Killer Colt (2 page)

On the corner of Ann Street, along Mr. Adams’s route, stands Scudder’s American Museum, a run-down repository of seashells, minerals, stuffed birds, and other natural-history specimens. Within a few months, it will be purchased by Phineas T. Barnum, who will transform it into a gaudy showplace crammed with astounding artifacts, believe-it-or-not exhibitions, and bizarre anatomical “curiosities.” At present, Barnum has not the slightest awareness of Mr. Adams’s existence—though, like the rest of the population, he will soon come to take an absorbing interest in the printer.
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The time is somewhere around 3:30 p.m. Near the Rotunda on Chambers Street, Mr. Adams is spotted by an acquaintance, a clerk at City Hall Place named John Johnson, who has just emerged from the post office. The two men have already spoken several times that day. Intent on his affairs, Mr. Adams does not notice the clerk, who watches as the printer strides purposefully in the direction of Broadway.
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It is almost 4:00 p.m. when Mr. Adams arrives at his final destination.
Catercorner to City Hall, the Granite Building is an unimposing structure by today’s standards but “large and rather glooming-looking” to the eyes of Jackson-era New Yorkers.
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Mr. Adams enters unnoticed, proceeds directly to the dimly illuminated stairwell, and climbs to the second floor.

Minutes pass. Outside on Broadway—oblivious to the horror transpiring just out of sight—the swirling human tide hurries along.

FRAIL BLOOD

T
he neighborhood of his birth would later become known as Asylum Hill, after the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, the nation’s first institution of its kind. In 1814, however, it was still called Lord’s Hill, an apt name for a place so steeped in Puritan tradition—though, in fact, it derived from the original owners of the land: the descendants of Captain Richard Lord, one of the early heroes of the colony.
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In succeeding decades, various luminaries—among them Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe—would make their home on Lord’s Hill, drawn by the tranquil charm of this rural district of Hartford. The infant born in a farmhouse there on July 19, 1814, would himself grow up to be one of the century’s most eminent figures, a man whose name would become synonymous with the nation’s burgeoning industrial might: Samuel Colt.

He came by his enterprising spirit honestly. His maternal grandfather, Major John Caldwell, was one of Hartford’s leading citizens: first president of its bank, first commander of its volunteer horse guard, a founder of the deaf asylum, and one of the commissioners responsible for building the statehouse in 1796. He was also the richest man in town, a shipbuilder and canny businessman who—like many another God-fearing New England merchant—made a fortune in the West Indies trade, shipping produce, livestock, and lumber to the Caribbean slave plantations in exchange for molasses, tobacco, and rum.
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To his other grandfather, Lieutenant Benjamin Colt, Samuel owed
some of the mechanical aptitude that would make him one of the world’s great inventors. Admired throughout the Connecticut Valley for his handiwork, Benjamin had been a blacksmith of unusual skill and ingenuity who owned a wider variety of tools than any metalworker in the region. History would credit him as manufacturer of the first scythe in America.
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The children of these two worthies, Christopher Colt and Sarah Caldwell (“Sally” to her family and friends), had met in Hartford in 1803, when—according to one possibly apocryphal account—the strapping six-footer had stopped the runaway buggy in which the young woman was trapped.
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An attraction immediately developed between the pair, both in their early twenties at the time. Despite his many virtues, however—his manly bearing, indefatigable energy, and striving ambition—Christopher Colt did not appear to be a particularly suitable candidate for the hand of Sarah Caldwell, patrician daughter of Hartford’s leading citizen.

To be sure, Christopher claimed an illustrious background of his own, tracing his lineage to Sir John Coult, an English peer in Oliver Cromwell’s day who gained everlasting renown in his country’s civil wars. During one ferocious battle—so the story goes—he had three horses killed under him, shattered his sword, and still led his troops to victory. Knighted for his heroism, Coult adopted a coat of arms emblematic of his exploits: a shield with three charging steeds above the family motto,
Vincit qui patitur—
“He conquers who endures.”
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At the time of his meeting with Sarah, however, Christopher—a recent arrival from his native Massachusetts who had left home to seek his fortune in Hartford—was in dire financial straits. Indeed, the members of the city council, wary of indigent newcomers who relied on the public dole, had resolved to expel him from town.
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Impressed, however, with young Colt’s personal qualities, Major Caldwell took the youth under his wing. Before long, thanks to his strict adherence to the Franklin-esque values of industry, frugality, and perseverance—coupled with a zeal for commercial speculation—Christopher Colt had accumulated a sizable fortune of his own. In April 1805, with the blessing of his mentor in Hartford’s booming mercantile trade, he and Sarah were wed.

