Part Two
7
To say that people cope with grief in different ways may be a platitude, but it’s no less true for that. Those who knew Samuel Colt best testify that he cherished the memory of his long-deceased sisters to the very end of his life.1 To be sure, his reaction to Sarah Ann’s suicide was less dramatic than John’s. Indeed, to all outward appearances, her shocking death had little impact on him at all. Certainly it did nothing to deflect him from his immediate pursuits. But his reaction says less about the love he bore for her than about the fierce single-mindedness that (as with other men of genius) was one of Sam Colt’s most salient traits.
• • •
Exactly when Sam became obsessed with the mechanics of undersea warfare is unknown, though his official biographer claims that water mines—“aquatic pyrotechnics,” in the quaint locution of the day—were the great inventor’s “first love,” predating even his fascination with repeating firearms.2 Perhaps, as another authority speculates, Sam’s interest in these weapons was stimulated by accounts of the so-called Battle of the Kegs, a celebrated Revolutionary War episode in which watertight oaken kegs, packed with gunpowder and rigged with flintlock detonators, were floated down the Delaware River in an attempted attack on British vessels moored in the Philadelphia harbor. The incident was immortalized in a ballad that Sam reportedly heard as a young boy from his grandfather Major Caldwell:
Gallants attend, and hear a friend,
Trill forth harmonious ditty,
Strange things I’ll tell which late befell
In Philadelphia city.
’Twas early day, as poets say,
Just when the sun was rising,
A soldier stood on a log of wood,
And saw a thing surprising.
As in amaze he stood to gaze,
The truth can’t be denied, sir,
He spied a score of kegs or more
Come floating down the tide, sir.
A sailor, too, in jerkin blue,
This strange appearance viewing,
First damn’d his eyes in great surprise,
Then said, “Some mischief’s brewing.
“These kegs, I’m told, the rebels bold,
Pack’d up like pickled herring;
And they’re come down t’attack the town,
In this new way of ferrying.”3
As Sam later testified, he was also aware at an early age of Robert Fulton’s experiments with aquatic explosives. Later renowned as the inventor of the commercial steamboat, Fulton was an early proponent of undersea warfare whose experiments with “submarine bombs” (as he called them) were widely publicized in his book Torpedo War. Published in 1810, this work included illustrated instructions for the manufacture of copper-encased water mines that would (theoretically) detonate upon contact with an enemy ship. The very first engraving in the book—a picture that, by Sam’s own admission, made a deep impression on him as a boy—showed a tall-masted brig being blown out of the water by one of Fulton’s devices.4
Though there’s no way of knowing when Sam himself began to dream about destroying boats with “submarine bombs,” it is clear that by the time he was fifteen, he was already mulling over the possibility of detonating gunpowder underwater by means of an electrical current, transmitted from a simple battery via a tarred copper wire. His first known attempt to put this idea into practice occurred just six months after the death of Sarah Ann, during a summer break from Amherst Academy. Displaying the showman’s flair that would serve him so well throughout his career, Sam evidently distributed a crudely printed handbill trumpeting his intended contribution to the town’s Independence Day festivities:
SAM’L COLT WILL BLOW A RAFT SKY-HIGH
ON WARE POND, JULY 4, 1829
Sam’s advertisement succeeded in drawing a sizable crowd of spectators, including a crew of neighborhood apprentices who “walked some way to see the sight.” Unfortunately, the promised spectacle turned into something of a bust. According to one eyewitness, “an explosion was produced, but the raft was by no means blown sky-high.” Still, however disappointing as a pyrotechnical display, Sam’s experiment did produce one significant result. “Curious regarding the boy’s explosive contrivances,” one of the apprentices, a brilliant twenty-one-year-old machinist named Elisha K. Root, introduced himself to the young inventor. It was the start of a long relationship that would have enormous consequences not only for the two men but for the American industrial system itself.5
• • •
By the following spring, Sam found himself dreaming of a life before the mast—an aspiration cherished, according to the author of Moby-Dick, by countless young men of the time. “Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?” observes Herman Melville, another child of privilege whose family suffered severe financial reversals that ultimately led him to seek a sailor’s life.6
Writing to her stepson at Amherst Academy in June 1830, Mother O. S. Colt (as Olivia signed herself) informed him that a family friend, the Boston textile entrepreneur Samuel Lawrence, had spoken to the owner of a ship named Corvo, which was scheduled to leave shortly for a ten-month cruise to the Orient. “Mr. Lawrence,” Olivia assured Sam, “had no doubt but you could have the Situation desired aboard that Ship … provided you qualify your self.”
With her stepson about to venture forth into the wider world, Olivia took the opportunity to dispense the kind of counsel that parents have been ladling out to young men since at least the days of Polonius:
You see then, Samuel, that self-application is necessary to the gratification of your inclination in your favourite pursuit and a thorough knowledge of Navigation will be a great advantage to you in a voyage upon the Seas. It is an uncertain element and all the information you can get on this subject (Should you continue to follow the seas) will be of immense benefit to you—but life is still more uncertain therefore get Wisdom, that Wisdom which is profitable to direct in the life that is now and that which is to come …
Now, when making choice of your occupation it is time to pause and reflect … Look around—on the one side you see the abodes of Wisdom and Virtue—enter in thru her gates. On the other, that of vice and folly—her habitation looks to misery and wretchedness—pass not by her gates—turn away, pass by on the other side. Give up the low frivolous pursuits of a boy—and determine at once you will pursue the steps of Manhood … above all reverence the Supreme Being, never let your lips be polluted by profaning and taking his name in vain.7
Olivia’s admonition to Sam, urging him to abandon the “frivolous pursuits of a boy,” appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Among the cherished relics of the town of Amherst was an old Revolutionary War cannon, an iron six-pounder, that belonged to General Ebenezer Mattoon, who had brought it home from the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. At daybreak on July 4, 1830—just two weeks after receiving Olivia’s missive—Sam and two schoolmates, Alphonso Taft (who would become United States attorney general under President Ulysses S. Grant) and Robert Purvis (later a famous abolitionist), snuck onto Mattoon’s property. Attaching ropes to the old field piece, they lugged it up to College Hill and proceeded to get a jump on the Independence Day festivities by discharging it.
Awakened from their slumbers, several faculty members, including the Reverend John Fiske, hurried up the hill and ordered the boys “not to fire again.” Ignoring the command, Sam placed himself “near … the cannon, swung his match and cried out, ‘a gun for Prof. Fiske’ and touched it off.” When the outraged teacher demanded that he identify himself, Sam jeered that “his name was Colt and he could kick like Hell.”8
Whether Sam was expelled for this escapade or left school voluntarily is unclear. What’s certain is that a few days later, he left Amherst Academy for good, his formal education having come to an end with a very literal bang.
• • •
Less than one month later, on the morning of August 2, 1830, the brig Corvo set sail from Boston Harbor. Among its passengers were Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Jones of the American Baptist Mission, on their way to Rangoon to convert the heathen Burmese.9 Also on board—not as a passenger but as a novice crewmember—was Samuel Colt.
At a cost of $91.24—slightly more than $2,000 in current funds—Samuel had been outfitted with a sailor’s necessities: seaman’s chest and slop clothes, quadrant and compass, boots and bedding, jackknife and almanac, and more. His supplies included a sheaf of stationery so that he could send an occasional letter to his family, none of whom was there to see him off.10
Standing in for his father was Samuel Lawrence, who, later that day, sent the following report to Christopher Colt:
The last time I saw Sam he was in a tarpaulin, check’d shirt & duck trousers on the fore topsail yard loosing the topsail. This was famous at a first going-off. The Capt & Super cargo will give him good advice if required & instruction in seamanship, he is a manly fellow & I have no doubt will do credit to all concerned, he was in good spirits on departure. There were some thousands present to see the missionaries off. Prayers and singing were performed on board.11
Not long after Mr. and Mrs. Jones’s fellow missionaries completed their farewell services, the anchor was heaved up, the ship got under way, and sixteen-year-old Samuel Colt embarked on what would prove to be the most fateful trip of his life.
8
From his days of boyhood make-believe—when he and his friends formed a troop of play soldiers, with equipment supplied by his mother—to his adolescent dream of enrolling in West Point, John Colt had always been drawn to the military. It is little wonder, then, that after Sarah Ann’s suicide, when he sought to throw off his old life and leave for other parts of the world, he decided to enlist in the marines.1
He appears to have taken this drastic step with a certain degree of naivety. Shortly after fleeing home, he made the acquaintance of a former member of the corps, who—preying on the young man’s gullibility—assured him that the duties of a new recruit were extremely light, “the most irksome of them being to stand guard daily for a prescribed number of hours.” For the grief-addled John, this seemed a small price to pay for the chance to “escape the native land which had now become so desolate to him.” Making his way to the Gosport marine station at Norfolk, Virginia, he signed up at once, expecting that “after three or four months at the most,” he would be off on a voyage that would take him around the world: “to Constantinople—thence to Alexandria—thence to Calcutta—thence to Canton—crossing the Pacific returning homeward through South America.”2
The reality turned out to be far more disagreeable than he had been led to believe. Though John had endured his share of hardships since his father went bankrupt, he had been raised in genteel circumstances and was unprepared for the rigors of life in the corps: the coarse, barely palatable fare, the even coarser behavior of his comrades, and the harsh, demeaning discipline to which he was routinely subjected. Not long after his first night of sentry duty, he was seized with a “violent fever” and confined to the infirmary. He emerged several weeks later to find that his ship had sailed without him. By then he had awakened to the sobering truth that a military career was “not only a waste of time for him but a waste of his powers and chances.” Though John had committed himself to an extended term of service, he resolved to leave the corps.
