Authors: Harold Schechter
Killer Colt (41 page)
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.
LEGENDS58
O
n 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: