Killer Colt Page 28
In the event, of course, John had not been compelled to rely on his incisors. Someone had smuggled the suicide weapon into his cell. Questioned by the coroner, the various witnesses—Hart, deputies Westervelt, Vultee, and Green, Keeper William Jones, the Reverend Dr. Anthon, Sam, and Caroline (referred to in the papers for the first time as “Caroline Colt”)—all testified that they “had no knowledge of how the deceased came into possession of the knife.”
Once the last witness was examined, Coroner Archer charged the jury “that if any evidence had been furnished of any person having given the knife to Colt, he could be indicted for manslaughter; but as no such evidence was furnished, the jury would simply find what was the cause and manner of the death of the deceased.”
The jury then retired and, after a brief absence, returned with a verdict “that John C. Colt came to his death by a wound inflicted by himself but the jury are unable to say in what manner he came to be possessed of said knife.”
Immediately following the inquest, John’s body, which had been placed in a coffin, was transported to the Dead House. Early the next morning, in keeping with the Reverend Dr. Anthon’s offer, it was conveyed to St. Mark’s Church and, in the presence of Sam, Caroline, John Howard Payne, and several other of John’s friends, interred in a vault.7
• • •
As for the mysterious conflagration, it took another day or two for the cause to be determined. Suspicious as it seemed, there turned out to be a perfectly straightforward explanation. Because of the wintry weather, the watchman stationed in the tower, who habitually warmed himself by a potbellied stove installed for that purpose, had made a particularly large fire that afternoon. At a few minutes before four o’clock, he had left his post to view the execution. No sooner had he gone than “the stove-pipe became red-hot and set fire to the cupola roof.”8
Precisely because it was so simple, this explanation failed to convince many people. In the view of countless conspiracy-minded observers, the blaze was just too coincidental to be anything other than a diversionary tactic. Despite all evidence to the contrary, there were those who did not and never would believe that John Caldwell Colt had died on November 18, 1842.
Conclusion
LEGENDS
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On Sunday, November 20, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Hanson Cox of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn preached what the Herald described as “an able and eloquent sermon on murder.” Inspired by the tragic denouement of the Colt affair, he “dwelt at some length upon the crime of self-murder, regarding it as little less heinous than the murder of a fellow being.”
In Cox’s view, suicide was symptomatic of social and moral decline, being especially prevalent—so he claimed—in such decadent foreign capitals as London and Paris. Alarmingly, said Cox, “the cities of the United States, if they had not actually overtaken their trans-Atlantic sisters in this respect, were close upon their heels.” This national surge in suicide was a deeply worrisome development—“one which,” he argued, “demanded the solemn considerations of every right-minded and patriotic citizen.”1
Cox was hardly the only one to draw large, portentous lessons from John’s suicide. In the days and weeks following the “bloody close” of the Colt affair, magazines and newspapers were full of editorials that turned the tragedy into a cautionary tale. In the evangelical press, John was widely portrayed as an unbeliever, a man who—despite his professions of faith—“seems to have been under the influence of a false system of morals—a perverted sense of honor—and a sentiment that is at utter variance with the mysterious revelations of Christianity.”2 As such, his fate was foreordained. As one midwestern journal put it, “An educated man without religion is like a ship without ballast, the sport of every breeze, a mere toy and whim-wham with no mastery over himself or power of resisting the evil influences of others.”3
For others in the evangelical community, the problem wasn’t John’s wholesale rejection of religion but rather the particular brand of Christianity he purportedly embraced. In one of his published letters, as well as in his reported final conversation with the Reverend Dr. Anthon, John had expressed scorn for the orthodox Calvinist beliefs in original sin and eternal damnation for all but the elect. “God is one of infinite goodness,” he had asserted. “Agreeably to my views, it is as absurd to suppose that the Creator would inflict an infinite punishment upon one of his creatures as it is to suppose in the first place that he created man as sin. Man is doubtless punished according to deeds done in the body.”4
