Killer Colt Page 23
• • •
The trial was over, but for James Gordon Bennett, “the most exciting part of the drama” was still to come. “Will Colt be hung, or will a new trial be granted?” he asked breathlessly, as though the conviction were the latest chapter of a serialized cliffhanger. “Will the Governor dare to pardon him?”
Bennett was inclined to think that a pardon was unlikely. Within recent memory, the perpetrators of two of the city’s most notorious murders had escaped the noose. Despite his manifest guilt, Richard Robinson, accused of the axe murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett, had been acquitted at his trial in June 1836. Four years later, after being sentenced to death for a brutal stabbing during a tavern brawl, the young Bowery tough Ezra White had his conviction overturned on a technicality. Retried, he got off with a four-year stint in Sing Sing Prison.5
Now, Bennett believed, Colt was doomed to serve as a scapegoat. “The public have been cheated so often that Colt has to suffer for the sins of Ezra White, Robinson, and all who have escaped for the last ten years,” he editorialized on January 31. “Had the verdict not been ‘murder’ we don’t know what would the consequences have been. It is a very unjust thing. But so it is.”6
Part Five
THE NEW YORK TRAGEDY
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As Bennett observed, Colt’s conviction was a gratifying outcome to the public at large, whose hunger for retributive justice had been repeatedly thwarted in recent years. To John’s friends and supporters, however, the verdict came as a devastating blow.
The reaction of Lewis Gaylord Clark was typical. Coeditor with his twin brother, Willis, of the Knickerbocker Magazine, the country’s leading literary periodical, Clark was a family friend of the Colts and, from the time of John’s arrest, had maintained “staunchly and publicly that the prisoner’s crime had simply been an unhappy accident.” When the jury handed down its decision, Clark was so distraught that—though he “adored Charles Dickens above all other authors”—he could not bring himself “to attend an important meeting that night to plan the great dinner in honor of Dickens,” who was then visiting America.1
Word of the verdict quickly spread throughout the country in newspapers from Milwaukee to Maine; in religious publications from the Catholic Herald to the Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate; and in popular journals ranging from the United States Magazine and Democratic Review to The New World: A Weekly Compendium of Popular Literature and Knowledge.2 While many of these publications merely reported the facts, others used the verdict as an occasion to convey lessons tailored to their target audiences.
Indulging in “some reflections that are naturally suggested” by the case, for example, the Episcopal Recorder asserted that John’s “proficiency in iniquity” was the result of his “defective religious education” at home, and offered some warning words to parents:
We are told by those who know his history from childhood that Colt had no religious instruction around the family fireside, and that all those restraints which are the fruits of a pious father’s counsels and a mother’s tears were unknown by him. Let these facts sink into the hearts of parents! Your children are as depraved by nature as this miserable youth. Send them into the world with no ties that take hold on the family altar, and what security have you that they will not plunge into sin and ruin?3
The Youth’s Companion, on the other hand, addressed its admonitions directly to its juvenile readership, comparing John Colt to “the first murderer,” Cain, and using both cases as examples of “how wrong it is, in anyone, to give way to bad and angry feelings.”4
Even the American Phrenological Journal got in on the act. In an article published not long after the conviction, an anonymous practitioner of that then popular pseudoscience claimed that “in the spring of 1837, at the Astor House, N.Y.,” he had performed a phrenological examination of Colt’s head, the results of which had proved all too prophetic:
His temperament was one of the most active and excitable that I ever witnessed, being sanguine-nervous. This, together with the great size and sharpness of Combativeness, Destructiveness, and Approbativeness, led me to lay especial stress upon his irritability, the suddenness and ungovernable fury of his anger, particularly when his honor was aspersed. I remember not only dwelling upon the excitability and power of his anger but also closing his examination by rising, taking a position nearly before him, and in a most emphatic manner and gesture, my finger pointing toward him and wishing to give force to the most important words, saying to him as follows: “Mr. Colt, I have one word of caution to give you. You are passionate and impulsive in the highest degree, which, with the great size and extreme activity of Combativeness and Destructiveness, will make you desperate in a moment of passion. I warn you to avoid occasions calculated to excite it. When you find a dispute rising, turn on your heel and leave the scene of action; for when you become angry, your wrath is ungovernable and you are liable to do what you might be sorry for.”5
Like other sensational homicides dating at least as far back as Shakespeare’s time, the Colt-Adams case also inspired a crude broadside “murder ballad,” composed and peddled by an anonymous hack eager to cash in on the unabating fascination with the crime. Titled “The New-York Tragedy”—“an account of a Horrid Murder, committed in a Room on the second story of the large granite building, corner of Broadway and Chambers street in the City of New-York”—it was priced at two cents and could be purchased wholesale or retail at the printer’s shop, no. 71 Greenwich Avenue, Manhattan:
Good people all, I pray give ear;
My words concern ye much;
I will repeat a Tragedy:
You never heard of such!
