Killer Colt (37 page)

By the time Kent reached the end of this statement, his voice was taut with suppressed anger. Throwing the paper onto his desk, he glared down at John and proceeded to upbraid him in a tone of “high dudgeon.”
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“The court has no desire, I can assure you, to make unnecessary comments,” he said icily. “The scene is as painful to the court as it is distressing to you. I only refuse to accede to your request by making a few remarks on
the conduct of the jury. It is due to justice and it is due to one of the most intelligent juries that ever sat in a court of justice that I should not allow them, in this their appropriate tribunal, to be traduced.”

In the same affronted tone, Kent went on to defend the jury as a select group, drawn from “three hundred of our most respectable citizens”—men who had borne “with the most exemplary patience and dignity even unnecessary delays in the progress of the trial, earnest only to discover the truth from the appalling evidence spread before them.

“Insofar, therefore, as this paper expresses dissatisfaction with and contempt of the court and the jury, it is the conclusion of him who now addresses you that it is entirely incorrect and unsupported,” said Kent, still glowering at John. “If that court erred at all, I believe it did in too lenient a construction of the circumstances of your offense, and happy will it be for innocence in all future time to be brought before a tribunal as willing to hear, as ready to believe, as humane to forgive.”

As he spoke, Kent’s voice had risen with indignation. He now paused, as though to get hold of his emotions.

“I do not wish to prolong this distressing scene,” he continued after a moment, speaking more softly, though in a no less caustic tone. “You are a man of education—a man of talent. We have had the most striking and impressive evidence that you can calmly contemplate and coolly meet the most alarming crisis in human life. I will not therefore address to you any of the commonplace, ordinary topics addressed to criminals on the approach of death. I leave that to your reflections, simply adding that so far as the court is concerned, they are now about to appoint the ultimate hour of your existence, and I trust you will meet that hour relying not on human means, and that when earth is disappearing from your view, your thoughts will not be placed on earthly things. It is my duty to say in addition that it appears to me that you evince the most total insensibility regarding the crime whose commission has brought you to the bar. For it should be remembered that, though lawyers and juries debated what degree of offense it came to—whether it was technical murder or technical manslaughter—no man ever doubted that it was a crime of the greatest magnitude and enormity, and one which has left the stain of blood-guiltiness on your soul!”

Taken aback by Kent’s tirade (“the judge came down on me like a hurricane,” he lamented afterward), John leapt to his feet.
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“I did not mean to
convey the idea that the jury acted willfully wrong but that they were misled,” he protested. “The judge’s charge is the best argument to prove that. I do not impugn the motives of the jury—I only speak of them as having been in error, which is, I believe, now the opinion of nine-tenths of the community.

“As far as regarding my own conscience in this affair,” John continued, adopting a lofty tone that, to the ears of many listeners, bordered on the supercilious, “I assure you, sir, that I would rather trust the whole affair to God than to man. I never committed an act in my life that I would not have done again under the same circumstances. Depend upon it, I am not the man who could receive an insult without making some retaliation. The retaliation was not made with any idea of killing the man, but he made the assault and was responsible for the consequences. I think, sir, you have misapprehended entirely the sentiment I meant to convey on that bit of paper.”

Drawing himself up to his full height, he then calmly declared, “I am ready for the sentence, as I know it cannot be avoided.”

Whether John’s concluding words to Kent were a display of manful pride or blind insolence would be a matter of much debate in the coming days. To Kent, however, the matter was clear. Fixing John with a withering look, the judge said: “The sentence will now be pronounced, with an expression of regret with which the court have marked such morbid insensibility which you exhibited in your last speech and which convinces me that any further remarks would be lost on you. The sentence of the court is that you, John C. Colt, on the eighteenth of November next, be hanged until you be dead, and may God have mercy on your soul. Remove the prisoner.”

At the bang of Kent’s gavel, John swiveled on his heels and strode toward the doorway, head high, without the least apparent trace of emotion. It was his brother, Sam, whose face wore a stricken expression as he followed his brother from the courtroom.
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W
ednesday’s newspaper accounts of John’s sentencing marveled at the man’s contradictions, expressing equal measures of awe at both his audacious spirit and his apparent lack of any sense of remorse. In his written statement and particularly in his last, defiant speech to Judge Kent, John, all agreed, had “exhibited as much boldness and as little feeling as could be imagined”—a stout heart coupled with “a mind dead to all moral feeling.”
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This ambivalent attitude toward John’s “reckless hardihood and effrontery” was particularly pronounced in the
New York Herald
, where James Gordon Bennett devoted a lengthy editorial to the subject. Commenting on Colt’s “remarkable behavior throughout the scene,” Bennett could hardly restrain his admiration. “His confidence, his assurance, his courage, his coolness, all rolled so together, and rising to the sublime of impudence, as we may call it—surpass anything on record. He is truly
sui generis
, and under other aspects, and with a different education, and another destiny, might have served for a hero—or a chieftain of the highest order—for a master spirit to revolutionize the age.”

