Killer Colt (23 page)

On November 25, 1841, Congress approved the six-thousand-dollar appropriation for the development of Sam’s underwater defense system. At that point, Sam “moved rapidly to acquire additional financing from the private sector.”
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Investors included a number of his powerful Washington friends—among them Major McNeill and Senator Samuel L. Southard—as well as the pioneering civil engineer Major George W. Whistler, who, thanks to his artist-son’s celebrated painting, would come to be known by waggish historians as “Whistler’s Father.” There was another name, too, on the list of early investors: John C. Colt.

To defray some of the legal costs Sam had already incurred on his account,
John had offered to pay his brother $125 to “be used for shares in the Submarine Battery Company.” Besides a desire to ease Sam’s financial burden, John might have had another motive for the investment. According to one well-known historian of the Colt family, John’s gesture may have been intended to show the world that he was a man of means—not so hard up that he would murder a man in a petty argument over a “picayune” debt. Or perhaps, as the same writer speculates, the investment was meant to show that John possessed a serene faith in his own innocence—“that he was confident of the future and the justice of the court.”
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D
espite a lashing rain, an enormous crowd showed up at City Hall Park early on the morning of Monday, January 17, 1842, for the reopening of the Colt trial. “People of all classes and ages” thronged the pathways leading up to the building and packed every inch of the portico. When the doors opened at 9:00, the jostling horde swarmed inside. A few constables, armed with long staves, were on hand to maintain order. They made free use of their implements, “knocking about them right and left, and rapping people’s heads and shoulders, sometimes quite outrageously.” Their exertions, however, had little effect on the boisterous crowd, which shoved its way inside the courtroom, occupying every available space within two or three minutes. Shut out of the courtroom, “hundreds waited and clamored in the hallway; whilst in the park, there were also hundreds waiting to catch a sight of Colt or Mrs. Adams or any of the witnesses.”
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Among those who made it inside was twenty-two-year-old Walt Whitman, then a writer for a new penny paper, the
Aurora
. Though Whitman would eventually compose soaring poetry celebrating the divinity inherent in even the most degraded individual, the frenzied excitement of the crowd afforded him a glimpse of the very worst side of human nature. Five years later, remembering “the struggle he had to get in the courtroom at the trial of John C. Colt,” Whitman had still not gotten over his sense of outrage.

“There was a kind of ferocious interest felt in that case, which seemed quite disgusting,” he recalled. “There existed a feverish jealousy lest he might be only sent to prison for life and not strangled. Public malignance
was aroused; and cloaking itself in the convenient garb of justice, the most inhuman spirit of revenge pervaded the bosoms of the people.”

“Wretched fellow!” wrote Whitman of Colt. “How he was hunted by an unrelenting public appetite for blood!”
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James Gordon Bennett was also in attendance, along with an artist named Forbes, who was there to sketch the prisoner for the
Herald
. That evening, the paper’s front page was dominated by Forbes’s portrait, rendered in woodcut. In it, John sits with an elbow on the arm of his chair, head resting on his closed hand. He is shown as a strikingly handsome man with a luxuriant head of dark, wavy hair, neatly trimmed side whiskers, finely molded features, and exceptionally large, penetrating eyes. His expression seems perfectly serene.

According to the accompanying story, John—who had been brought into the courtroom earlier that morning and sat in a corner, warming himself by the stove—was, in fact, “collected and calm.” As he awaited the opening of the trial, he chatted freely with the person seated next to him: his brother Sam, who appeared to be far more agitated than the defendant. Another of John’s supporters was present in the courtroom as well: Caroline Henshaw, who had returned from Philadelphia after giving birth to a boy and was invariably referred to in the papers as “the female who lived with Colt.”
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Shortly before 10:00 a.m., John’s counsel arrived. His cousin Dudley Selden was assisted by two other highly accomplished attorneys: Robert Emmett, son of New York State’s former attorney general and a future justice of the superior court, and James A. Morrill. The latter had achieved recent celebrity as the lawyer for Mrs. Ann Lohman—alias “Madame Restell,” the nation’s most notorious abortionist—who had been brought to trial the previous July after the death of one of her customers.
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Opposing them was District Attorney James R. Whiting and his able young assistant, James M. Smith, Jr., in later years a justice of the Court of General Sessions. Whiting, whose own distinguished career would culminate with a seat on the state supreme court, had prosecuted the Restell trial. He’d prevailed over Morrill when “the mistress of abominations” (as she was dubbed in the press) was convicted of “unlawfully, wickedly, willfully, and maliciously” inducing an abortion by means of “a piece of wire, a pair of pliers, or some unknown instrument.”
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At precisely 10:30 a.m., Judge William Kent entered the courtroom and took his place. An imposing figure, Kent was the son of the country’s most eminent jurist, the former New York State chancellor James Kent, esteemed in legal circles as the author of the monumental
Commentaries on American Law
, a four-volume treatise credited with “disentangling a distinctively American practice from the inherited mass of British common law.”
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After a brief delay while the judge awaited the arrival of two aldermen, the court was officially opened. By then, the other star attraction, Emeline Adams, widow of the slain victim, had arrived. A few months earlier, reporting on Mrs. Adams’s allegedly premonitory dreams of her husband’s murder, Bennett, in his most melodramatic style, had informed his readers that “her reason is a shattered wreck, and it is probable that she will soon lie peacefully beside her husband in the quiet grave.”
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Now, however—sounding somewhat piqued that she had not fulfilled his prophecy—he described her as “dressed in deep mourning” but otherwise looking “uncommonly well in health and appearance.” In fact, far from hurrying to join her husband underground, Mrs. Adams would remarry in 1850 and live to a ripe old age, dying just eight years shy of the twentieth century.
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A ripple of anticipatory excitement ran through the crowd when John was summoned to the bar. Rising promptly at the calling of his name, he “walked to the end of the table where his counsel sat with a firm, steady step, an unblanched cheek, and an eye that did not quail,” and took his place beside Selden. The audience, however, was in for a disappointment. Having braved the bad weather to be present at a dramatic spectacle, they witnessed instead a proceeding that was aborted almost as soon as it began. Ordered by the judge to call the roll of potential jurors who had been summoned to court, Clerk Henry Vandervoort rose and read out a list of forty-five names. Only nineteen men, however, had shown up.