There was a man, an Author good
For making a BOOK you’ll own;
And for the KEEPING of the same
No better, than was known.
Besides all this, I can you tell,
That he was well endow’d
With many graces of the mind
Had they been well bestow’d.
To print the BOOK and have it bound,
Colt, by agreement say,
The printer should, the work when done,
Be first to have his pay.
Upon the books, when they were sent,
Cash would advanced be;
Adams was to have his money,
For so they did agree.
Wicked man, for the sake of gold;
Which he would never pay,
He Murder did commit, and then
The body put away! … 6
Moses Beach, too, lost no time in cashing in. As soon as the verdict was handed down, the Sun rushed out its souvenir sixteen-page pamphlet, which sold so briskly that, within forty-eight hours, it was already in its third edition.
As promised, it featured a handful of woodcut engravings. Dominating page one was a picture labeled “Colt, the Murderer,” showing John seated at a table and holding up a copy of his bookkeeping text. Below was an illustration of a comely young woman flashing a coquettish look while clutching a baby to her bosom. “Miss Henshaw (Colt’s Mistress) and Their Child,” read the caption. Two more portraits appeared inside: one of a grieving Emeline Adams raising a handkerchief to her eyes, and one purportedly of her husband. Seated at a writing desk, quill in hand, Adams was depicted as a nattily attired gentleman with dark curly hair, a bulbous nose, and a prominent, dimpled chin.
In truth, this last illustration bore little resemblance to the murder victim, for the very good reason that it was actually a picture of somebody else: Phineas T. Barnum.
The previous fall, Barnum—who had begun his show business career staging traveling exhibitions of a wizened African-American woman named Joice Heth, touted as the 161-year-old former nursemaid of George Washington—had purchased a run-down natural history museum on the corner of Ann Street and Broadway. Within weeks, he had set about converting it into the country’s most spectacular showplace: Barnum’s American Museum, home to such unparalleled wonder
s as a six-legged cow, Crowley the Man-Horse (“Nature’s most astounding freak!”), the Feejee Mermaid, and a troupe of performing fleas. With his genius for self-promotion, Barnum had no trouble drumming up publicity in the city press. One early piece was an admiring profile of the showman that appeared in the New York Evening Atlas in the fall of 1841. Accompanying the article was an engraved portrait of the dark-haired, bulbous-nosed, dimple-chinned Barnum, handsomely attired and seated at a writing desk, quill in hand.7
Like thousands of other New Yorkers, Barnum—as he later recounted in his autobiography—was swept up in the excitement surrounding the Colt-Adams case. Eager to know what “poor murdered Adams” looked like, he “greedily purchased” a copy of the Sun pamphlet, opened to the picture labeled “Samuel Adams, Deceased,” and was thunderstruck to find his own face staring out at him. Making inquiries, he discovered that “the stereotype of my portrait had been purchased from the Atlas and published as the portrait of Adams!” The incident merely reinforced a lesson that Barnum had learned a long time before: when it came to exploiting public credulity by peddling outrageous hoaxes—“humbugs,” as he called them—the news business was not so very different from show business.8
46
Owing to several unavoidable delays, John’s lawyers were unable to present their bill of exceptions until the last day of February. The following morning, March 1, 1842, the bill was allowed and sent before the state supreme court for adjudication.1 Months would pass before a decision was rendered. In the meantime, John remained ensconced in the Tombs.