In thus affirming “the cherishing hope he entertained of a happy hereafter, his trust in the efficacy of the divine atonement, and his disbelief in endless punishment,” John—in the view of many observers—had aligned himself with the movement known as Universalism. This small but increasingly popular sect held to the highly controversial doctrine of eternal salvation for all humankind: the concept that punishment for earthly sins ends at death and that every departed soul ascends to heaven.5 In the view of its many critics, this heretical notion was little more than a license to sin. “Without the threat of retribution, human beings were left morally adrift, fell victim to the baser passions, and doomed society,” went the argument.6 They also contended that, among its other “bad moral effects,” Universalism led logically to suicide:
For if our existence, in this world, be uncomfortable, why may we not put an end at once to misery and enter into blessedness? Indeed, according to the clearest dictates of universalist reason, if a man finds himself sunk into degradation and misery, self-destruction becomes an imperious duty; for by it “we ascend instantly from the condition of a downtrodden, suffering sinful mortal to that of a glorious, exalted, immortal spirit.” Many have acted on these principles.7
In “the manner of his life and death”—committing both murder and suicide while serenely espousing a faith in his ultimate salvation—Colt, in the opinion of the enemies of Universalism, served as a striking illustration “of the nefarious influence of that doctrine which denies the future eternal punishment of the wicked.”8
There was, of course, one major problem with this argument, as defenders of Universalism were quick to point out: namely, that Colt had at no time ever been affiliated with the denomination. “Colt a Universalist!” scoffed a writer for the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine. “Was he ever known as a Universalist? Did he ever attend a Universalist church? Was he ever connected with Universalism in any way?”
Even assuming for the sake of argument that Colt was a Universalist, read the article, “what then?” Did that prove “that Universalism leads to murder and suicide?” Turning the tables on his orthodox foes, he quite reasonably pointed out “that probably nineteen-twentieths of those who have died on the gallows have believed unhesitatingly in the doctrine of endless misery. What will this fact prove? It will prove with a force equal to nineteen to one that the doctrine of endless misery leads to murder and other capital offenses.”9
• • •
If the Colt tragedy became instant fodder for the enemies of Universalism, it also fed into other raging controversies of the time. One remarkable editorial, echoing the arguments of early feminists like Margaret Fuller, used the Colt case to attack the lack of intellectual opportunities for women. Deploring the prevailing philosophy of female education—which held that too much schooling rendered a woman unfit for her proper household duties—this writer maintained that John’s downfall was the result not of his faulty religious training but of his mother’s deficient education:
The idea appears to be entertained that an educated woman is unfitted for the exercise of those domestic qualities which render the fireside and the home happy and attractive. But how sadly erroneous is it! It is an educated, an intellectual woman alone who can render the fireside permanently attractive—it is she alone who can properly contribute to domestic enjoyment—she alone who can understand and discharge the important duties and responsibilities devolving upon a mother … Had not the mind of Washington re
ceived its impulse and taken its course from an intelligent and virtuous mother’s influence, can it be presumed that he would ever have been saluted with the proud title of “His country’s deliverer,” or have been a model for all that is great and noble in morals and politics? And had the naturally wayward propensities of Colt been checked and restrained in infancy and youth by a mother’s head, and his moral qualities sufficiently cultivated, far different doubtless would have been his fate.10
Other reformers invoked the Colt case in their assault on capital punishment, a battle that grew into a sweeping nationwide campaign during the early 1840s.11 In her best-selling essay collection Letters from New-York, activist Lydia Maria Child—a powerful voice in the anti-gallows movement—described with bitter woe the “convulsive excitement” that pervaded her supposedly “Christian community” in the tense days leading up to John’s planned execution:
