Killer Colt Page 24
The table itself is a pretty one; there is nothing handsomer in Washington Square. It is of exquisite workmanship and is covered with a dainty cloth. In a gilt cage hanging against a wall is a canary, whose dulcet strain gushes out from his palpitating throat in a flood of melody. A pretty set of swinging shelves suspended by silken cords catches the eye. Here are to be found the latest novel, the freshest magazine. Pictures here and there break up the dull wall into gorgeous color. You tread on roses, for the cold stones are concealed by rare Kidderminster.
And Colt; how is it with him? You see he is not sitting on any pallet of straw. In a patent extension chair he lolls smoking an aromatic Havana, while he reads the proceedings of his trial the day previous in the morning’s papers. He has on an elegant dressing-gown, faced with cherry colored silk, and his feet are encased in delicately worked slippers. His clothes are neat and up in style to the latest fashion plate. He is cleanly shaven and has a general air of elevation about him which is quite refreshing. To one side of him is his bed, a miracle of comfort.
When he is tired of reading or smoking or sleeping he takes a stroll in the yard. It is necessary to dress for this, and his toilet takes considerable time. Finally he appears, booted and gloved. He may have his seal-skin coat on or he may appear in a light Autumn affair of exquisite cut and softest tint. In his hand is a gold-headed switch which he carelessly twirls during his promenade.
Then comes his lunch; not cooked in the Tombs but brought in from a hotel. It consists of a variety of dishes—quail on toast, game pâtés, reed birds, ortolans, fowl, vegetables, coffee, cognac. Then it is back again to the easy chair with book and cigar. Such is life in Murderer’s Row as lived by Colt, and a not unmerry life it is.11
• • •
Besides reading, smoking, and taking the occasional stroll around the yard, John passed the hours corresponding with friends and acquaintances in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New Orleans—the cities where he had spent the most time during his peripatetic life. Nineteen of his letters would eventually find their way into print.12 As to be expected, they are full of protestations of innocence. “I did but defend myself against a wanton, vile, and unpardonable attack,” he writes at one point. “This I would do again, at any time, when insulted and assaulted. No man would do less. His very nature compels him to this … I have nothing in this affair to reproach my conscience with.”
He repeatedly denounces the “consummate scoundrels” of the penny press for stirring up public hysteria and accuses the jurors of either moral cowardice or active bias:
Twelve men, either from error or prejudice, trampled upon the evidence—they trampled upon the judge’s charge—they trampled upon the law, for the law says that when there is a doubt, it should be given in favor of the prisoner. They were out nine hours wrangling about a decision; there was much doubt, and strange to say they threw the doubt against the prisoner. There will be no difficulty, if justice be done, in setting aside their opinion, as it is now well known that several of them either willfully or unguardedly expressed hostile opinions before the trial.
Not without justification, he insists that he was convicted “for endeavoring to conceal a misfortune, not for killing a man.”
He devotes considerable space to setting the record straight about his victim. Contrary to depictions of Adams “as one of the mildest and meekest men the world has ever seen,” the printer was “a most aggravating fellow in his language. I had always before attributed his manner to ignorance, not to ill will. However, I was mistaken. I was cherishing a viper that was ready at any time to sting me.”
In one particularly dramatic letter, John provides an account of the “fatal quarrel” far more graphic than the one contained in his original confession. Adams, he claims, not only tried to choke him but grabbed him “by the privates” (“per prives parties,” as John latinizes it): a charge that, if true, goes a long way toward explaining the frenzied violence of Colt’s reaction.
