Part Five

THE NEW YORK TRAGEDY

45

As Bennett observed, Colt’s conviction was a gratifying outcome to the public at large, whose hunger for retributive justice had been repeatedly thwarted in recent years. To John’s friends and supporters, however, the verdict came as a devastating blow.

The reaction of Lewis Gaylord Clark was typical. Coeditor with his twin brother, Willis, of the Knickerbocker Magazine, the country’s leading literary periodical, Clark was a family friend of the Colts and, from the time of John’s arrest, had maintained “staunchly and publicly that the prisoner’s crime had simply been an unhappy accident.” When the jury handed down its decision, Clark was so distraught that—though he “adored Charles Dickens above all other authors”—he could not bring himself “to attend an important meeting that night to plan the great dinner in honor of Dickens,” who was then visiting America.¹

Word of the verdict quickly spread throughout the country in newspapers from Milwaukee to Maine; in religious publications from the Catholic Herald to the Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate; and in popular journals ranging from the United States Magazine and Democratic Review to The New World: A Weekly Compendium of Popular Literature and Knowledge.² While many of these publications merely reported the facts, others used the verdict as an occasion to convey lessons tailored to their target audiences.

Indulging in “some reflections that are naturally suggested” by the case, for example, the Episcopal Recorder asserted that John’s “proficiency in iniquity” was the result of his “defective religious education” at home, and offered some warning words to parents:

We are told by those who know his history from childhood that Colt had no religious instruction around the family fireside, and that all those restraints which are the fruits of a pious father’s counsels and a mother’s tears were unknown by him. Let these facts sink into the hearts of parents! Your children are as depraved by nature as this miserable youth. Send them into the world with no ties that take hold on the family altar, and what security have you that they will not plunge into sin and ruin?³

The Youth’s Companion, on the other hand, addressed its admonitions directly to its juvenile readership, comparing John Colt to “the first murderer,” Cain, and using both cases as examples of “how wrong it is, in anyone, to give way to bad and angry feelings.”⁴

Even the American Phrenological Journal got in on the act. In an article published not long after the conviction, an anonymous practitioner of that then popular pseudoscience claimed that “in the spring of 1837, at the Astor House, N.Y.,” he had performed a phrenological examination of Colt’s head, the results of which had proved all too prophetic:

His temperament was one of the most active and excitable that I ever witnessed, being sanguine-nervous. This, together with the great size and sharpness of Combativeness, Destructiveness, and Approbativeness, led me to lay especial stress upon his irritability, the suddenness and ungovernable fury of his anger, particularly when his honor was aspersed. I remember not only dwelling upon the excitability and power of his anger but also closing his examination by rising, taking a position nearly before him, and in a most emphatic manner and gesture, my finger pointing toward him and wishing to give force to the most important words, saying to him as follows: “Mr. Colt, I have one word of caution to give you. You are passionate and impulsive in the highest degree, which, with the great size and extreme activity of Combativeness and Destructiveness, will make you desperate in a moment of passion. I warn you to avoid occasions calculated to excite it. When you find a dispute rising, turn on your heel and leave the scene of action; for when you become angry, your wrath is ungovernable and you are liable to do what you might be sorry for.”⁵

Like other sensational homicides dating at least as far back as Shakespeare’s time, the Colt-Adams case also inspired a crude broadside “murder ballad,” composed and peddled by an anonymous hack eager to cash in on the unabating fascination with the crime. Titled “The New-York Tragedy”—“an account of a Horrid Murder, committed in a Room on the second story of the large granite building, corner of Broadway and Chambers street in the City of New-York”—it was priced at two cents and could be purchased wholesale or retail at the printer’s shop, no. 71 Greenwich Avenue, Manhattan:

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! … ⁶

Moses Beach, too, lost no time in cashing in. As soon as the verdict was handed down, the Sun rushed out its souvenir sixteen-page pamphlet, which sold so briskly that, within forty-eight hours, it was already in its third edition.

As promised, it featured a handful of woodcut engravings. Dominating page one was a picture labeled “Colt, the Murderer,” showing John seated at a table and holding up a copy of his bookkeeping text. Below was an illustration of a comely young woman flashing a coquettish look while clutching a baby to her bosom. “Miss Henshaw (Colt’s Mistress) and Their Child,” read the caption. Two more portraits appeared inside: one of a grieving Emeline Adams raising a handkerchief to her eyes, and one purportedly of her husband. Seated at a writing desk, quill in hand, Adams was depicted as a nattily attired gentleman with dark curly hair, a bulbous nose, and a prominent, dimpled chin.

In truth, this last illustration bore little resemblance to the murder victim, for the very good reason that it was actually a picture of somebody else: Phineas T. Barnum.

The previous fall, Barnum—who had begun his show business career staging traveling exhibitions of a wizened African-American woman named Joice Heth, touted as the 161-year-old former nursemaid of George Washington—had purchased a run-down natural history museum on the corner of Ann Street and Broadway. Within weeks, he had set about converting it into the country’s most spectacular showplace: Barnum’s American Museum, home to such unparalleled wonders as a six-legged cow, Crowley the Man-Horse (“Nature’s most astounding freak!”), the Feejee Mermaid, and a troupe of performing fleas. With his genius for self-promotion, Barnum had no trouble drumming up publicity in the city press. One early piece was an admiring profile of the showman that appeared in the New York Evening Atlas in the fall of 1841. Accompanying the article was an engraved portrait of the dark-haired, bulbous-nosed, dimple-chinned Barnum, handsomely attired and seated at a writing desk, quill in hand.⁷

Like thousands of other New Yorkers, Barnum—as he later recounted in his autobiography—was swept up in the excitement surrounding the Colt-Adams case. Eager to know what “poor murdered Adams” looked like, he “greedily purchased” a copy of the Sunpamphlet, opened to the picture labeled “Samuel Adams, Deceased,” and was thunderstruck to find his own face staring out at him. Making inquiries, he discovered that “the stereotype of my portrait had been purchased from the Atlas and published as the portrait of Adams!” The incident merely reinforced a lesson that Barnum had learned a long time before: when it came to exploiting public credulity by peddling outrageous hoaxes—“humbugs,” as he called them—the news business was not so very different from show business.⁸

46

Owing to several unavoidable delays, John’s lawyers were unable to present their bill of exceptions until the last day of February. The following morning, March 1, 1842, the bill was allowed and sent before the state supreme court for adjudication.¹ Months would pass before a decision was rendered. In the meantime, John remained ensconced in the Tombs.

•   •   •

“It scarcely seems credible to the present generation,” writes a late-nineteenth-century historian of Manhattan, “that there was once a lovely and picturesque lake, bounded by Canal Street on the north, Pearl Street on the south, Mulberry Street on the east, and Centre Street on the west; and yet such was the case.” Surrounded by “romantic hills” that “rose to a considerable height,” the lake—so deep that it was “regarded by many as bottomless”—was known as Collect Pond, a name derived from its original Dutch designation, Kalchook, meaning “Shell Point,” a reference to the “large deposit of decomposed shells that formed a point on the western shore.”²

In the winter of 1808, when the city was hit with both unusually harsh weather and a severe slump in the maritime trade, a group of jobless seamen and other unemployed laborers, their families on the verge of starvation, marched on City Hall and demanded relief, “threatening to tear the Common Council members apart if they didn’t get jobs.” Appropriations were hastily voted and, “for want of something else to give them to do,” the council had the men level the hills surrounding Collect Pond and fill it up with the displaced earth. Eventually “streets were cut through, Centre Street (formerly called Collect Street) running in a direct line north and south through what was the middle of the pond.”³

Twenty years later, when the population of the city had grown to over two hundred thousand and “crime had increased in proportion,” the Common Council—acting on the urgent need to replace the old Bridewell jail in City Hall Park—voted to erect a new prison and selected the old Collect Pond grounds as its site. Work on the project began in 1835. No sooner had the workmen begun digging than they hit the pond, forcing the contractor to sink piles of hemlock logs into the swampy ground to serve as a foundation.

Constructed at a cost of $430,000—the equivalent of more than $10 million in today’s money—the building was designed by architect John Haviland, who modeled it after an engraving of an Egyptian temple found in a then popular volume, John Stevens’s Travels in Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine. Distinguished by its gloomy granite portico with heavy columns adorned in Pharaonic style, the Halls of Justice (as it was formally known) had a deeply forbidding aspect. “A dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian” was the way Charles Dickens described it on his visit to New York City in February 1842.⁴ Resembling an immense mausoleum, the building was immediately nicknamed—and known forever after as—the Tombs. Within days of its opening in 1838, James Gordon Bennett decried it as “a loathsome and dreary charnel house” and demanded that it be immediately torn down.⁵

For a while, it seemed as if, like Poe’s House of Usher, the edifice would collapse on its own. Constructed on the “sinking, marshy landfill” of the old Collect Pond, the building began to sag from the day it opened. Within five months, “it had sunk several inches, warping all the cells” and producing “four-inch cracks in some walls.” As it continued to settle over the following years, the grinding, cracking noises convinced many nervous prisoners that the building was about to cave in, though it remained intact for more than sixty years until it was replaced with a Gothic-style building that opened in September 1902.⁶

The prison contained 173 cells arranged in four tiers, each reserved for a different class of criminal. Convicted prisoners occupied the ground floor cells prior to their transfer to state prison. The other three tiers were for individuals awaiting trial, the majority of them too poor to procure bail. Accused murderers were consigned to the second tier; those charged with burglary, larceny, and other “lower grade” felonies to the third; while the uppermost level housed an assortment of petty criminals.