The effect of executions on all brought within their influence is evil and nothing but evil. For a fortnight past, this whole city has been kept in a state of corroding excitement … Each day, hope and fear alternated; the natural effect of all this was to have the whole thing regarded as a game, in which the criminal might or might not become the winner. Worse than all this was the horrible amount of diabolical passions excited. The hearts of men were filled with murder; they gloated over the thoughts of vengeance, and were rabid to witness a fellow-creature’s agony.12
In a similar vein, Horace Greeley—though agreeing with the jury’s verdict—deplored the ugly passions incited by Colt’s death sentence. “We hope that this tragedy in all its proportions has done much to hasten the abolition of the Punishment of Death,” he editorialized in the Tribune:
What has been the influence of the Punishment of Death in this case? What moral effects have been produced by its existence? Have we not seen the community divided with regard to the justice of the sentence?… Not from compassion to criminals but from regard to the community—whose sympathies and whose feelings are so unhealthily excited by public executions—whose abhorrence of crime and reverence for laws are confused and disturbed by these deeds of legal butchery—we demand the abolition of the Punishment of Death.13
Perhaps the most intriguing of all the editorials to appear in the wake of John’s suicide was a piece in the November 24 issue of the New York Sun. Headlined “The Moral of the Recent Tragedy,” the essay is remarkable for its psychological sophistication and acuity: its recognition of the extent to which our actions are motivated by what a later age would call unconscious impulses.
The “fearful drama” of the Colt affair, the author writes, teaches “how little we know ourselves—what strangers we are to our evil propensities … and how terrible and uncontrollable is the wild tempest of human passions when once they obtain the mastery over the reason and the conscience”:
But a few short summers since, John C. Colt was sporting round the hearth of fond parents in all the gaiety and glee of child-like innocence. And but a few months since, he was threading the devious path of life with all the pride and ambition of self-confident youth. Who that might have seen him at either period of life would not have been appalled at the thought that his career was to be in crime—in blood—in double murder? Had he been told as he walked abroad erect among his gay companions that such would be his fate, how would his eye have kindled and his bosom swelled with deep and irrepressible indignation? And yet, young men of New York, he did it all. He knew not himself, and was not master of his fierce and desolating passions.
“Let us be admonished by this terrible example,” the writer concludes. “Let us ask—Do we know ourselves any better than he knew himself? Do we comprehend, and have we the fixed moral principle, the high moral energy, to control the fearful volcano of human passions whose maddened fires roar and blaze within our bosoms?”14
In its avoidance of pat moralizing—its acknowledgment that, operating beneath our awareness, there are dark, destructive drives that can only be neutralized through a process of deep and ruthless introspection—this article strikes a singularly contemporary note. Though it was published anonymously, scholars have since identified its author as the twenty-three-year-old journalist Walt Whitman.15
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While preachers, pundits, and crusaders of various stripes put the Colt case to their own particular uses, the public continued to traffic in rumor and gossip. “The fever of excitement into which our city was lashed on Friday has subsided but little and continues to rage in all circles,” reported the Sun on Monday, November 21. New Yorkers, the paper continued, were in the grip of “a perfect Colt mania.”1
The most persistent story had it that the dead body found in John’s cell was that of a “pauper convict” and that, during the tumult of the fire, John himself had been smuggled out of the prison and put on a ship bound for France.2 Among those who accepted that John had in fact committed suicide, speculation swirled around the source of the suicide weapon. With the exception of the Reverend Dr. Anthon, virtually everyone who had visited John during his final hours was suspected of having supplied him with the fatal pocketknife, though the consensus seemed to be that it had been “concealed in the long clothes of the baby that Caroline Henshaw carried with her into the cell when she went there to be married.”3 That the infant, according to every newspaper account, had not been present at the ceremony did nothing to dampen the rumor.