Adams’s assault on me was entirely wanton. I never was cooler and calmer than when he came into my office, and his entrance was abrupt and quite unexpected. He accused me at once with an intent of cheating him, to which I calmly replied that I was astonished that he should say so, and requested him to give some reasons for warranting such a charge. Word followed word, and in the meantime I drew out his account from my portfolio, and so far as there was cheating on foot, I showed him the evidence of it on his part, in his account. As he would not hear to reason, and feeling alarmed at his manner and language, I applied to him unavoidably, in answer to his abuse, in perfect justice, his own unmeasured terms. At this he became more exasperated and gave me a slap with the back of his hand across the mouth which, you may be assured, was returned in due justice, as I sprang to my feet in self-defense. He almost instantly seized hold of my neckcloth, which placed me in his power—pressing me to the table and wall, he struck me three or four times in the breast and seized me per prives parties. Everything seemed to turn black. I was in agony and exerting myself for relief, how I know not.
The last distinct recollection I have, before I was relieved by his fall, was that of trying to press him off with my left hand, as I held to his collar, endeavoring with my right hand, at the same time, to raise myself from the table, as he had me pressed over backwards upon it. It was in this painful position that I seized that cursed hatchet and gave him the unfortunate blows that I did. When relieved from his horrid grasp, I beheld for the first time my awful defense. Heaven knows the number of blows I struck him. There may have been four or five. And when I reflect upon the instrument most unfortunately seized and instantaneously used, it is only to be wondered at that his head was not dashed into a thousand pieces.
About the future, John expresses serene confidence. He is convinced that the bill of exceptions will be “carried up” to the Supreme Court and that he will “get a new trial and be justly dealt with.” But even if the final decision should go against him, he is resigned to his fate. “Death,” he assures a friend, “hath no terrors for me”:
I have ever had hopes of beyond this world. Did I believe that this existence was the beginning and the end, I should curse the giver. No—impossible—it cannot be. The universal world—the mighty heavens above—speak in signs more conclusive than argument, more appealing than parables, that there is a God above—just, mighty, all-powerful. No man should fear to shake off this mortal coil—this dying, sickening, painful body—this incarcerating prison-house to the mind—this incubus to the heart—this chain of disease and corruption to the soul.
Imbued with the conviction that “there is a world above this, and a more just one,” he is, so he claims, prepared for any eventuality. “Let come the worst,” he declares, “I shall die as calm as any man died.”
47
In preparation for their appeal, John’s lawyers enlisted the aid of Dr. David L. Rogers, the eminent surgeon whose display of Samuel Adams’s decapitated head had been one of the dramatic highlights of the trial. Rogers was requested “to investigate the probable relative position and actions of John C. Colt and Samuel Adams during the recontre which ended with the death of the latter.” After conducting a series of experiments, he prepared a lengthy report detailing his findings and “the reasonings by which he has arrived at such conclusions.”1 The report, eventually submitted to Governor William Seward, stands as a remarkable piece of early forensic science.
Rogers notes, for example, that “blood was found on the wall [of Colt’s office] in larger spots and greater abundance at the height of a man’s head than elsewhere.” In addition, the testimony of Asa Wheeler and his pupil Arzac Seignette clearly indicated that “after the fall of Adams no blow was inflicted.” Taken together, these facts lead Rogers to conclude that “Adams was in an erect position at the time the fatal blows were inflicted.”
Based on a highly sophisticated analysis of the number, shape, and position of the wounds, Rogers is further able to deduce that Colt and Adams were standing �
��face to face within a foot-and-a-half of each other during the whole of the fatal encounter.” He then asserts that “one of the parties at least must have firmly grappled with the other while the blows were inflicted.” His proof is compelling in its simplicity: “Several blows were received by Adams, any one of which would have felled him if unsupported, yet he did not fall till after the infliction of all the blows.”
Rogers, however, goes one step further. In the most ingeniously argued section of his report, he demonstrates that “Adams was grappling with Colt at the time the first blow with the hatchet was given and was the first to close and grapple.” Rogers bases his conclusion on four main points.
To begin with, if Colt “had been the assailing party,” he would logically have “approached Adams from behind, which he evidently did not.” Moreover, the testimony of Asa Wheeler indicated that Adams had not cried out in alarm, which he doubtlessly would have done if attacked from the front by Colt. Third, if Colt had “commenced the attack, he would have selected a distance which would have given him the full sweep and force of his right arm.” The first blow inflicted on Adams, however, proved that this was not the case. Finally, the absence of defensive wounds on Adams’s arms strongly suggested that his “arms were engaged during the recontre.”