The cells, measuring just six by eight feet and dimly lighted by a foot-high slit in the wall—were originally meant to accommodate a single occupant. For most of its existence, however, the Tombs was so overcrowded that two, three, and even four inmates were often crammed into one cell. Underheated, badly ventilated, pervaded by dampness from the muddy ground on which it was built, and reeking of sewage from its woefully inadequate drainage system, the prison was, as historian Timothy Gilfoyle writes, “a sanitary nightmare”:

When cells were doubled up, inmates usually slept on the narrow berth found in each cell, each one sharing his pillow with the other’s feet. In periods of severe overcrowding, Tombs officials sometimes strung up hammocks for a third or even a fourth prisoner. Otherwise they slept on the floor … Drinking water came from a rooftop tank where water festered under the hot rays of the summer sun. Upon reaching the faucets in the cells, the water was “pretty near the boiling point and unfit to drink.” Bathing facilities were worse. Since the Tombs was built with no such provision in mind, few were given the opportunity to bathe. Furthermore, bed sheets were changed every six or seven weeks, and inmate clothing was never washed unless prisoners paid for laundry service.⁷

As for food, the menu for the average prisoner was a “wretched and stinted fare” consisting “almost entirely of pallid stews and coffee made of burnt rye steeped in hot water. The only variant was an occasional ration of pale tea. The food was lugged from cell to cell in big buckets and ladled through the bars.”⁸

Such were the conditions suffered by the majority of “poor and friendless” inmates. For the more affluent, however, the situation was radically different. “By paying the warden a proper sum,” a man could not only secure a private cell in a special section reserved for wealthy prisoners but also adorn it with such “homey touches” as “singing canaries, a Kidderminster carpet, and fancy wallpaper.” For the right price, the warden would even “have the Tombs carpenter put up a few hanging shelves, build in a clothes closet, or throw together some small tables to hold books, pipes, and tobacco.” In contrast to the barely palatable stews dished out to the general population, the higher class of criminals could also pay to “have their meals brought in from the best hotels.” Visitors came and went freely with little or no supervision. Altogether, as a writer for Horace Greeley’s Tribune noted, “if a prisoner was rich or had political influence,” he “lived like a gentleman, surrounded by every comfort.”⁹

Thanks in part to the generosity of his brother Sam, John himself enjoyed a high degree of comfort during his extended stretch in the Tombs. “I have my meals brought in from an excellent restaurant,” he wrote to one correspondent. “My cell is better furnished than half the rooms in the hotels, and in it there is as much spare room as in many of them.”¹⁰ In addition to Caroline, who “came to see him every day and remained for hours,” he received frequent calls from John Howard Payne, Lewis Gaylord Clark, and other influential friends. On one occasion, he was also visited by the social reformer and journalist Charles A. Dana, who—incensed at the luxuries for sale to wealthy prisoners—produced a vivid and scathing portrait of John’s life in the Tombs:

The popular idea of a murderer in his cell is a grave one. The fancy paints with somber tints a cold, dark cell. A sickly shaft of light comes from the high, barred window and illuminates feebly the haggard face of the criminal as he sits upon his wretched pallet of straw. Whenever he moves or presses his trembling hands to his hot brow we hear the clanking of chains. The fires of despair burn luridly in his bloodshot eyes. At intervals the iron door creaks harshly open, and the rough keeper hands him his coarse fare. There is no furniture save a crazy chair or two, no carpet, nothing but the damp stone flags. And here he lies until he is led out to be hanged in chains or executed in whatever manner may be in vogue. Victor Hugo paints this picture superbly. We shrink with horror from the contemplation of the scene and wonder, since such is his fate, how any man can commit murder.

They may do those things better in France, but how is it in New York? Let us take a stroll through Murderer’s Row in the Tombs and glance in on homicide Colt. Coming in from the pure air and warm sunshine you say, as you step upon the corridor, “Surely this is dismal enough!” And so it is; but this is only the exterior of the parlors. As the keeper swings open the door of Colt’s cell the odor of sweet flowers strikes you. It is no delusion, for there they are in a delicate vase upon the center table. That handsomely dressed little lady whom we passed on the stairs has just left them. Tomorrow they will be replaced by fresh ones.

The table itself is a pretty one; there is nothing handsomer in Washington Square. It is of exquisite workmanship and is covered with a dainty cloth. In a gilt cage hanging against a wall is a canary, whose dulcet strain gushes out from his palpitating throat in a flood of melody. A pretty set of swinging shelves suspended by silken cords catches the eye. Here are to be found the latest novel, the freshest magazine. Pictures here and there break up the dull wall into gorgeous color. You tread on roses, for the cold stones are concealed by rare Kidderminster.

And Colt; how is it with him? You see he is not sitting on any pallet of straw. In a patent extension chair he lolls smoking an aromatic Havana, while he reads the proceedings of his trial the day previous in the morning’s papers. He has on an elegant dressing-gown, faced with cherry colored silk, and his feet are encased in delicately worked slippers. His clothes are neat and up in style to the latest fashion plate. He is cleanly shaven and has a general air of elevation about him which is quite refreshing. To one side of him is his bed, a miracle of comfort.

When he is tired of reading or smoking or sleeping he takes a stroll in the yard. It is necessary to dress for this, and his toilet takes considerable time. Finally he appears, booted and gloved. He may have his seal-skin coat on or he may appear in a light Autumn affair of exquisite cut and softest tint. In his hand is a gold-headed switch which he carelessly twirls during his promenade.

Then comes his lunch; not cooked in the Tombs but brought in from a hotel. It consists of a variety of dishes—quail on toast, game pâtés, reed birds, ortolans, fowl, vegetables, coffee, cognac. Then it is back again to the easy chair with book and cigar. Such is life in Murderer’s Row as lived by Colt, and a not unmerry life it is.¹¹

•   •   •

Besides reading, smoking, and taking the occasional stroll around the yard, John passed the hours corresponding with friends and acquaintances in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New Orleans—the cities where he had spent the most time during his peripatetic life. Nineteen of his letters would eventually find their way into print.¹² As to be expected, they are full of protestations of innocence. “I did but defend myself against a wanton, vile, and unpardonable attack,” he writes at one point. “This I would do again, at any time, when insulted and assaulted. No man would do less. His very nature compels him to this … I have nothing in this affair to reproach my conscience with.”

He repeatedly denounces the “consummate scoundrels” of the penny press for stirring up public hysteria and accuses the jurors of either moral cowardice or active bias:

Twelve men, either from error or prejudice, trampled upon the evidence—they trampled upon the judge’s charge—they trampled upon the law, for the law says that when there is a doubt, it should be given in favor of the prisoner. They were out nine hours wrangling about a decision; there was much doubt, and strange to say they threw the doubt against the prisoner. There will be no difficulty, if justice be done, in setting aside their opinion, as it is now well known that several of them either willfully or unguardedly expressed hostile opinions before the trial.

Not without justification, he insists that he was convicted “for endeavoring to conceal a misfortune, not for killing a man.”

He devotes considerable space to setting the record straight about his victim. Contrary to depictions of Adams “as one of the mildest and meekest men the world has ever seen,” the printer was “a most aggravating fellow in his language. I had always before attributed his manner to ignorance, not to ill will. However, I was mistaken. I was cherishing a viper that was ready at any time to sting me.”

In one particularly dramatic letter, John provides an account of the “fatal quarrel” far more graphic than the one contained in his original confession. Adams, he claims, not only tried to choke him but grabbed him “by the privates” (“per prives parties,” as John latinizes it): a charge that, if true, goes a long way toward explaining the frenzied violence of Colt’s reaction.

Adams’s assault on me was entirely wanton. I never was cooler and calmer than when he came into my office, and his entrance was abrupt and quite unexpected. He accused me at once with an intent of cheating him, to which I calmly replied that I was astonished that he should say so, and requested him to give some reasons for warranting such a charge. Word followed word, and in the meantime I drew out his account from my portfolio, and so far as there was cheating on foot, I showed him the evidence of it on his part, in his account. As he would not hear to reason, and feeling alarmed at his manner and language, I applied to him unavoidably, in answer to his abuse, in perfect justice, his own unmeasured terms. At this he became more exasperated and gave me a slap with the back of his hand across the mouth which, you may be assured, was returned in due justice, as I sprang to my feet in self-defense. He almost instantly seized hold of my neckcloth, which placed me in his power—pressing me to the table and wall, he struck me three or four times in the breast and seized me per prives parties. Everything seemed to turn black. I was in agony and exerting myself for relief, how I know not.

The last distinct recollection I have, before I was relieved by his fall, was that of trying to press him off with my left hand, as I held to his collar, endeavoring with my right hand, at the same time, to raise myself from the table, as he had me pressed over backwards upon it. It was in this painful position that I seized that cursed hatchet and gave him the unfortunate blows that I did. When relieved from his horrid grasp, I beheld for the first time my awful defense. Heaven knows the number of blows I struck him. There may have been four or five. And when I reflect upon the instrument most unfortunately seized and instantaneously used, it is only to be wondered at that his head was not dashed into a thousand pieces.

About the future, John expresses serene confidence. He is convinced that the bill of exceptions will be “carried up” to the Supreme Court and that he will “get a new trial and be justly dealt with.” But even if the final decision should go against him, he is resigned to his fate. “Death,” he assures a friend, “hath no terrors for me”:

I have ever had hopes of beyond this world. Did I believe that this existence was the beginning and the end, I should curse the giver. No—impossible—it cannot be. The universal world—the mighty heavens above—speak in signs more conclusive than argument, more appealing than parables, that there is a God above—just, mighty, all-powerful. No man should fear to shake off this mortal coil—this dying, sickening, painful body—this incarcerating prison-house to the mind—this incubus to the heart—this chain of disease and corruption to the soul.

