Conclusion
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On Sunday, November 20, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Hanson Cox of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn preached what the Herald described as “an able and eloquent sermon on murder.” Inspired by the tragic denouement of the Colt affair, he “dwelt at some length upon the crime of self-murder, regarding it as little less heinous than the murder of a fellow being.”
In Cox’s view, suicide was symptomatic of social and moral decline, being especially prevalent—so he claimed—in such decadent foreign capitals as London and Paris. Alarmingly, said Cox, “the cities of the United States, if they had not actually overtaken their trans-Atlantic sisters in this respect, were close upon their heels.” This national surge in suicide was a deeply worrisome development—“one which,” he argued, “demanded the solemn considerations of every right-minded and patriotic citizen.”1
Cox was hardly the only one to draw large, portentous lessons from John’s suicide. In the days and weeks following the “bloody close” of the Colt affair, magazines and newspapers were full of editorials that turned the tragedy into a cautionary tale. In the evangelical press, John was widely portrayed as an unbeliever, a man who—despite his professions of faith—“seems to have been under the influence of a false system of morals—a perverted sense of honor—and a sentiment that is at utter variance with the mysterious revelations of Christianity.”2 As such, his fate was foreordained. As one midwestern journal put it, “An educated man without religion is like a ship without ballast, the sport of every breeze, a mere toy and whim-wham with no mastery over himself or power of resisting the evil influences of others.”3
For others in the evangelical community, the problem wasn’t John’s wholesale rejection of religion but rather the particular brand of Christianity he purportedly embraced. In one of his published letters, as well as in his reported final conversation with the Reverend Dr. Anthon, John had expressed scorn for the orthodox Calvinist beliefs in original sin and eternal damnation for all but the elect. “God is one of infinite goodness,” he had asserted. “Agreeably to my views, it is as absurd to suppose that the Creator would inflict an infinite punishment upon one of his creatures as it is to suppose in the first place that he created man as sin. Man is doubtless punished according to deeds done in the body.”4
In thus affirming “the cherishing hope he entertained of a happy hereafter, his trust in the efficacy of the divine atonement, and his disbelief in endless punishment,” John—in the view of many observers—had aligned himself with the movement known as Universalism. This small but increasingly popular sect held to the highly controversial doctrine of eternal salvation for all humankind: the concept that punishment for earthly sins ends at death and that every departed soul ascends to heaven.5 In the view of its many critics, this heretical notion was little more than a license to sin. “Without the threat of retribution, human beings were left morally adrift, fell victim to the baser passions, and doomed society,” went the argument.6 They also contended that, among its other “bad moral effects,” Universalism led logically to suicide:
For if our existence, in this world, be uncomfortable, why may we not put an end at once to misery and enter into blessedness? Indeed, according to the clearest dictates of universalist reason, if a man finds himself sunk into degradation and misery, self-destruction becomes an imperious duty; for by it “we ascend instantly from the condition of a downtrodden, suffering sinful mortal to that of a glorious, exalted, immortal spirit.” Many have acted on these principles.7
In “the manner of his life and death”—committing both murder and suicide while serenely espousing a faith in his ultimate salvation—Colt, in the opinion of the enemies of Universalism, served as a striking illustration “of the nefarious influence of that doctrine which denies the future eternal punishment of the wicked.”8
There was, of course, one major problem with this argument, as defenders of Universalism were quick to point out: namely, that Colt had at no time ever been affiliated with the denomination. “Colt a Universalist!” scoffed a writer for the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine. “Was he ever known as a Universalist? Did he ever attend a Universalist church? Was he ever connected with Universalism in any way?”
Even assuming for the sake of argument that Colt was a Universalist, read the article, “what then?” Did that prove “that Universalism leads to murder and suicide?” Turning the tables on his orthodox foes, he quite reasonably pointed out “that probably nineteen-twentieths of those who have died on the gallows have believed unhesitatingly in the doctrine of endless misery. What will this fact prove? It will prove with a force equal to nineteen to one that the doctrine of endless misery leads to murder and other capital offenses.”9
• • •
If the Colt tragedy became instant fodder for the enemies of Universalism, it also fed into other raging controversies of the time. One remarkable editorial, echoing the arguments of early feminists like Margaret Fuller, used the Colt case to attack the lack of intellectual opportunities for women. Deploring the prevailing philosophy of female education—which held that too much schooling rendered a woman unfit for her proper household duties—this writer maintained that John’s downfall was the result not of his faulty religious training but of his mother’s deficient education:
The idea appears to be entertained that an educated woman is unfitted for the exercise of those domestic qualities which render the fireside and the home happy and attractive. But how sadly erroneous is it! It is an educated, an intellectual woman alone who can render the fireside permanently attractive—it is she alone who can properly contribute to domestic enjoyment—she alone who can understand and discharge the important duties and responsibilities devolving upon a mother … Had not the mind of Washington received its impulse and taken its course from an intelligent and virtuous mother’s influence, can it be presumed that he would ever have been saluted with the proud title of “His country’s deliverer,” or have been a model for all that is great and noble in morals and politics? And had the naturally wayward propensities of Colt been checked and restrained in infancy and youth by a mother’s head, and his moral qualities sufficiently cultivated, far different doubtless would have been his fate.10
Other reformers invoked the Colt case in their assault on capital punishment, a battle that grew into a sweeping nationwide campaign during the early 1840s.11 In her best-selling essay collection Letters from New-York, activist Lydia Maria Child—a powerful voice in the anti-gallows movement—described with bitter woe the “convulsive excitement” that pervaded her supposedly “Christian community” in the tense days leading up to John’s planned execution:
The effect of executions on all brought within their influence is evil and nothing but evil. For a fortnight past, this whole city has been kept in a state of corroding excitement … Each day, hope and fear alternated; the natural effect of all this was to have the whole thing regarded as a game, in which the criminal might or might not become the winner. Worse than all this was the horrible amount of diabolical passions excited. The hearts of men were filled with murder; they gloated over the thoughts of vengeance, and were rabid to witness a fellow-creature’s agony.12
In a similar vein, Horace Greeley—though agreeing with the jury’s verdict—deplored the ugly passions incited by Colt’s death sentence. “We hope that this tragedy in all its proportions has done much to hasten the abolition of the Punishment of Death,” he editorialized in the Tribune:
What has been the influence of the Punishment of Death in this case? What moral effects have been produced by its existence? Have we not seen the community divided with regard to the justice of the sentence?… Not from compassion to criminals but from regard to the community—whose sympathies and whose feelings are so unhealthily excited by public executions—whose abhorrence of crime and reverence for laws are confused and disturbed by these deeds of legal butchery—we demand the abolition of the Punishment of Death.13
Perhaps the most intriguing of all the editorials to appear in the wake of John’s suicide was a piece in the November 24 issue of the New York Sun. Headlined “The Moral of the Recent Tragedy,” the essay is remarkable for its psychological sophistication and acuity: its recognition of the extent to which our actions are motivated by what a later age would call unconscious impulses.
The “fearful drama” of the Colt affair, the author writes, teaches “how little we know ourselves—what strangers we are to our evil propensities … and how terrible and uncontrollable is the wild tempest of human passions when once they obtain the mastery over the reason and the conscience”:
But a few short summers since, John C. Colt was sporting round the hearth of fond parents in all the gaiety and glee of child-like innocence. And but a few months since, he was threading the devious path of life with all the pride and ambition of self-confident youth. Who that might have seen him at either period of life would not have been appalled at the thought that his career was to be in crime—in blood—in double murder? Had he been told as he walked abroad erect among his gay companions that such would be his fate, how would his eye have kindled and his bosom swelled with deep and irrepressible indignation? And yet, young men of New York, he did it all. He knew not himself, and was not master of his fierce and desolating passions.
“Let us be admonished by this terrible example,” the writer concludes. “Let us ask—Do we know ourselves any better than he knew himself? Do we comprehend, and have we the fixed moral principle, the high moral energy, to control the fearful volcano of human passions whose maddened fires roar and blaze within our bosoms?”14
In its avoidance of pat moralizing—its acknowledgment that, operating beneath our awareness, there are dark, destructive drives that can only be neutralized through a process of deep and ruthless introspection—this article strikes a singularly contemporary note. Though it was published anonymously, scholars have since identified its author as the twenty-three-year-old journalist Walt Whitman.15
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While preachers, pundits, and crusaders of various stripes put the Colt case to their own particular uses, the public continued to traffic in rumor and gossip. “The fever of excitement into which our city was lashed on Friday has subsided but little and continues to rage in all circles,” reported the Sun on Monday, November 21. New Yorkers, the paper continued, were in the grip of “a perfect Colt mania.”1
The most persistent story had it that the dead body found in John’s cell was that of a “pauper convict” and that, during the tumult of the fire, John himself had been smuggled out of the prison and put on a ship bound for France.2 Among those who accepted that John had in fact committed suicide, speculation swirled around the source of the suicide weapon. With the exception of the Reverend Dr. Anthon, virtually everyone who had visited John during his final hours was suspected of having supplied him with the fatal pocketknife, though the consensus seemed to be that it had been “concealed in the long clothes of the baby that Caroline Henshaw carried with her into the cell when she went there to be married.”3 That the infant, according to every newspaper account, had not been present at the ceremony did nothing to dampen the rumor.