In short, it was Rogers’s belief that the quarrel turned deadly when Adams leapt to his feet, lunged at Colt, and violently grabbed him, forcing him into a “lower position.” To be sure—as Robert Emmett had observed in his closing statement—no one but God knew precisely what truly transpired. Insofar as 1840s forensic science was able to reconstruct the crime, however, all the evidence suggested that John had been telling the truth.
48
For a while, Sam Colt shared his brother’s hopeful outlook. In early February—at the very time that John was telling friends that he expected to get a new trial—Sam went out and purchased a ten-dollar flute for himself: a sign, according to the speculations of his most authoritative biographer, that he was in a sufficiently optimistic frame of mind to indulge in some lighthearted diversion.1
From the evidence of his diary, he was still in an upbeat mood one month later during a brief trip to Connecticut. By then, with Dudley Selden and his associates concentrating on John’s appeal, Sam had refocused his own attentions on his submarine battery project. During the first week of March, he traveled to New London, Stonington, and Mystic to “investigate several intriguing leads on the attempts of an obscure Connecticut inventor, Silas Clowden Halsey, to conduct a torpedo attack” during the War of 1812.2
Halsey’s efforts had been undertaken in response to emergency legislation enacted by Congress offering private citizens a hefty reward for the destruction of British warships. He had tinkered together an ingenious “submarine boat”—a tiny, one-man affair with a hand-cranked propeller and an air tube poking out of the water. Attached to the front was a small, corkscrewed spear with an explosive charge attached. The plan was to sneak beneath the hull of one of the British vessels blockading New London Harbor, drive the spear into the hull, then retreat before the explosion went off. On the night of June 30, 1813, he had set off on his mission and was never heard of again.3
For several days, Sam traveled around the various Connecticut towns, interviewing veterans of the war, including Captain Jeremiah Holmes of Mystic, who had participated in the efforts to attack the British fleet with submarine explosives and provided Sam with a detailed description of Halsey’s ship and torpedoes.4 Though engaged in serious business, Sam appears to have been in a relaxed, even carefree mood, as his comically misspelled journal entries make clear. On Sunday, March 7, for example, he records that, after attending “piscopal chirch” in Norwich, he “rambled through the town & over the hils,” then “called on Mrs. Chappell was introduced to her husband (fine fellow) & to of her brothers, took tea & spent the evening very pleasantly to say nothing of the whiskey.” The following morning, he took a “stemebote” back to New London, admiring the beautiful “senery on the river.” The rest of the day was “spent very pleasantly at the residence of Captain Bassett in company of Miss Bassitt & Miss Church.”5
Back in New York City, he continued his experiments. Just a few days after returning from Connecticut, he reported to Naval Secretary Abel Upshur that he had succeeded in setting off an underwater charge “at a distance of ten miles.” In the same letter, he assured Upshur that he would be ready to make a public test of his harbor defense system “about the first of May.”6
Delays in the delivery of zinc plates and other vital components forced Sam to postpone his demonstration (“all progress in my experiments must wate,” as he put it to one correspondent).7 He was finally ready in midsummer. Ever the showman, he decided to stage the event in the harbor off Castle Garden, the popular amusement spot on the southern tip of Manhattan where he had held a demonstration of his repeating rifles five years earlier. The date he chose was the Fourth of July—thirteen years to the day after his first, boyhood experiment with underwater explosives on Ware Pond.
Ballyhooed by the city press, the event drew thousands of spectators who crowded the wharves on both the Lower Manhattan and Jersey City waterfronts. Among those in attendance were Mayor Morris and the entire city council, along with reporters from a dozen newspapers. At precisely noon, the firing of a twenty-gun national salute signaled the start of the demonstration.
