Killer Colt Page 26
In explaining his ruling, Walworth offered a highly unusual aside. “No one not immediately connected with the condemned individual whose case I have been considering can more deeply regret than I do the situation in which he is placed, or sympathize more sincerely with his numerous connections,” he wrote. “It has been my great fortune to be acquainted with many of them, and I know them to be among the most respectable in any community. With one of them, a lady who is his very near relative, I have been in terms of intimacy and friendship for more than thirty years.”
After making this remarkable confession, Walworth stressed that he was not the sort to allow such personal matters to influence his decisions. “In the administration of justice, upon which not only the safety of the community but all that is dear in life depends, the calls of private friendship must, or at least, should always give way to the stern demands of public duty,” he proclaimed. “Having therefore arrived at the conclusion that there is no probable cause for supposing that there is any error in the judgment in this case … I must refuse to allow this writ of error.”
To more than one observer, it appeared that Walworth’s “friendship and intimacy” with one “very near relative” of the condemned man had actually worked against John—that the chancellor, precisely because of his close connection to the Colt family, felt the need to prove that he was operating without bias. As one legal analyst remarked, there was “something like an ostentation of deciding according to strict law” in Walworth’s written opinion, as though he feared that a less stern judgment would be read as a sign of favoritism.2
• • •
Only one recourse now remained to John’s supporters. On November 4, 1842, the day after Chancellor Walworth handed down his ruling, a small party of them boarded an Albany-bound stagecoach to embark on the last desperate battle for John Colt’s life.3
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For William Henry Seward, the power to grant pardons was a particularly onerous burden of office. During his two terms as governor of New York State, he was constantly besieged by petitioners. On one morning alone—as he records in his journals—he was approached by no fewer than five female supplicants: the widow of an old acquaintance, imploring him “to release her son from the county jail”; a woman, eight months’ pregnant, begging “for the pardon of her young husband, a watchman, who had committed burglary”; a “maiden lady” whose brother was “in the state prison at Auburn for forgery”; a “poor brokenhearted creature whose honeymoon was scarcely passed before her husband was dispatched to Sing Sing”; and a “grocer’s wife whose husband was consigned to the penitentiary for larceny.” Later that same day, he was presented with yet another appeal, this “one for a pardon to Thomas Topping, convicted of the murder of his wife.”1
Determining whether to dispense executive clemency was not only a trying task for the governor, it was, more often than not, a thankless one. Seward commonly found himself under fire for his decisions, accused of either playing political favorites or ignoring the will of the people. His pardon of his friend and fellow Whig, James Watson Webb, for example—who had been sentenced to two years at hard labor for violating the law against dueling—drew widespread criticism and ridicule from Seward’s Democratic foes. On the other hand, he incurred the outrage of thousands of his own constituents for refusing to pardon Benjamin B. Rathbun, a prominent Buffalo businessman who—despite his imprisonment for forgeries amounting to several million dollars—was one of upstate New York’s most admired citizens.2
Of the countless cases he’d been faced with during his four years in office, however, none, by Seward’s own admission, was as agonizing as that of John Colt. In the days following Chancellor Walworth’s decision, Seward found himself under assault by partisans of the condemned man. “Each docking of a steamboat from New York brought the influential. His own political supporters, big Whigs, arrived hourly and breathed the words, ‘Pardon Colt.’ ” As the campaign for clemency mounted, it “eclipsed all other state business.”3
“You have no idea of the fatiguing weariness of the week spent in hearing every form of application for pardon to Colt,” Seward wrote to his wife, Frances, describing the parade of supporters who had come to plead on the prisoner’s behalf. Among them were Seward’s “friend and former counselor,” Willis Hall, until recently the New York State attorney general; David Graham, Jr., a prominent New York City attorney and author of A Treatise on the Law of New Trials in Cases Civil and Criminal; Judge Ambrose Spencer, former chief justice of the state supreme court; and Lewis Gaylord Clark—all of whom, wrote Seward, came “to inform me that Colt was unjustly condemned.”4
Besides these personal callers, Seward was inundated with written pleas for executive intervention. “My table groans with letters from gentlemen and ladies of acknowledged respectability and influence,” Seward wrote to his wife. “Among the former are gentlemen of the press and of every profession, urging and soliciting the pardon of Colt.”5
Many of these letters based their appeals on legal grounds, arguing that the “evidence of premeditated crime was insufficient to warrant” the verdict, that Colt was clearly “the helpless victim of uncontrolled passion,” and that the outcome had less to do with the crime itself than with communal revulsion at the “attempt at concealment.” Others made their case on moral grounds. For example, Dr. Blanchard Fosgate—physician to the New York State Prison at Auburn and the author of such works as Sleep Psychologically Considered, Dream-Thoughts of Waking Circumstances, and On the Influence of Coffee over the Narcotic Effect of Morphia—maintained that a commutation of Colt’s sentence would be in the “best interests of society.” However disguised under the name of justice, Blanchard argued, the infliction of the death penalty was nothing more than revenge—a “direct stimulus” to a brutal appetite rooted in the “early history of our race.” By commuting John’s sentence to life imprisonment, Seward would be fostering “the higher qualities of our nature—repentance, benevolence, and sympathy for our fellow men in adversity”—and thus assisting in “the progress of mankind toward a more lofty and just comprehension of the value of human life.”6
Not all of the communications received by Seward presented their arguments in such measured tones. There were crank letters too, including at least one direct death threat:
You have time to grant a pardon to him whom your prejudices are about to deprive of a life as dear to him as yours is to you. Yes, you have full time, but not the disposition; you thirst for the blood of a fellow-being, and you may drink it to the last drop; but by the Almighty God, into whose presence you usher a poor soul with a load of sin upon his head, by the hopes I entertain of immortality hereafter, I swear that one who has lived for him, and will at any time die for him, holds you responsible to the very tittle for what may happen to him! Should he suffer an ignominious death, his corpse shall not be interred before your life pays the forfeit, and you follow him to an eternal hell!