When his formal request for a discharge was denied, he briefly considered desertion before resorting to a more cunning expedient: a forged letter addressed to the commanding officer of the marine station. Written (presumably) by a Massachusetts farmer named Hamilton, the letter declared that the young recruit who had enlisted under the name John C. Colt was actually the sender’s underage son, who had run away from home in his boyish eagerness to see the world. The letter begged that the lad be discharged so that he might be reunited with his aged and ailing parents who had been “rendered wretched” by his absence. John mailed this letter to his brother James, asking him to post it from Ware.
The hoax (as John later described it) succeeded. Shortly after its arrival, he was granted his discharge. Altogether, he had done “three months’ service—eleven days and two nights of which he had been on duty, and more than half the rest of the time upon the sick list in the hospital.”3
• • •
John’s aborted experience with the marines marked the end of his nautical ambitions. His life would remain strictly landlocked—though in later years, at the height of his notoriety, a rumor circulated that he had spent some time as a riverboat gambler on the Ohio and Mississippi during the early 1830s. It was even said that, during this interlude, he fought a gun duel with a wealthy planter over an octoroon mistress.4
There is good reason to doubt this sensational tale. One thing seems certain, however. If a duel did take place, it would have been conducted with the kind of handgun standard for such encounters in those days: the kind that required a painstaking process of reloading after discharging a single shot.
9
In pursuit of what one anthropologist describes as humanity’s most characteristic goal—creating ever more efficient weapons with which to dispatch other members of the species—gunsmiths had been attempting to devise a workable repeating firearm for several centuries before Samuel Colt’s birth.1 Various approaches were tried, among the least sensible of which was to load two bullets into the barrel of a gun and fire them successively with dual triggers. More practical (and far less apt to explode in the shooter’s hand) was the multibarrel design. Matchlock pistols with several barrels that could be rotated by hand were invented as early as the 1540s. By the eighteenth century, the “pepperbox” pistol—a percussion-cap firearm equipped with up to eight barrels that revolved with each pull of the trigger—represented the state of the art in rapid-fire technology. Unfortunately, while they didn’t require constant reloading, they were cumbersome, poorly balanced, and virtually impossible to aim with any accuracy.
The solution to the problem, as gunsmiths recognized from early on, was a pistol with a single barrel and a revolving cylinder that could be loaded with several balls. Though a few specimens of such weapons have been traced to the time of Charles I, it wasn’t until 1813 that a Boston mechanic named Elisha H. Collier produced a reasonably effective model: a flintlock pistol with a cylindrical breech that, when turned by hand, allowed a “succession of discharges from one loading” (as he described it). Unable to interest American investors in his invention, Collier moved to London, where he secured a patent and set up shop in the Strand. Though his weapons were expensive to manufacture and somewhat clumsy to operate, they could fire up to eight shots without reloading and were purchased in bulk by the British army. They were in wide use by His Majesty’s troops in India when Sam Colt’s ship arrived in Calcutta in the winter of 1831.2
• • •
“When truth becomes legend, print the legend.” The line is from John Ford’s 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of the classics of a genre whose iconic figures—from Owen Wister’s Virginian to Jesse James and John Wayne—are impossible to picture without Samuel Colt’s invention strapped to their hips. The truth of how he came up with that invention has long been a matter of controversy. One story claims that the idea sprang directly from his sympathy for Southern slave owners. At some point during his early adolescence, according to this tale, young Colt
happened to be near the scene of a sanguinary insurrection of Negro slaves, in the southern district of Virginia. He was startled to think against what fearful odds the white planter must ever contend, thus surrounded by a swarming population of slaves. What defense could there be in one shot, when opposed to multitudes, even though multitudes of the unarmed? The master and his family were certain to be massacred. Was there no way, thought young Colt, of enabling the planter to repose in peace? No longer to feel that to be attacked was to be at once and inevitably destroyed? That no resistance would avail were the Negroes once spirited up to revolt?
As yet he knew little of mechanics; in firearms, he was aware of nothing more efficient than the ordinary double-barreled pistol and fowling-piece. But even loading and reloading these involved a most perilous loss of time. Could no mode be hit upon of obviating the danger of such delay? The boy’s ingenuity was from that moment on the alert.3
Dismissing this account as a racist fabrication, various firearm historians insist that Colt conceived his idea after seeing some of Elisha Collier’s flintlock revolvers in India. Alternatively, these scholars suggest, he may have viewed some ancient specimens of repeating handguns on display in the Tower of London “when the Corvo docked in the Thames” on its return trip to the United States.4
Colt himself steadfastly denied that he had been inspired by Collier’s weapons. Indeed (so he claimed), he did not become aware of their existence until years later, during a subsequent voyage to England. His idea, he insisted, was wholly original to himself, an epiphany that came to him on board the Corvo, when—so the story goes—he was “watching the action of the ship’s wheel” and suddenly “realized that the same method of locking the wheel in a fixed position could be applied to a revolving firearm.”5
This tale became the standard version, the official creation myth recounted throughout the later nineteenth century in books like Famous Leaders of Industry: The Life Stories of Boys Who Have Succeeded—inspirational texts intended to teach young men “what an individual can accomplish by ability and indomitable energy and perseverance.”6
Did the idea for his revolver really burst upon the mind of sixteen-year-old Sam Colt one day as he watched the first mate at the wheel of the Corvo? Perhaps so. Still, the story seems a little too pat, like one of those eureka moments so beloved by the makers of Hollywood biopics. It is undeniably true, however, that at some point during the voyage, Colt used his fifty-cent jackknife and a chunk of scrap wood to whittle a crude model of his invention. It was among his effects when the Corvo dropped anchor off Boston on a late spring morning in 1831.7
10
By the fall of 1831, Sam Colt, barely seventeen years old, had already found his calling. His brother John, four years his senior, was still casting about for his.
After securing his discharge from the marines, John made his way to New York City, where he clerked in the law office of his cousin Dudley Selden, a prominent Manhattan attorney, a future U.S. congressman, and a man who—during John’s most desperate hours—would play a critical role in his life. John’s duties, which demanded extensive reading in Blackstone and other standard legal texts, reawakened his hunger for formal schooling. At the end of a year, with his cousin’s blessing, he headed north to enroll in the University of Vermont.1
Though its curriculum covered everything from Greek prosody to moral philosophy to elocution, the university had always stressed the study of mathematics, an emphasis reflected in its official seal, which featured a prominent pictorial representation of the Pythagorean theorem.2 Besides practical (or, as it was then called, “vulgar”) arithmetic, required courses included Logarithms and Algebra, Geometry and Euclid’s Elements, Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, and Conic Sections. Though John pursued his studies with no particular professional goal in mind, he did discover a special aptitude for mathematics—a skill that would serve him well in the coming years.
Those years would be filled with a dizzying variety of pursuits as John, after leaving the university in the summer of 1832, wandered the country in search of his fortune. He tried his hand as a fur trader in Michigan. Land speculator in Texas. Schoolteacher in Kentucky. Soap manufacturer in New York. Dry-goods merchant in Florida. Sales agent for a grocery wholesaler in Georgia. Even party promoter (as it would now be called) in New Orleans, organizing masquerade balls during Mardi Gras season.3
Some of these ventures were more profitable than others. (He reportedly pocketed more than thirteen hundred dollars from the galas he staged in New Orleans.)4 None of them, however, satisfied his larger financial ambitions—or his growing desire to make a mark in the world.
• • •
It was during his summer stay in Louisville that John Colt finally settled on his vocation, the lifework that would—so he was convinced—secure him both wealth and renown. The field he chose was utterly devoid of glamour; even today its practitioners are stereotyped as joyless drones. Colt himself acknowledged that he could think of no other subject that was “calculated to excite so little interest” in the general public.5 And yet it was a subject that could inspire him to heights of near-poetic eloquence—a field he embraced with a passionate enthusiasm and promoted with a crusader’s zeal. That field was accounting.
His knowledge of the subject derived from several sources. It is likely that he was exposed to the basics of business math as early as grammar school, since American children of his era were commonly taught to “cast accounts” as part of their elementary education.6 In the following years, he practiced bookkeeping as an apprentice in Connecticut, taught practical mathematics in the South, and became adept at balancing ledgers in the course of his varied and far-flung mercantile pursuits. By the time he reached Louisville, he had evidently become proficient enough not merely to undertake a series of public lectures on double entry bookkeeping but also to entertain thoughts of a grand project: a volume, addressed to the young nation’s booming population of merchants, manufacturers, and tradesmen, that would offer a simplified way to master the science of accounting.
That summer in Louisville, “he devoted himself exclusively to the subject,” reading whatever texts he could get his hands on, making extensive notes, and refining his own approach through lectures and teaching.7 It quickly became apparent to him that his magnum opus would require a significant amount of time to complete. To support himself in the meanwhile, he resumed his former pursuits, “devoting himself to trade and speculation in the West and the South.”8
• • •
Sometime after his watershed summer in Louisville—the exact date is impossible to determine—John’s peregrinations landed him in Cincinnati, where he would live on and off for the next several years.