One particularly disturbing story quickly made the rounds. It was recorded by George Templeton Strong, who heard it from George Anthon, son of the clergyman. In his diary entry of November 22, Strong notes that John had been “reluctantly persuaded into” suicide in order “to spare his family” the ignominy of the gallows. Exactly who did the persuading was left unsaid; though as the world knew, only one member of John’s family had been at his side throughout the ordeal and had much to lose by having the Colt name besmirched with the permanent taint of dishonor.4
At the same time that this rumor reached Strong’s ears, James Gordon Bennett was publicizing another, unsubstantiated story. In addition to the suicide, John’s last-minute marriage to Caroline—“the strange and somber bridal,” as one penny paper called it—had been a subject of intense speculation.5 Most people assumed that John had wed his mistress for noble motives: to “redeem the character of the unfortunate woman” and to legitimize their out-of-wedlock son.6 Bennett, however, claimed that there was another and far less admirable reason.
“Circumstances that have recently come into our possession,” wrote Bennett, had persuaded him that Colt and Caroline were actually married “in Philadelphia before the murder of Adams took place in this city. After this deed was committed, it became necessary that she should be used as a witness, and knowing that her testimony could not be received as the wife of Colt, she was introduced as plain Caroline Henshaw, and for the purpose of carrying out the deception as originally practiced, the marriage ceremony was again performed, in order to blind the eyes of the world to the previous transaction.”
To Bennett, this somewhat tortured story offered the only plausible rationale “for the commission of an act that, under any other circumstances, appears perfectly inexplicable.”7 There was, however, another explanation for John and Caroline’s marriage, one so shocking that many years would pass before it was brought to light.
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The infant son born to Caroline Henshaw had been named Samuel Colt, Jr.—a tribute, so the world assumed, to Sam’s steadfast devotion to his brother. For the rest of his life, Sam would look after the boy and his mother. His efforts on their behalf began shortly after John’s death, when he sought help from a woman who had long proven herself a friend to the outcast and oppressed: Lydia Maria Child.
Born outside of Boston in 1802, Child taught for a time at a girls’ school before achieving prominence as the author of the historical novel Hobomok, published when she was just twenty-two. A few years later, she founded the pioneering children’s magazine the Juvenile Miscellany, then turned out a series of popular domestic advice books, beginning with The American Frugal Housewife. By the mid-1830s, Child had taken up the radical causes of abolitionism and women’s rights. After moving to Manhattan in 1841, she became editor of the abolitionist newspaper the National Anti-Slavery Standard, to which she contributed a regular column, “Letters from New-York,” later collected into the best-selling volume of the same name.
As Child’s chief biographer notes, these city sketches were remarkable, among other reasons, for their haunting, deeply sympathetic “vignettes that encapsulated the daily lives of the poor”:
a “ragged urchin” staggering under a load of newspapers, his face “blue, cold, and disconsolate,” his childish voice “prematurely cracked into shrillness by screaming street cries at the top of his lungs”; a woman “with garments all draggled in New-York gutters,” lying in the street where she had “fallen in intoxication”; two small girls with “scanty garments fluttering in the wind” and “blue hands … locked in each other” as they struggled through snow drifts and stopped every now and then to exchange the single “pair of broken shoes,” bound with rags, that they shared.1
Child’s widely read piece on John Colt, originally published in the November 24, 1842, issue of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, not only dealt with another of her causes—the crusade against capital punishment—but went out of its way to stress the estimable traits of John’s character. “I mean no extenuation of the awful crime of John C. Colt when I say that, through the whole course of this terrible tragedy, he has shown the self-same qualities which men admire under the name of military greatness,” Child wrote. “The stern silence with which he shut up in his own breast his secrets and plans; his cool self-possession under circumstances that would have crazed a common brain; his bold defiance of the law, which he regarded as a powerful enemy; the strong pride which bore him up under a long imprisonment and prompted him to suicide; all these indicate such elements of character as military heroes are made of.” Mrs. Child also praised Sam, who “never forsook his disgraced and suffering brother; but sustained him throughout by his presence and sympathy; and made almost superhuman efforts to save him from his untimely end.”2
Whether Sam and Mrs. Child were already friends when this essay was written is unclear, though the two shared a mutual acquaintance in Lydia Huntley Sigourney.3 In any event, within two weeks of John’s suicide, Sam had approached Mrs. Child to solicit her aid in finding suitable living arrangements for his brother’s widow and the infant boy he was determined to “treat as if he were his own son.” We know of Sam’s visit from a letter that Child addressed to her friend John Sullivan Dwight on December 1, 1842. A former Unitarian minister and key figure in the Transcendentalism movement, Dwight was at the time a teacher of Latin and music at Brook Farm, the Utopian commune established at West Roxbury, Massachusetts—the founding members of which included Nathaniel Hawthorne.4 Referring to Caroline, Mrs. Child wrote:
Mr. Colt’s brother has been to see me and consult with me about her. He says he believes her to be a modest, worthy girl; that she never formed any other connection than that with his unfortunate brother … He says he feels it a duty to do more for her than feed and clothe her; that he ought, as far as possible, to throw a protecting influence around her and the child whom he shall in all respects treat as if he were his own son. “I want to educate her,” says he; “to put her under influences that will make her a judicious mother for my brother’s son. But where shall I find a suitable place? I have thought of a country clergyman’s family; but she would be pointed at in a country village, and she would have little chance to improve intellectually; and in most cases there would not be that entire forgetfulness of her peculiar situation, which is desirable.” I at once thought of the West Roxbury Community, and mentioned it; at the same time telling him that you were so much crowded that I thought it not very likely you could take her. I had otherfears than those of your being crowded. I thought you might perhaps fear the “speech of people.” But, my dear friend, this is a real case of a fellow creature fallen among thieves, wounded and bleeding by the wayside. If she were a loose woman, I would be the last to propose such a thing. But I think she is not. She is, as I believe, an honest confiding young creature, the victim of a false state of society. She is almost heart-broken, and longs for seclusion, soothing influences, and instruction how to do her duty. If you, with your large and liberal views, and your clear perception of human brotherhood, if you, at West Roxbury, reject her, where, in the name of our common Father, can I find a shelter for her poor storm-pelted heart? … My soul is on its knees before you, to receive this poor shorn lamb of our Father’s flock. I am in agony, lest you should not listen to my supplications, for somehow or other, though a stranger to me, God has laid her upon my heart.