Imbued with the conviction that “there is a world above this, and a more just one,” he is, so he claims, prepared for any eventuality. “Let come the worst,” he declares, “I shall die as calm as any man died.”

47

In preparation for their appeal, John’s lawyers enlisted the aid of Dr. David L. Rogers, the eminent surgeon whose display of Samuel Adams’s decapitated head had been one of the dramatic highlights of the trial. Rogers was requested “to investigate the probable relative position and actions of John C. Colt and Samuel Adams during the recontre which ended with the death of the latter.” After conducting a series of experiments, he prepared a lengthy report detailing his findings and “the reasonings by which he has arrived at such conclusions.”¹ The report, eventually submitted to Governor William Seward, stands as a remarkable piece of early forensic science.

Rogers notes, for example, that “blood was found on the wall [of Colt’s office] in larger spots and greater abundance at the height of a man’s head than elsewhere.” In addition, the testimony of Asa Wheeler and his pupil Arzac Seignette clearly indicated that “after the fall of Adams no blow was inflicted.” Taken together, these facts lead Rogers to conclude that “Adams was in an erect position at the time the fatal blows were inflicted.”

Based on a highly sophisticated analysis of the number, shape, and position of the wounds, Rogers is further able to deduce that Colt and Adams were standing “face to face within a foot-and-a-half of each other during the whole of the fatal encounter.” He then asserts that “one of the parties at least must have firmly grappled with the other while the blows were inflicted.” His proof is compelling in its simplicity: “Several blows were received by Adams, any one of which would have felled him if unsupported, yet he did not fall till after the infliction of all the blows.”

Rogers, however, goes one step further. In the most ingeniously argued section of his report, he demonstrates that “Adams was grappling with Colt at the time the first blow with the hatchet was given and was the first to close and grapple.” Rogers bases his conclusion on four main points.

To begin with, if Colt “had been the assailing party,” he would logically have “approached Adams from behind, which he evidently did not.” Moreover, the testimony of Asa Wheeler indicated that Adams had not cried out in alarm, which he doubtlessly would have done if attacked from the front by Colt. Third, if Colt had “commenced the attack, he would have selected a distance which would have given him the full sweep and force of his right arm.” The first blow inflicted on Adams, however, proved that this was not the case. Finally, the absence of defensive wounds on Adams’s arms strongly suggested that his “arms were engaged during the recontre.”

In short, it was Rogers’s belief that the quarrel turned deadly when Adams leapt to his feet, lunged at Colt, and violently grabbed him, forcing him into a “lower position.” To be sure—as Robert Emmett had observed in his closing statement—no one but God knew precisely what truly transpired. Insofar as 1840s forensic science was able to reconstruct the crime, however, all the evidence suggested that John had been telling the truth.

48

For a while, Sam Colt shared his brother’s hopeful outlook. In early February—at the very time that John was telling friends that he expected to get a new trial—Sam went out and purchased a ten-dollar flute for himself: a sign, according to the speculations of his most authoritative biographer, that he was in a sufficiently optimistic frame of mind to indulge in some lighthearted diversion.¹

From the evidence of his diary, he was still in an upbeat mood one month later during a brief trip to Connecticut. By then, with Dudley Selden and his associates concentrating on John’s appeal, Sam had refocused his own attentions on his submarine battery project. During the first week of March, he traveled to New London, Stonington, and Mystic to “investigate several intriguing leads on the attempts of an obscure Connecticut inventor, Silas Clowden Halsey, to conduct a torpedo attack” during the War of 1812.²

Halsey’s efforts had been undertaken in response to emergency legislation enacted by Congress offering private citizens a hefty reward for the destruction of British warships. He had tinkered together an ingenious “submarine boat”—a tiny, one-man affair with a hand-cranked propeller and an air tube poking out of the water. Attached to the front was a small, corkscrewed spear with an explosive charge attached. The plan was to sneak beneath the hull of one of the British vessels blockading New London Harbor, drive the spear into the hull, then retreat before the explosion went off. On the night of June 30, 1813, he had set off on his mission and was never heard of again.³

For several days, Sam traveled around the various Connecticut towns, interviewing veterans of the war, including Captain Jeremiah Holmes of Mystic, who had participated in the efforts to attack the British fleet with submarine explosives and provided Sam with a detailed description of Halsey’s ship and torpedoes.⁴ Though engaged in serious business, Sam appears to have been in a relaxed, even carefree mood, as his comically misspelled journal entries make clear. On Sunday, March 7, for example, he records that, after attending “piscopal chirch” in Norwich, he “rambled through the town & over the hils,” then “called on Mrs. Chappell was introduced to her husband (fine fellow) & to of her brothers, took tea & spent the evening very pleasantly to say nothing of the whiskey.” The following morning, he took a “stemebote” back to New London, admiring the beautiful “senery on the river.” The rest of the day was “spent very pleasantly at the residence of Captain Bassett in company of Miss Bassitt & Miss Church.”⁵

Back in New York City, he continued his experiments. Just a few days after returning from Connecticut, he reported to Naval Secretary Abel Upshur that he had succeeded in setting off an underwater charge “at a distance of ten miles.” In the same letter, he assured Upshur that he would be ready to make a public test of his harbor defense system “about the first of May.”⁶

Delays in the delivery of zinc plates and other vital components forced Sam to postpone his demonstration (“all progress in my experiments must wate,” as he put it to one correspondent).⁷ He was finally ready in midsummer. Ever the showman, he decided to stage the event in the harbor off Castle Garden, the popular amusement spot on the southern tip of Manhattan where he had held a demonstration of his repeating rifles five years earlier. The date he chose was the Fourth of July—thirteen years to the day after his first, boyhood experiment with underwater explosives on Ware Pond.

Ballyhooed by the city press, the event drew thousands of spectators who crowded the wharves on both the Lower Manhattan and Jersey City waterfronts. Among those in attendance were Mayor Morris and the entire city council, along with reporters from a dozen newspapers. At precisely noon, the firing of a twenty-gun national salute signaled the start of the demonstration.

A derelict hundred-ton naval “vessil” (as Sam spelled it) had been provided for the occasion. “Fitted with temporary masts from which were displayed various flags with piratical devices,” the “old hulk” was towed through the water until it reached a speed of roughly three knots. Two hundred yards way, on the deck of the seventy-four-gun warship North Carolina, Sam—surrounded by naval officers and other official observers—activated his galvanic detonating device. The “effect of the explosion was tremendous,” wrote the reporter for the New York Evening Post. “The vessel was shattered into fragments, some of which were thrown two or three hundred feet in the air, and there was not a single piece left longer than a man could have carried in one hand.”⁸

The response of the spectators was captured by a gentleman named John Mount, who witnessed the demonstration from the Jersey side. Two days later, on July 6, he sat down and composed an effusive letter to Sam, congratulating him on “the entire success of your recent submarine explosion.”

“As the dense volume of smoke rose heavenwards,” Mount enthused, “its terrific grandeur could only be exceeded by the amazement and wonder of all the multitude around me at the means by which it was accomplished … I trust, my dear sir, that the government will properly appreciate the vast importance of this mode of defense and that you may reap the honors and emoluments to which you are justly entitled.”⁹

Sam himself was justifiably pleased with the results of his experiment. He had no time to savor his triumph, however. On the very day that he received Mount’s admiring letter, word arrived of a long-awaited decision in his brother’s case. And for Sam and the other supporters of John Colt, the news couldn’t have been worse.

49

Even before the New York Supreme Court took up John’s case in its July term, his lawyers had made a separate bid to have the conviction overturned. On Friday, May 6, 1842, John Morrill and James Emmett appeared before Judge Kent at the Court of Oyer and Terminer to make a motion for a new trial. Word having spread that Colt himself would be present, “all the world assembled to see him.” The rumor proved unfounded, however. Colt never appeared, “and all the world was disappointed.”¹

The principal ground for the motion was that one of the jurors, a boardinghouse owner named Nathan R. Husted, “had expressed strong and unqualified sentiments as to the guilt of the prisoner” before being sworn in. Specifically, a lodger at Husted’s hostelry had heard him remark that if it were up to him, “Colt would be hanged first and tried afterward.”

District Attorney Whiting countered that “Colt had received a fair and impartial trial” and that the motion constituted “an impeachment of the juror, an honorable and honest man” who had performed “a most unpleasant and unthankful duty,” only to find himself “arraigned for having expressed an opinion relative to the prisoner.”

A week later, Judge Kent handed down his ruling. This time, John was brought into court. The spectators who filled the room to capacity watched him intently as Kent read his decision.

“The remarks of Mr. Husted,” said the judge, “were made at his own house in October last. They were casual and unpremeditated and unaccompanied by discussions.” After careful consideration, Judge Kent therefore ruled, “This court, under the affidavits produced, cannot disturb this verdict, and they deny the motion under the firm conviction that granting it would impair, if it did not vitally weaken, the administration of justice in criminal cases of magnitude and importance.”

John, who had kept his gaze steadily fixed on the judge, showed no trace of emotion as the decision was rendered. It was as if, wrote James Gordon Bennett, “he had expected it as a matter of course.”²

•   •   •

Two months to the day after John’s lawyers made their unsuccessful motion before Judge Kent, Dudley Selden appeared before the state supreme court at Utica to argue for a new trial.

