Killer Colt Page 30

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  What became of Caroline is unknown. There are indications that sometime in the late 1840s, she returned to Europe. A legend arose that she adopted the name Julia Leicester and eloped with a dashing young Prussian nobleman, Count Friedrich August Kunow Waldemar von Oppen, who—having been disinherited because of his unsuitable marriage—became an overseas agent for Colt’s arms. Though von Oppen certainly existed and did indeed marry a relation of Sam Colt’s, evidence shows that his wife was not Caroline Henshaw.1

  An equally colorful rumor was said to have originated with one Samuel M. Everett, an acquaintance of John Colt’s who supposedly encountered him during a trip to California in 1852. According to this story, John was alive and well and passing himself off as a Spanish grandee named Don Carlos Juan Brewster, complete with “brocaded jacket, silk scarf, silver spurs, sombrero, and trousers slashed to the knees and garnished along the seams with a fringe of little silver bells.” Sharing his hacienda were Caroline and two handsome children.2 Like the sightings of dead celebrities that have become increasingly common in our own time, however, this outlandish tale was a product of folklore, not fact.

  • • •

  Still, its widespread circulation in 1852—ten years after John’s suicide—was significant: a sign of the persistent fascination exerted by the Colt case, which continued to live on in story and song. As early as February 1843, two Colt-related stage melodramas (the era’s equivalent of today’s “ripped-from-the-headlines” TV crime shows) were mounted in Cincinnati: John C. Colt, or the Unhappy Suicide, and John C. Colt, or the End of a Murderer, the latter written by and starring the popular actor and dramatist Nathaniel Harrington Bannister.3

  At roughly the same time, a barroom ballad titled “The Lay of Mr. Colt” began to make the rounds:

  The clock is ticking onward,

  It nears the hour of doom,

  And no one yet hath entered

  Into that ghastly room.

  The jailer and the sheriff,

  They are walking to and fro,

  And the hangman sits upon the steps

  And smokes his pipe below.

  In grisly expectation

  The prison all is bound,

  And, save for expectoration,

  You cannot hear a sound.

  The turnkey stands and ponders,

  His hand upon the bolt—

  “In twenty minutes more, I guess,

  ’Twill all be up with Colt!”

  But see, the door is opened!

  Forth comes the weeping bride;

  The courteous sheriff lifts his hat,

  And saunters to her side.

  “I beg your pardon, Mrs. C.,

  But is your husband ready?”

  “I guess you’d better ask himself,”

  Replied the woeful lady.

  The clock is ticking onward;

  Hark! Hark! It striketh one!

  Each felon draws a whistling breath,

  “Time’s up with Colt; he’s done!”

  The sheriff consults his watch again,

  Then puts it in his fob,

  And turning to the hangman, says—

  “Get ready for the job!”

  The jailer knocketh loudly,

  The turnkey draws the bolt,

  And pleasantly the sheriff says—

  “We’re waiting, Mr. Colt!”

  No answer! No—no answer!

  All’s still as death within;

  The sheriff eyes the jailer,

  The jailer strokes his chin.

  “I shouldn’t wonder, Nahum, if

  It were as you suppose.”

  The hangman looked unhappy, and

  The turnkey blew his nose.

  They entered. On his pallet

  The noble convict lay,—

  The bridegroom on his marriage-bed

  But not in trim array.

  His red right hand a razor held,

  Fresh sharpened from the hone,

  And his ivory neck was severed,

  And gashed into the bone.

  And when the lamp is lighted

  In the long November days,

  And lads and lasses mingle

  At shucking of the maize;

  When pies of smoking pumpkin

  Upon the table stand,

  And bowls of black molasses

  Go round from hand to hand;

  When flap-jacks, maple-sugared,

  Are hissing in the pan,

  And cider, with a dash of gin,

  Foams in the social can;

  When the goodman wets his whistle,

  And the goodwife scolds the child;

  And the girls exclaim convulsively,

  “Have done, or I’ll be riled!”

  With laughter and with weeping,

  Then shall they tell the tale,

  How Colt his foeman quartered

  And died within the jail.4

  • • •

  The following year, the Colt-Adams case inspired a far more enduring piece of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story “The Oblong Box.” Set aboard a packet ship headed from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City, the story concerns a passenger named Cornelius Wyatt, a “young artist” with a studio “in Chambers Street,” who is traveling with a mysterious pine box “six feet in length by two and a half in breadth.” The contents of the box—which Wyatt keeps stored in his own stateroom throughout the trip—remain a mystery until the climax of the tale, when the nameless narrator learns to his amazement that it held the corpse of Wyatt’s lovely, recently deceased young wife, packed in salt.5