In the fifty years since its founding, Cincinnati had undergone a remarkable transformation. Beginning as little more than a forest clearing—a rudimentary settlement that “seemed better suited for the raccoons, opossums, and wildcats that infested it than for human habitation”—it swiftly grew into a major mercantile and manufacturing center. By the time of John Colt’s arrival, the raw frontier village had blossomed into the largest and most flourishing trading hub in the Ohio Valley:
The easterner, mingling with the crowds in the Cincinnati streets and observing the handsome buildings, could forget “the nursery slanders about backwoods and boors.” A compactly built city stood where before had been merely another Ohio river clearing. The quay, paved with limestone and extending three hundred yards along the river, was jammed during the busy seasons of the year; drays and wagons of every kind brought passengers and freight to and from the landing where steamboats arrived and departed hourly. Overlooking the lower level of the city stood rows of rectangular blocks of houses, occasionally relieved by the gilded spires of the churches, and few conspicuous mansions of the rich. Clouds of smoke poured from chimneys of the Queen City’s steam foundries, and behind the city rose the hills, hazy and indistinct, a few houses on their wooded summits.9
In this buzzing hive of commerce, John found a receptive audience for his orations on the “practical importance and scientific beauty” of double entry bookkeeping. It was an era when public lecturing served as a form not only of mass education but also of popular entertainment. Communities throughout the country—as many as four thousand towns, villages, and cities, according to the estimate of one historian—boasted lyceum societies that sponsored regular addresses on a staggering range of topics. In one season alone, for example, the residents of a small city in Maine could attend “lectures on astronomy, biology and physiology, the principles of geology, conversation, reading, the cultivation of memory, popular delusions concerning the Middle Ages, Iceland, the equality of the human condition, the true mission of women, the domestic life of the Turks, the problem of the age, and the origin of letters.” Colt’s talks on bookkeeping were typical of this phenomenon, the product of an age when the lyceum lecture served “to satisfy the seemingly insatiable craving for ‘useful knowledge’ ” among the American public.10
Several of John’s speeches would later be published as an appendix to his book. They are revealing documents. Informed by a sweeping erudition, they trace the history of accounting from its reputed origins in the ancient Middle East to its development in medieval Italy, and invoke sources from Seneca and Pliny to Sir Walter Scott and Samuel Johnson. Given the inherent dryness of the subject, the lectures are also remarkable for their sheer fervor.
Colt saw accounting as a branch of knowledge peculiarly suited to America, a young, enterprising country rapidly “advancing to become the greatest maritime and commercial nation in the world.” In his lofty view, the teaching and learning of double entry bookkeeping promoted the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, allowing the individual to “enjoy the blessing of enlightened life” by helping him achieve “money, property, and possessions.” In a society committed to democratic principles and material pursuits, it was a subject that should be “taught in every common school.” In contrast to the study of literature—which instilled in the young a dangerous love for “the corrupting fiction of a novel”—the science of bookkeeping had a “daily and indispensable use, valuable alike to the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the statesman and the man of business.”
So mathematically elegant, so intellectually stimulating was the system of double entry bookkeeping that young men who devoted themselves to it were certain to have their “views enlarged,” their “minds expanded.” In addition, it possessed a powerful moral dimension. A knowledge of bookkeeping, Colt argued, “fastens upon the mind the respect we owe to others’ rights, and the bounden duty man owes to himself and his dependents. It points to justice, honor, and honesty. It is a daily beacon prompting to frugality; an hourly admonisher of the ruinous effects of sluggishness, carelessness, and extravagance.”11
There was one final benefit to be derived from a mastery of double entry bookkeeping. Colt stressed it repeatedly in his talks. In light of later events, his remarks take on a terrible irony.
According to this “mercantile philosopher” (as Colt styled himself), double entry bookkeeping was the method best suited to document business transactions and thus to provide an irrefutable record of the financial dealings between debtors and creditors. As such, it was the surest way to prevent “frauds, collisions, and disputes.”
11
In the decades to come, all too many disputes would be resolved not with the help of John Colt’s beloved system of double entry bookkeeping but with the invention that his younger brother conceived on board the brig Corvo. Indeed, in its most famous incarnation, Sam Colt’s six-shooter would be known by a name that proclaimed its uniquely effective ability to settle arguments once and for all: the Peacemaker.
That sleek, lethal implement—“the gun that won the West”—was a far cry from the carved wooden model that Sam brought home from his maiden voyage. Even that rough contrivance, however, represented a revolutionary step in handgun design, “a multishot weapon … that allowed its user to automatically rotate the cylinder by the simple action of cocking the hammer.”1
Given the money they had already invested in his seaman’s gear, Sam’s parents—particularly his ever-prudent stepmother—expected him to embark on a second voyage without undue delay. A distant relation of Olivia’s, Captain Abner Bassett of New London, Connecticut, was happy to offer him a place on board his merchantman, scheduled to depart shortly on an extended voyage.2 By then, however, Sam had lost interest in the sailor’s life. When he crossed the ocean next, he would travel as a businessman, propelled by the dream that would drive him for the rest of his days.
• • •
In February 1832, just eight months after the Corvo returned to port, Sam left home again, this time via stagecoach for Washington, DC. Packed among his belongings were a pair of crude but functioning prototypes of his invention—one a pistol, the other a rifle—both equipped with rotating cylinders constructed according to his innovative design. They had been built by a local gunsmith named Anson Chase, hired largely because he worked fast and cheap.3 Also in Sam’s possession was a letter of introduction to Henry L. Ellsworth, a Hartford native shortly to become commissioner of U.S. patents.
Details of this journey are exceedingly sparse; only a single piece of evidence pertaining to it still exists. This document does, however, shed considerable light not only on the purpose of the trip but also on a trait of Sam Colt’s that would stand him in excellent stead in the coming years: his salesman’s gift for ingratiating himself with men who could advance his ambitions.
The document is a brief note from Henry Ellsworth to Christopher Colt, Sr., reporting on Sam’s visit. Dated February 20, 1832, it reads: “Samuel is now here getting along very well with his new invention. Scientific men & the great folks speak highly of the thing—I hope he will be well rewarded for his labors. I shall be happy to aid him. He obtained $300 here at the bank with my endorsement.”4
Impressed as he was by young Colt’s invention, Ellsworth counseled him to put off filing “for a patent until he had improved the experimental models.”5 Sam realized that to perfect his firearm would require far more money than the loan he had obtained with Ellsworth’s backing. (Indeed, over the next three years, he would invest “a total of $1,362.73 in the production of ten pistols, seven rifles, and one shotgun”—an amount equivalent to more than $34,000 in today’s money.)6 And so, sometime in late 1832, the eighteen-year-old inventor embarked on a career that has always proved extremely lucrative to its most successful practitioners. He became a popular entertainer.
• • •
First identified by Joseph Priestley in 1773, nitrous oxide—“laughing gas”—became known to the world through the work of Sir Humphry Davy, the great British chemist who began to experiment with the substance twenty-six years after its discovery. Working at a research facility called the Pneumatic Institute—established to explore the therapeutic use of certain gases in the treatment of consumption—Davy spent fourteen months inhaling from six to twelve quarts of the gas four or five times a week, often while sealed inside an airtight “breathing chamber.” His ecstatic accounts of the “sublime emotions” he experienced during this period—reported to the Royal Institution of London in 1802 and published in his treatise, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide—set off a craze for public demonstrations of the “exhilarating gas” in both England and the United States.
In mid-nineteenth-century America, such demonstrations became a big part of show business, conducted before sell-out crowds in various smalltown and big-city venues: hotel ballrooms, Masonic halls, lyceums, young men’s associations, dime museums. Presenting himself as a highly qualified scientist, chemist, or physician, the lecturer would invite willing audience members onto the stage and, by means of an oversized rubber bladder, administer a “potent dose” of the gas to the volunteers. Their resulting behavior—laughing, singing, dancing, declaiming, leaping about the stage, and, in general, making public spectacles of themselves—served as a rich source of amusement for the spectators, well worth the standard twenty-five-cent admission.7
That Sam Colt would turn to performing as a way to earn money seems completely in character. His flair for the theatrical had been evident since childhood, most notably in the raft-blowing experiment he had staged with such ballyhoo on the Fourth of July, 1829. In later years, his phenomenal success would owe much to his genius for showmanship and self-promotion. A brilliant manipulator of “myths, symbols, and stagecraft,” he turned himself into America’s first industrial superstar, “a man whose personality became so widely associated with his product that ownership provided access to the celebrity, glamour, and drama of its namesake.”8 Given his early fascination with chemistry—fostered by his friendship with William T. Smith, supervisor of the bleaching and dyeing lab at the Hampshire mill—it is equally unsurprising that he would set himself up as a laughing gas lecturer.9
Employing the ancestral (and presumably more high-toned) spelling of his family name, Sam assumed the role of “the Celebrated Dr. Coult of New York, London, and Calcutta.” Decked out in frock coat and high hat, and sporting a newly grown mustache and beard to make him look older than his eighteen years, he embarked on a tour of the eastern seaboard. Arrived at his destination, he would drum up excitement with a newspaper ad. The following announcement of an 1833 appearance in Lowell, Massachusetts, is typical:
Dr. Coult (late of New York, London, and Calcutta) respectfully informs the Ladies and Gentlemen of Lowell and vicinity, that he will lecture and administer Nitrous Oxide, or Exhilarating Gas, this evening, Nov. 29, at the Town Hall. The peculiar effect of this singular compound upon the animal system was first noticed by the English chemist, Sir Humphrey Davy. He observed that when inhaled into the lungs, it produced the most astonishing effects on the Nervous System; that some individuals were disposed to involuntary fits of laughter, others to recitation, and that the greater number had an irresistible propensity to muscular exertion, such as leaping and running, wrestling, boxing & c., with innumerable fantastic feats. In short, the sensations produced by it are highly pleasurable, and are not followed by debility.
