Killer Colt (38 page)

There was good cause for the urgency of this plea. On the day the pamphlet went on sale—October 21, 1842—exactly one month remained before John was scheduled to be hanged.

T
heir bid for a new trial having been refused by both Judge Kent and the New York State Supreme Court, John’s attorneys made a last-ditch effort to obtain a writ of error by applying to the only person left who could allow it: Reuben Hyde Walworth, the last man to hold the soon-to-be-abolished position of chancellor of New York, the highest judicial office in the state.

In future years, Walworth’s own family would be at the center of a highly publicized homicide, arguably the most sensational case of parricide in the annals of New York crime. In June 1873, Walworth’s forty-three-year-old son, a prolific popular novelist named Mansfield Tracy Walworth, was shot to death by
his
own son, nineteen-year-old Frank Hardin Walworth, who lured his father to a Broadway hotel room and gunned him down with cold deliberation. The murder weapon was a five-shot Colt revolver.
¹

That tragedy, however, was still several decades away when the chancellor was asked to intervene in John’s case. His ruling came on November 3, two weeks and a day before the scheduled execution. After reviewing each of the points raised by John’s lawyers in their earlier appeals, Walworth found that there was no “reason to doubt that the prisoner has been properly convicted.”

In explaining his ruling, Walworth offered a highly unusual aside. “No one not immediately connected with the condemned individual whose case I have been considering can more deeply regret than I do the situation in which he is placed, or sympathize more sincerely with his numerous connections,”
he wrote. “It has been my great fortune to be acquainted with many of them, and I know them to be among the most respectable in any community. With one of them, a lady who is his very near relative, I have been in terms of intimacy and friendship for more than thirty years.”

After making this remarkable confession, Walworth stressed that he was not the sort to allow such personal matters to influence his decisions. “In the administration of justice, upon which not only the safety of the community but all that is dear in life depends, the calls of private friendship must, or at least, should always give way to the stern demands of public duty,” he proclaimed. “Having therefore arrived at the conclusion that there is no probable cause for supposing that there is any error in the judgment in this case … I must refuse to allow this writ of error.”

To more than one observer, it appeared that Walworth’s “friendship and intimacy” with one “very near relative” of the condemned man had actually worked against John—that the chancellor, precisely because of his close connection to the Colt family, felt the need to prove that he was operating without bias. As one legal analyst remarked, there was “something like an ostentation of deciding according to strict law” in Walworth’s written opinion, as though he feared that a less stern judgment would be read as a sign of favoritism.
²

•   •   •

Only one recourse now remained to John’s supporters. On November 4, 1842, the day after Chancellor Walworth handed down his ruling, a small party of them boarded an Albany-bound stagecoach to embark on the last desperate battle for John Colt’s life.
³

F
or William Henry Seward, the power to grant pardons was a particularly onerous burden of office. During his two terms as governor of New York State, he was constantly besieged by petitioners. On one morning alone—as he records in his journals—he was approached by no fewer than five female supplicants: the widow of an old acquaintance, imploring him “to release her son from the county jail”; a woman, eight months’ pregnant, begging “for the pardon of her young husband, a watchman, who had committed burglary”; a “maiden lady” whose brother was “in the state prison at Auburn for forgery”; a “poor brokenhearted creature whose honeymoon was scarcely passed before her husband was dispatched to Sing Sing”; and a “grocer’s wife whose husband was consigned to the penitentiary for larceny.” Later that same day, he was presented with yet another appeal, this “one for a pardon to Thomas Topping, convicted of the murder of his wife.”
¹

Determining whether to dispense executive clemency was not only a trying task for the governor, it was, more often than not, a thankless one. Seward commonly found himself under fire for his decisions, accused of either playing political favorites or ignoring the will of the people. His pardon of his friend and fellow Whig, James Watson Webb, for example—who had been sentenced to two years at hard labor for violating the law against dueling—drew widespread criticism and ridicule from Seward’s Democratic foes. On the other hand, he incurred the outrage of thousands of his own constituents for refusing to pardon Benjamin B. Rathbun, a prominent Buffalo businessman who—despite his imprisonment for forgeries amounting
to several million dollars—was one of upstate New York’s most admired citizens.
²