  Given his particular obsessions, it is no surprise that Poe latched on to the single most macabre element of the Colt case—the salted remains loaded onto a ship in a wooden crate—and transformed the body of a stout middle-aged male into that of a prematurely dead beautiful young woman. In another great American short story of the period—Herman Melville’s masterpiece “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—the Colt-Adams case appears in undisguised form. At one point in this endlessly fascinating parable about (among other things) the limits of Christian charity, the narrator—a mild-mannered, middle-aged lawyer struggling to deal with an increasingly impossible employee—finds himself driven to such heights of exasperation that he fears he might commit violence upon the maddening copyist. It is the sudden recollection of the Colt-Adams case that allows him to keep his temper in check:

  I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it but prudent to check myself at present from further demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone. I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurried into his fatal act—an act which certainly no man could possibly deplore more than the actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings upon the subject, that had that altercation taken place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have terminated as it did. It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations—an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;—this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt.

  But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why, simply by recalling the divine injunction: “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.” Yes, this it was that saved me. Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle—a great safeguard to its possessor. Men have committed murder for jealousy’s sake, and anger’s sake, and hatred’s sake, and selfishness’ sake, and spiritual pride’s sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity’s sake. Mere self-interest, the
n, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy.6

  • • •

  For one woman writer, it was not the killing of Adams, or the boxing-up of his body, or John’s iron-nerved resolve to cheat the hangman that made the Colt case so memorable but the somber wedding ceremony in the Tombs. This author was Theodora De Wolf Colt, wife of Sam and John’s brother Christopher, who, in her privately printed volume Stray Fancies, included a poem called “The Marriage in a Prison,” a sentimental celebration of love’s unconquerable might, even in face of imminent death:

  ’Twas not within the sacred aisle,

  Before the altar of our God,

  With parents and with sisters near,

  The bridegroom and the fair one stood.

  ’Twas in a dungeon dark and drear,

  With naught to dissipate its gloom,

  With nothing genial to efface

  The horrors of that living tomb!

  The man of God in silence stood,

  His eyes were raised as if in prayer,

  And by his side two forms, as still

  As death,—they were the bridal pair!

  One was a youth of noble mien,

  Ill-fitted for so vile a place,

  And on his brow a loftiness

  That prison-walls could not efface.

  Excepting when he glanced at her,

  That fair young being at his side,

  Then agonizing was his gaze,—

  It seemed as if his spirit died.

  A solemn stillness reigned throughout,

  You might have heard each beating heart,

  ’Till broken by the preacher’s voice:

  “Wilt thou love her ’till death do part?”

  A scaffold near the casement stood!—

  ’Twas there, oh God! That he might see

  That, although innocent of crime,

  A sufferer he was doomed to be.

  He answered not, nor bowed assent,

  But pressed that fair girl to his breast,

  As when in days of happiness

  She knew it as her place of rest.

  The blessing then the priest pronounced,

  And left them for a last farewell

  They wished to take alone, unseen

  By any in that gloomy cell!

  Oh, what can woman’s love efface?—

  Not dungeon, scaffold, chains, nor death;

  She clings but with a firmer hold,—

  She loves until her latest breath.

  She loved him when he was esteemed

  And honored by his fellow men;

  And now her soul still turns to him,—

  Though all forsake, she’ll not condemn!7

  • • •

  The contrast between the grim jailhouse nuptials of John Colt and Caroline Henshaw and the wedding, fourteen years later, of Sam Colt and Elizabeth Jarvis couldn’t have been more stark. The ceremony, held at the Protestant Episcopal Church at Middletown, Connecticut, on June 5, 1856, was conducted by the Right Reverend T. C. Brownell, bishop of Connecticut. The bride was bedecked in “a dress and jewelry rumored to cost eight thousand dollars”—the equivalent of more than two hundred thousand in today’s dollars. The wedding cake, standing six feet tall, was trimmed with confectionery pistols and topped with a spun-sugar colt.

  Following the ceremony, the entire bridal party took the evening express to Manhattan, where Sam had rented one of the city’s largest hotels, the St. Nicholas, for a gala reception. The next morning, the newlyweds set off by ship on a six-month honeymoon. After an extended stay in London, they traveled to Holland, Bavaria, Vienna, the Tyrolean Alps, and finally Russia, where—along with “princes and princesses and top-ranking diplomats and military officers” from throughout Europe—they were guests at the coronation of Czar Alexander II.8