There were two major grounds for his plea. The first had to do with jury selection. After the fiasco of the first day of the trial—when only nineteen out of forty-five potential jurors had shown up—Judge Kent had directed the sheriff to summon “three hundred persons duly qualified to serve as jurors.” He had, moreover, demanded that all three hundred appear in two days’ time and refused Selden’s request for a lengthier postponement. Selden now insisted that, by ordering so large a number in so short a time, Kent had deprived the defendant “of a fair opportunity for scrutinizing the panel and preparing for a proper exercise of his right to challenge.”

Selden further argued that since “the only instrument specified in the indictment as the means of committing the offense was a hatchet,” Judge Kent had “erred in allowing proof tending to show that the death of the deceased might have been caused by the discharge of a pistol.”

Following Selden’s presentation, District Attorney Whiting arose to argue on behalf of the people. Even before he could speak, however, the court announced its decision.

The judges were “unable to see any ground for interfering with the proceedings.” To begin with, “The statute in respect to summoning jurors prescribes no precise limit as to numbers but says that the sheriff shall be directed to summon so many as are necessary to make at least twenty-four jurors from whom a jury may be selected … As to the refusal of the court to postpone, this was also a matter resting in discretion and therefore not the subject of review in the present case.”

The judges further ruled that Kent was correct in allowing evidence regarding the pistol, since the indictment also contained a count charging that the killing had been done “with a certain instrument to the jurors unknown.”

The defense’s motion having been denied, the court ordered that “the proceedings be remitted to the Oyer and Terminer with directions to proceed and pass sentence.”³ Eight months after his conviction, John Colt would finally receive his dread judgment.

50

At 10:10 on Tuesday morning, September 27, 1842—a year, almost to the day, since his arrest—John Colt was led into the packed courtroom by officers James Colvin and Frank F. Smith. Apart from his jailhouse pallor, his appearance had changed “very little from what it presented at the trial” and his “manner and demeanor” struck most observers as “perfectly calm and collected.” Making his way to the front of the room, he took his usual seat beside the stove and—with his back to the gawking spectators—occupied himself in perusing the morning newspapers, looking up occasionally to exchange a word with his lawyers and his brother Sam, seated directly beside him.¹

Twenty minutes later, Judge Kent entered and took his seat. Following some preliminary business, John, clutching a sheet of paper in one hand, was asked to rise. The clerk, Henry Vandervoort, then faced him and intoned the ritual formula: “Prisoner, you may remember that you have heretofore been indicted for a certain murder; upon that indictment you were arraigned; upon your arraignment you pleaded not guilty and put yourself upon the country for trial, which country has found you guilty. What have you now to say why judgment should not be pronounced against you, according to law?”

“I have prepared a few remarks that I wish to go to the court,” John said with his usual composure.

“Do you wish it read aloud?” asked Kent.

“Certainly, sir,” John said, reaching out the paper to Kent. He then reseated himself while Kent briefly scanned the document.

A moment later, Kent—whose expression had darkened noticeably—launched into Colt’s statement in a voice that carried to the furthest corner of the courtroom:

The position I now hold is to a sentient being the most agonizing possible. It is more painful than the struggle of death itself. But it is a form of procedure that I am obliged to pass through before my case reaches the last tribunal of the state to which it will be carried in accordance with that justice which cannot be denied to the meanest of mankind. Most cheerfully will I submit my case to final examination by the Court of Errors. I fully believe that it will set aside the judgment of the jury, who were so far led aside by prejudice and error as to trample on the evidence—to trample on the law—to trample on the judge’s charge. Amid the thousand false rumors in circulation at the time of and before my trial, it may not, however, be considered surprising that the jury were misled from coming to a right conclusion. All that, unfortunately situated as I am, I can expect is an impartial trial by jury. This is all I desire, and this the meanest vagrant in the streets has a right to demand. Misfortune, not crime, has placed me in this position, and although as low down as possible without being annihilated, still, rest assured, I have not so lost my self-respect, nor regard for the credit of the peoples, as to submit calmly to this injustice. As this consequently is not to be the end of this business, I desire that the Court will spare me the pain of all unnecessary powers of sentence, especially the accompanying comments.

By the time Kent reached the end of this statement, his voice was taut with suppressed anger. Throwing the paper onto his desk, he glared down at John and proceeded to upbraid him in a tone of “high dudgeon.”²

“The court has no desire, I can assure you, to make unnecessary comments,” he said icily. “The scene is as painful to the court as it is distressing to you. I only refuse to accede to your request by making a few remarks on the conduct of the jury. It is due to justice and it is due to one of the most intelligent juries that ever sat in a court of justice that I should not allow them, in this their appropriate tribunal, to be traduced.”

In the same affronted tone, Kent went on to defend the jury as a select group, drawn from “three hundred of our most respectable citizens”—men who had borne “with the most exemplary patience and dignity even unnecessary delays in the progress of the trial, earnest only to discover the truth from the appalling evidence spread before them.

“Insofar, therefore, as this paper expresses dissatisfaction with and contempt of the court and the jury, it is the conclusion of him who now addresses you that it is entirely incorrect and unsupported,” said Kent, still glowering at John. “If that court erred at all, I believe it did in too lenient a construction of the circumstances of your offense, and happy will it be for innocence in all future time to be brought before a tribunal as willing to hear, as ready to believe, as humane to forgive.”

As he spoke, Kent’s voice had risen with indignation. He now paused, as though to get hold of his emotions.

“I do not wish to prolong this distressing scene,” he continued after a moment, speaking more softly, though in a no less caustic tone. “You are a man of education—a man of talent. We have had the most striking and impressive evidence that you can calmly contemplate and coolly meet the most alarming crisis in human life. I will not therefore address to you any of the commonplace, ordinary topics addressed to criminals on the approach of death. I leave that to your reflections, simply adding that so far as the court is concerned, they are now about to appoint the ultimate hour of your existence, and I trust you will meet that hour relying not on human means, and that when earth is disappearing from your view, your thoughts will not be placed on earthly things. It is my duty to say in addition that it appears to me that you evince the most total insensibility regarding the crime whose commission has brought you to the bar. For it should be remembered that, though lawyers and juries debated what degree of offense it came to—whether it was technical murder or technical manslaughter—no man ever doubted that it was a crime of the greatest magnitude and enormity, and one which has left the stain of blood-guiltiness on your soul!”

Taken aback by Kent’s tirade (“the judge came down on me like a hurricane,” he lamented afterward), John leapt to his feet.³ “I did not mean to convey the idea that the jury acted willfully wrong but that they were misled,” he protested. “The judge’s charge is the best argument to prove that. I do not impugn the motives of the jury—I only speak of them as having been in error, which is, I believe, now the opinion of nine-tenths of the community.

“As far as regarding my own conscience in this affair,” John continued, adopting a lofty tone that, to the ears of many listeners, bordered on the supercilious, “I assure you, sir, that I would rather trust the whole affair to God than to man. I never committed an act in my life that I would not have done again under the same circumstances. Depend upon it, I am not the man who could receive an insult without making some retaliation. The retaliation was not made with any idea of killing the man, but he made the assault and was responsible for the consequences. I think, sir, you have misapprehended entirely the sentiment I meant to convey on that bit of paper.”

Drawing himself up to his full height, he then calmly declared, “I am ready for the sentence, as I know it cannot be avoided.”

Whether John’s concluding words to Kent were a display of manful pride or blind insolence would be a matter of much debate in the coming days. To Kent, however, the matter was clear. Fixing John with a withering look, the judge said: “The sentence will now be pronounced, with an expression of regret with which the court have marked such morbid insensibility which you exhibited in your last speech and which convinces me that any further remarks would be lost on you. The sentence of the court is that you, John C. Colt, on the eighteenth of November next, be hanged until you be dead, and may God have mercy on your soul. Remove the prisoner.”

At the bang of Kent’s gavel, John swiveled on his heels and strode toward the doorway, head high, without the least apparent trace of emotion. It was his brother, Sam, whose face wore a stricken expression as he followed his brother from the courtroom.⁴

51

Wednesday’s newspaper accounts of John’s sentencing marveled at the man’s contradictions, expressing equal measures of awe at both his audacious spirit and his apparent lack of any sense of remorse. In his written statement and particularly in his last, defiant speech to Judge Kent, John, all agreed, had “exhibited as much boldness and as little feeling as could be imagined”—a stout heart coupled with “a mind dead to all moral feeling.”¹

This ambivalent attitude toward John’s “reckless hardihood and effrontery” was particularly pronounced in the New York Herald, where James Gordon Bennett devoted a lengthy editorial to the subject. Commenting on Colt’s “remarkable behavior throughout the scene,” Bennett could hardly restrain his admiration. “His confidence, his assurance, his courage, his coolness, all rolled so together, and rising to the sublime of impudence, as we may call it—surpass anything on record. He is truly sui generis, and under other aspects, and with a different education, and another destiny, might have served for a hero—or a chieftain of the highest order—for a master spirit to revolutionize the age.”

Unfortunately, continued Bennett, John’s limitless potential had been undermined by “a want of moral and religious culture.” Whereas other commentators attributed Colt’s downfall to everything from his supposedly permissive upbringing to the corrupting influences of the city, Bennett—riding his own hobbyhorse—blamed it on “the great error in the education of the youth of the present age of the world,” who were inculcated with “the vain principle of personal honor”: an insidious ideal that led them to take offense at the smallest perceived slight and demand violent satisfaction for any insult.

“Instead of being taught the precepts of Jesus Christ as he delivered them on the mount,” Bennett complained, “our young men have their minds filled with personal pride—personal consequence—the false theories of moral honor with its machinery of insults, satisfaction, resentment, passion, duels, and death.”