Their first child, Margaret, was born a year later. Seven more followed
at regular intervals. Of this substantial brood, two would die in childhood, two others in the bloom of their youth. The survivors would comprise a judge, a textile pioneer, the legendary Colonel Colt, and a brilliant accountant responsible—in the language of nineteenth-century sensation-mongers—for the most “horrid and atrocious” murder of his day.

O
f his three brothers, Sam was closest to the eldest, John Caldwell Colt, four years his senior.
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Much later, at the height of John’s notoriety, commentators would offer radically different views of his boyhood character. According to his harshest critics, he was a “willful, cunning, and revengeful youth,” ruled by “violent passions” over which he had “no great control.” Bridling at parental authority, he displayed rank “insubordination from childhood upwards,” refusing to submit to “the common restraints of the family, the school room, and the law of God.”
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Other people, whose loyalty to John never wavered, described him in far more flattering terms as a rambunctious but fundamentally good-hearted boy, who reveled “in air and freedom” and would “do anything for a frolic.” “His juvenile characteristics,” insisted one acquaintance, “were a fondness for boyish sports, extreme bravery, and great generosity of character … His daring was remarkable.” Though given to all sorts of juvenile pranks, “there was nothing vicious about his sportfulness.”
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In his own published statements, John recalled himself as a headstrong youth—“rash and foolishly venturesome”—whose boldness often bordered on sheer recklessness and whose penchant for risk taking frequently put his life in danger. Besides numerous hunting and riding accidents, there were at least five separate occasions when his fearlessness nearly got him killed.

At the age of five, for example, while playing near a cider press, he lost his footing and “plunged head foremost” into the vat full of juice. Only the
quick actions of a playmate, “a stout young girl” who saw him go under, saved him from drowning.

Several winters later, he nearly drowned again, this time while playing on a frozen river. He was “jumping up and down on the ice” when it gave way beneath his feet. “Swept by the current some sixty feet under a sheet of ice,” he was carried into open water, where he managed to catch the limb of a fallen tree and drag himself onto the bank.

Another time, he was “playing tricks with” his favorite horse, which retaliated by throwing him from the saddle and delivering a near-crippling kick to his hip. And then there was his “awful encounter” with an enraged buffalo, part of “a caravan of animals” that arrived in Hartford with a traveling show. Sneaking into the creature’s pen, young John found himself face-to-face with the “shaggy-throated beast” that “forthwith plunged at me, nailing me fast against the wall between his horns.” He was rescued by the keeper’s assistants, who immediately leapt at the buffalo and began to “belabor him with their clubs.”

The most memorable of all John’s juvenile mishaps, however, occurred when he was eight. His favorite pastime at that age was playing soldier. His doting mother—whose father had fought with distinction in the Continental army—was happy to encourage her little boy’s “military mania” and supplied him with the means to “rig out a little troop of boys” with outfits and toy rifles. The centerpiece of their company was a miniature brass cannon. One day, John, with the help of a companion, loaded the little weapon with an excessive charge of powder. When John put a light to the fuse, the cannon exploded.

Somewhat miraculously, neither John nor his playmate suffered serious injury, though their eyesight was temporarily impaired. “How we escaped with our lives,” John later recalled, “is a wonder.”
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Whether Samuel Colt was present when his older brother detonated the toy is unclear. Some biographers speculate that the four-year-old boy did, in fact, witness the event, which had a powerful effect on his imagination, sparking his lifelong fascination with armaments. If so, the repercussions from that small blast would be felt, in time, throughout the world.
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Besides the bond they shared with each other, both boys were deeply attached to their older sisters, Margaret and Sarah Ann. Throughout his exceptionally peripatetic life, John would carry keepsake locks of their hair; while the adult Sam, after finally achieving his hard-won fame and fortune, would hang framed mementoes of his sisters in his private room at Armsmear, the baronial estate he constructed in Hartford.
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