Mr. Colt seemed to leave the arrangements to me; but I thought his idea was to have her board with you for a year, doing what conveniently she could, consistently with the care of her child; and you to make such deductions from the price of board as her labors were worth; and if you found her a useful and pleasant inmate, to make such after arrangements about the education of the child, &c as should seem proper.5
• • •
Even as he coped with his grief and sought a haven for Caroline and his infant namesake, Sam pressed on with his submarine battery project. Two more public demonstrations of his remote-controlled underwater mine had followed the first. In August 1842, before an audience that included President John Tyler and members of his Cabinet, he had blown up a sixty-ton schooner moored 150 yards offshore in the Potomac River. Another spectacular display took place on October 18—just a month before John’s execution date—when Sam’s destruction of a 260-ton target vessel in New York Harbor was witnessed by an estimated forty thousand spectators.6
To be sure, there were powerful politicians who opposed Sam’s undertaking. Notable among them was Representative John Quincy Adams, the former U.S. president. Ignoring the old adage about love and war, Adams believed that the use of submarine mines was unsporting, and that if enemy ships were to be blown up “at all, it should be done by fair and honest” means. Despite Adams’s objections, however, Congress voted to appropriate a substantial sum to Sam’s ongoing experiments.7
• • •
Historical records do not indicate whether Mrs. Child succeeded in securing a yearlong residency at Brook Farm for Caroline and baby Sam. What is certain is that by early 1844—while continuing his experiments and arranging for a fourth and final demonstration of his invention—Sam was casting about for another suitable position for Caroline.
The evidence is contained in several letters from his brother James. By then, the twenty-eight-year-old James had been admitted to the bar and fought a pistol duel over an “amorous relationship” with the wife of a fellow lawyer—a scandal that did nothing to impede his rapid advancement to judge of the St. Louis Criminal Court.8
Though Sam’s own letters do not survive, it is clear from James’s responses that by early 1844, Caroline had received enough education to teach school out west. That, at any rate, was the life Sam now imagined for her. James, however, consistently discouraged this plan.
“In relation to Caroline’s coming out to this city for the purpose of teaching school,” he wrote from St. Louis on February 23, 1844, “I cannot, now, recommend it for several reasons … The west is full of surplus teachers and every day do I see instances of both males and females who are entirely destitute of a means of living … This city is full of teachers and all of them are distressed for the want of patronage.”9
Eight months later, the ever-persistent Sam was still pressing James to find a teaching job for Caroline. James, however, continued to resist, adding a new argument to his original objection: that, besides being “literally filled with teachers and governesses,” the West, with its relatively loose and lawless moral atmosphere, was no place for a vulnerable young woman like Caroline.
“I have made repeated suggestions to some of my female acquaintances, to such persons who would be most likely to aid me with their counsel, and have invariably met with no encouragement whatsoever,” he wrote to Sam on October 11, 1844. “Their answer is if you want to save her character, do not permit her to come here … The waywardness of the western people would lead her to be very much exposed and this in no way could be prevented. She would be almost as much so here as she would be if she were ‘at large’ in NY … The whole west is made up of new settlers, adventurers, and speculators, and among such people what could she expect?”