You may disbelieve me now, but too soon, perhaps, will death cause you to regret the past. As for Kent, his fate is sealed, provided John C. Colt is hanged. I say BEWARE!7
• • •
After days of “consuming anxiety,” Seward reached his decision on Friday, November 11—one week before the scheduled execution. It would be published in its entirety in Saturday’s Albany Evening Journal and, in succeeding days, reprinted in newspapers throughout the country.
Those friends and supporters of John who hoped for—even expected—a pardon would have been heartened by Seward’s preliminary remarks, since he began his review of the case by acknowledging that the crime had not been premeditated. At the same time, Seward noted, the victim “was a meek and inoffensive man. He was unarmed, and visited the prisoner, although under excitement, yet without any hostile purpose; and when the remains of the deceased were found, the head, fractured with certainly five and probably more wounds, no longer retained the human form.”
For Seward, the inordinate savagery of Colt’s attack ruled out t
he argument that it was made in self-defense. “Such a homicide could not have been accidental or necessary for self-defense,” he noted. “It was committed with a deadly weapon in a cruel and inhuman manner upon a defenseless and powerless man.”
For the accused to be convicted of the “milder” charge of manslaughter, the defense would have to show that he “was in imminent danger, and in the heat of passion, suddenly excited, intense, uncontrollable, and allowing no time for reflection, and that he did not design to produce death, and was unconscious that such a consequence might follow his violence.” The evidence, however, spoke loudly against such an assumption.
For Seward, as for virtually everyone else, it was John’s actions following the killing—his “almost superhuman” efforts to “remove the evidence of the fatal transaction”—that spoke most damningly against him. In the governor’s view, those actions could have been performed only by a man “guilty of deliberate and willful murder”:
Guilt seeks concealment … If the blood which had been spilled did not accuse the prisoner, he would not have endeavored to remove the stains it left. Much less would the accused have mutilated those remains and disposed of them in a manner, the very account of which produces a revolt of all the sympathies of the human heart.
As for John’s argument that his attempts at concealment were prompted by fear of public disgrace, Seward was having none of it:
Manslaughter, although declared to be a felony and punished as such, is regarded by the offender, as well as by society, as a misfortune rather than a crime. He who has committed it, if he possesses the common tendencies of our nature, deplores the injury he has done, but conscience vindicates him and sustains him against accusations of a higher crime. Society exacts his punishment with reluctance and he suffers no ignominy.
As much as anything else, it was John’s complete lack of contrition—the cool, unrepentant demeanor he had exhibited during his final courtroom appearance—that hardened Seward against him.
His conduct in relation to the crime and its consequences has been insincere, inhuman, relentless, and remorseless. He is vain, self-confident, and irreverent; imbued with false sentiments of honor, morality, justice, and virtue; and seems incapable of compunction for crime committed or sorrow for injuries inflicted. Penitence and resolutions to amend are indispensable, among other conditions, of pardon. No such conditions are offered in the present case. The prisoner has forgotten his victim, heaped insult upon his humble and bereaved family, defied the court, denounced the jury, and presented himself before the executive as an injured, not as a penitent man.
In the end, Seward could find no cause to “interpose his executive power between the sentence of the law and its execution.” For John C. Colt, “the expectation of pardon, the last hope of life, must be relinquished.”8
• • •
In making known his final determination—that all the impassioned pleas for clemency had failed and “the hopes entertained by many can no longer be cherished”—Seward expressed his “earnest wish that the few days which yet remain to the prisoner may be spent in preparing to appear before that dread tribunal appointed for all men.” Similar sentiments were conveyed in various newspaper accounts of Seward’s decision. In Monday’s New York Sun, for example, Moses Beach declared, “All hope for a melioration of the dread fate which the law has pronounced against the unfortunate John C. Colt has vanished, and he has now no alternative left him but to resign himself composedly to the embrace of death, to which on Friday next he must inevitably yield.”9
But Beach was wrong in one crucial regard. For John Colt, death might indeed be inevitable on “Friday next.” But as he would prove, there were other alternatives left him besides resigning himself composedly to its embrace.