Colt’s closing statement to Judge Kent—his brazen assertion that, under the same circumstances, he would do the deed again because “I was insulted”—reflected the “ridiculous code of honor” that prevailed among America’s young men.”² For Bennett, the “false and bloody code of honor” that led to such “wretched quarrels” was nothing short of sacrilege. Bereft of Christian principles, Colt’s boldness was mere sinful pride: “a degree of hardihood,” concluded Bennett, “that Satan himself could not surpass.”³

52

To counter the negative portrayals of John in the press, his friends embarked on their own public relations campaign (a “venture in spin control,” as one historian describes it),¹ subsidizing the publication of a biographical pamphlet that cast the subject in a highly sympathetic light. Titled An Authentic Life of John C. Colt, the seventy-page work was authored by Charles F. Powell, a popular writer of historical romances whose fiction—“Nahwista; a Story of the Colonies,” “Zeulia of Madrid,” “Kit the Orphan,” “The Painted Rock”—appeared regularly in journals like the Knickerbocker and the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion.

Shortly after the trial ended, Powell paid a visit to the Tombs, accompanied by two of John’s close friends. They found him seated at his writing table, “a one-volume octavo edition of Goldsmith’s works by his side.” As they entered the cell, John, wearing “slippers and a dressing-gown,” rose to greet them. In glaring contrast to the public at large—who “look on him as a monster”—Powell was struck by John’s “gentle” expression, his “courteous and manly bearing.” Only once during the visit, when the subject turned to the penny papers, did his “sweet and mild” voice turn bitter.

“The newspapers!” he exclaimed. “They are the true mischief breeders! They are really the unprincipled and remorseless murderers! By the pen there is more slaughter—and that of the most heartless and ferocious character—than either by lead or steel!”

Immediately following the visit, Powell dashed off the biography, basing it on information gathered from John’s friends as well as on his prison-house interview with the subject himself. Powell’s favorable impression of Colt is reflected throughout the work, where the subject is described as a young man of “extreme bravery,” “great generosity of disposition,” “ardent and ambitious spirit,” “moral and temperate habits,” “excellent conduct and remarkable talents.” Every episode recounted by Powell illustrates John’s sterling qualities: the keen sense of justice that, during his boyhood, “inclined him to take sides with the weaker party in all juvenile quarrels”; the “kind-hearted” impulses that led him to nurse a half-frozen lamb back to health during his time on his uncle’s farm; the “zeal and fidelity” he displayed while apprenticing at the Union Manufacturing Company; his “Herculean labors” as a young supervisor on the North Branch of the Susquehanna Canal; his “studious and industrious” habits while clerking for his cousin, Dudley Selden; and more.

How an individual of such “frank, open, and manly character” has come to be “in prison under sentence of death” is, Powell writes, “a mystery.” He can only assume that Colt “possesses two characters, one inherent, the other superinduced by circumstances.” Endowed from birth with many “attractive qualities,” John had developed a moody, distrustful side, largely—Powell posits—because of the faulty guidance of those “intrusted with management of his early years,” especially his hardhearted stepmother, who was constantly “at work against him.” In the end, Powell concludes, John possessed a naturally benevolent, affectionate, and amiable temperament that had been “warped” and “imbittered” by excessively critical “relations and teachers” who failed to appreciate or encourage his particular talents and ambitions.²

•   •   •

Several months later, not long after the fiasco of John’s sentencing, a second pamphlet appeared, combining a three-page biographical sketch—cribbed from Powell’s work—with a compilation of John’s jailhouse letters. This one, titled Life and Letters of John Caldwell Colt, was even more unabashed in its advocacy. In it, John is portrayed not only as a paragon of Franklin-esque virtues—frugality, industry, self-reliance, temperance—but as a man who, through some perverse “sport of destiny,” has been cruelly misunderstood throughout his life, most recently by Judge Kent. In a passage that might have been dictated by John himself, the anonymous pamphleteer—seeking to clarify the comments that had so infuriated Kent—explains that the judge “mistook the feeling of the remark he was handed to read. The prisoner meant to say that his disposition led him to resent an insult, and that the same causes operating upon his mind would produce the same effect—unknown and beyond control. There are thousands of men who, upon being called liar—scoundrel—or swindler, would strike the man who said it—a blow might lead to a scuffle—in a scuffle men become maddened, the mildest are infuriated, and consequences are no longer in their control.”³

The pamphlet concludes with a direct appeal to the public, entreating them to rally to John’s defense: “A few days and it will be too late to repair the wrong. A few days, and unless there be some merciful—some just—interposition, thousands of hearts will be wrung with agony and horror for the untimely death of a young, amiable, gentle, and, as all who know him believe, innocent man!”⁴

There was good cause for the urgency of this plea. On the day the pamphlet went on sale—October 21, 1842—exactly one month remained before John was scheduled to be hanged.

53

Their bid for a new trial having been refused by both Judge Kent and the New York State Supreme Court, John’s attorneys made a last-ditch effort to obtain a writ of error by applying to the only person left who could allow it: Reuben Hyde Walworth, the last man to hold the soon-to-be-abolished position of chancellor of New York, the highest judicial office in the state.

In future years, Walworth’s own family would be at the center of a highly publicized homicide, arguably the most sensational case of parricide in the annals of New York crime. In June 1873, Walworth’s forty-three-year-old son, a prolific popular novelist named Mansfield Tracy Walworth, was shot to death by his own son, nineteen-year-old Frank Hardin Walworth, who lured his father to a Broadway hotel room and gunned him down with cold deliberation. The murder weapon was a five-shot Colt revolver.¹

That tragedy, however, was still several decades away when the chancellor was asked to intervene in John’s case. His ruling came on November 3, two weeks and a day before the scheduled execution. After reviewing each of the points raised by John’s lawyers in their earlier appeals, Walworth found that there was no “reason to doubt that the prisoner has been properly convicted.”

In explaining his ruling, Walworth offered a highly unusual aside. “No one not immediately connected with the condemned individual whose case I have been considering can more deeply regret than I do the situation in which he is placed, or sympathize more sincerely with his numerous connections,” he wrote. “It has been my great fortune to be acquainted with many of them, and I know them to be among the most respectable in any community. With one of them, a lady who is his very near relative, I have been in terms of intimacy and friendship for more than thirty years.”

After making this remarkable confession, Walworth stressed that he was not the sort to allow such personal matters to influence his decisions. “In the administration of justice, upon which not only the safety of the community but all that is dear in life depends, the calls of private friendship must, or at least, should always give way to the stern demands of public duty,” he proclaimed. “Having therefore arrived at the conclusion that there is no probable cause for supposing that there is any error in the judgment in this case … I must refuse to allow this writ of error.”

To more than one observer, it appeared that Walworth’s “friendship and intimacy” with one “very near relative” of the condemned man had actually worked against John—that the chancellor, precisely because of his close connection to the Colt family, felt the need to prove that he was operating without bias. As one legal analyst remarked, there was “something like an ostentation of deciding according to strict law” in Walworth’s written opinion, as though he feared that a less stern judgment would be read as a sign of favoritism.²

•   •   •

Only one recourse now remained to John’s supporters. On November 4, 1842, the day after Chancellor Walworth handed down his ruling, a small party of them boarded an Albany-bound stagecoach to embark on the last desperate battle for John Colt’s life.³

54

For William Henry Seward, the power to grant pardons was a particularly onerous burden of office. During his two terms as governor of New York State, he was constantly besieged by petitioners. On one morning alone—as he records in his journals—he was approached by no fewer than five female supplicants: the widow of an old acquaintance, imploring him “to release her son from the county jail”; a woman, eight months’ pregnant, begging “for the pardon of her young husband, a watchman, who had committed burglary”; a “maiden lady” whose brother was “in the state prison at Auburn for forgery”; a “poor brokenhearted creature whose honeymoon was scarcely passed before her husband was dispatched to Sing Sing”; and a “grocer’s wife whose husband was consigned to the penitentiary for larceny.” Later that same day, he was presented with yet another appeal, this “one for a pardon to Thomas Topping, convicted of the murder of his wife.”¹

Determining whether to dispense executive clemency was not only a trying task for the governor, it was, more often than not, a thankless one. Seward commonly found himself under fire for his decisions, accused of either playing political favorites or ignoring the will of the people. His pardon of his friend and fellow Whig, James Watson Webb, for example—who had been sentenced to two years at hard labor for violating the law against dueling—drew widespread criticism and ridicule from Seward’s Democratic foes. On the other hand, he incurred the outrage of thousands of his own constituents for refusing to pardon Benjamin B. Rathbun, a prominent Buffalo businessman who—despite his imprisonment for forgeries amounting to several million dollars—was one of upstate New York’s most admired citizens.²

Of the countless cases he’d been faced with during his four years in office, however, none, by Seward’s own admission, was as agonizing as that of John Colt. In the days following Chancellor Walworth’s decision, Seward found himself under assault by partisans of the condemned man. “Each docking of a steamboat from New York brought the influential. His own political supporters, big Whigs, arrived hourly and breathed the words, ‘Pardon Colt.’ ” As the campaign for clemency mounted, it “eclipsed all other state business.”³

“You have no idea of the fatiguing weariness of the week spent in hearing every form of application for pardon to Colt,” Seward wrote to his wife, Frances, describing the parade of supporters who had come to plead on the prisoner’s behalf. Among them were Seward’s “friend and former counselor,” Willis Hall, until recently the New York State attorney general; David Graham, Jr., a prominent New York City attorney and author of A Treatise on the Law of New Trials in Cases Civil and Criminal; Judge Ambrose Spencer, former chief justice of the state supreme court; and Lewis Gaylord Clark—all of whom, wrote Seward, came “to inform me that Colt was unjustly condemned.”⁴