In the same letter, James offered an alternative proposal:
My plan for Caroline is this. Next winter if it is possible one of us goes into Virginia or North or South Carolina and to some of the old and worthy families there, represent her situation, and if possible—to secure her a home among some of them. In Virginia among the old families the feeling of true chivalry is of much higher standards than in comparative new countries, and it is so in North and South Carolina. In these states they have private teachers. Here we have none nor governesses. A situation could be found where her feelings would be respected and she could enjoy herself in a little society … The family should be of high moral tone and there are many such as I am informed by Virginians and North and South Carolinians who are here. She could make herself useful and become, there, an ornament to her sex. Besides, the noble little boy would come under the best influences. The New England influences would be too bigoted or rather too severe, the western too careless, but the Virginian, &c would be of that character that would lead him to feel that all he may hope for in the future would alone depend upon himself (I mean so far as character is concerned), which he would meet with noble examples of success and would receive encouragement the most liberal in his early travel of life.
Nothing in the historical record, however, suggests that either Sam or James followed through on this plan. Caroline and her “noble little boy,” so far as is known, never found refuge among the chivalrous slave-holding families of the South.
• • •
Just five days before the first of these letters was written, Sam’s hope of securing a big military contract was dealt a serious blow. On February 18, 1844, he lost his main government advocate, Abel Upshur—recently appointed secretary of state—who was killed on board the newly commissioned warship USS Princeton when one of her massive guns exploded during a demonstration.
Despite this setback, Sam forged ahead with preparations for his fourth and final demonstration, acquiring the 500-ton schooner Brunette for use as a target vessel. On April 13, 1844, as the ship—renamed the Styx “for its death cruise”—moved under full sail down the Potomac River, Sam set off his mines before a massive crowd of onshore spectators that included the president, his Cabinet, and members of Congress, who had adjourned for the occasion. In a great eruption of water, smoke, and timber, the ship was “instantly shattered to atoms.”10
As a pure pyrotechnical display, the destruction of the Styx, like Sam’s three preceding demonstrations, was a spectacular success. Military professionals, however, remained deeply skeptical of Sam’s system. “As experiments,” wrote one influential observer, “these, as many others, were very beautiful and striking, but in the practical application of this apparatus to purposes of war, we have no confidence.”11 By then, moreover, the United States and Great Britain had reached an agreement over several disputed border issues, eliminating the threat of Anglo-American hostilities and the need for a costly harbor defense system.
In the end, nothing would come of Sam’s invention. Though he was compensated for “personal expenses incurred during his experiments,” Congress refused to commit additional funds to the project. After devoting more than three years to its development and promotion, Sam was forced to abandon the venture. Its failure was “one of his greatest personal disappointments.”12
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For a while, he channeled his unquenchable energies into a collaboration with his friend Samuel Morse, setting up a business called the New York and Offing Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Association, a subscription service for stock traders, commodity speculators, newspaper editors, and other professionals who stood to profit from receiving overseas news ahead of their competitors. Stationed at the westernmost tip of Coney Island, a fleet of fast sloops maintained by the company would sail out to meet incoming vessels and gather the latest information from abroad, which was then flashed via telegraph to Manhattan. Like every other enterprise he had thrown himself into, however, Sam’s wire service failed to live up to his hopes. By 1846, the thirty-two-year-old inventor was permanently done with telegraphy and as financially hard pressed as ever.1
• • •
It was the bloodshed on the Texas frontier that finally made Samuel Colt’s fortune.
In June 1844—in a real-life version of a scenario that would become a cliché of countless Western movies—a band of fifteen Texas Rangers under the leadership of the legendary Major John Coffee Hays encountered a war party of eighty Comanches along the Pedernales River. The Comanches were renowned as “the finest light cavalry in the world,” each warrior capable of letting fly a half dozen lethally aimed arrows in a matter of seconds while riding bareback at full gallop. Expecting an easy victory over the badly outnumbered Rangers—armed, so the Indians assumed, with their usual single-shot muzzle loaders—the Comanches were thrown into confusion when Hays and his men came charging at them while firing their pistols at a furious rate. Within minutes, half the Comanches lay dead on the ground, while the rest of the war party fled.2
Exactly how Hays and his men came into possession of their handguns—early model Colt repeaters—remains unclear. What is certain is that “Hays’s Big Fight,” as it came to be known, not only foreshadowed the fate of the Plains Indians but also altered the destiny of Samuel Colt.