Dr. C. being a practical Chemist, no fears need be entertained of inhaling an impure Gas; and he is willing to submit his preparation to the inspection of any Scientific Gentlemen.
Dr. C. has exhibited the extraordinary powers of this Gas in many cities in America, to numerous audiences of Ladies and Gentlemen of the first respectability. He has administered it to more than 20,000 individuals and has taken it himself no less than 1,000 times.
The persons who inhale the Gas will be separated from the audience by means of a network, in order to give all a better opportunity of seeing the exhibition. Dr. C. will first inhale the gas himself, and then administer it to those who are desirous of inhaling it.
Such individuals as wish to inhale the gas in private parties, will be accommodated by applying to Dr. C. at the Merrimack House.
Tickets 25 cents each to be had at the principal Hotels and at the door. Seats may be secured between the hours of 12 and 3 o’clock. Doors open at 6 1/2 o’clock; entertainment will commence precisely at 7.10
Colt seems to have been a hit wherever he played. A newspaper item about his appearance at Trowbridge’s Albany Museum in October 1833 conveys the excitement that typically attended his performances:
We never beheld such an anxiety as there has been during the past week to witness the astonishing effects of Dr. Coult’s gas. The Museum was crowded to excess every evening; and so intense was the interest which was manifested that the doctor has been compelled to give two exhibitions every evening.
The effect which the gas produces on the system is truly astonishing. The person who inhales it becomes completely insensible, and remains in that state for about three minutes, when his senses become restored, and he sneaks off with as much shame as if he had been guilty of some little mean action. No person will begrudge his two shillings for the gratification of half an hour’s laugh at the ludicrous feats displayed in the lecture hall.11
Precisely how much money Sam earned during his time on the road is unclear, though all his profits went directly to the various gunsmiths at work on his models. For three years, he lugged his equipment—bottles, retorts, funnels, hoses, and his big India-rubber gasbag outfitted with a wooden spigot—from city to city. Besides Lowell and Albany, he played Baltimore and Boston, New Haven and Philadelphia, Natchez and New Orleans, Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Portland, Maine. His journeys eventually took him as far north as Halifax, Nova Scotia, and westward all the way to Cincinnati.12
12
Cincinnati’s Western Museum was established in 1820 with the high-minded goal of serving as a “citadel of scientific knowledge.” Originally located in the Cincinnati College Building, it began as an assemblage of natural history odds and ends: glass-encased displays of fossils, seashells, stuffed birds and reptiles, geological specimens, Egyptian antiquities, Indian artifacts, and the like. There was also a small library of scientific treatises and a collection of color sketches by the museum’s assistant curator and resident taxidermist, the young artist-naturalist John James Audubon.1
Unfortunately, the public seemed less interested in these edifying exhibits than in the novelties offered at a competing establishment, a supposed “fine arts” museum called Letton’s that featured, among other attractions, waxwork effigies of historical figures, a horseshoe reputedly dating back to the sixteenth century, a mummified mermaid, an armless woman, and an “Enormous Elk.”2 Within two years of its founding, the Western Museum went bankrupt.
Its fortunes revived when it passed into the hands of an enterprising French émigré named Joseph Dorfeuille. Relocating the museum to a heavily trafficked intersection by the waterfront, he proceeded to transform it from a somber scientific institution into the kind of popular showplace that, as one English commentator observed dryly, defined the notion of museum in nineteenth-century America:
A “Museum” in the American sense of the word means a place of amusement, wherein there shall be a theatre, some wax figures, a giant and a dwarf or two, a jumble of pictures, and a few live snakes. In order that there may be some excuse for the use of the word, there is in most instances a collection of stuffed birds, a few preserved animals, and a stock of oddly assorted and very dubitable curiosities; but the mainstay of the “Museum” is the “live art,” that is the theatrical performance, the precocious manikins, or the intellectual dogs and monkeys.3
Within months of taking charge, Dorfeuille had reinvigorated business by installing such crowd-pleasing attractions as a seven-legged pig; the absolutely authentic aboriginal war club used to slay Captain Cook; the tattooed head of a New Zealand cannibal; a waxwork tableau depicting the butchering of a wife by her hatchet-wielding husband; and “the head, right hand, and heart of Mathias Hoover, a murderer of local renown,” preserved in alcohol-filled jars.4
It was another exhibit, however, that turned the Western Museum into a bona fide sensation, a must-see attraction for visitors to the Queen City. This was an elaborate funhouse display variously known as “Dorfeuille’s Hell,” “Dante’s Inferno,” and the “Infernal Regions.” The apparent brainchild of Mrs. Fanny Trollope—the British novelist and caustic observer of American manners, then residing in Cincinnati—this “stupendous and colossal entertainment” was realized by the museum’s young waxwork modeler and chief inventor, Hiram Powers, later to become America’s most celebrated sculptor.
Born and raised in Vermont, Powers had migrated to Ohio with his family in 1819 at the age of fourteen. Two years later, he found work as a stock clerk in a Cincinnati grocery store, where, in his spare moments, he gave vent to his creative urges by sculpting mounds of butter into hissing rattlesnakes, gaping loggerhead turtles, and other “horrid forms.” When the grocery failed, Powers went to work at a local clock and organ factory, displaying an aptitude that soon got him promoted to head mechanic. Among his accomplishments during this period was the construction of a mechanical organ equipped with life-sized angelic automatons that “moved, sounded trumpets, and rang bells.”5
During a visit to Dorfeuille’s museum, Powers was so taken with a replica of Jean Antoine Houdon’s marble bust of George Washington—then the most popular piece of statuary in America—that he promptly enrolled in a local artist’s studio, where he soon mastered the art of making plaster casts. Before long, he came to the attention of Dorfeuille himself, who hired him as the museum’s full-time “wax-figure maker and general mechanical contriver.”
Powers’s skills as both sculptor and technician found their fullest expression in the creation of the Infernal Regions. An antebellum precursor of the kind of “animatronic” spook house epitomized today by Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and similar theme park thrill-rides, this lurid spectacle—located in the museum’s cramped, darkened attic—offered customers an effects-laden tour of the horrors of hell, complete with automated demons, writhing sinners, swirling smoke, artificial flames, and a “continuous clamor” of hair-raising sounds. To provide an extra—and quite literal—jolt, an electrified iron grating was installed between the spectators and the moving wax figures, so that (as Mrs. Trollope put it) “should any daring hand or foot obtrude itself within the bars, it receives a smart shock that often passes through many of the crowd.”6
While this mechanized spectacle quickly established itself as the museum’s biggest draw, Dorfeuille continued to offer live entertainment as well, including the ever-popular administration of nitrous oxide, whose amusing effects on audience volunteers were celebrated by one anonymous poetaster:
Have you ever been at the museum
When D—— was giving the gas?
By jokers, it’s funny to see ’em
When candidates plenty he has.
Some fence, some caper and shout
And some of them act like a fool,
And others will tragedy spout—
I suppose they have learnt it at school.7
Early on (as this bit of newspaper doggerel indicates) Dorfeuille himself “gave the gas,” though he had evidently quit performing by the time “Dr. Coult” arrived in Cincinnati.
We know of Sam Colt’s appearance at the Western Museum from a letter sent to him many years later by none other than Hiram Powers, who began a long-lasting friendship with the six-gun inventor in Cincinnati. By the time this letter was composed in 1851, Powers was living in Florence, Italy, where he had won international renown as the creator of The Greek Slave. A life-sized marble statue of a chained female nude, this piece achieved a level of popular success that no other American sculpture has ever rivaled (at least partly, no doubt, because it afforded Victorian gentlemen the chance to ogle a naked, nubile woman under the pretext of contemplating fine art).
In his letter to Colt, Powers reminisced about a memorable incident at the Western Museum:
I shall never forget the gas at the old museum, nor your sly glances at the ropes stretched around the columns, when about to snatch the gas bag from the huge blacksmith, who glowered so threateningly at you, while his steam was getting up—nor his grab at your coat tail as, froglike, you leaped between the ropes—8
Since Powers’s letter constitutes the only record of Colt’s visit to Cincinnati, there is no way of knowing exactly what transpired on the trip, beyond the comical episode involving the intoxicated blacksmith. Still, it is safe to assume, as have various historians, that Sam spent a good portion of his time there in the company of his brother John, who was not only residing in the Queen City during this period but was himself an occasional lecturer at Dorfeuille’s.9
• • •
While maintaining himself through public speaking, teaching, and assorted mercantile pursuits, John continued to work on his textbook. To illustrate the basic principles of his method, he included hundreds of sample ledger entries. Many of these were drawn from his own experiences. One entry, for example, refers to “sundry notes” owed to Edmund B. Stedman, the fiancé of his late sister Margaret. Another mentions “bills payable” to Robert Trumble, a college friend from John’s days at the University of Vermont. Other friends and relations whose names appear in the book include his cousin John Caldwell; his business associate Joseph Law; and his youngest brother, James.10 Thanks to this practice, Colt’s “treatise on book-keeping” is an unexpectedly autobiographical work, offering provocative clues to his personal life.
