Killer Colt (13 page)

Even before the company underwent its final collapse, however, the ever-resilient inventor, now twenty-seven years old, had begun to focus his prodigious energies on a new project. Or, rather, to redirect them toward an old project he had kept in abeyance while pursuing his gun business: the development of “submarine explosives,” an interest of Sam’s dating back to his adolescence, when he had attempted to blow a raft “sky high” on Ware Pond as part of the town’s Fourth of July festivities.

•   •   •

The possibility of using underwater mines to defend the nation’s harbors had taken on a new urgency in the spring of 1841, owing to increasing tensions between the United States and Great Britain over a crisis that came to be known as the McLeod affair.

Several years earlier, a group of insurgents in upper Canada, intent on establishing a republican government, had attempted an armed rebellion against British rule. Their leader was the fiery reformer, newspaper editor, and former mayor of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie. After a few skirmishes—culminating in a rout of Mackenzie’s forces in March 1837—the rebel leaders fled to the United States, took refuge on a small island in the Niagara River, and began making preparations for an invasion of upper Canada. To provision themselves, they chartered a little steamer called the
Caroline
, which operated out of Buffalo, and ferried men and munitions to the island from the American shore.

When the insurgents began launching attacks on the Canadian village of Chippewa, the British mustered a large force under the command of a colonel named McNabb, who resolved to cut off the rebels’ supply line by destroying the
Caroline
. On December 29, 1837, an expedition of five small boats, carrying a party of heavily armed men, set out for this purpose under the cover of night. Finding the
Caroline
moored to the wharf at Fort Schlosser on the American side of Niagara Falls, the attackers, wielding muskets and swords, clambered on board and drove the crew from the vessel. They then towed the ship out onto the river, set it ablaze, and sent it drifting over the falls. During the melee, one of the
Caroline
’s crew members, a New Yorker named Amos Durfee, was shot through the head and killed.

Three years later, at a tavern in upstate New York, a Canadian deputy sheriff named Alexander McLeod drunkenly boasted that he had not only taken part in the destruction of the
Caroline
but was the man who shot Durfee. He was promptly arrested by New York authorities and indicted for arson and murder. The British government demanded his immediate release on the grounds that, at the time of the incident, McLeod had been “acting in the necessary defense of his country against a treasonable insurrection, of which Amos Durfee was acting in aid at the time.” The Supreme Court of the State of New York, however—ruling that “the attack upon the
Caroline
was an offense against the laws of the state and the life and property of her citizens, and came within the jurisdiction of her courts”—refused to let him go. The decision to proceed with McLeod’s trial aroused widespread outrage among the people of Great Britain, whose government began to mobilize for war.
²

While this escalating international crisis caused alarm in many quarters, Sam Colt saw it as a godsend, a chance to sell the military—no longer interested in his small arms—on a unique new weapons technology: his so-called submarine battery. This device, the precise workings of which Sam kept shrouded in secrecy, consisted of “a tin tube containing anywhere from one hundred to two hundred pounds of black powder that was anchored to the sea floor at a predetermined depth. To detonate the mine, Colt proposed using a spark created by an underwater electromagnetic cable.”
³

In June 1841, Sam traveled to Washington, DC, set himself up at Fuller’s Hotel, and proceeded to compose a letter that—judging from its perfect orthography—clearly was set down on paper for him by someone who could actually spell. In it, Sam boasted that, after years of “study & experiment,” he had devised a system for “effectually protecting our Sea Coast”—a method that, “if adopted for the service of our government, will not only save them millions in outlay for the construction of means of defense, but in the event of foreign war, will prove a perfect safeguard against all the combined fleets of Europe without exposing the life of our citizens.”

Without entering into specifics, Colt proclaimed that his invention enabled him “to effect the instant destruction of either Ships or Steamers, at my pleasure on their entering a harbor, whether singly or in fleets … All this I can do in perfect security and without giving an invading enemy the slightest sign of danger.” Emphasizing the economic benefits of his system—which could protect a “harbor like that of New York” for “less than the cost of a single steamship” and required only “one single man to manage the destroying agent against any fleet that Europe can send”—he requested a government appropriation of twenty thousand dollars to arrange a demonstration of his submarine battery before the Cabinet. He then sent the letter to President John Tyler.
⁴

It was a particularly hectic time for Tyler, who had ascended to the presidency only months earlier following the untimely death of William Henry Harrison. (The record holder for the shortest presidency in U.S. history,
Harrison had insisted on delivering his two-hour inauguration speech in freezing rain without either a hat or a coat; one month later, he was dead of pneumonia.) When Tyler failed to respond to the letter, Sam turned to two supporters who could provide him with an entrée to the chief executive. One was Senator Samuel L. Southard of New Jersey, previously secretary of the navy under presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. The other was John Howard Payne.

