Killer Colt Read online

  6. Geoffrey O’Brien, The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Murder and Madness in Saratoga’s Gilded Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), p. 60.

  7. New York Herald, October 6, 1841, p. 2.

  8. Her second husband was a New York City educator named William H. Vanderhoof. See Charles Adams, Jr., A Genealogical Register of North Brookfield Families, Including the Records of Many Early Settlers of Brookfield (published by the Town of North Brookfield, 1887), p. 487, and The New York Supplement, Vol. 17, Containing the Decisions of the Supreme, Superior, and Lower Courts of Record of New York State. February 11–March 24, 1892 (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co., 1892), p. 712.

  9. New York Herald, January 18, 1842, p. 2.

  10. Ibid., January 20, 1842, p. 1.

  11. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 32

  1. New York Sun, January 21, 1842, p. 2; Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, January 21, 1842, p. 2; New York Herald, January 21, 1842, p. 2.

  2. New York Herald, January 20, 1842, p. 1.

  3. New York Sun, January 21, 1842, p. 2; New York Herald, January 20, 1842, p. 1.

  4. Ibid.

  5. New York Herald, January 21, 1842, p. 1.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Tucher, Froth & Scum, p. 152.

  9. New York Herald, January 21, 1842, p. 1.

  CHAPTER 33

  1. New York Herald, January 23, 1842, p. 2.

  2. New York Sun, January 23, 1842, p. 2.

  3. New York Herald, January 22, 1842, pp. 1–2.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., January 22, 1842, p. 1; Meyer Berger, “That Was New York: The Tombs—I,” New Yorker, August 30, 1941, p. 24.

  6. New York Herald, p. 2.

  CHAPTER 34

  1. New York Sun, January 22, 1842, p. 1.

  2. Tucher, Froth & Scum, p. 103.

  3. New York Herald, January 23, 1842, p. 1.

  4. Ibid.; Lawson, American State Trials, p. 464.

  5. Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, p. 246; New York Sun, January 23, 1842, p. 1; New York Herald, January 23, 1842, p. 2.

  6. Lawson, American State Trials, pp. 465–66.

  7. Ibid., pp. 465, 468.

  8. New York Sun, January 23, 1842, p. 1.

  9. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 35

  1. New York Herald, January 24, 1842, p. 2.

  2. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 36

  1. Tucher, Froth & Scum, p. 103.

  2. L. J. Bigelow, Bench and Bar: A Complete Digest of the Wit, Humor, Asperities, and Amenities of the Law (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1871), p. 214.

  3. Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, January 26, 1842, p. 2; New York Sun, January 26, 1842, p. 2; New York Herald, January 26, 1842, p. 1.

  4. Ibid.

  5. New York Herald, January 26, 1842, p. 1.

  6. Ibid., p. 2.

  CHAPTER 37

  1. Bigelow, Bench and Bar, p. 214.

  2. New York Sun, January 26, 1842, p. 2; New York Herald, January 26, 1842, p. 1.

  3. Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, p. 256.

  4. Bigelow, Bench and Bar, p. 215.

  5. New York Sun, January 26, 1842, p. 2.

  6. Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, January 26, 1842, p. 1.

  7. New York Herald, January 26, 1841, p. 1.

  8. Tucher, Froth & Scum, p. 104; New York Sun, January 26, 1842, p. 2.

  9. New York Sun, January 26, 1842, p. 2.

  10. Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, p. 260.

  11. Bigelow, Bench and Bar, p. 215.

  12. New York Sun, January 26, 1842, p. 2.

  13. Ibid.

  14. New York Herald, January 26, 1842, p. 2.

  15. Bigelow, Bench and Bar, p. 215.

  CHAPTER 38

  1. Philadelphia North American, January 26, 1842, p. 3. The story was widely reprinted in newspapers throughout the Northeast.

  2. New-York Commercial Advertiser, January 27, 1842, p. 1; New York Sun, January 27, 1842, p. 2.

  3. New York Herald, January 27, 1842, p. 1.

  4. New York Sun, January 27, 1842, p. 2.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, pp. 262–67.

  7. Ibid., p. 267.

  CHAPTER 39

  1. New York Herald, January 28, 1842, p. 1; New York Sun, January 28, 1842, p. 2.

  2. New York Herald, January 28, 1842, p. 1.

  3. Ibid.; New York Sun, January 28, 1842, p. 2.

  4. New York Sun, January 28, 1842, p. 2.

  CHAPTER 40

  1. Colt’s confession was widely reprinted in its entirety in the penny papers. This transcription is taken from Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, pp. 272–78.

  Though Emmett was permitted to read the statement aloud, it was ruled inadmissible as evidence, and the jury was told to disregard it during its deliberations. Once having heard it, of course, the jurors could not possibly banish it from their minds. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it, “its effect [could] scarcely be less as a ‘statement’ than as testimony” (January 28, 1842, p. 2).