Unfortunately, continued Bennett, John’s limitless potential had been undermined by “a want of moral and religious culture.” Whereas other commentators attributed Colt’s downfall to everything from his supposedly permissive upbringing to the corrupting influences of the city, Bennett—riding his own hobbyhorse—blamed it on “the great error in the education of the youth of the present age of the world,” who were inculcated with “the vain principle of personal honor”: an insidious ideal that led them to take offense
at the smallest perceived slight and demand violent satisfaction for any insult.

“Instead of being taught the precepts of Jesus Christ as he delivered them on the mount,” Bennett complained, “our young men have their minds filled with personal pride—personal consequence—the false theories of moral honor with its machinery of insults, satisfaction, resentment, passion, duels, and death.”

Colt’s closing statement to Judge Kent—his brazen assertion that, under the same circumstances, he would do the deed again because “I was insulted”—reflected the “ridiculous code of honor” that prevailed among America’s young men.”
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For Bennett, the “false and bloody code of honor” that led to such “wretched quarrels” was nothing short of sacrilege. Bereft of Christian principles, Colt’s boldness was mere sinful pride: “a degree of hardihood,” concluded Bennett, “that Satan himself could not surpass.”
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T
o counter the negative portrayals of John in the press, his friends embarked on their own public relations campaign (a “venture in spin control,” as one historian describes it),
¹
subsidizing the publication of a biographical pamphlet that cast the subject in a highly sympathetic light. Titled
An Authentic Life of John C. Colt
, the seventy-page work was authored by Charles F. Powell, a popular writer of historical romances whose fiction—“Nahwista; a Story of the Colonies,” “Zeulia of Madrid,” “Kit the Orphan,” “The Painted Rock”—appeared regularly in journals like the
Knickerbocker
and the
Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion
.

Shortly after the trial ended, Powell paid a visit to the Tombs, accompanied by two of John’s close friends. They found him seated at his writing table, “a one-volume octavo edition of Goldsmith’s works by his side.” As they entered the cell, John, wearing “slippers and a dressing-gown,” rose to greet them. In glaring contrast to the public at large—who “look on him as a monster”—Powell was struck by John’s “gentle” expression, his “courteous and manly bearing.” Only once during the visit, when the subject turned to the penny papers, did his “sweet and mild” voice turn bitter.

“The newspapers!” he exclaimed.
“They
are the true mischief breeders!
They
are really the unprincipled and remorseless murderers! By the pen there is more slaughter—and that of the most heartless and ferocious character—than either by lead or steel!”

Immediately following the visit, Powell dashed off the biography, basing it on information gathered from John’s friends as well as on his prison-house
interview with the subject himself. Powell’s favorable impression of Colt is reflected throughout the work, where the subject is described as a young man of “extreme bravery,” “great generosity of disposition,” “ardent and ambitious spirit,” “moral and temperate habits,” “excellent conduct and remarkable talents.” Every episode recounted by Powell illustrates John’s sterling qualities: the keen sense of justice that, during his boyhood, “inclined him to take sides with the weaker party in all juvenile quarrels”; the “kind-hearted” impulses that led him to nurse a half-frozen lamb back to health during his time on his uncle’s farm; the “zeal and fidelity” he displayed while apprenticing at the Union Manufacturing Company; his “Herculean labors” as a young supervisor on the North Branch of the Susquehanna Canal; his “studious and industrious” habits while clerking for his cousin, Dudley Selden; and more.

How an individual of such “frank, open, and manly character” has come to be “in prison under sentence of death” is, Powell writes, “a mystery.” He can only assume that Colt “possesses two characters, one inherent, the other superinduced by circumstances.” Endowed from birth with many “attractive qualities,” John had developed a moody, distrustful side, largely—Powell posits—because of the faulty guidance of those “intrusted with management of his early years,” especially his hardhearted stepmother, who was constantly “at work against him.” In the end, Powell concludes, John possessed a naturally benevolent, affectionate, and amiable temperament that had been “warped” and “imbittered” by excessively critical “relations and teachers” who failed to appreciate or encourage his particular talents and ambitions.
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•   •   •

Several months later, not long after the fiasco of John’s sentencing, a second pamphlet appeared, combining a three-page biographical sketch—cribbed from Powell’s work—with a compilation of John’s jailhouse letters. This one, titled
Life and Letters of John Caldwell Colt
, was even more unabashed in its advocacy. In it, John is portrayed not only as a paragon of Franklin-esque virtues—frugality, industry, self-reliance, temperance—but as a man who, through some perverse “sport of destiny,” has been cruelly misunderstood throughout his life, most recently by Judge Kent. In a passage that might have been dictated by John himself, the anonymous pamphleteer—seeking
to clarify the comments that had so infuriated Kent—explains that the judge “mistook the feeling of the remark he was handed to read. The prisoner meant to say that his disposition led him to resent an insult, and that the same causes operating upon his mind would produce the same effect—unknown and beyond control. There are thousands of men who, upon being called liar—scoundrel—or swindler, would strike the man who said it—a blow might lead to a scuffle—in a scuffle men become maddened, the mildest are infuriated, and consequences are no longer in their control.”
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The pamphlet concludes with a direct appeal to the public, entreating them to rally to John’s defense: “A few days and it will be too late to repair the wrong. A few days, and unless there be some merciful—some just—interposition, thousands of hearts will be wrung with agony and horror for the untimely death of a young, amiable, gentle, and, as all who know him believe, innocent man!”
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