Without bothering to conceal his displeasure at this turn of events, Judge Kent immediately announced his ruling. “The statute says that when twenty-four jurors do not answer to their names, the Court shall direct the Sheriff to summon a sufficient number from the city and county,” he declared. “Considering the circumstances of the case, which render it likely that it will be difficult to form a jury, the Court therefore orders the Sheriff to summon three hundred persons from the county at large to be in attendance here at ten o’clock on Wednesday morning.”

When Selden questioned “if that be time enough” to assemble such a large pool of potential jurors, Kent cited the precedent of Ezra White, a twenty-three-year-old hooligan tried in 1840 for stabbing a young man to death after crashing a party at a Lower East Side tavern. In that case, the sheriff had been directed to summon “two hundred jurors the next day.” Kent acknowledged that there had been “some difficulty in getting them together” in such short order. As a result, he was now granting the sheriff an additional twenty-four hours for the task.

Before adjourning until Wednesday morning, Judge Kent issued one final ruling. In light of the clamorous scene outside the courtroom that morning, he directed the sheriff “to have ten additional constables to keep order.”
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•   •   •

An unseasonable warmth enveloped the city on Wednesday, January 19, bringing out the curiosity seekers in even greater droves. “Very early in the day,” the
Herald
reported, “thousands of persons were seen wending their way to the City Hall in the hopes of obtaining admission. Never was such intense excitement exhibited.”
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A full two hours before the trial was scheduled to begin, the defendant, escorted by three police officers, arrived at court. Even at that early hour, so many people had assembled outside the chamber that Colt “had to press through the crowd gathered in the hall.” Once inside, he seated himself, as before, near the stove in the far corner of the room and “amused himself reading a newspaper.” When Sam appeared at 9:30, John—looking in “much better spirits” than “at any time since his arrest”—set aside the paper and began conversing cheerfully with his brother.

Promptly at 10:00, the proceedings got under way. With a sharp rap of his gavel, Judge Kent called for “perfect silence” in the courtroom and ordered the spectators—many of whom had risen for a better view of the defendant—to “take their seats at once.” Clerk Vandervoort was then directed to call the roll of potential jurors. No sooner had he begun, however, than Dudley Selden rose with an objection.

Owing to the feverish attentions of the penny press, Selden argued, the case had received an unprecedented degree of publicity. “The subject matter of this trial has been more extensively published than any other that has
ever occurred in this country,” he claimed, “and it has entered every house and every room of the city.” As a result, finding jurors with no preconceived opinions was a particularly challenging task.

“We want to distinguish between the man who can look with kindness on his fellow man and the one whose heart is hardened and knows not mercy,” said Selden. Having been provided with the names of the three hundred potential jurors only the previous afternoon, he contended that the defendant had been deprived of a fundamental right.

“I call the attention of the court,” said Selden, “to the statute which provides that every prisoner shall be informed as to the jurors so that he shall be enabled to meet them in challenge. Is it possible in twenty-four hours to ascertain whether or not the panel has been made up of men who are enemies to the prisoner, or who have made up their minds in regard to him?” Insisting that he had no desire to cause an unnecessary delay, Selden nevertheless asked for an additional “two days’ time for scrutinizing” the list of jurors.

After hearing counterarguments from the district attorney—who again invoked the precedent of the Ezra White case and argued that the intense public excitement generated by the present crime was no “reason for the trial being thus deferred”—Judge Kent handed down his ruling. “The trial,” he announced, “must proceed.”

Vandervoort then proceeded to call the roll of names. Of the 300 men summoned, 228 answered. One by one, they came forward and were questioned: dentists and dry-goods dealers, cobblers and confectioners, booksellers and grocers, watchmakers and merchants, hardware clerks and housepainters. For twelve full hours, the examinations went on, interrupted only by a one-hour recess at 3:00. At 11:00 p.m., with 220 men having been called, just 11 jurors had been sworn. Directing them to be sequestered at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Park Row and “furnished with any refreshments they might require except spirituous liquors,” Judge Kent then adjourned until 10:00 the next morning.

In all the monotony of that exhausting day, one moment stood out for James Gordon Bennett. It happened shortly before 8:00 p.m., when the City Hall bell began to toll, “pealing an alarm of fire in the Second District.”

For Bennett, the ringing of the bell added a disturbing note to the proceedings. “This is at all times a mournful and unwelcome sound,” he observed,
“but it falls with a peculiar chill upon the ear when a murderer is present and the ministers of justice assemble to pass upon life and death. Such was the case here.” Months would pass before that tolling of the fire bell took on an even more uncanny significance—not as a chilling accompaniment to the start of the trial but as a grim premonition of its terrible outcome.
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