Besides these personal callers, Seward was inundated with written pleas for executive intervention. “My table groans with letters from gentlemen and ladies of acknowledged respectability and influence,” Seward wrote to his wife. “Among the former are gentlemen of the press and of every profession, urging and soliciting the pardon of Colt.”⁵

Many of these letters based their appeals on legal grounds, arguing that the “evidence of premeditated crime was insufficient to warrant” the verdict, that Colt was clearly “the helpless victim of uncontrolled passion,” and that the outcome had less to do with the crime itself than with communal revulsion at the “attempt at concealment.” Others made their case on moral grounds. For example, Dr. Blanchard Fosgate—physician to the New York State Prison at Auburn and the author of such works as Sleep Psychologically Considered, Dream-Thoughts of Waking Circumstances, and On the Influence of Coffee over the Narcotic Effect of Morphia—maintained that a commutation of Colt’s sentence would be in the “best interests of society.” However disguised under the name of justice, Blanchard argued, the infliction of the death penalty was nothing more than revenge—a “direct stimulus” to a brutal appetite rooted in the “early history of our race.” By commuting John’s sentence to life imprisonment, Seward would be fostering “the higher qualities of our nature—repentance, benevolence, and sympathy for our fellow men in adversity”—and thus assisting in “the progress of mankind toward a more lofty and just comprehension of the value of human life.”⁶

Not all of the communications received by Seward presented their arguments in such measured tones. There were crank letters too, including at least one direct death threat:

You have time to grant a pardon to him whom your prejudices are about to deprive of a life as dear to him as yours is to you. Yes, you have full time, but not the disposition; you thirst for the blood of a fellow-being, and you may drink it to the last drop; but by the Almighty God, into whose presence you usher a poor soul with a load of sin upon his head, by the hopes I entertain of immortality hereafter, I swear that one who has lived for him, and will at any time die for him, holds you responsible to the very tittle for what may happen to him! Should he suffer an ignominious death, his corpse shall not be interred before your life pays the forfeit, and you follow him to an eternal hell!

You may disbelieve me now, but too soon, perhaps, will death cause you to regret the past. As for Kent, his fate is sealed, provided John C. Colt is hanged. I say BEWARE!⁷

•   •   •

After days of “consuming anxiety,” Seward reached his decision on Friday, November 11—one week before the scheduled execution. It would be published in its entirety in Saturday’s Albany Evening Journal and, in succeeding days, reprinted in newspapers throughout the country.

Those friends and supporters of John who hoped for—even expected—a pardon would have been heartened by Seward’s preliminary remarks, since he began his review of the case by acknowledging that the crime had not been premeditated. At the same time, Seward noted, the victim “was a meek and inoffensive man. He was unarmed, and visited the prisoner, although under excitement, yet without any hostile purpose; and when the remains of the deceased were found, the head, fractured with certainly five and probably more wounds, no longer retained the human form.”

For Seward, the inordinate savagery of Colt’s attack ruled out the argument that it was made in self-defense. “Such a homicide could not have been accidental or necessary for self-defense,” he noted. “It was committed with a deadly weapon in a cruel and inhuman manner upon a defenseless and powerless man.”

For the accused to be convicted of the “milder” charge of manslaughter, the defense would have to show that he “was in imminent danger, and in the heat of passion, suddenly excited, intense, uncontrollable, and allowing no time for reflection, and that he did not design to produce death, and was unconscious that such a consequence might follow his violence.” The evidence, however, spoke loudly against such an assumption.

For Seward, as for virtually everyone else, it was John’s actions following the killing—his “almost superhuman” efforts to “remove the evidence of the fatal transaction”—that spoke most damningly against him. In the governor’s view, those actions could have been performed only by a man “guilty of deliberate and willful murder”:

Guilt seeks concealment … If the blood which had been spilled did not accuse the prisoner, he would not have endeavored to remove the stains it left. Much less would the accused have mutilated those remains and disposed of them in a manner, the very account of which produces a revolt of all the sympathies of the human heart.

As for John’s argument that his attempts at concealment were prompted by fear of public disgrace, Seward was having none of it:

Manslaughter, although declared to be a felony and punished as such, is regarded by the offender, as well as by society, as a misfortune rather than a crime. He who has committed it, if he possesses the common tendencies of our nature, deplores the injury he has done, but conscience vindicates him and sustains him against accusations of a higher crime. Society exacts his punishment with reluctance and he suffers no ignominy.

As much as anything else, it was John’s complete lack of contrition—the cool, unrepentant demeanor he had exhibited during his final courtroom appearance—that hardened Seward against him.

His conduct in relation to the crime and its consequences has been insincere, inhuman, relentless, and remorseless. He is vain, self-confident, and irreverent; imbued with false sentiments of honor, morality, justice, and virtue; and seems incapable of compunction for crime committed or sorrow for injuries inflicted. Penitence and resolutions to amend are indispensable, among other conditions, of pardon. No such conditions are offered in the present case. The prisoner has forgotten his victim, heaped insult upon his humble and bereaved family, defied the court, denounced the jury, and presented himself before the executive as an injured, not as a penitent man.

In the end, Seward could find no cause to “interpose his executive power between the sentence of the law and its execution.” For John C. Colt, “the expectation of pardon, the last hope of life, must be relinquished.”⁸

•   •   •

In making known his final determination—that all the impassioned pleas for clemency had failed and “the hopes entertained by many can no longer be cherished”—Seward expressed his “earnest wish that the few days which yet remain to the prisoner may be spent in preparing to appear before that dread tribunal appointed for all men.” Similar sentiments were conveyed in various newspaper accounts of Seward’s decision. In Monday’s New York Sun, for example, Moses Beach declared, “All hope for a melioration of the dread fate which the law has pronounced against the unfortunate John C. Colt has vanished, and he has now no alternative left him but to resign himself composedly to the embrace of death, to which on Friday next he must inevitably yield.”⁹

But Beach was wrong in one crucial regard. For John Colt, death might indeed be inevitable on “Friday next.” But as he would prove, there were other alternatives left him besides resigning himself composedly to its embrace.

55

Despite the evident finality of Seward’s decision, three dozen members of the New York State Bar Association met on Tuesday morning, November 15, to draw up a petition demanding a reprieve. That afternoon, the group set out for Albany to present its case to the governor in person. At the same time, John’s lawyers notified Sheriff Monmouth Hart that, because of a legal technicality, the warrant for Colt’s execution was invalid and “should not be carried into effect.” Hart—who had developed strong sympathies for Colt and had sent Seward his own letter protesting the sentence “on the ground of the injustice of the verdict”—seemed more than willing to refuse “the painful and disgraceful task.”¹

Even so, preparations for the execution proceeded apace. A wagon was dispatched to New Jersey to bring back the gallows and rope used to hang Peter Robinson, the New Brunswick carpenter who had perpetrated the shockingly sadistic murder of banker Abraham Suydam two years earlier. According to the abolitionist and moral reformer Lydia Maria Child, this measure was taken for no other reason than to add one more “bitter drop” to “the dreadful cup of vengeance.” “As the memory of Robinson was execrated more than other criminals,” wrote Child, “they sent for his gallows to add to the degradation”—to “give an additional pang” of humiliation to the proud Colt by treating him no differently from the most reviled murderer in recent memory.²

As the day of the execution approached, it seemed as if New Yorkers could talk of nothing else. “Colt is the all-engrossing topic,” wrote the noted attorney and indefatigable diarist George Templeton Strong.³ To those, like Lydia Child, who regarded the death penalty as a holdover from a barbaric past—“legalized murder in cold blood”—and believed Colt to have been unjustly condemned, the city appeared to be in the grip of a primitive bloodlust. “The very spirit of murder was rife” among the populace, Child lamented. “They were swelling with revenge, and eager for blood.”⁴ With space for no more than three hundred witnesses in the courtyard of the Tombs, printed invitations to the hanging—“You are respectfully invited to witness the execution of John C. Colt”—became the most coveted items in town.⁵

To the very end, John’s defenders refused to give up. When Seward refused the request of the thirty-six lawyers who had traveled to Albany—dismissing them as “seditious”—John’s counsel made another desperate appeal to Chancellor Walworth, “praying that the Chancellor will reconsider his refusal to allow a writ of error.” “His friends are still moving heaven and earth to save him,” wrote George Templeton Strong, who, as late as Thursday, felt that there was “still an even chance” of a reprieve.⁶

For a moment, it seemed as if the “persevering pleaders” on John’s behalf had succeeded. Late Thursday afternoon, a rumor swept through the city that Colt had been reprieved until January. Though “confidently repeated and believed by everyone,” it was quickly proved to be unfounded. “Colt’s second application to the Chancellor was met by a peremptory refusal,” Strong recorded in his journal that evening, “and as there was no hope of success with the Governor, his last chance is gone.” By then, even Sheriff Hart had announced that he would, after all, go through with the hanging. Given the prevailing sentiment among the citizenry, Hart feared that he himself might be lynched if he refused to carry out his duty.⁷

It was the Reverend Dr. Henry Anthon who delivered the devastating news to John. Rector of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, Anthon—who was “firmly convinced of John’s innocence”—had been approached by Sam to “attend to the spiritual welfare” of his brother.⁸ He was with John in his cell when Sheriff Hart called him aside. Hart—who could not bring himself to tell John—begged Anthon to perform the awful task and “to ask John at what hour tomorrow he wished to be executed.”

Though John professed to be unafraid of death—“Let come the worst, I shall die as calm as any man died,” he had boldly declared in one of his published letters—his reaction belied his bravado. At the news, he “flung himself on the bed and rocked there in agony for a moment or two.”