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Despite the evident finality of Seward’s decision, three dozen members of the New York State Bar Association met on Tuesday morning, November 15, to draw up a petition demanding a reprieve. That afternoon, the group set out for Albany to present its case to the governor in person. At the same time, John’s lawyers notified Sheriff Monmouth Hart that, because of a legal technicality, the warrant for Colt’s execution was invalid and “should not be carried into effect.” Hart—who had developed strong sympathies for Colt and had sent Seward his own letter protesting the sentence “on the ground of the injustice of the verdict”—seemed more than willing to refuse “the painful and disgraceful task.”1
Even so, preparations for the execution proceeded apace. A wagon was dispatched to New Jersey to bring back the gallows and rope used to hang Peter Robinson, the New Brunswick carpenter who had perpetrated the shockingly sadistic murder of banker Abraham Suydam two years earlier. According to the abolitionist and moral reformer Lydia Maria Child, this measure was taken for no other reason than to add one more “bitter drop” to “the dreadful cup of vengeance.” “As the memory of Robinson was execrated more than other criminals,” wrote Child, “they sent for his gallows to add to the degradation”—to “give an additional pang” of humiliation to the proud Colt by treating him no differently from the most reviled murderer in recent memory.2
As the day of the execution approached, it seemed as if New Yorkers could talk of nothing else. “Colt is the all-engrossing topic,” wrote the noted attorney and indefatigable diarist George Templeton Strong.3 To those, like Lydia Child, who regarded the death penalty as a holdover from a barbaric past—“legalized murder in cold blood”—and believed Colt to have been unjustly condemned, the city appeared to be in the grip of a primitive bloodlust. “The very spirit of murder was rife” among the populace, Child lamented. “They were swelling with revenge, and eager for blood.”4 With space for no more than three hundred witnesses in the courtyard of the Tombs, printed invitations to the hanging—“You are respectfully invited to witness the execution of John C. Colt”—became the most coveted items in town.5
To the very end, John’s defenders refused to give up. When Seward refused the request of the thirty-six lawyers who had traveled to Albany—dismissing them as “seditious”—John’s counsel made another desperate appeal to Chancellor Walworth, “praying that the Chancellor will reconsider his refusal to allow a writ of error.” “His friends are still moving heaven and earth to save him,” wrote George Templeton Strong, who, as late as Thursday, felt that there was “still an even chance” of a reprieve.6
For a moment, it seemed as if the “persevering pleaders” on John’s behalf had succeeded. Late Thursday afternoon, a rumor swept through the city that Colt had been reprieved until January. Though “confidently repeated and believed by everyone,” it was quickly proved to be unfounded. “Colt’s second application to the Chancellor was met by a peremptory refusal,” Strong recorded in his journal that evening, “and as there was no hope of success with the Governor, his last chance is gone.” By then, even Sheriff Hart had announced that he would, after all, go through with the hanging. Given the prevailing sentiment among the citizenry, Hart feared that he himself might be lynched if he refused to carry out his duty.7
It was the Reverend Dr. Henry Anthon who delivered the devastating news to John. Rector of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, Anthon—who was “firmly convinced of John’s innocence”—had been approached by Sam to “attend to the spiritual welfare” of his brother.8 He was with John in his cell when Sheriff Hart called him aside. Hart—who could not bring himself to tell John—begged Anthon to perform the awful task and “to ask John at what hour tomorrow he wished to be executed.”
Though John professed to be unafraid of death—“Let come the worst, I shall die as calm as any man died,” he had boldly declared in one of his published letters—his reaction belied his bravado. At the news, he “flung himself on the bed and rocked there in agony for a moment or two.”
At length, John regained his composure, sat upright, and—in a ragged voice—said: “Sunset.”9
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The temperature never rose above twenty-eight degrees on Friday, Nove
mber 18. There was, of course, no such measurement as “windchill factor” back then, but the stiff wind from the west must have made it feel considerably colder. Throughout much of the day, dark, lowering clouds hung over the city like a pall.1
None of this deterred the eager crowd that began gathering outside the city prison at daybreak. By 8:00 a.m., according to one contemporary, “the Tombs was literally besieged by a mob, blocking every street around it, all assembled … to gaze eagerly at the walls that contained the miserable prisoners and to catch what rumors they could of what was going on within them.” Eventually, their number would swell to the thousands—men, women, and children—some having traveled from as far away as New Hampshire.2
A group of police officers under the charge of A.M.C. Smith was stationed at the prison entrance “to prevent the ingress of any except those who had tickets of admission.” No women were to be allowed inside, and a few could be heard complaining loudly of their exclusion. As the hour of the execution approached, the rooftops of all the surrounding buildings would be packed with spectators of both sexes and all ages, straining for a view of the courtyard. Despite the bitter weather, a holiday air prevailed.3
• • •
John had not slept that night. Seated at his table, he had passed the hours writing letters to friends and family members. He had just set down his quill and was blotting the last of these missives when his brother appeared at his cell door. The time was approximately 6:30 a.m. After a few minutes of intense discussion, Sam left again on an errand.