One item has struck scholars as particularly intriguing. In a section labeled “Inventory of my Property with which I commence business,” Colt includes the following:
|
Rec’d from the executors of my father-in-law’s estate, as follows: |
|
|
Sundry Notes, amounting to |
$ 4,500 |
|
A deed for 1,000 acres of Texas land valued at |
5,000 |
|
Cash—deposited |
10,000 |
|
19,50011 |
|
Based on this notation, biographers of the Colt family have speculated that, sometime during his travels around the Southwest, John had acquired a wife with property in Texas.12 What became of her—assuming that she existed at all—is unknown. Death, divorce, or abandonment are the likeliest possibilities. Whatever the case, John appears to have been free of any marital entanglements during his residence in Cincinnati. Certainly there was nothing to prevent him from pursuing a romance with an adventurous young woman named Frances Anne Frank, stepdaughter of another of Joseph Dorfeuille’s competitors.
• • •
While certain scholars insist that the idea for “The Infernal Regions” originated with Mrs. Trollope, others attribute it to Frederick Frank, proprietor of an eponymous showplace located above a drugstore on the southwest corner of Main and Upper Market streets. Like Letton’s, Frank’s establishment had begun as a “gallery of fine arts” before being converted into a garish dime museum. For the price of admission—a quarter for adults; fifteen cents for children under ten—visitors were treated to the usual array of “unprecedented attractions,” from anatomical curiosities, to a “cosmoramic tableau” of “the bustling streets and markets of Cincinnati,” to live performances by the likes of thirteen-year-old Master Kent, “the greatest Juba dancer living,” and Mr. Jenkins, “the celebrated Singer and Delineator of Yankee Eccentricities.”13 According to some historians, Frank was also the first Cincinnati showman to present a lurid exhibition of the torments of hell, featuring waxwork figures of cavorting “imps, devils, and goblins.”14
Performing daily at Frank’s Museum was his twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter, Frances Anne, an enchanting (if “uninstructed”) singer who accompanied herself on the organ. In addition to her “sweet, rich” voice, Frances was endowed with other natural charms:
Her form, of the medium height, was perfectly symmetrical, though inclining to fullness. She had the foot of Cinderella, and hands and fingers long and exquisitely turned. To a fine bust, she added a countenance stamped with the heroic—the forehead broad and high—the complexion animated and transparent—the eyes large, full, black, and fiery—the hair very dark brown and luxuriant.15
Despite her youth, Frances had already been married twice and was the mother of an infant girl. At fifteen she had eloped with a riverboat gambler, then divorced him after two years of wandering “from wretchedness to splendor and from splendor back to wretchedness.” Shortly thereafter, she entered into a marriage of convenience with a “young German of considerable wealth and rank.” That union—which produced Frances’s child—ended when her husband died after squandering his fortune “in three years of reckless luxury.”
Whether John met Frances while visiting the museum as a customer or appearing there as a lecturer is unknown. In any event, he was immediately “enraptured by her beauty and manner” and “found no difficulty in engaging her in conversation.” They immediately formed a close and increasingly intimate friendship.
Seated on the museum’s balcony overlooking the “vast quay of Cincinnati,” they shared the stories of their “strange, wild” lives while gazing out at the glorious vista: “the moving city of steamers,—the strangely fashioned flat and keel boats,—the ever bustling crowd thronging the water’s edge,—the gentle Ohio and its beautiful banks,—on the opposite Kentucky shore, the picturesque city of Covington, and in the far distance beyond, hills rising upon hills, and landscapes of varied loveliness.” Before long, the two had become lovers.16
Their relationship continued for several years. When John was away on one of his frequent business trips, they were “constant correspondents”; when he was in town, “they were constant visitors.” As the time passed, it became increasingly evident that Frances had marital designs on John and was prepared to deploy all of her “allurements” to “make him hers.”
One evening, for example, they were out for a ride at dusk along the banks of the Ohio. Stopping “at a brook where they were accustomed to let their horses drink,” Frances suddenly announced, “No man can outswim me!” When John took up the challenge, she alighted from her steed, stripped off her clothing, and plunged into the water. John—after watching her for a moment as if in a “reverie”—followed suit. Meeting “his fair antagonist midway across the stream,” he raced her to the opposite shore; whereupon “Frances sprang to the bank and stood there, another Venus from the ocean foam,” allowing John to contemplate her naked form in the moonlight.
Despite all the favors she bestowed on him, however—which included a constant stream of “little presents wrought by her own hand”—it became increasingly clear that John had no intention of becoming Frances’s third husband. Their relationship grew increasingly strained, particularly after Frances informed him that she was thinking of becoming a professional thespian. In keeping with the view of the theatrical profession prevalent in Victorian America—when actresses were seen as little better than harlots—John sent her a tongue-clucking letter, warning her that if she pursued such a path, she would not only “be set down as a bad woman” but “be ranked among the most worthless.”17
Mortified by John’s priggish tone, Frances “felt as though she had been baffled and repelled.” She sent no reply to his “offensive letter.” When John—“piqued by her silence”—sent a reproachful follow-up, she ignored that one as well. Finally, after one more failed attempt to get in touch with her, John, acting very much “like a chagrined lover,” “gathered the elegant little presents she had wrought” and sent them back to her, while demanding the return of his own letters.
Although they managed to patch up this quarrel when he returned to Cincinnati, the incident effectively marked the end of their love affair. Soon afterward, John made an extended trip to New York City. When Frances wrote “for permission to join him” there, he promptly sent a curt letter of refusal.
Just hours after she received this note, Frances showed up at the home of her sister and brother-in-law, Susan and Joseph Adams. As Mr. Adams would later testify, Frances appeared to be in a state of extreme agitation, plying them with such “strange and confused questions” that he and his wife grew alarmed and urged the young woman to lie down. Flinging herself onto the bed, she lay there in a stupor for several hours before rousing herself and begging her sister to stay by her side.
While Susan attempted to comfort her, Joseph hurried off to find a physician. In the meantime, Frances’s closest friend, a woman named Lawton, was summoned to her bedside. Throughout the evening, as Frances grew increasingly “frenzied,” her attendants applied mustard poultices to her ankles and stomach and tried to administer calomel and other medications, which Frances refused to swallow. Finally, crying out that her vision was failing, she urged Mrs. Lawton to get a pencil and paper and take down the following letter:
You say right. I do not love you; for women love but once, and the idol I worship is beyond my reach; but still, I love him yet; but I am grateful for the many favors I have received from you, and the interest you have displayed in my welfare. I have pretended to love you dearly, but in my heart I did not. I have ever admired your talents and respected your person, but your last two letters were of such a nature as to kill even those feelings. You will never see me again; for, a few short hours, and I will be in heaven. Forgive me, for I am dying now.
To Mrs. Lawton and the others gathered at the scene, this message seemed so “unaccountable” that “they set it down to mere fever-dream incoherence.”
As midnight approached, Frances “seemed entirely to lose all perception of what was passing. She called in a hurried, frenzied manner for her brother-in-law and sister but could not distinguish any one.” She lingered until early the following afternoon, when she “died with a few short struggles.” That the vital young woman had been carried off with such shocking swiftness struck her survivors as an inexplicable calamity until a note found among her possessions revealed the truth: “that this extraordinary girl had taken one hundred and fifty grams of opium upon receiving the last letter” from John C. Colt.18
13
In early 1834, Sam began an extended run at the Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Paintings. Touted in contemporary guidebooks as a “grand repository of sublime works” both natural and manmade, this establishment offered the usual hodgepodge of curiosities, diversions, and wonders. Its most popular attraction, created by a “profound Italian physician and artist” named Joseph Chiappi, was an “obstetric and anatomical cabinet” featuring wax representations of the female reproduction system—an ostensibly edifying display that (like the sleazy “miracle of birth” exploitation films of a century later) served up sexual titillation in a scientific guise.1
It was during this engagement that Sam—dissatisfied with the model weapons he had been receiving from Anson Chase—secured the services of a new and more sophisticated technician, a Baltimore gunsmith named John Pearson. Their relationship, though productive, proved to be thorny. While Pearson labored ten hours a day in a cramped and underheated workshop, Sam—out on the road with his act—bombarded him via mail with a steady stream of demands and directions.
The older Pearson bristled not only at his young employer’s high-handed tone but also at Sam’s habitual failure to meet his financial obligations, including Pearson’s salary. In letters that grew increasingly bitter over the course of their two-year business arrangement, Pearson complained that his day-and-night labors had gotten him nothing but “vexation and trouble” and that Sam’s treatment of him was an “insult.”