At length, John regained his composure, sat upright, and—in a ragged voice—said: “Sunset.”⁹

56

The temperature never rose above twenty-eight degrees on Friday, November 18. There was, of course, no such measurement as “windchill factor” back then, but the stiff wind from the west must have made it feel considerably colder. Throughout much of the day, dark, lowering clouds hung over the city like a pall.¹

None of this deterred the eager crowd that began gathering outside the city prison at daybreak. By 8:00 a.m., according to one contemporary, “the Tombs was literally besieged by a mob, blocking every street around it, all assembled … to gaze eagerly at the walls that contained the miserable prisoners and to catch what rumors they could of what was going on within them.” Eventually, their number would swell to the thousands—men, women, and children—some having traveled from as far away as New Hampshire.²

A group of police officers under the charge of A.M.C. Smith was stationed at the prison entrance “to prevent the ingress of any except those who had tickets of admission.” No women were to be allowed inside, and a few could be heard complaining loudly of their exclusion. As the hour of the execution approached, the rooftops of all the surrounding buildings would be packed with spectators of both sexes and all ages, straining for a view of the courtyard. Despite the bitter weather, a holiday air prevailed.³

•   •   •

John had not slept that night. Seated at his table, he had passed the hours writing letters to friends and family members. He had just set down his quill and was blotting the last of these missives when his brother appeared at his cell door. The time was approximately 6:30 a.m. After a few minutes of intense discussion, Sam left again on an errand.

Roughly an hour later, William Dolson, a barber who operated a shop on Centre Street and was commonly known as “Deaf Bill,” arrived by prearrangement to give John a final shave under the watchful eye of Deputy Sheriff Frederic L. Vultee. No sooner had Dolson departed than a young man brought in a basket containing John’s breakfast, prepared at a local eatery called Cowder’s Victualling Cellar. John was finishing up his last meal when the Reverend Dr. Anthon arrived at precisely 9:00.⁴

Though the two men had known each other only for a few days, their hours together spent in prayer, spiritual conversation, and discourse over doctrines like original sin and predestination had forged a close bond between them. Rising from his breakfast to greet Anthon warmly, John offered the minister his chair, then seated himself at the foot of his bed. Reaching over to take a small package from the table, he handed it to Anthon and asked him to open it. Inside were a bunch of gold coins and bank notes, amounting to five hundred dollars.

Explaining that he had received the money that morning from his brother, John asked Anthon to deposit it in a savings bank and see that it was doled out to Caroline at the rate of twenty dollars per month to help support her and their newborn child. He spoke fervently of “how anxious he was that the mother and child should lead a virtuous life and the child be duly educated.” Anthon, deeply moved by John’s solicitude for the welfare of Caroline and the baby, gave way to tears and vowed to assume responsibility for the child’s religious upbringing.

The longest of the letters John had written that night was addressed to his son. After reading it aloud to Anthon—who found himself “overpowered with emotions”—John sealed it in an envelope and passed it to the minister, explaining that it was “to be kept for his small child until it shall be old enough to understand its contents.” He then told Anthon that he had one final favor to ask. He and Caroline wished to be married. Would Anthon perform the ceremony?

Anthon, without hesitation, assented.⁵

•   •   •

During each of his preceding visits with John, Anthon had “pressed upon him the indispensable necessity as one mark of true penitence of a confession of the sin for which he had been condemned.” He now exhorted him again to make a clean breast. As he had done on every previous occasion, John “solemnly declared that he committed the act in self-defense.”

“I have said so again and again,” he exclaimed with a catch in his voice. “But what is the use? They will not believe it, they will not believe it.”

“Will you carry this as your confession to the bar of God?” asked Anthon, reaching over to clasp John by the hand.

“I am full prepared to do so,” John replied. “I would not die with a lie upon my lips.”

Satisfied, Anthon suggested that they “spend the time profitably in prayer” and asked John “if there was any passage in the Bible in particular he wished to read.”

“I will leave the selection to you,” said John.

Taking up his Bible, Anthon proceeded to recite passages from Luke 15:7 (“I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance”), 2 Corinthians 5:1 (“For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”), and Luke 18:35–43 (in which Jesus restores sight to the blind man at Jericho).

Anthon read until 10:00, then—assuring John that he would be nearby—retreated to a vacant cell two doors down the corridor, “leaving the prisoner alone to his own reflections.”⁶

•   •   •

Even as John communed with his spiritual counselor, he could hear the activity in the prison yard, where the gallows was being erected directly outside his window.

This gallows did not operate by conventional means. There was no elevated scaffold upon which the condemned man stood, nor a trap through which he plunged to his death. Instead, as one contemporary described the apparatus, “The culprit stands on the ground and is lifted up by means of pulleys and a rope to which is attached about 250 pounds. This weight is held at the top of the cross piece by a small cord which is cut by a hatchet, when the weight descends and the doomed man is suspended with a suddenness that is supposed to destroy at once all consciousness.”⁷

Though the hanging was not scheduled until late afternoon, invited witnesses began arriving early in the morning so that they could get the most advantageous views of the gallows. By noon, the courtyard was so packed that late arrivals could be heard complaining that Colt “was not to be hung high enough for those in the back of the crowd to see him.”⁸

•   •   •

John’s lawyers Dudley Selden and Robert Emmett showed up at his cell at around 11:00 in the company of their colleague David Graham, Jr., who had just returned from his futile visit to Governor Seward in Albany. Informed of their arrival, Anthon returned to John’s cell to prepare for the ceremony.

Roughly fifty minutes later, Caroline was escorted into the cell by Sam and John Howard Payne. She was “attired in a straw bonnet, green shawl, claret colored cloak trimmed with red cord, and a muff.” Though she managed a brave smile, “her appearance denoted much anxiety, and she was much thinner than when a witness at the trial.”⁹ At precisely noon—in the presence of Sam, Payne, the three attorneys, Justice Gilbert Merritt, and Sheriff Monmouth Hart—John and Caroline were wed by the Reverend Dr. Anthon. “The mistress became by law a wife,” as one historian put it, “and the same law decreed that in four short hours she would become a widow.”¹⁰

The strange, somber nuptials would, in coming days, inspire the penny papers to new extremes of overwrought wonder. “What a bridal scene!” marveled one reporter. “The marriage hall a prison cell! The prospect from the bridal window the bridegroom’s gallows on which he was sentenced to die a felon’s death in a few short hours. What an anticipation for a bride! Ere the setting of the sun to mourn over the ignominious grave of him with whom her reputation and fortunes were just linked by the sacred ties of love and matrimony!”¹¹

At John’s request, he and Caroline were left alone to bid each other farewell. While Anthon retired to the nearby vacant cell, Sam, John Howard Payne, and the three attorneys waited in the corridor, where Sheriff Hart paced ceaselessly up and down, “evidently deeply affected by the shocking duty he was about to perform.”¹²

Shortly afterward, Anthon called Sam into his cell and gently asked if “he had made arrangements to provide for the internment.” At the question, Sam “was completely overcome.” “Oh,” he cried, “I did not think it would come to this!”

Seeing his anguish, Anthon “felt no hesitation in offering temporary use of a vault in St. Mark’s and the services of the sexton.” Sam, in a voice quaking with emotion, offered a fervent thanks before stepping back into the hallway.¹³

At one o’clock—“the honeymoon of an hour” having ended—Sam reentered the cell “where John was still engaged in conversation with his wife, who was sitting at the foot of his bed, convulsed with tears.”¹⁴ By then the Colts’ friend Lewis Gaylord Clark had arrived at the prison. At John’s request, Clark and Payne, along with the three lawyers, were admitted into his cell, where tearful good-byes were exchanged.

A few minutes later, the five visitors, all weeping openly, stepped back out into the corridor, leaving Sam and Caroline alone with John for another ten minutes. When Sam finally emerged, he looked, according to one observer, “even more ghastly than the condemned man.” For her part, Caroline “could scarcely support herself, so violent were her feelings and acute her sufferings. She stood at the door of the cell for a minute—Colt kissed her passionately—strained her to his bosom—and watched as her receding form passed into the corridor. Here she stood and sobbed convulsively as though her heart would break for five minutes. At last she was led away by Colt’s brother, and his friends followed.”¹⁵

•   •   •

Once his loved ones were gone, John asked to speak privately with Sheriff Hart. Making a last desperate appeal, John proclaimed once again that he had not meant to kill Adams, and “begged the sheriff to postpone the execution.” Hart, steeling himself against his own sympathies, replied that “it was impossible to delay any longer than 4 o’clock, and John must now prepare himself to die.”

John appeared to submit. Extracting his watch from his vest pocket, he synchronized it with Hart’s, then asked to see Dr. Anthon. The moment Anthon entered the cell, John took him by the arm and said, “Now, let us pray.”

“O my God, I come to thee,” John began, as the two men knelt side by side. He then “poured out his soul in prayer, supplicating for his wife, his child, friends and enemies,” while Anthon “exhorted him to die with Christian fortitude.”¹⁶

After ten minutes, Anthon got to his feet and retreated to the vacant cell “to count the minutes until four o’clock.”¹⁷ John then asked his keeper, Mr. Green, “to let him be alone until the last moment.” His cell door was closed, Green remaining just outside.

