselves in consequence of each and all of us having too independent minds. We have too much self-sufficiency and vain pride. We all want to be independent of each other when it is certainly most wise for us to do away with such feeling. If there should be a misunderstanding among any of us, it should be the first object of those who are not parties to bring about reconciliation. If we adopt this as a rule, it will certainly be better for all of us.10

  It was not long after James dispatched this letter that accounts of the Colt-Adams affair first appeared in the St. Louis papers, which reported (inaccurately) that the victim had been murdered in a dispute over two hundred dollars. James immediately composed a letter to Sam conveying his shock and incredulity, as well as a belief in John’s blamelessness that would never waver:

  St. Louis, Oct. 6, 1841

  My Dear Brother:

  I cannot express to you the intense agony of my feelings at this moment. I have heard of the sad catastrophe which has befallen John. Our daily newspapers are full of circumstantial evidence against him, but I cannot for a moment believe he is guilty of the charge. The first intimation I got of it was through yesterday’s evening paper. I read it and threw it down—and read it again. I cannot but conclude from what I have seen in relation to the matter that he is in difficulty.

  Suppose John did the act. Did he do it for the paltry sum of two hundred dollars? No. For it would be against all the impulses of our nature or any man to hazard his life for two hundred dollars. Then if he did it, he must be deranged. This may be so. For, mark you, has not John been confined at his books for the last six months and do you not know that Sarah’s derangement was brought on in the same way? I have thought that John would be deranged, for you know that he has applied himself too closely to books and to his work. His habit is and always has been when he undertakes to do anything to do it with all the intensity of a madman. If this is the foundation for the charges against John or sufficient to name the conclusion that he did the act, he was a madman at the time he did it and this fact should be made to appear.

  I cannot but hope that what I have seen in the papers is all false. Not hearing from you leads me to think it is so.11

  James’s desperate hope that the newspaper accounts were unfounded was dashed the very next day when the mail brought a letter from Sam relaying the bad news. James immediately penned a reply, reiterating his belief that, if John had in fact committed the crime, he had done so in a state of “derangement” induced by mental overexertion:

  I have this moment received your letter of the 27th bearing confirmation of the newspaper intelligence. My mind was prepared to receive it and I fear not the general result. If it is possible I shall come and be with you in this hour of trouble. Write me whether I had better do so or not.

  The news of John’s arrest and of his being a brother of mine has spread like wild fire through the city and my friends flock in to see me on the subject. But they see I am calm upon the subject and therefore fear not the consequences. I have no doubt but that an alibi can be proven and therefore no just suspicion can rest on John. But suppose this came to be done, was he not deranged? Has he not labored too hard mentally and bodily? I say again this brought on Sarah’s derangement and John has when I have been with him manifested derangement on this subject of ambitions and notoriety. Let medical men examine him on this subject. These things have undoubtedly suggested themselves to you and you being present and knowing all the circumstances can best judge as to what will be the best course of action to pursue.

  Write to me every
day and give me all the particulars. I will write John and Father today. Would to God I could at this moment be with you. God knows our family has had afflictions enough. I did not think we were to suffer afflictions of such a nature. But do not give way under it. There is a brighter sky ahead. If all the elements conspired together to crush me I would still war against them and nothing should conquer my energy but the grave.

  Despite his seemingly heartfelt offer to hurry to Sam’s side, James, for a variety of reasons, would never make it back east during the ordeal. From his law office in St. Louis, however, he did everything possible to assist John’s cause. Not long after the news of his brother’s arrest reached him, a story appeared in a St. Louis daily that was widely reprinted in papers throughout the Northeast:

  The St. Louis Pennant, on the authority of a brother of John C. Colt, residing in that city, advances the plea of insanity on behalf of the supposed murder of Mr. Adams. Mr. Colt, who is a member of the St. Louis bar, informs the Pennant that insanity is hereditary in their family and that he has no doubt that his brother was insane when he committed the dreadful act with which he stands charged. He further states that John had several times become suddenly insane, generally after a period of intense application to study or to severe mental exercise. He further cites the case of a sister who committed suicide in 1827.12

  James’s willingness to trumpet such a painful personal matter as Sarah’s suicide reflects the urgency of the situation. Clearly, he was ready to do whatever it took to save his brother from the gallows. However sincerely he believed his own theory, his very public proclamation that a streak of “hereditary insanity” ran in his immediate family was a calculated move—the sowing of a seed that would culminate, so he hoped, in John’s acquittal.

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  While James Colt saw his brother’s homicidal outburst as a consequence of excessive mental exertion, other observers traced the crime to different sources. For some, the Colt case demonstrated the inevitable outcome of youthful insubordination—the type of tragedy that resulted when parents spared the rod in dealing with refractory children. In papers throughout the country, John was accused of having been “a passionate, cunning, and revengeful boy,” whose “whole course has been marked by self-will” and whose bitter fate “teaches a lesson that ought never to be forgotten: that parental disobedience and disregard to the laws of God in youth is most generally followed by a life of crime, ending in either a violent or disgraceful death.”1

  “Let the child who will not submit to be checked and guided tremble for the end of his own career,” thundered one writer whose jeremiad was reprinted in papers throughout the country, “and let the parent tremble for the child who cannot be made to yield to just authority, and let him never dare to hope that the youth whom he cannot control will learn to control himself and curb his own wild passions!”2