“The manner you are using us is too bad,” he railed in one of his letters. “Come up with some money. I am in a devil of a humor and not without a cause.” In reply, Sam (who, as one scholar drily remarks, “was about as good at spelling as at meeting his debts”) did his best to placate Pearson: “make your expenses as lite as possible … Don’t be allarmed about your wages, nothing shal be rong on my part, but doo wel for me & you shal fare wel.”2
Charging as much as fifty cents per person for admission to his show (a considerable sum at a time when a complete multicourse dinner at Delmonico’s original restaurant in New York City could be had for twelve cents), Sam traveled through South Carolina and Georgia, keeping Pearson mollified—and “at the grindstone”—by sending him whatever money he could spare: seventy-five dollars in February 1835; another fifty in March.3
One month later, Sam returned to Baltimore, having finished his tour with a swing through Virginia. His performances in Lynchburg and Richmond would be his last. The celebrated Dr. Coult was laid permanently to rest. Henceforth, Sam Colt would devote himself, with absolute singleness of purpose, to the fashioning of a far more heroic persona—one that would eventually take its place in the pantheon of America’s industrial demigods.
• • •
Taking rooms in Baltimore, Sam secured both a larger workplace and a helper for Pearson, then set about supervising the construction of a pair of patent models: one pistol, one rifle. They were completed to his satisfaction in early June. On the seventeenth of that month, he traveled to Manhattan to show them to his cousin (and potential investor) Dudley Selden, the distinguished Manhattan attorney for whom John had briefly clerked several years earlier.
Deeply impressed with the invention—and worried that it might fall prey to the piratical practices of foreign manufacturers—Selden advised Sam to patent it first in Great Britain and France. Accordingly, in the third week of August 1835, Sam—flush with loans from several family members—set sail for England.
He was gone for just under four months. From a legal standpoint, the trip was an unqualified success. When his ship, the Albany, arrived back in the United States in early December, Sam had his foreign patents safely in hand. According to his most reliable biographer, he brought home another acquisition as well: a sixteen-year-old wife.4
Historians describe her as a person of “striking beauty” but extremely “humble origins” who “could barely read or write.” The precise circumstances of their courtship (such as it was) remain shrouded in mystery, though she and Sam reportedly met in Scotland. Since he was there for only a week or two between visits to London and Paris, he clearly leaped into the marriage with the kind of haste that, as Dr. Franklin wisely observes, causes couples to repent in leisure.
The truth of that old saw was proven in the case of Sam Colt himself. Indeed, by the time he returned to America with his bride, he already appears to have been beset by second thoughts. Perhaps, as his biographers have speculated, Sam’s initial sexual infatuation quickly gave way to a sobering realization: that he had saddled himself with an unschooled, socially awkward young wife who was unlikely to help advance his ambitions. In any event, from the moment his ship docked in New York Harbor, Sam Colt “kept the marriage a secret from the rest of the family, and the world at large.”5
14
According to the myths of the world, there are times when all heroes must prove themselves by performing miraculous tasks—overcoming obstacles and ordeals that would defeat lesser mortals. To accomplish their quests, they must scale impossible mountains, sail peril-filled seas, descend into the lairs of monsters, negotiate nightmarish mazes, cross bottomless chasms over bridges no wider than knives. Like the classic figures of mythology, Sam Colt, too—according to the official chroniclers and keepers of his legend—had to surmount a succession of challenges and tribulations as he fought his way to his ultimate goal. That perilous “road of trials,” so full of crises and reversals, started shortly after his return from Europe.
• • •
Things began promisingly enough. After Sam’s American patent came through in February 1836, he and his investors lost no time in forming the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company for the making of “arms, machinery, and cutlery.” In March, under prodding from influential friends, the New Jersey legislature granted the fledgling operation a charter of incorporation. While construction commenced on an imposing four-story factory on the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, Sam and his partners leased an old gristmill nearby and set up shop on the ground floor. A gifted craftsman named Pliny Lawton—formerly Christopher Colt’s head machinist at the Hampshire mill in Ware—was brought in as superintendent. Lawton set about at once devising machines for the mass production of the guns, which, until then, had been crafted individually by hand.1
It soon became clear, however, that Sam’s great expectations were wildly optimistic; that—as inspirational guides were forever reminding young go-getters—the “road to success was never smooth, straight, nor strewn with flowers.”2 On a trip to Washington, DC, that spring, he did manage to generate some favorable publicity in the Washington Post, where a writer named F. S. Burns testified that he had “tried the newly improved pistol of Mr. Colt and found that it shot exceedingly well—in my opinion it will prove a very great improvement in firearms.”3 But Sam’s hopes of winning a far more important endorsement—that of President Andrew Jackson—were quickly dashed.
Jackson, of course, had an intimate, lifelong knowledge of firearms. Aside from his military heroics—most famously during the Battle of New Orleans, when he and his ragtag forces wreaked havoc on the massed British regulars—he had fought several gun duels in his younger days and still carried the bullets from two of these deadly encounters in his shoulder and chest. Moreover, just a few weeks before Sam’s arrival in the capital, Old Hickory had escaped with his life when a would-be assassin attempted to discharge a pair of pistols at his chest, both of which misfired. As one historian observes, the incident should have given the old warrior “a keen sense of the unreliability of old-time firearms.”4 Nevertheless, when Sam—who had somehow wangled a meeting with the president—demonstrated his invention, Jackson was unimpressed, seeing no need for the army to abandon the kind of single-shot flintlocks that had served him so well against the redcoats.
Other disappointments soon followed. Despite his intense lobbying efforts—which consisted largely of throwing lavish, wine-fueled dinner parties for Washington officials and dispensing the occasional gift—Sam not only failed to snag any government commissions but also incurred the ire of his powerful cousin Dudley Selden. The company’s single biggest investor and de facto director, Selden repeatedly rebuked the young inventor on his extravagant—and ethically dubious—ways: “You use money as if it were drawn from an inexhaustible mine,” he fumed in one letter. “I have no belief in undertaking to raise the character of your gun by old Madeira.” At another point, he blasted Sam’s readiness to resort to bribery as “dishonorable in every way.”5
When Sam did manage to win a spot for his guns in an army trial conducted at West Point in the summer of 1837, the results were disastrous. During one demonstration, his rifle discharged several loads at once, producing a mini-explosion. In another, the hammer broke off. In the end—while conceding that Colt’s weapons might have certain limited applications—the ordnance board was “unanimous in opinion” that, owing to their “complicated character, liability to accident, and other reasons,” his revolvers were “entirely unsuited to the general purpose of the service.”6
There were some encouraging developments along the way. To boost the reputation of his product, Colt—whose grasp of public relations was at least as impressive as his knowledge of firearms technology—joined the prestigious American Institute of New York City, an organization dedicated to the “encouragement of science and invention.” At the institute’s annual public exhibition in October 1837, one of Sam’s revolving rifles was awarded a gold medal, the first of many that would be bestowed upon him. Pioneering a ploy that would be exploited by countless marketers to follow, he touted the award in his advertisements, the first of which appeared in the December 27, 1837, issue of the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer:
Colt’s Repeating Rifles are now for the first time offered for sale. They have been manufactured at the “Patent Arms Manufacturing Company” at Paterson, and in beauty and workmanship are fully equal to the highest finished Rifles imported from England …
The Rifles now offered for sale are even superior to those exhibited at the last Fair of the American Institute, for which the Gold medal was awarded. They are put up in mahogany cases, with all their equipments complete.7
Two months later, in a typically splashy bit of showmanship, Sam—having secured the consent of the mayor and the city council—staged a public demonstration of his rifles at Castle Garden on the southernmost tip of Manhattan. Though the rapid-firing repeaters elicited admiring gasps from the crowd, the price of the guns—$150 apiece (equivalent to roughly $3,500 in current funds)—rendered them prohibitive for the average purchaser. Sales remained stagnant, even as Sam continued to burn through his investors’ money at an alarming rate in an effort to drum up business.
More convinced than ever that the very survival of his company depended on volume sales to the government, Sam embarked on a bold venture. In February 1838, just weeks after his Castle Garden exhibition, he personally transported ten cases of his rifles—one hundred pieces altogether—to the Florida Everglades, where U.S. forces were bogged down in a bloody effort to dispossess the native Seminoles from their rightful lands. Fifty of his repeaters were purchased by the Second Dragoons and put into immediate action in the grueling guerrilla war. Their accuracy and rapidity of fire—sixteen shots in thirty-one seconds—won a glowing review from the commanding officer, Colonel W. S. Harney. “I do assure you that sooner I would use any other Rifle myself, I would use none,” Harney reported to his superiors in Washington—an endorsement that Sam (a pioneer in the use of expert testimonials for advertising purposes) would be quick to publicize.8
Even so, the trip was far from the triumph that Sam had hoped for. Half of his rifles remained unsold. On the return voyage, moreover, Sam’s boat capsized in the waters off St. Augustine, Florida. Though he escaped drowning by clinging to the overturned craft for four hours, his luggage—including the trunk containing the army’s $6,250 draft—was lost in the surf. By the time he was safely back on land, he had come to regard the whole trip as a “cursed adventure.”9
Making his way back north, Sam holed up at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan for a few recuperative days before throwing himself back into the hectic business of promoting his guns. In late fall, he returned to Washington for another costly—and ultimately futile—round of courting public officials. During one demonstration on the White House lawn—so the legend goes—“a squad of men armed with Colt’s repeating rifles” let off a “fusillade that scared the horses of the President’s carriage. The coachman was thrown from his seat trying to control the plunging horses and fell onto a picket fence, impaled.”10 The story is unverified and almost certainly apocryphal, though it does serve as an apt metaphor for Colt’s depressing situation at this period of his life, when his high hopes were invariably punctured in the most brutal way.