Of the countless cases he’d been faced with during his four years in office, however, none, by Seward’s own admission, was as agonizing as that of John Colt. In the days following Chancellor Walworth’s decision, Seward found himself under assault by partisans of the condemned man. “Each docking of a steamboat from New York brought the influential. His own political supporters, big Whigs, arrived hourly and breathed the words, ‘Pardon Colt.’ ” As the campaign for clemency mounted, it “eclipsed all other state business.”
³

“You have no idea of the fatiguing weariness of the week spent in hearing every form of application for pardon to Colt,” Seward wrote to his wife, Frances, describing the parade of supporters who had come to plead on the prisoner’s behalf. Among them were Seward’s “friend and former counselor,” Willis Hall, until recently the New York State attorney general; David Graham, Jr., a prominent New York City attorney and author of
A Treatise on the Law of New Trials in Cases Civil and Criminal;
Judge Ambrose Spencer, former chief justice of the state supreme court; and Lewis Gaylord Clark—all of whom, wrote Seward, came “to inform me that Colt was unjustly condemned.”
⁴

Besides these personal callers, Seward was inundated with written pleas for executive intervention. “My table groans with letters from gentlemen and ladies of acknowledged respectability and influence,” Seward wrote to his wife. “Among the former are gentlemen of the press and of every profession, urging and soliciting the pardon of Colt.”
⁵

Many of these letters based their appeals on legal grounds, arguing that the “evidence of premeditated crime was insufficient to warrant” the verdict, that Colt was clearly “the helpless victim of uncontrolled passion,” and that the outcome had less to do with the crime itself than with communal revulsion at the “attempt at concealment.” Others made their case on moral grounds. For example, Dr. Blanchard Fosgate—physician to the New York State Prison at Auburn and the author of such works as
Sleep Psychologically Considered, Dream-Thoughts of Waking Circumstances
, and
On the Influence of Coffee over the Narcotic Effect of Morphia—
maintained that a commutation of Colt’s sentence would be in the “best interests of society.” However disguised under the name of justice, Blanchard argued, the infliction
of the death penalty was nothing more than revenge—a “direct stimulus” to a brutal appetite rooted in the “early history of our race.” By commuting John’s sentence to life imprisonment, Seward would be fostering “the higher qualities of our nature—repentance, benevolence, and sympathy for our fellow men in adversity”—and thus assisting in “the progress of mankind toward a more lofty and just comprehension of the value of human life.”
⁶

Not all of the communications received by Seward presented their arguments in such measured tones. There were crank letters too, including at least one direct death threat:

•   •   •

After days of “consuming anxiety,” Seward reached his decision on Friday, November 11—one week before the scheduled execution. It would be published in its entirety in Saturday’s
Albany Evening Journal
and, in succeeding days, reprinted in newspapers throughout the country.

Those friends and supporters of John who hoped for—even expected—a pardon would have been heartened by Seward’s preliminary remarks, since he began his review of the case by acknowledging that the crime had
not been premeditated. At the same time, Seward noted, the victim “was a meek and inoffensive man. He was unarmed, and visited the prisoner, although under excitement, yet without any hostile purpose; and when the remains of the deceased were found, the head, fractured with certainly five and probably more wounds, no longer retained the human form.”

For Seward, the inordinate savagery of Colt’s attack ruled out the argument that it was made in self-defense. “Such a homicide could not have been accidental or necessary for self-defense,” he noted. “It was committed with a deadly weapon in a cruel and inhuman manner upon a defenseless and powerless man.”

For the accused to be convicted of the “milder” charge of manslaughter, the defense would have to show that he “was in imminent danger, and in the heat of passion, suddenly excited, intense, uncontrollable, and allowing no time for reflection, and that he did not design to produce death, and was unconscious that such a consequence might follow his violence.” The evidence, however, spoke loudly against such an assumption.

For Seward, as for virtually everyone else, it was John’s actions following the killing—his “almost superhuman” efforts to “remove the evidence of the fatal transaction”—that spoke most damningly against him. In the governor’s view, those actions could have been performed only by a man “guilty of deliberate and willful murder”:

As for John’s argument that his attempts at concealment were prompted by fear of public disgrace, Seward was having none of it:

As much as anything else, it was John’s complete lack of contrition—the cool, unrepentant demeanor he had exhibited during his final courtroom appearance—that hardened Seward against him.