•   •   •

Born in 1791, Payne was a prodigy who became obsessed with the stage at an early age. Discouraged by his bluenosed father—who shared the general view of acting as a scandalous occupation—he was shipped off to New York City at the age of fourteen to apprentice to a merchant, in the hope that “hard work” would “cure his unwholesome ambitions.” All efforts to quash his “yearning for things theatrical,” however, were in vain. Sneaking off to the city playhouses at every opportunity, the stagestruck youth began to write and publish a little paper called the
Thespian Mirror—
a kind of early nineteenth-century fanzine—containing “interesting sketches of contemporary actors, criticisms of plays, and dramatic news items from American and British papers.” The publication brought him to the attention of the editor of the
New York Evening Post
and other influential figures who offered to further Payne’s education at their own expense. After a year at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Payne embarked on a highly successful acting career, appearing (among many other leading roles) as Romeo and Hamlet alongside Edgar Allan Poe’s actress-mother, Elizabeth.

In 1813 Payne left the United States for London, where he enjoyed a brilliant, if relatively short-lived, stage career, formed a deep and lasting friendship with Washington Irving (then residing in England), and (at least according to rumor) wooed the recently widowed Mary Shelley. When his popularity as an actor began to wane, he turned to playwriting.

In 1823, as part of an operetta called
Clari, the Maid of Milan
, he composed the lyric that would make him immortal: “Home, Sweet Home.” The song—whose second line quickly became proverbial (“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home”)—was a genuine cultural phenomenon, achieving “a wider circulation and a more universal appeal than any other ever written,” according to the rapturous account of one of Payne’s early biographers:

After nineteen years abroad, Payne returned to the United States and embarked on a theatrical tour through the South and the West to raise money for an ambitious project: a weekly international arts and literary journal. Precisely when and where he became acquainted with Sam Colt is unclear, though historians speculate that they crossed paths on the performance circuit, most probably in Cincinnati, where they may have been introduced by John Colt, himself a close acquaintance of the actor. A surviving letter of Payne’s—expressing his interest in investing in Colt’s revolver—leaves no doubt that the two had become friends by the time the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company was established.
⁶

When Sam Colt came to Washington to lobby for his submarine battery in June 1841, Payne was living in the city, writing for the
United States Magazine and Democratic Review
, a publication with a long list of eminent contributors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. With his gift for friendship, Payne (who would soon be appointed the U.S. consul to Tunis) had established a large network of social connections, including Robert Tyler, an amateur poet and son of the chief executive. When Sam’s initial attempt to contact the president failed, Payne sent a letter to Robert, warmly recommending Colt and insisting that the young inventor’s latest proposal was “thoroughly entitled to attention.”

In a matter of days, Sam received an invitation to meet with President Tyler and Secretary of the Navy George E. Badger. Though Tyler merely listened
politely, Badger’s interest was piqued, and in late July, Sam received word that an upcoming naval appropriation bill would include a sizable allocation for the development of his harbor defense system.
⁷

By early September 1841, Sam was back in Manhattan, where he put up in his favorite hostelry, the City Hotel on lower Broadway—just a short distance from the lodgings then occupied by his brother John and John’s pregnant mistress, Caroline Henshaw.

THE SUBLIME OF HORROR

J
ames Gordon Bennett didn’t invent the penny press. That distinction belongs to Benjamin Day. Before Day founded the New York
Sun
in 1833, urban newspapers catered largely to the mercantile and professional elites. Somber to the point of deadliness, they devoted themselves primarily to commercial news, financial affairs, and political propaganda on behalf of whatever party they were established to serve. They were also priced beyond the means of the average reader. Sold mainly by subscription, the big-city papers—the
Daily Advertiser
, the
Courier and Enquirer
, the
Journal of Commerce—
cost ten dollars a year. Individual issues could be purchased only at the publisher’s office for six cents a copy—this at a time when the daily wage for the typical workingman was eighty-five cents.
¹