The same disheartening pattern repeated itself over the next year. In 1839 the company opened a retail shop at 155 Broadway. By this point—thanks in large part to Sam’s tireless PR efforts—the public was becoming increasingly aware of the lethal efficacy of his revolvers. One newspaper editorial, for example, proposed a simple test for anyone who doubted their superiority over old-fashioned flintlocks. Should a man find himself “engaged to meet another in single combat, and his antagonist apprise him that he will come armed with one of Colt’s repeating pistols, taking his station at forty yards, then to advance and fire at will, the friend of the old system, we think, would hesitate to meet the encounter with a single dueling pistol against one of Colt’s.”11 Despite such tributes, however, the high cost of the handguns—twenty-six dollars each versus six dollars for a pair of flintlock pistols—kept sales to a trickle at the Broadway store.
Military contracts remained equally elusive, owing largely to the hidebound attitude of the head of the army’s ordnance department: Colonel George Bomford, an officer who “had reached that age and rank at which extreme rigidity sets in” and who (as Sam wrote in his reliably wretched manner) was “dedly oposed” to his newfangled firearms.12 Matters came to a head in June 1840. With virtually no commercial or governmental demand for Colt’s repeaters, the board of directors—whose members had been in more or less constant conflict with Sam over his profligate ways with company funds—made a fateful decision. Sam, in Washington at the time, learned about it in a letter from Pliny Lawton, who informed him that the directors had “resolved to stop a large portion of the works … and have been devising means to pay off the workmen.” Production had been halted at the Paterson gun mill.
Under the circumstances, the news couldn’t have come as a total surprise to Sam. Still, it was a blow. And worse—much worse—was yet to come.
15
Like other members of the Colt family, John had become actively involved in Sam’s enterprise. In late 1837 he served as an agent for the Patent Arms Company, receiving several thousand dollars’ worth of rifles and holster pistols on consignment, most of which he succeeded in selling “to various dealers and speculators.”1 Even while engaged in this and other business, he managed to run a small accounting school in Cincinnati and to put in so much work on his text that it eventually grew to fifteen hundred pages. By the end of the year, determined to get the book in print, he gave up his teaching, suspended his commercial dealings, and devoted himself full-time to putting the manuscript into publishable shape. In the spring of 1838, it was ready to go to press.2
By then, Cincinnati had established itself as a major publishing center—“the Literary Emporium of the West.” As early as 1826, with its population at just over sixteen thousand, the city’s printers were already issuing books in impressive numbers—nearly two hundred thousand primers, almanacs, songbooks, religious works, river guides, and more in that year alone. A decade later, that number had increased tenfold, with two million volumes pouring off the presses in the course of a single year. By the time John Colt had finished preparing his textbook, “Cincinnati publishers and dealers were famous throughout the West.”3
Preeminent among these was a pioneering bookman named Ephraim Morgan, a Massachusetts native who had migrated to Ohio with his family at the age of fourteen. In 1827, after a long apprenticeship as a printer’s devil, he and two partners launched the Cincinnati Gazette, the city’s first newspaper. One year later, after quitting the paper in protest over its “policy of carrying advertisements for the return of fugitive slaves,” Morgan embarked on a highly successful five-decade career as a bookseller and publisher. By the time he retired, he had seen his printing operation expand from a small, water-propelled mill to an industrial powerhouse with a dozen steam-driven presses turning out millions of volumes per year. In 1836, eager to see his son, James, enter the trade, he helped the young man establish a publishing house with two partners. One of these was William Webster, son of the famous lexicographer. The other was a fascinating character named Nathan G. Burgess.4
In later years, Burgess would become renowned as one of America’s earliest professional daguerreotypists. Among historians of photography, he is perhaps best known as a practitioner of that peculiarly Victorian craft, the making of artfully arranged postmortem portraits. In an article published in an 1855 issue of the Photographic and Fine Arts Journal, he offers detailed instructions on this delicate process, including tips for creating tasteful pictures of dead babies. (“If a portrait of an infant is to be taken, it may be placed in the mother’s lap and taken in the usual manner by a side light, representing sleep.”)5
In 1836, however, the daguerreotype had not yet been introduced to the world, and Burgess was making his living as an agent for an eastern publisher. Traveling to Cincinnati on behalf of his employer, he joined with William Webster and James Morgan in establishing their own company. Within the space of two years, as partners came and went, the name of the firm underwent several corresponding changes: Webster, Burgess & Morgan became Burgess & Morgan, then Burgess & Crane, and finally, in 1838, N. G. Burgess & Co. It was under this imprint that Nathan Burgess brought out the first edition of John Colt’s accounting textbook.6
Colt had high expectations for his book, anticipating “its adoption far and wide, and thence its providing him with a yearly income for life.”7 And, in fact, his text met with a gratifying reception. A review in the influential trade publication the Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review praised its novel approach and wealth of practical exercises, presented “with such clearness and simplicity as to render all of them perfectly comprehensible even to a child.”8 Prominent educators, merchants, and bankers in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York offered glowing testimonials, hailing Colt’s work as “the best we have ever examined” and “far superior to the treatises in common use.”
Several hundred public schools and seminaries were quick to adopt the book, which rapidly went through various revisions and reprintings. Some editions carried an appendix containing several of Colt’s public lectures, while others were issued in two separate formats: a larger one (priced at $1.50) for “Teachers and Clerks,” and a more compact version (costing $1) for students.9
In the end, The Science of Double Entry Book-Keeping would go through no fewer than forty-five editions and earn its author a lasting place in the history books. Or rather, in two very different sorts of history books: the kind dealing with the development of the accounting profession in the United States, and the kind chronicling the nation’s most notorious homicides.10
16
Shortly after the publication of his accounting text, John—adding to his already dizzying array of commercial and speculative ventures—entered into a business partnership with Nathan G. Burgess who, like other publishers of the time, also ran a small book and stationery store.1 Besides devoting themselves to the marketing of Colt’s work, they gambled on a major undertaking, investing a sizable sum to bring out a deluxe edition of a book called An Inquiry into the Origin of the Antiquities of America by John Delafield, Jr.
A prominent New York banker actively involved in the city’s cultural life, Delafield had apparently become fascinated by pre-Columbian civilizations during a visit to Cincinnati, when he viewed a number of archaeological curiosities on display at Dorfeuille’s Western Museum.2 His book, produced during the breaks between his many other professional and social affairs, marshaled a wide range of highly dubious evidence (including geographical calculations based on the presumed location of Mount Ararat, where “Noah’s ark came to rest upon the receding of the Flood”) to prove that the aboriginal inhabitants of Mesoamerica were descended from the Cushites of ancient Egypt. Adding to this exercise in pseudo-scholarship was an egregious appendix by an amateur historian named James Lakey that offered “A Brief Inquiry into the Causes of the Superiority of Man in the Northern Hemisphere over Those of the Southern Hemisphere.” Quite lavishly produced for its time and place, the volume was illustrated with ten engraved plates, five of them hand colored, plus a foldout facsimile of the Aztec document known as the “codex Boturini”—measuring no less than nineteen feet in length.3
Offered by subscription only, Delafield’s book proved to be a major disappointment to its publishers. Its failure wiped away most of the profits from John’s accounting text and put the fledgling firm of Colt, Burgess & Co. (as it was now called) into a deep financial hole. Burgess later testified that the two partners lost one thousand dollars—equivalent to roughly twenty-three thousand dollars today—on the venture.4
Believing that he might find a larger market for the Delafield book in New York City, Colt relocated to 14 Cortlandt Street, Manhattan, in April 1839, renting a small office that doubled as his residence. For the most part, he devoted himself wholly to his business affairs, single-handedly performing all the “duties of such establishment,” including the construction of the wooden packing cases used to ship his wares. The “few friends who frequented his office” would later recall “the array of boxes and profusion of paper strips, and the nails, and the hatchet or hammer, and other tools—and [Colt’s] appearance, stripped to his shirt with his sleeves rolled up” as he assembled the crates.5
John’s efforts on behalf of Delafield’s book brought only middling results. The bulk of his income continued to come from his own accounting text, which he found himself continually updating. Evidence suggests that—perhaps because of the extreme financial burden he and Burgess had incurred by bringing out the costly and unprofitable Antiquities—John’s behavior was increasingly troubled at this time.
Working tirelessly from daybreak to nightfall while living “in the most frugal manner,” he began to seek respite from his labors in a local tavern. On one occasion, after a long night of imbibing punch with a friend, he found himself in jail after breaking into a law office on the Battery. His official biographer and leading apologist would later attribute this incident to an innocent “blunder”—a matter of John’s having drunkenly mistaken the attorney’s office for his own. The explanation would be more convincing if John hadn’t found himself in other legal difficulties during this period of his life.6
Temporarily abandoning New York, John next opened a bookstore on the corner of Fifth and Minor streets in Philadelphia. While there, he was the target of a lawsuit by the Cincinnati publisher (and father of Nathan Burgess’s original business partner) Ephraim Morgan, who accused John of swindling him out of nearly six hundred dollars.7
Though the details of this case have been lost to history, one fact about John’s life during this interlude in Philadelphia is certain: He became intimately involved with a beautiful, if uneducated, “female in humble life” named Caroline Henshaw, who worked in a corset maker’s shop.8 In early 1841, after six months in Philadelphia, he returned to New York City and took up residence at a boardinghouse in Lower Manhattan run by a Captain and Mrs. Hart. Soon afterward, Caroline joined him there, passing as John’s wife. By then, she was several months pregnant.9
17
Even after the Patent Arms Company ceased producing new weapons, Sam Colt clung fiercely to the hope of salvaging his business. That possibility, already remote, grew even more unlikely with the news out of Florida. After putting Colt’s repeating carbines to heavy use in the grueling campaign against the Seminoles, Colonel Harney’s Second Dragoons—initially so enthusiastic about the guns—had reached a devastating conclusion. “I am very sorry to report that your arms have proved an entire failure when put to the test of actual service,” wrote one officer, detailing problems that ranged from exploding cylinders and bursting barrels to accidental discharges and jammed cap primers.