One particularly disturbing story quickly made the rounds. It was recorded by George Templeton Strong, who heard it from George Anthon, son of the clergyman. In his diary entry of November 22, Strong notes that John had been “reluctantly persuaded into” suicide in order “to spare his family” the ignominy of the gallows. Exactly who did the persuading was left unsaid; though as the world knew, only one member of John’s family had been at his side throughout the ordeal and had much to lose by having the Colt name besmirched with the permanent taint of dishonor.4
At the same time that this rumor reached Strong’s ears, James Gordon Bennett was publicizing another, unsubstantiated story. In addition to the suicide, John’s last-minute marriage to Caroline—“the strange and somber bridal,” as one penny paper called it—had been a subject of intense speculation.5 Most people assumed that John had wed his mistress for noble motives: to “redeem the character of the unfortunate woman” and to legitimize their out-of-wedlock son.6 Bennett, however, claimed that there was another and far less admirable reason.
“Circumstances that have recently come into our possession,” wrote Bennett, had persuaded him that Colt and Caroline were actually married “in Philadelphia before the murder of Adams took place in this city. After this deed was committed, it became necessary that she should be used as a witness, and knowing that her testimony could not be received as the wife of Colt, she was introduced as plain Caroline Henshaw, and for the purpose of carrying out the deception as originally practiced, the marriage ceremony was again performed, in order to blind the eyes of the world to the previous transaction.”
To Bennett, this somewhat tortured story offered the only plausible rationale “for the commission of an act that, under any other circumstances, appears perfectly inexplicable.”7 There was, however, another explanation for John and Caroline’s marriage, one so shocking that many years would pass before it was brought to light.
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The infant son born to Caroline Henshaw had been named Samuel Colt, Jr.—a tribute, so the world assumed, to Sam’s steadfast devotion to his brother. For the rest of his life, Sam would look after the boy and his mother. His efforts on their behalf began shortly after John’s death, when he sought help from a woman who had long proven herself a friend to the outcast and oppressed: Lydia Maria Child.
Born outside of Boston in 1802, Child taught for a time at a girls’ school before achieving prominence as the author of the historical novel Hobomok, published when she was just twenty-two. A few years later, she founded the pioneering children’s magazine the Juvenile Miscellany, then turned out a series
of popular domestic advice books, beginning with The American Frugal Housewife. By the mid-1830s, Child had taken up the radical causes of abolitionism and women’s rights. After moving to Manhattan in 1841, she became editor of the abolitionist newspaper the National Anti-Slavery Standard, to which she contributed a regular column, “Letters from New-York,” later collected into the best-selling volume of the same name.
As Child’s chief biographer notes, these city sketches were remarkable, among other reasons, for their haunting, deeply sympathetic “vignettes that encapsulated the daily lives of the poor”:
a “ragged urchin” staggering under a load of newspapers, his face “blue, cold, and disconsolate,” his childish voice “prematurely cracked into shrillness by screaming street cries at the top of his lungs”; a woman “with garments all draggled in New-York gutters,” lying in the street where she had “fallen in intoxication”; two small girls with “scanty garments fluttering in the wind” and “blue hands … locked in each other” as they struggled through snow drifts and stopped every now and then to exchange the single “pair of broken shoes,” bound with rags, that they shared.1
Child’s widely read piece on John Colt, originally published in the November 24, 1842, issue of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, not only dealt with another of her causes—the crusade against capital punishment—but went out of its way to stress the estimable traits of John’s character. “I mean no extenuation of the awful crime of John C. Colt when I say that, through the whole course of this terrible tragedy, he has shown the self-same qualities which men admire under the name of military greatness,” Child wrote. “The stern silence with which he shut up in his own breast his secrets and plans; his cool self-possession under circumstances that would have crazed a common brain; his bold defiance of the law, which he regarded as a powerful enemy; the strong pride which bore him up under a long imprisonment and prompted him to suicide; all these indicate such elements of character as military heroes are made of.” Mrs. Child also praised Sam, who “never forsook his disgraced and suffering brother; but sustained him throughout by his presence and sympathy; and made almost superhuman efforts to save him from his untimely end.”2