  In the Tribune, editor Horace Greeley used the Colt case to expound on his “most constant theme: the dangers that could destroy a young man alone in the city without a concerned family or a close-knit community to help mold his character.” Despite his many advantages—“a respected and influential family, good talents and a winning address, liberal opportunities for mental culture”—John had “inevitably slid into a ‘depth of horrid guilt and blasting infamy,’ demonstrating afresh that Crime has a vital, growing power which thrusts downward deep into the heart its mighty roots and overshadows the whole inner being with its death-distilling shade.”3

  Another commentator, signing himself as “Junius,” drew a different moral from the case. Denouncing Colt as a “literary pirate” whose accounting book had been copied with minor alterations from a competing text, this anonymous writer saw John’s arrest for murder as the logical result of his ostensible penchant for plagiarism. “It is a most natural progress in crime from forgery to piracy to murder,” Junius declared. “Men seldom break out into the commission of high crimes suddenly. Conscience, that inner monitor given by the Almighty to warn men against the violation of human and divine law, must first be blunted or deafened by the smaller class of crimes and misdemeanors before the soul becomes fit for the commission of the higher crimes of robbery, rape, and murder.”4

  The public’s “excited curiosity” about the Adams murder—its hunger for every juicy detail—prompted another writer to editorialize on the perils of pandering to such impulses. Sounding much like modern critics who condemn today’s tabloid entertainment for “glorifying” crime and inciting acts of copycat violence, this observer wondered

  how far public curiosity should be gratified in such a case. We are disposed to enquire whether this morbid taste for the details of crime may not help to provide material for its own gratification … We do not ask for apathy or indifference to crime; its frequent recurrence in such horrid forms calls for the most vigilant interest; but not for that fascinated interest, that shuddering admiration, with which we have suffered ourselves to be drawn into sympathy with vice until we have come to look upon great wickedness as great romance.5

  Colt himself was deeply concerned about the public’s “fascinated interest” in his case—though for the opposite reason. Far from inducing “shuddering admiration” and even sympathy, the intense news coverage, he felt, had so inflamed public sentiment that a fair trial might not be possible. Writing to a friend from his cell in the Tombs, he assailed the penny papers for “exciting the passions of the people to an alarming degree” and expressed his fear “that passion and not evidence will decide the case.”6

  On the very day this letter was composed, James Gordon Bennett published a lengthy editorial that confirmed John’s darkest apprehensions about the press’s prejudicial treatment of his case. Under the headline “Sympathy for Criminals,” Bennett railed against the kind of people derided nowadays as “bleeding hearts,” accusing them of mollycoddling “villains” while ignoring the rights of victims. In terms that any right-wing law-and-order advocate would applaud, he also denounced the judicial system for allowing criminals to go free on mere legal technicalities:

  It is called cruel nowadays to exercise a proper vigilance in the conviction of a scoundrel whether he exhibits himself in the capacity of a thief, an incendiary, or a murderer. No matter how much misery the crime may involve—no matter whether a man’s house may have been burned down, or a woman’s husband been foully murdered—the miscreant who has done the act is immediately taken into the keeping of the public mercy. “The humanity of the law” is invoked in his favor and the community is called upon to presume everything in his behalf.

  It is quite time for this false philanthropy—this misdirected and most absurd sympathy—to cease. It cannot be denied that it would be very much to be lamented if an individual should chance to be hanged for a crime he had not committed; but in our opinion, it is not the lesser to be regretted that fifty villains who have been guilty of palpable and undoubted enormities should be suffered to escape punishment through some pettifogging technicality of the common law forms or the still worse fanaticism of an ill-directed popular feeling. We have no participation in that false sympathy which, in displaying itself towards the criminal, has no feelings for the victims of his iniquity.

  Presenting himself as a noble guardian of the public weal, Bennett concluded his piece with what amounted to a demand for John Colt’s blood. Without mentioning either Colt or his victim by name, Bennett nevertheless made it plain that, in his considered opinion, the killing of Samuel Adams was not a case of manslaughter—as the defense clearly intended to argue—but an act of cold-blooded murder deserving of the full penalty of the law:

  We refrain, as we have refrained in all similar cases, from saying aught that can prejudice public opinion upon cases still to be passed upon by Court and Jury; but we have a duty as well to the public as to individuals, and when we see that public likely to be poisoned by pernicious influences, it is proper for the press to guard the community from false opinions. As has been the case in similar instances, pains are being take
n to impress upon the public a very false notion with respect to a case soon to be tried in our Courts. It is not true that the law presumes every case of killing to be a manslaughter unless an adequate motive for the commission of homicide be proved upon the accused. So far from this being the case, the law always presumes malice aforethought, express or implied in every case of homicide; and the prisoner is always bound to rebut that presumption by proof. The fact of the killing made out, the prisoner must prove the absence of malice if he would escape the penalty of murder.7

  • • •

  The intense public excitement stirred up by Bennett and his competitors was very much in evidence on the morning of Monday, November 1, 1841, when—after a one-month delay—John’s trial was scheduled to begin.8 By 9:00 a.m., a throng of curiosity seekers, “anxious to catch a view of the noted individual,” had gathered outside the courtroom. When the doors swung open promptly at 10:00, the crowd swarmed inside. Within two minutes, as one newspaper reported, “the large space allotted to the public was completely filled, and there was scarce standing room inside the railing.”9

  A few moments later, the star attraction was led inside and seated at the end of a long table at the front of the room. For the past week, reports had circulated that John had been reduced to a physically pitiable condition by extreme “mental agonies and terrors of conscience.” Now, however, it became clear to observers that those stories, like so many others concerning John and his family, were mere rumor. Apart from his jailhouse pallor, he seemed hardly changed at all. “Certainly,” one paper reported, “his appearance was not that of a haggard conscience-stricken man.”10