  Shortly after their return to Hartford, they moved into the spectacular residence known as Armsmear (“the mansion that ‘arms’ had built on the ‘mere,’ or lowlands, of Hartford’s South Meadow”).9 Designed by Sam himself, the massive brownstone building, with its five-story tower, its steel and glass conservatories, its exotic minarets and domes, stood as “the perfect model of a Victorian-age mogul’s idea of opulence and elegance.”10 Its nearly two dozen rooms—dining room, drawing room, music room, billiard room, ballroom, reception room, library, picture gallery, and various private quarters—were outfitted with imported custom-made furniture, carpets, drapery, and other items of décor costing the equivalent of more than six hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. The sweeping grounds of the estate—with its private garden, deer park, artificial lake, terraced lawn, spectacular greenhouses, marble fountains and statuary—was designed by Copeland and Cleveland of Boston, “one of the nation’s first and most respected landscape architectural firms.”11

  Between the day that he and Elizabeth moved into Armsmear and Sam’s early death of gout and rheumatic fever at the age of forty-seven, only five years elapsed. Still, despite the heart-wrenching loss of his first two children (both memorialized, of course, in the funereal verse of his friend Mrs. Sigourney), those years “were the most stable and prosperous of his life.” Some of his most contented hours were spent within his “private room,” where Sam “gathered the pictured forms and mementos of those he loved best.”12 Among these precious items were portraits of his long-departed mother and sisters, marble statues of his two tragically short-lived infants, and, it is said, an oil painting of his doomed but indomitable brother, John Caldwell Colt.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe my greatest debt of thanks to Professor Richard Vangermeersch, distinguished historian of American accounting, who graciously shared his research material on the Colt case and offered vital assistance throughout the project.

  I am also grateful to the following people for their kindness and generosity: Randy Blomquist, Mickey Cartin, Kenneth Cobb, Dale Flesher, Bob Kenworthy, the Hon. Diane Kiesel, Richard Morgan, Karen Nickeson, Richard Pope, Richard Roberts, David Smith, Jamie Stockton, and, as always, Marianne Stein and Evelyn Silverman. The Research Foundation of the City of New York provided generous assistance in the form of a PSC-CUNY Research Award.

  I can’t adequately convey my appreciation for the love and support of my wife and partner, Kimiko Hahn. To describe my feelings about our life together, I must turn to the words of John Colt’s contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I am glad to the brink of fear.”

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE: NEW YORK CITY, FRIDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 17, 1841

  1. We know these details of Samuel Adams’s dress and gait from the trial testimony of his acquaintance John Johnson. See Thomas Dunphy and Thomas J. Cummins, Remarkable Trials of All Countries (New York: Dossy & Company, 1870), pp. 247–48.

  2. Besides Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” my evocation of the street scene is drawn from several sources, primarily Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd,” Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation, and Nathaniel Parker Willis’s Open-Air Musings in the City. Excerpts from the last two can be found in Phillip Lopate’s anthology Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (New York: Library of America, 2008), pp. 51–64, 74–90.

  3. For example, see J. Disturnell, The Classified Mercantile Directory for the Cities of New-York and Brooklyn (New York: J. Disturnell, 1837), and E. Porter Belden, New-York: Past, Present, and Future (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 276–450.

  4. On the very day of Samuel Adams’s disappearance, the New York Herald ran a prominent story, “The Case of Mary Rogers—The Place of the Murder,” accompanied by a large woodcut illustration showing “The House Where Mary Rogers Was Last Seen Alive.” See New York Herald, September 17, 1841, p. 2. For a full account of the McLeod case, see William Renwick Riddell, “An International Murder Trial,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 10, no. 2 (August 1919): pp. 176–83.

  5. For a
description of Scudder’s American Museum, see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 39.

  6. Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, p. 248.

  7. See Holden’s Dollar Magazine, vol. 6 (1851): p. 187.

  PART ONE: FRAIL BLOOD

  CHAPTER 1

  1. The school was later renamed the American Asylum at Hartford for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons.

  According to local historian Mary K. Talcott, Captain Lord (1611–62) “was one of the most energetic and efficient men in the colony; when the first troop of horse was organized, he was chosen commander, March 11, 1658, and distinguished himself in the Indian Wars. He was constable, 1642; townsman, 1645; represented Hartford in the General Court from 1656 until his death.” Also see J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Memorial History of Hartford County Connecticut 1633–1884 (Boston: Edward L. Osgood, 1886), p. 249.

  2. William Hosley, Colt: The Making of an American Legend (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 14, 228. For more about the complicity of New England merchants in the infamous “Triangle Trade,” see Janet Siskind, Rum and Axes: The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

  3. Hosley, American Legend, p. 15; Josiah Gilbert Holland, History of Western Massachusetts (Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles and Company, 1855), p. 225.

  4. Jack Rohan, Yankee Arms Maker: The Story of Sam Colt and His Six-Shot Peacemaker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 3.

  5. Miriam Davis Colt, Went to Kansas (Watertown, MA: L. Ingalls & Co., 1862), p. 250; William B. Edwards, The Story of Colt’s Revolver: The Biography of Col. Samuel Colt (New York: Castle Books, 1957), p. 15.