• • •
“It scarcely seems credible to the present generation,” writes a late-nineteenth-century historian of Manhattan, “that there was once a lovely and picturesque lake, bounded by Canal Street on the north, Pearl Street on the south, Mulberry Street on the east, and Centre Street on the west; and yet such was the case.” Surrounded by “romantic hills” that “rose to a considerable height,” the lake—so deep that it was “regarded by many as bottomless”—was known as Collect Pond, a name derived from its original Dutch designation, Kalchook, meaning “Shell Point,” a reference to the “large deposit of decomposed shells that formed a point on the western shore.”2
In the winter of 1808, when the city was hit with both unusually harsh weather and a severe slump in the maritime trade, a group of jobless seamen and other unemployed laborers, their families on the verge of starvation, marched on City Hall and demanded relief, “threatening to tear the Common Council members apart if they didn’t get jobs.” Appropriations were hastily voted and, “for want of something else to give them to do,” the council had the men level the hills surrounding Collect Pond and fill it up with the displaced earth. Eventually “streets were cut through, Centre Street (formerly called Collect Street) running in a direct line north and south through what was the middle of the pond.”3
Twenty years later, when the population of the city had grown to over two hundred thousand and “crime had increased in proportion,” the Common Council—acting on the urgent need to replace the old Bridewell jail in City Hall Park—voted to erect a new prison and selected the old Collect Pond grounds as its site. Work on the project began in 1835. No sooner had the workmen begun digging than they hit the pond, forcing the contractor to sink piles of hemlock logs into the swampy ground to serve as a foundation.
Constructed at a cost of $430,000—the equivalent of more than $10 million in today’s money—the building was designed by architect John Haviland, who modeled it after an engraving of an Egyptian temple found in a then popular volume, John Stevens’s Travels in Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine. Distinguished by its gloomy granite portico with heavy columns adorned in Pharaonic style, the Halls of Justice (as it was formally known) had a deeply forbidding aspect. “A dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian” was the way Charles Dickens described it on his visit to New York City in February 1842.4 Resembling an immense mausoleum, the building was immediately nicknamed—and known forever after as—the Tombs. Within days of its opening in 1838, James Gordon Bennett decried it as “a loathsome and dreary charnel house” and demanded that it be immediately torn down.5
For a while, it seemed as if, like Poe’s House of Usher, the edifice would collapse on its own. Constructed on the “sinking, marshy landfill” of the old Collect Pond, the building began to sag from the day it opened. Within five months, “it had sunk several inches, warping all the cells” and producing “four-inch cracks in some walls.” As it continued to settle over the following years, the grinding, cracking noises convinced many nervous prisoners that the building was about to cave in, though it remained intact for more than sixty years until it was replaced with a Gothic-style building that opened in September 1902.6
The prison contained 173 cells arranged in four tiers, each reserved for a different class of criminal. Convicted prisoners occupied the ground floor cells prior to their transfer to state prison. The other three tiers were for individuals awaiting trial, the majority of them too poor to procure bail. Accused murderers were consigned to the second tier; those charged with burglary, larceny, and other “lower grade” felonies to the third; while the uppermost level housed an assortment of petty criminals.