Though Sam insisted that the defects in those models had subsequently been fixed, the damage was done. In February 1841, John Ehlers—a major investor who had managed to take control of the company—sent Sam a dispiriting message: “Our sales are little better than nothing.” Within the year, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson would be defunct.1
Even before the company underwent its final collapse, however, the ever-resilient inventor, now twenty-seven years old, had begun to focus his prodigious energies on a new project. Or, rather, to redirect them toward an old project he had kept in abeyance while pursuing his gun business: the development of “submarine explosives,” an interest of Sam’s dating back to his adolescence, when he had attempted to blow a raft “sky high” on Ware Pond as part of the town’s Fourth of July festivities.
• • •
The possibility of using underwater mines to defend the nation’s harbors had taken on a new urgency in the spring of 1841, owing to increasing tensions between the United States and Great Britain over a crisis that came to be known as the McLeod affair.
Several years earlier, a group of insurgents in upper Canada, intent on establishing a republican government, had attempted an armed rebellion against British rule. Their leader was the fiery reformer, newspaper editor, and former mayor of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie. After a few skirmishes—culminating in a rout of Mackenzie’s forces in March 1837—the rebel leaders fled to the United States, took refuge on a small island in the Niagara River, and began making preparations for an invasion of upper Canada. To provision themselves, they chartered a little steamer called the Caroline, which operated out of Buffalo, and ferried men and munitions to the island from the American shore.
When the insurgents began launching attacks on the Canadian village of Chippewa, the British mustered a large force under the command of a colonel named McNabb, who resolved to cut off the rebels’ supply line by destroying the Caroline. On December 29, 1837, an expedition of five small boats, carrying a party of heavily armed men, set out for this purpose under the cover of night. Finding the Caroline moored to the wharf at Fort Schlosser on the American side of Niagara Falls, the attackers, wielding muskets and swords, clambered on board and drove the crew from the vessel. They then towed the ship out onto the river, set it ablaze, and sent it drifting over the falls. During the melee, one of the Caroline’s crew members, a New Yorker named Amos Durfee, was shot through the head and killed.
Three years later, at a tavern in upstate New York, a Canadian deputy sheriff named Alexander McLeod drunkenly boasted that he had not only taken part in the destruction of the Caroline but was the man who shot Durfee. He was promptly arrested by New York authorities and indicted for arson and murder. The British government demanded his immediate release on the grounds that, at the time of the incident, McLeod had been “acting in the necessary defense of his country against a treasonable insurrection, of which Amos Durfee was acting in aid at the time.” The Supreme Court of the State of New York, however—ruling that “the attack upon the Caroline was an offense against the laws of the state and the life and property of her citizens, and came within the jurisdiction of her courts”—refused to let him go. The decision to proceed with McLeod’s trial aroused widespread outrage among the people of Great Britain, whose government began to mobilize for war.2
While this escalating international crisis caused alarm in many quarters, Sam Colt saw it as a godsend, a chance to sell the military—no longer interested in his small arms—on a unique new weapons technology: his so-called submarine battery. This device, the precise workings of which Sam kept shrouded in secrecy, consisted of “a tin tube containing anywhere from one hundred to two hundred pounds of black powder that was anchored to the sea floor at a predetermined depth. To detonate the mine, Colt proposed using a spark created by an underwater electromagnetic cable.”3
In June 1841, Sam traveled to Washington, DC, set himself up at Fuller’s Hotel, and proceeded to compose a letter that—judging from its perfect orthography—clearly was set down on paper for him by someone who could actually spell. In it, Sam boasted that, after years of “study & experiment,” he had devised a system for “effectually protecting our Sea Coast”—a method that, “if adopted for the service of our government, will not only save them millions in outlay for the construction of means of defense, but in the event of foreign war, will prove a perfect safeguard against all the combined fleets of Europe without exposing the life of our citizens.”
Without entering into specifics, Colt proclaimed that his invention enabled him “to effect the instant destruction of either Ships or Steamers, at my pleasure on their entering a harbor, whether singly or in fleets … All this I can do in perfect security and without giving an invading enemy the slightest sign of danger.” Emphasizing the economic benefits of his system—which could protect a “harbor like that of New York” for “less than the cost of a single steamship” and required only “one single man to manage the destroying agent against any fleet that Europe can send”—he requested a government appropriation of twenty thousand dollars to arrange a demonstration of his submarine battery before the Cabinet. He then sent the letter to President John Tyler.4
It was a particularly hectic time for Tyler, who had ascended to the presidency only months earlier following the untimely death of William Henry Harrison. (The record holder for the shortest presidency in U.S. history, Harrison had insisted on delivering his two-hour inauguration speech in freezing rain without either a hat or a coat; one month later, he was dead of pneumonia.) When Tyler failed to respond to the letter, Sam turned to two supporters who could provide him with an entrée to the chief executive. One was Senator Samuel L. Southard of New Jersey, previously secretary of the navy under presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. The other was John Howard Payne.
• • •
Born in 1791, Payne was a prodigy who became obsessed with the stage at an early age. Discouraged by his bluenosed father—who shared the general view of acting as a scandalous occupation—he was shipped off to New York City at the age of fourteen to apprentice to a merchant, in the hope that “hard work” would “cure his unwholesome ambitions.” All efforts to quash his “yearning for things theatrical,” however, were in vain. Sneaking off to the city playhouses at every opportunity, the stagestruck youth began to write and publish a little paper called the Thespian Mirror—a kind of early nineteenth-century fanzine—containing “interesting sketches of contemporary actors, criticisms of plays, and dramatic news items from American and British papers.” The publication brought him to the attention of the editor of the New York Evening Post and other influential figures who offered to further Payne’s education at their own expense. After a year at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Payne embarked on a highly successful acting career, appearing (among many other leading roles) as Romeo and Hamlet alongside Edgar Allan Poe’s actress-mother, Elizabeth.
In 1813 Payne left the United States for London, where he enjoyed a brilliant, if relatively short-lived, stage career, formed a deep and lasting friendship with Washington Irving (then residing in England), and (at least according to rumor) wooed the recently widowed Mary Shelley. When his popularity as an actor began to wane, he turned to playwriting.
In 1823, as part of an operetta called Clari, the Maid of Milan, he composed the lyric that would make him immortal: “Home, Sweet Home.” The song—whose second line quickly became proverbial (“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home”)—was a genuine cultural phenomenon, achieving “a wider circulation and a more universal appeal than any other ever written,” according to the rapturous account of one of Payne’s early biographers:
In the days of its greatest popularity, it is said that every English speaking person in the civilized world could hum the air … It became the world’s answer to pain and unrest, its refuge from sorrow and sin. It was a sermon on every lip, a prayer in every heart. Nothing ever written outside the Bible and a few grand old hymns is believed to have had wider influence for good. It checked tendencies to stray, it hallowed the fireside and sanctified the marriage altar. To estimate fully its far-reaching influence is as impossible as to calculate the productive quality of a single sunbeam, the attraction of a single star, or the fixed processes of spiritual elements. Every man’s home was blessed by it.5
After nineteen years abroad, Payne returned to the United States and embarked on a theatrical tour through the South and the West to raise money for an ambitious project: a weekly international arts and literary journal. Precisely when and where he became acquainted with Sam Colt is unclear, though historians speculate that they crossed paths on the performance circuit, most probably in Cincinnati, where they may have been introduced by John Colt, himself a close acquaintance of the actor. A surviving letter of Payne’s—expressing his interest in investing in Colt’s revolver—leaves no doubt that the two had become friends by the time the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company was established.6
When Sam Colt came to Washington to lobby for his submarine battery in June 1841, Payne was living in the city, writing for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, a publication with a long list of eminent contributors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. With his gift for friendship, Payne (who would soon be appointed the U.S. consul to Tunis) had established a large network of social connections, including Robert Tyler, an amateur poet and son of the chief executive. When Sam’s initial attempt to contact the president failed, Payne sent a letter to Robert, warmly recommending Colt and insisting that the young inventor’s latest proposal was “thoroughly entitled to attention.”
In a matter of days, Sam received an invitation to meet with President Tyler and Secretary of the Navy George E. Badger. Though Tyler merely listened politely, Badger’s interest was piqued, and in late July, Sam received word that an upcoming naval appropriation bill would include a sizable allocation for the development of his harbor defense system.7
By early September 1841, Sam was back in Manhattan, where he put up in his favorite hostelry, the City Hotel on lower Broadway—just a short distance from the lodgings then occupied by his brother John and John’s pregnant mistress, Caroline Henshaw.