  CHAPTER 41

  1. New York Sun, January 28, 1842, p. 2.

  2. New York Herald, January 29, 1842, p. 1.

  3. Ibid.; New York Sun, January 28, 1842, p. 2.

  CHAPTER 42

  1. Lawson, American State Trials, p. 279.

  2. New York Herald, January 29, 1842, p. 1.

  3. On August 4, 1806, Federalist attorney Thomas O. Selfridge shot and killed Charles Austin, the eighteen-year-old son of the “venomous” Republican newspaper editor Benjamin Austin. The murder stemmed from a dispute between Selfridge and the elder Austin, who had excoriated Selfridge in print. The latter demanded a retraction, which the editor refused to supply. Soon afterward, Austin’s teenaged son, Charles, encountered Selfridge on State Street in Boston. Words passed between them. When Austin struck Selfridge on the forehead with his hickory cane, Selfridge drew a pistol and shot the boy dead. Charged with manslaughter, Selfridge was tried in December and eventually acquitted. This highly controversial and unpopular verdict “affected the lives and reputations of several individuals involved in the case,” including the jury foreman, Paul Revere, whose “honor came under fire.” See Jane E. Triber, A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 189–90.

  4. Lawson, American State Trials, pp. 279–83.

  5. New York Sun, January 29, 1842, p. 2.

  CHAPTER 43

  1. Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in South and North America (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854), p. 184; Thomas M. McDade, Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), p. 240. Also see The Trial of Peter Robinson or the Murder of Abraham Suydam, Esq., President of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank of New Brunswick (New York: S. G. Deeth Bookseller, 1841).

  2. New York Herald, January 29, 1842, p. 2.

  3. New York Sun, January 29, 1842, p. 3. Also see Tucher, Froth & Scum, p. 166.

  4. New York Sun, January 29, 1842, p. 1.

  5. Ibid., p. 2; Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, pp. 287–95.

  6. See Berger, “The Tombs,” pp. 23–24.

  7. Dunphy and Cummins, Remarkable Trials, pp. 296–301; New York Sun, January 29, 1842, pp. 2–3; Dollar Weekly Herald, February 1, 1842, pp. 1–2.

  CHAPTER 44

  1. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 36 (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), p. 425.

  2. New York Herald, January 31, 1842, p. 2.

  3. Ibid.; Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, January 31, 1842, p. 2.

  4. Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, January 31, 1842, p. 2.

  5. See Michael Kaplan, “New York City Tavern Violence and the Creation of a Working-Class Male Identity,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 15, no. 4 (Winter 1995): pp. 603–5.

  6. New York Her
ald, January 31, 1842, p. 2.

  PART FIVE: THE NEW YORK TRAGEDY

  CHAPTER 45

  1. Tucher, Froth & Scum, pp. 105, 224. Held on Valentine’s Day at the Park Theatre, the gala event in Dickens’s honor, known as the “Boz Ball,” was, in the amused estimation of diarist Philip Hone, “the greatest affair in modern times, the tallest compliment ever paid to a little man, the fullest libation ever poured upon the altar of the muses.”

  2. For example, see Maine Farmer and Journal of the Useful Arts, October 30, 1841; Ohio Repository, February 10, 1842; Norwalk (OH) Experiment, February 16, 1842; Portland (ME) Tribune, May 24, 1842, p. 3; Milwaukee Sentinel & Farmer, April 2, 1842), Madison (WI) Express, March 5, 1842; Boston Recorder, November 24, 1842. The story was also covered, among other publications, in the New York Evangelist, the Catholic Telegraph, the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, the Christian Reflector, the Christian Secretary, the Christian Register and Boston Observer, the Biblical Reporter and Princeton Review, Brother Jonathan: A Weekly Compendium of Belle Lettres and the Fine Arts, the Weekly Messenger, Youth’s Companion, and Yankee Doodle.

  3. Episcopal Recorder, February 19, 1842, p. 192.

  4. Youth’s Companion, March 16, 1842, p. 126.

  5. American Phrenological Journal (April 1842): vol. 4, no. 2, p. 312.

  6. Offered for sale just days after John’s conviction, this cheaply printed sheet of doggerel did not stint on gruesome details, catering to the public’s prurient appetite for gore even while affecting an ostentatiously pious tone. (A parenthetical note at the top of the sheet suggests that the verses be sung to the “solemn tune of Come Christian People.”) The surviving stanzas of the ballad read as follows:

  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!

  In New York City, Adams liv’d

  A chaste and pious life.

  And there he might have lived still

  Had Debt not caused a strife.

  ’Twas in the year Eighteen Hundred

  and Forty One, they say.

  The Seventeenth of September,

  It was the fatal day.

  To see about the books, being

  Four hundred vols. Or more:

  On Friday afternoon, it was

  About the hour of four.

  To Colt’s room, Samuel Adams

  Went, you will remember:

  In the Granite Building, corner

  Of Broadway and Chamber.

  This vex’d the man unto the heart;

  He was of wrath so fell,

  That finding no hole in his bill,

  He pick’d two in his skull.

  Behind him with a Burkite rope,

  Round his neck did bundle,

  For quickly then the slip knot flew,

  So the printer struggl’d.

  Oh savage man! For blood did thirst,

  And with blows so violent

  Out of his head the brains did gush;

  Down fell he all silent.