The cells, measuring just six by eight feet and dimly lighted by a foot-high slit in the wall—were originally meant to accommodate a single occupant. For most of its existence, however, the Tombs was so overcrowded that two, three, and even four inmates were often crammed into one cell. Underheated, badly ventilated, pervaded by dampness from the muddy ground on which it was built, and reeking of sewage from its woefully inadequate drainage system, the prison was, as historian Timothy Gilfoyle writes, “a sanitary nightmare”:
When cells were doubled up, inmates usually slept on the narrow berth found in each cell, each one sharing his pillow with the other’s feet. In periods of severe overcrowding, Tombs officials sometimes strung up hammocks for a third or even a fourth prisoner. Otherwise they slept on the floor … Drinking water came from a rooftop tank where water festered under the hot rays of the summer sun. Upon reaching the faucets in the cells, the water was “pretty near the boiling point and unfit to drink.” Bathing facilities were worse. Since the Tombs was built with no such provision in mind, few were given the opportunity to bathe. Furthermore, bed sheets were changed every six or seven weeks, and inmate clothing was never washed unless prisoners paid for laundry service.7
As for food, the menu for the average prisoner was a “wretched and stinted fare” consisting “almost entirely of pallid stews and coffee made of burnt rye steeped in hot water. The only variant was an occasional ration of pale tea. The food was lugged from cell to cell in big buckets and ladled through the bars.”8
Such were the conditions suffered by the majority of “poor and friendless” inmates. For the more affluent, however, the situation was radically different. “By paying the warden a proper sum,” a man could not only secure a private cell in a special section reserved for wealthy prisoners but also adorn it with such “homey touches” as “singing canaries, a Kidderminster carpet, and fancy wallpaper.” For the right price, the warden would even “have the Tombs carpenter put up a few hanging shelves, build in a clothes closet, or throw together some small tables to hold books, pipes, and tobacco.” In contrast to the barely palatable stews dished out to the general population, the higher class of criminals could also pay to “have their meals brought in from the best hotels.” Visitors came and went freely with little or no supervision. Altogether, as a writer for Horace Greeley’s Tribune noted, “if a prisoner was rich or had political influence,” he “lived like a gentleman, surrounded by every comfort.”9
Thanks in part to the generosity of his brother Sam, John himself enjoyed a high degree of comfort during his extended stretch in the Tombs. “I have my meals brought in from an excellent restaurant,” he wrote to one correspondent. “My cell is better furnished than half the rooms in the hotels, and in it there is as much spare room as in many of th
em.”10 In addition to Caroline, who “came to see him every day and remained for hours,” he received frequent calls from John Howard Payne, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and other influential friends. On one occasion, he was also visited by the social reformer and journalist Charles A. Dana, who—incensed at the luxuries for sale to wealthy prisoners—produced a vivid and scathing portrait of John’s life in the Tombs:
The popular idea of a murderer in his cell is a grave one. The fancy paints with somber tints a cold, dark cell. A sickly shaft of light comes from the high, barred window and illuminates feebly the haggard face of the criminal as he sits upon his wretched pallet of straw. Whenever he moves or presses his trembling hands to his hot brow we hear the clanking of chains. The fires of despair burn luridly in his bloodshot eyes. At intervals the iron door creaks harshly open, and the rough keeper hands him his coarse fare. There is no furniture save a crazy chair or two, no carpet, nothing but the damp stone flags. And here he lies until he is led out to be hanged in chains or executed in whatever manner may be in vogue. Victor Hugo paints this picture superbly. We shrink with horror from the contemplation of the scene and wonder, since such is his fate, how any man can commit murder.
They may do those things better in France, but how is it in New York? Let us take a stroll through Murderer’s Row in the Tombs and glance in on homicide Colt. Coming in from the pure air and warm sunshine you say, as you step upon the corridor, “Surely this is dismal enough!” And so it is; but this is only the exterior of the parlors. As the keeper swings open the door of Colt’s cell the odor of sweet flowers strikes you. It is no delusion, for there they are in a delicate vase upon the center table. That handsomely dressed little lady whom we passed on the stairs has just left them. Tomorrow they will be replaced by fresh ones.