About an hour later, at around 2:40 p.m., a deputy sheriff named John Hillyer came by to bid John farewell. He was admitted into the cell, where John—who had been walking back and forth—shook him warmly by the hand and said, “God bless you, and may you prosper in this life, which is soon to close on me.” Hillyer, deeply moved, then took his leave—the cell door was locked—and John was left all alone.¹⁸

•   •   •

As the execution hour approached, the mob outside the prison walls—which had been “horribly boisterous throughout the day”—grew even more raucous, sending up, in the words of one reporter, “a continuous and dissonant shout as of ten thousand voices. It seemed like the hungry cry of an army of wild beasts, eager for their prey.”¹⁹

Within the packed prison yard, there were also some who seemed giddy with excitement—“buoyant with the ecstasy of anticipation.” On the whole, however, the prevailing mood was solemn. Among the witnesses were judges and aldermen, legislators and lawyers, police magistrates and other civil functionaries. There were also “several members of the theatrical profession, anxious to catch a glimpse of a real death scene, which they have so often mimicked on the stage,” as well as various “members of the press, shuddering at the painful duty they were required to perform.”²⁰

At 3:50 p.m., a group of police officers armed with long wooden staves came out into the yard and cleared a path in the crowd for the condemned man to pass through on his way to the gallows. By then the strong west wind that had been gusting all day had cleared the sky of clouds. Overhead, “the planet Venus was distinctly visible in the broad glare of the day, notwithstanding the brilliancy of the sun’s rays.” Within the prison yard, out on the surrounding streets, and throughout the city, people turned their eyes heavenward to marvel at the sight. In the days to come, many would “regard it as a portent.”²¹

•   •   •

Sheriff Hart had given John as much time as possible. At 3:50 he went to the cell to escort the doomed man to the gallows. With him were his deputy, J. C. Westervelt, and the Reverend Dr. Anthon, who was clutching his prayer book.

Keeper Green unlocked the door. Anthon, who was in the lead, stepped inside the cell. Immediately he let out a cry, threw up his hands as if to shield his eyes, and backed out into the corridor, “pale as death.” As he staggered back to the vacant cell, Sheriff Hart hurried to John’s cot.

Mouth agape, sightless eyes halfway open, John was stretched out at full length, “as if laid out for a funeral by others.” His bloody hands lay crossed on his belly. Jutting from the center of his shirt was the handle of a clasp knife, its blade buried deep in his chest.

For a moment, Hart merely stared down at the corpse. Then, removing the glove from one hand, he touched John’s cheek. The skin, he testified afterward, was “still warm.”²²

•   •   •

A tense, expectant silence had descended on the crowd within the prison yard. All eyes were turned toward the doorway from which the condemned man was to emerge at any moment. All at once, an officer of the police court, Andrew J. Campbell, burst through the doorway and ran toward the gallows.

“He’s committed suicide!” shouted Campbell. “Colt is dead in his cell!”²³

At that very instant, a cry rang out from somewhere in the crowd. “The prison is on fire! The prison is on fire!”

Overhead, a great stream of flame and smoke billowed from the prison roof. As the witnesses gazed upward in shock and confusion, the Franklin Street gate burst open, and the mob that had waited outside all day began to pour through.²⁴

•   •   •

At the sight of poor Colt’s blood-soaked body, the Reverend Dr. Anthon felt he might faint. He had just managed to make his way back to the vacant cell and sink onto the cot. It took a full five minutes before he recovered his senses. Now, seated upright on the edge of the bed, he became aware of a great commotion outside the window: shouts, screams, cries of alarm. His first thought was “that the mob had risen and was storming the Tombs.” Only gradually did he become aware of another sound: the clanging of the City Hall bell, signaling a fire.²⁵

•   •   •

Fanned by the strong westerly wind, the blaze was quickly out of control. By the time the volunteer members of Southwark Engine Company 38 arrived on the scene from Nassau Street, the seventy-foot-high wooden cupola on the rooftop of the Tombs was totally engulfed in flames.

Unhitching their engine from the four-horse team, the firemen—attired in their distinctive fitted jackets and leather helmets with long black brims—dragged it through the packed crowd into proximity with the blaze. Newly purchased from a company in Philadelphia, the engine—a handsome apparatus proudly maintained in spit-and-polish condition and operated by foldout “pumping brakes”—was capable of throwing water a horizontal distance of 180 feet from its central tank. Even with the most vigorous efforts of the forty-eight men required to operate the pump, however, the water could not shoot high enough to reach the conflagration. The fire was finally extinguished—but not before the entire cupola had burned down to the roof.²⁶

•   •   •

By then, Coroner Archibald Archer had arrived at John’s cell, where he found Sheriff Hart keeping watch over the body. Despite his suitably solemn mien, Hart—according to the testimony of one contemporary—could “ill conceal his relief” that he would not have to carry out the hanging.

Outside the prison walls, the prevailing mood was very different. Cheated of the hanging, the disappointed mob—in the words of the same observer—reacted “with fierce mutterings of frustrated rage.”²⁷ There were mutterings of another kind, too. Even before the ashes of the prison tower had cooled, wild rumors about John Colt’s suicide—conspiracy theories, as a later age would call them—had begun to circulate.

57

In the days leading up to the execution, reports that John’s friends were plotting elaborate, last-minute rescues had already appeared in the press. On Thursday afternoon, for example, the Herald claimed that “the sum of $1000 had been offered to each of three of the deputy keepers of the City Prison, provided they would connive at the escape of Colt by allowing him to dress in the clothes of Caroline Henshaw, who would be sent into his cell for that purpose.”¹ Even more improbable was a widely disseminated rumor that “employees of the Tombs had been bribed to cut down Colt’s body from the gallows while it was still warm and smuggle it quickly to the Shakespeare hotel at the corner of Fulton and Nassau Streets, where two doctors would restore it to life by the use of a galvanic battery.”²

However far-fetched, these stories reflected the widespread opinion that a man with as many wealthy and influential connections as John C. Colt would never be allowed to die on the gallows—that his powerful supporters would somehow contrive to save his life. In the minds of countless New Yorkers, the mysterious blaze that had broken out at the very moment of the scheduled hanging seemed a clear confirmation of this belief. By Friday evening, a story had “swept through the city that Samuel Colt had been arrested on suspicion of setting fire to the prison with a view to divert the attention of spectators and thus attempt a rescue.”³

•   •   •

Like every other rumor relating to the bizarre events of that day, this one was completely unfounded. Even as the city buzzed with false reports of his arrest, Sam was sitting in the Court of Sessions chamber, attending the coroner’s inquest.

Shortly after arriving at John’s cell that afternoon, Coroner Archer had summoned and sworn in a jury of twenty-two men. After viewing the body, they had repaired to the Halls of Justice to hear testimony from a dozen witnesses.

Dr. Alexander Hosack, who, along with the prison physician, John R. McComb, conducted the postmortem examination, “found that the suicide had been premeditated and arranged with mathematical accuracy. A hole two inches square had been cut out of the prisoner’s vest and shirt with the knife, so that nothing might interfere with the knife. Through this hole and into the body about a half an inch below the left nipple between the fourth and fifth ribs, the knife had been lodged. The left ventricle of the heart was pierced, to a depth of about an inch and a half with the four-inch blade.” It was a mark of John’s steely resolution that, with his last bit of strength, he had managed to “work and twist the knife round and round in his heart to puncture it as thoroughly as possible.”⁴

From McComb’s testimony, it was clear that John had been contemplating suicide for some time. A week before the execution date, he had asked the doctor “for a book on anatomy.” When McComb refused, John “then made a number of serious inquiries as to the location of the large veins and arteries of the body, evincing a disposition to ascertain at which particular point death would be the most easily and effectually produced.”⁵

Sheriff Hart, informed by McComb of these highly suspicious queries, had confiscated the buckhorn-handled penknife that John used to sharpen his writing quills. John had subsequently sneered at this measure, remarking “that such precautions were useless, inasmuch as if he wished to kill himself, he could open his veins with his teeth.”⁶

In the event, of course, John had not been compelled to rely on his incisors. Someone had smuggled the suicide weapon into his cell. Questioned by the coroner, the various witnesses—Hart, deputies Westervelt, Vultee, and Green, Keeper William Jones, the Reverend Dr. Anthon, Sam, and Caroline (referred to in the papers for the first time as “Caroline Colt”)—all testified that they “had no knowledge of how the deceased came into possession of the knife.”

Once the last witness was examined, Coroner Archer charged the jury “that if any evidence had been furnished of any person having given the knife to Colt, he could be indicted for manslaughter; but as no such evidence was furnished, the jury would simply find what was the cause and manner of the death of the deceased.”

The jury then retired and, after a brief absence, returned with a verdict “that John C. Colt came to his death by a wound inflicted by himself but the jury are unable to say in what manner he came to be possessed of said knife.”

Immediately following the inquest, John’s body, which had been placed in a coffin, was transported to the Dead House. Early the next morning, in keeping with the Reverend Dr. Anthon’s offer, it was conveyed to St. Mark’s Church and, in the presence of Sam, Caroline, John Howard Payne, and several other of John’s friends, interred in a vault.⁷

•   •   •

As for the mysterious conflagration, it took another day or two for the cause to be determined. Suspicious as it seemed, there turned out to be a perfectly straightforward explanation. Because of the wintry weather, the watchman stationed in the tower, who habitually warmed himself by a potbellied stove installed for that purpose, had made a particularly large fire that afternoon. At a few minutes before four o’clock, he had left his post to view the execution. No sooner had he gone than “the stove-pipe became red-hot and set fire to the cupola roof.”⁸

Precisely because it was so simple, this explanation failed to convince many people. In the view of countless conspiracy-minded observers, the blaze was just too coincidental to be anything other than a diversionary tactic. Despite all evidence to the contrary, there were those who did not and never would believe that John Caldwell Colt had died on November 18, 1842.