Authors: Harold Schechter
Killer Colt (44 page)
J
ames 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
W
hat 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.
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• • •
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!
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