One of the Rangers involved in that skirmish was Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker. When war broke out with Mexico in 1846, Walker was sent east to procure weapons for the U.S. Army. Within days of his arrival in New York City, he and Sam had met, forged an instant alliance, and concocted a new, heavier caliber, six-shot revolver designed to Walker’s specifications. A prototype of this imposing “hand cannon” was submitted to Secretary of War William L. Marcy, who—with Walker’s enthusiastic endorsement—placed an order for one thousand of the pistols to be delivered in three months’ time.3
Sam’s elation at achieving his long-sought goal of a military contract was only slightly tempered by the fact that, with his Paterson factory gone, he had no evident means to fulfill it. Colt, however, wasn’t the sort of man to be deterred by such a trifle. Deploying his considerable powers of persuasion, he prevailed on some of the nation’s finest gunsmiths—among them Edwin Wesson and Eliphalet Remington—to drop whatever else they were doing and supply him with parts, which were then assembled in the armory of Eli Whitney, Jr., son of the famed cotton gin inventor. Their cylinders engraved with an image of “Hays’s Big Fight,” the full complement of Colt Whitneyville-Walker holster pistols (so named by firearms aficionados) was delivered on schedule. Walker himself was brandishing a pair when he was killed on October 11, 1847, while leading a company of 250 Rangers against more than 1,600 Mexican lancers in the Battle of Huamantla.4
Another governmental order of one thousand pistols quickly followed. From that point on, nothing would stand in the way of Sam Colt’s “ascent to the top of the pyramid of American industry.”5 Within a few years, he owned his own state-of-the-art factory in Hartford, superintended by his old friend, the mechanical genius Elisha K. Root, who devised a system of steam-powered mass production that put Colt in the forefront of America’s industrial revolution. With the great westward migration—spurred by the discovery of gold in California—demand for Colt’s six-shooters boomed, while the outbreak of war and revolution throughout Europe opened up rich new markets for his weapons. As sales of his revolvers continued to soar—from twenty thousand per year in 1851 to fifty thousand per year by 1854—Colt kept expanding his facilities, which culminated in the construction of his vast armory on the banks of the Connecticut River. By the time this technological showcase began operation in 1855, Colonel Colt—as he now styled himself—had become an international celebrity and one of the country’s richest men.6
• • •
Sam had first met Elizabeth Jarvis in the summer of 1851 during a vacation at the glittering resort community of Newport, Rhode Island. A lovely twenty-three-year-old from a distinguished and affluent family, Elizabeth found herself “swept away by the thirty-seven-year-old industrialist”—“fairly awed,” as she later confessed, by “the magnetism of his presence … More truly than any other, he filled my ideal of a noble manhood, a princely nature, an honest, true, warm-hearted man.”7
As for Sam, the elegant, well-connected Elizabeth—daughter of a prominent Episcopal minister and descendant of an illustrious “line of religious, military, and political leaders”—was exactly the kind of woman who suited his social ambitions. After several years of courtship, Elizabeth joyfully accepted Sam’s offer of marriage, their engagement sealed with a seven-carat diamond ring, a gift originally bestowed on Colt by a grateful king of Sardinia.8
Sam, as biographers believe, had been married once before. When he proposed to the estimable Miss Jarvis, however, he was unencumbered, having long since divested himself of his first and far less desirable wife: Caroline Henshaw.
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James Gordon Bennett, who had reported the rumor that Caroline and John were already married “before the murder of Adams took place,” had gotten the story half right. Caroline had, in fact, been wed before. But not to John.
The full story would not be made public for many years, when Sam Colt’s most authoritative biographer revealed that the beautiful, unschooled sixteen-year-old Sam had so impulsively married during his early trip to Scotland was Caroline Henshaw.1 Once the heat of youthful passion had subsided, the ambitious young inventor—busily cultivating powerful political connections and ingratiating himself with Washington’s social elite—“decided that so humble a bride was no worthy partner for him.”2 In an age that viewed divorce as a shameful, if not immoral, act, he cast about for a way to extricate himself from the inconvenient union. Compounding his predicament was the awkward fact that, by then, Caroline was pregnant with Sam’s child.
It was John who, “out of either pity or duty,” took the pregnant Caroline in and became her protector and lover. When all the efforts to save John from the gallows failed, “Sam saw a way out.” The macabre ceremony in the shadow of the gallows was his doing. By agreeing to the “bigamous and semi-incestuous” marriage with her “condemned brother-in-law on the day of his death,” Caroline, already effectively discarded by Sam, was not only spared the stigma of divorce but guaranteed his grateful, lifelong support. John, who had nothing to lose, was able to repay his brother’s unwavering devotion during his darkest hours. And Sam had his freedom.3
As for the child born to Caroline—later renamed Samuel Caldwell Colt—Sam took an active role in his upbringing, overseeing his education and sending him to the finest private schools. In his correspondence, he consistently referred to the boy as his nephew (or “neffue,” as he spelled it), though he always enclosed the word in quotation marks, as if “to maintain a flimsy pretense that the boy was brother John’s son, while at the same time letting the world know that the handsome lad sprang from his own manly loins.”4 Sam’s will—which bequeathed his namesake a sum totaling more than two million dollars in today’s money—was probated in 1862, and it was then that “Samuel Caldwell Colt, Jr., produced a marriage license proving that Colt had married Caroline in Scotland.”5
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What became of Caroline is unknown. There are indications that sometime in the late 1840s, she returned to Europe. A legend arose that she adopted the name Julia Leicester and eloped with a dashing young Prussian nobleman, Count Friedrich August Kunow Waldemar von Oppen, who—having been disinherited because of his unsuitable marriage—became an overseas agent for Colt’s arms. Though von Oppen certainly existed and did indeed marry a relation of Sam Colt’s, evidence shows that his wife was not Caroline Henshaw.1
An equally colorful rumor was said to have originated with one Samuel M. Everett, an acquaintance of John Colt’s who supposedly encountered him during a trip to California in 1852. According to this story, John was alive and well and passing himself off as a Spanish grandee named Don Carlos Juan Brewster, complete with “brocaded jacket, silk scarf, silver spurs, sombrero, and trousers slashed to the knees and garnished along the seams with a fringe of little silver bells.” Sharing his hacienda were Caroline and two handsome children.2 Like the sightings of dead celebrities that have become increasingly common in our own time, however, this outlandish tale was a product of folklore, not fact.
• • •
Still, its widespread circulation in 1852—ten years after John’s suicide—was significant: a sign of the persistent fascination exerted by the Colt case, which continued to live on in story and song. As early as February 1843, two Colt-related stage melodramas (the era’s equivalent of today’s “ripped-from-the-headlines” TV crime shows) were mounted in Cincinnati: John C. Colt, or the Unhappy Suicide, and John C. Colt, or the End of a Murderer, the latter written by and starring the popular actor and dramatist Nathaniel Harrington Bannister.3
At roughly the same time, a barroom ballad titled “The Lay of Mr. Colt” began to make the rounds:
The clock is ticking onward,
It nears the hour of doom,
And no one yet hath entered
Into that ghastly room.
The jailer and the sheriff,
They are walking to and fro,
And the hangman sits upon the steps
And smokes his pipe below.
In grisly expectation
The prison all is bound,
And, save for expectoration,
You cannot hear a sound.
The turnkey stands and ponders,
His hand upon the bolt—
“In twenty minutes more, I guess,
’Twill all be up with Colt!”
But see, the door is opened!
Forth comes the weeping bride;
The courteous sheriff lifts his hat,
And saunters to her side.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. C.,
But is your husband ready?”
“I guess you’d better ask himself,”
Replied the woeful lady.
The clock is ticking onward;
Hark! Hark! It striketh one!
Each felon draws a whistling breath,
“Time’s up with Colt; he’s done!”
The sheriff consults his watch again,
Then puts it in his fob,
And turning to the hangman, says—
“Get ready for the job!”
The jailer knocketh loudly,
The turnkey draws the bolt,
And pleasantly the sheriff says—
“We’re waiting, Mr. Colt!”
No answer! No—no answer!
All’s still as death within;
The sheriff eyes the jailer,
The jailer strokes his chin.
“I shouldn’t wonder, Nahum, if
It were as you suppose.”
The hangman looked unhappy, and
The turnkey blew his nose.
They entered. On his pallet
The noble convict lay,—
The bridegroom on his marriage-bed
But not in trim array.
His red right hand a razor held,
Fresh sharpened from the hone,
And his ivory neck was severed,
And gashed into the bone.
And when the lamp is lighted
In the long November days,
And lads and lasses mingle
At shucking of the maize;
When pies of smoking pumpkin
Upon the table stand,
And bowls of black molasses
Go round from hand to hand;
When flap-jacks, maple-sugared,
Are hissing in the pan,
And cider, with a dash of gin,
Foams in the social can;
When the goodman wets his whistle,
And the goodwife scolds the child;
And the girls exclaim convulsively,
“Have done, or I’ll be riled!”
With laughter and with weeping,
Then shall they tell the tale,
How Colt his foeman quartered
And died within the jail.4
• • •
The following year, the Colt-Adams case inspired a far more enduring piece of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story “The Oblong Box.” Set aboard a packet ship headed from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City, the story concerns a passenger named Cornelius Wyatt, a “young artist” with a studio “in Chambers Street,” who is traveling with a mysterious pine box “six feet in length by two and a half in breadth.” The contents of the box—which Wyatt keeps stored in his own stateroom throughout the trip—remain a mystery until the climax of the tale, when the nameless narrator learns to his amazement that it held the corpse of Wyatt’s lovely, recently deceased young wife, packed in salt.5
Given his particular obsessions, it is no surprise that Poe latched on to the single most macabre element of the Colt case—the salted remains loaded onto a ship in a wooden crate—and transformed the body of a stout middle-aged male into that of a prematurely dead beautiful young woman. In another great American short story of the period—Herman Melville’s masterpiece “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—the Colt-Adams case appears in undisguised form. At one point in this endlessly fascinating parable about (among other things) the limits of Christian charity, the narrator—a mild-mannered, middle-aged lawyer struggling to deal with an increasingly impossible employee—finds himself driven to such heights of exasperation that he fears he might commit violence upon the maddening copyist. It is the sudden recollection of the Colt-Adams case that allows him to keep his temper in check:
I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it but prudent to check myself at present from further demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone. I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurried into his fatal act—an act which certainly no man could possibly deplore more than the actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings upon the subject, that had that altercation taken place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have terminated as it did. It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations—an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;—this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt.