A derelict hundred-ton naval “vessil” (as Sam spelled it) had been provided for the occasion. “Fitted with temporary masts from which were displayed various flags with piratical devices,” the “old hulk” was towed through the water until it reached a speed of roughly three knots. Two hundred yards way, on the deck of the seventy-four-gun warship North Carolina, Sam—surrounded by naval officers and other official observers—activated his galvanic detonating device. The “effect of the explosion was tremendous,” wrote the reporter for the New York Evening Post. “The vessel was shattered into fragments, some of which were thrown two or three hundred feet in the air, and there was not a single piece left longer than a man could have carried in one hand.”8
The response of the spectators was captured by a gentleman named John Mount, who witnessed the demonstration from the Jersey side. Two days later, on July 6, he sat down and composed an effusive letter to Sam, congratulating him on “the entire success of your recent submarine explosion.”
“As the dense volume of smoke rose heavenwards,” Mount enthused, “its terrific grandeur could only be exceeded by the amazement and wonder of all the multitude around me at the means by which it was accomplished … I trust, my dear sir, that the government will properly appreciate the vast importance of this mode of defense and that you may reap the honors and emoluments to which you are justly entitled.”9
Sam himself was justifiably pleased with the results of his experiment. He had no time to savor his triumph, however. On the very day that he received Mount’s admiring letter, word arrived of a long-awaited decision in his brother’s case. And for Sam and the other supporters of John Colt, the news couldn’t have been worse.
49
Even before the New York Supreme Court took up John’s case in its July term, his lawyers had made a separate bid to have the conviction overturned. On Friday, May 6, 1842, John Morrill and James Emmett appeared before Judge Kent at the Court of Oyer and Terminer to make a motion for a new trial. Word having spread that Colt himself would be present, “all the world assembled to see him.” The rumor proved unfounded, however. Colt never appeared, “and all the world was disappointed.”1
The principal ground for the motion was that one of the jurors, a boardinghouse owner named Nathan R. Husted, “had expressed strong and unqualified sentiments as to the guilt of the prisoner” before being sworn in. Specifically, a lodger at Husted’s hostelry had heard him remark that if it were up to him, “Colt would be hanged first and tried afterward.”
District Attorney Whiting countered that “Colt had received a fair and impartial trial” and tha
t the motion constituted “an impeachment of the juror, an honorable and honest man” who had performed “a most unpleasant and unthankful duty,” only to find himself “arraigned for having expressed an opinion relative to the prisoner.”
A week later, Judge Kent handed down his ruling. This time, John was brought into court. The spectators who filled the room to capacity watched him intently as Kent read his decision.
“The remarks of Mr. Husted,” said the judge, “were made at his own house in October last. They were casual and unpremeditated and unaccompanied by discussions.” After careful consideration, Judge Kent therefore ruled, “This court, under the affidavits produced, cannot disturb this verdict, and they deny the motion under the firm conviction that granting it would impair, if it did not vitally weaken, the administration of justice in criminal cases of magnitude and importance.”
John, who had kept his gaze steadily fixed on the judge, showed no trace of emotion as the decision was rendered. It was as if, wrote James Gordon Bennett, “he had expected it as a matter of course.”2
• • •
Two months to the day after John’s lawyers made their unsuccessful motion before Judge Kent, Dudley Selden appeared before the state supreme court at Utica to argue for a new trial.
There were two major grounds for his plea. The first had to do with jury selection. After the fiasco of the first day of the trial—when only nineteen out of forty-five potential jurors had shown up—Judge Kent had directed the sheriff to summon “three hundred persons duly qualified to serve as jurors.” He had, moreover, demanded that all three hundred appear in two days’ time and refused Selden’s request for a lengthier postponement. Selden now insisted that, by ordering so large a number in so short a time, Kent had deprived the defendant “of a fair opportunity for scrutinizing the panel and preparing for a proper exercise of his right to challenge.”