  But then his heart ’gan to relent,

  And griev’d he was full sore;

  The bloody Axe to scrape with glass,

  Then wash and scrub the floor.

  For blood will always leave a stain,

  Whatever we may think,

  And to completely hide the same,

  He’d cover all with ink.

  All in the darkness of the night,

  A large box then he made,

  When he’d wrapped the body round,

  Within this box ’twas laid.

  On board the ship Ka-la-ma-zoo,

  A Cartman did convey,

  In the hold of the ship,

  ’Twas snugly stowed away.

  But heav’n whose pow’r no mortal knows,

  On earth or on the main,

  Soon caus’d the body to be found,

  And brought it back again.

  The box, when open’d, what a sight,

  Was never seen before,

  A rope made fast to neck and knee,

  And maggots crawling oe’r.

  And that it no self-murder was,

  The case itself explains,

  No man could his head knock holes,

  To let out his own brains.

  Ere many days were gone and past,

  The deed it was made known,

  And John C. Colt confess’d at last,

  The fact to be his own.

  The trial came on for murder,

  In Court it must appear,

  The Doctors they did examine,

  The head of Adams there.

  The skull was brought into court,

  For all to witness it,

  The Jury saw the holes and hatchet,

  Did well each other fit.

  The district attorney, he did

  His duty well discharge,

  Twelve upright men then heard, the Judge

  Deliver his law charge.

  The dreadful case being ended,

  The Jury did agree,

  Of willful MURDER, guilty found,

  John Caldwell Colt to be.

  God prosper long the jury, who

  Protect the lives of all.

  And grant that we may a warning take,

  By John C. Colt’s fall.

  I have related all that’s past,

  Let Justice have its due.

  Many years hence, this may be read

  Because it all is true.

  An image of the original, albeit damaged, ballad sheet (two verses are missing between stanzas seven and eight) can be found online at the site American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml).

  7. The image of Barnum published in the Albany Evening Atlas is reprinted in Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., et al., P. T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 54. It does indeed bear a remarkable similarity to the portrait of Samuel Adams in the Sun pamphlet.

  8. P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York: Redfield, 1855), pp. 356–57.

  CHAPTER 46

  1. See New York Herald, February 1, February 15, February 22, March 1, and March 2, 1842, p. 2.

  2. Charles Sutton, The New York Tombs: Its Secrets and Its Mysteries (New York: United States Publishing Company, 1874), p. 44. According to Sutton, the name evolved from Kalchook to the abbreviated Kalch, and then to Callech, Colleck, and, finally, Collect.

  3. Sutton, New York Tombs, p. 47; Berger, “The Tombs,” p. 23.

  4. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1863), p. 37.

  5. Berger, “The Tombs,” p. 22; Edward H. Smith, “New Scene Added to the Drama of the Tombs,” New York Times, November 14, 1926, p. 23.

  6. Berger, “The Tombs,” p. 23; Timothy Gilfoyle, “ ‘America’s Greatest Criminal Barracks’: The Tombs and the Experience of Criminal Justice in New York City, 1838–1897,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 29, no. 5 (July 2003): p. 528.

  7. Gi
lfoyle, “Tombs and Criminal Justice,” p. 530.

  8. Berger, “The Tombs,” p. 28.

  9. Ibid., pp. 24, 27; Gilfoyle, “Tombs and Criminal Justice,” p. 532.

  10. Life and Letters of John C. Colt, letter 5, November 10, 1841.

  11. Quoted in Alfred Henry Lewis, Nation-Famous New York Murders (New York: G. W. Dillingham Company, 1914), pp. 232–34.

  12. John’s letters first appeared in the daily press (see the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, February 24, 1842, where they occupy all of pp. 1–2). In October 1842, they were published in pamphlet form as an Extra Tattler under the title Life and Letters of John C. Colt, Condemned to Be Hung on the Eighteenth of November, 1842, for the Murder of Samuel Adams. A selection of them was also printed as an appendix to later editions of the Sun pamphlet (see Tucher, Froth & Scum, p. 230, n. 4). The quoted passages in this chapter are taken from the letters dated November 10, 1841; February 6, 8, 10, 11, 15, and 22, 1842; March 15, 1842.

  CHAPTER 47

  1. Rogers’s handwritten report can be found on the microfilm edition of the William Henry Seward Papers, University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, reel 165, items 5894–5901.

  CHAPTER 48

  1. Edwards, Colt’s Revolver, p. 173.

  2. Lundeberg, Submarine Battery, p. 23.

  3. Leonard F. Guttridge, Our Country, Right or Wrong: The Life of Stephen Decatur, the U.S. Navy’s Most Illustrious Commander (New York: Forge Books, 2007), pp. 154–55.

  4. Lundeberg, Submarine Battery, p. 74; Edwards, Colt’s Revolver, p. 173. Sam’s notebook sketch of Halsey’s submersible—the only surviving image of the boat—can be found on Captain Brayton Harris’s website World Submarine History Timeline: 1580–2000 (www.submarine-history.com/NOVAone.htm).