But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why, simply by recalling the divine injunction: “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.” Yes, this it was that saved me. Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle—a great safeguard to its possessor. Men have committed murder for jealousy’s sake, and anger’s sake, and hatred’s sake, and selfishness’ sake, and spiritual pride’s sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity’s sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy.6
• • •
For one woman writer, it was not the killing of Adams, or the boxing-up of his body, or John’s iron-nerved resolve to cheat the hangman that made the Colt case so memorable but the somber wedding ceremony in the Tombs. This author was Theodora De Wolf Colt, wife of Sam and John’s brother Christopher, who, in her privately printed volume Stray Fancies, included a poem called “The Marriage in a Prison,” a sentimental celebration of love’s unconquerable might, even in face of imminent death:
’Twas not within the sacred aisle,
Before the altar of our God,
With parents and with sisters near,
The bridegroom and the fair one stood.
’Twas in a dungeon dark and drear,
With naught to dissipate its gloom,
With nothing genial to efface
The horrors of that living tomb!
The man of God in silence stood,
His eyes were raised as if in prayer,
And by his side two forms, as still
As death,—they were the bridal pair!
One was a youth of noble mien,
Ill-fitted for so vile a place,
And on his brow a loftiness
That prison-walls could not efface.
Excepting when he glanced at her,
That fair young being at his side,
Then agonizing was his gaze,—
It seemed as if his spirit died.
A solemn stillness reigned throughout,
You might have heard each beating heart,
’Till broken by the preacher’s voice:
“Wilt thou love her ’till death do part?”
A scaffold near the casement stood!—
’Twas there, oh God! That he might see
That, although innocent of crime,
A sufferer he was doomed to be.
He answered not, nor bowed assent,
But pressed that fair girl to his breast,
As when in days of happiness
She knew it as her place of rest.
The blessing then the priest pronounced,
And left them for a last farewell
They wished to take alone, unseen
By any in that gloomy cell!
Oh, what can woman’s love efface?—
Not dungeon, scaffold, chains, nor death;
She clings but with a firmer hold,—
She loves until her latest breath.
She loved him when he was esteemed
And honored by his fellow men;
And now her soul still turns to him,—
Though all forsake, she’ll not condemn!7
• • •
The contrast between the grim jailhouse nuptials of John Colt and Caroline Henshaw and the wedding, fourteen years later, of Sam Colt and Elizabeth Jarvis couldn’t have been more stark. The ceremony, held at the Protestant Episcopal Church at Middletown, Connecticut, on June 5, 1856, was conducted by the Right Reverend T. C. Brownell, bishop of Connecticut. The bride was bedecked in “a dress and jewelry rumored to cost eight thousand dollars”—the equivalent of more than two hundred thousand in today’s dollars. The wedding cake, standing six feet tall, was trimmed with confectionery pistols and topped with a spun-sugar colt.
Following the ceremony, the entire bridal party took the evening express to Manhattan, where Sam had rented one of the city’s largest hotels, the St. Nicholas, for a gala reception. The next morning, the newlyweds set off by ship on a six-month honeymoon. After an extended stay in London, they traveled to Holland, Bavaria, Vienna, the Tyrolean Alps, and finally Russia, where—along with “princes and princesses and top-ranking diplomats and military officers” from throughout Europe—they were guests at the coronation of Czar Alexander II.8
Shortly after their return to Hartford, they moved into the spectacular residence known as Armsmear (“the mansion that ‘arms’ had built on the ‘mere,’ or lowlands, of Hartford’s South Meadow”).9 Designed by Sam himself, the massive brownstone building, with its five-story tower, its steel and glass conservatories, its exotic minarets and domes, stood as “the perfect model of a Victorian-age mogul’s idea of opulence and elegance.”10 Its nearly two dozen rooms—dining room, drawing room, music room, billiard room, ballroom, reception room, library, picture gallery, and various private quarters—were outfitted with imported custom-made furniture, carpets, drapery, and other items of décor costing the equivalent of more than six hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. The sweeping grounds of the estate—with its private garden, deer park, artificial lake, terraced lawn, spectacular greenhouses, marble fountains and statuary—was designed by Copeland and Cleveland of Boston, “one of the nation’s first and most respected landscape architectural firms.”11
Between the day that he and Elizabeth moved into Armsmear and Sam’s early death of gout and rheumatic fever at the age of forty-seven, only five years elapsed. Still, despite the heart-wrenching loss of his first two children (both memorialized, of course, in the funereal verse of his friend Mrs. Sigourney), those years “were the most stable and prosperous of his life.” Some of his most contented hours were spent within his “private room,” where Sam “gathered the pictured forms and mementos of those he loved best.”12 Among these precious items were portraits of his long-departed mother and sisters, marble statues of his two tragically short-lived infants, and, it is said, an oil painting of his doomed but indomitable brother, John Caldwell Colt.