Killer Colt (42 page)

Perhaps the most intriguing of all the editorials to appear in the wake of John’s suicide was a piece in the November 24 issue of the New York
Sun
. Headlined “The Moral of the Recent Tragedy,” the essay is remarkable for its psychological sophistication and acuity: its recognition of the extent to which our actions are motivated by what a later age would call unconscious impulses.

The “fearful drama” of the Colt affair, the author writes, teaches “how little we know ourselves—what strangers we are to our evil propensities … and how terrible and uncontrollable is the wild tempest of human passions when once they obtain the mastery over the reason and the conscience”:

“Let us be admonished by this terrible example,” the writer concludes. “Let us ask—Do we know ourselves any better than he knew himself? Do we comprehend, and have we the fixed moral principle, the high moral energy, to control the fearful volcano of human passions whose maddened fires roar and blaze within our bosoms?”
¹⁴

In its avoidance of pat moralizing—its acknowledgment that, operating beneath our awareness, there are dark, destructive drives that can only be neutralized through a process of deep and ruthless introspection—this article strikes a singularly contemporary note. Though it was published anonymously, scholars have since identified its author as the twenty-three-year-old journalist Walt Whitman.
¹⁵

W
hile preachers, pundits, and crusaders of various stripes put the Colt case to their own particular uses, the public continued to traffic in rumor and gossip. “The fever of excitement into which our city was lashed on Friday has subsided but little and continues to rage in all circles,” reported the
Sun
on Monday, November 21. New Yorkers, the paper continued, were in the grip of “a perfect Colt mania.”
¹

The most persistent story had it that the dead body found in John’s cell was that of a “pauper convict” and that, during the tumult of the fire, John himself had been smuggled out of the prison and put on a ship bound for France.
²
Among those who accepted that John had in fact committed suicide, speculation swirled around the source of the suicide weapon. With the exception of the Reverend Dr. Anthon, virtually everyone who had visited John during his final hours was suspected of having supplied him with the fatal pocketknife, though the consensus seemed to be that it had been “concealed in the long clothes of the baby that Caroline Henshaw carried with her into the cell when she went there to be married.”
³
That the infant, according to every newspaper account, had not been present at the ceremony did nothing to dampen the rumor.

One particularly disturbing story quickly made the rounds. It was recorded by George Templeton Strong, who heard it from George Anthon, son of the clergyman. In his diary entry of November 22, Strong notes that John had been “reluctantly persuaded into” suicide in order “to spare his family” the ignominy of the gallows. Exactly who did the persuading was left unsaid; though as the world knew, only one member of John’s family
had been at his side throughout the ordeal and had much to lose by having the Colt name besmirched with the permanent taint of dishonor.
⁴

At the same time that this rumor reached Strong’s ears, James Gordon Bennett was publicizing another, unsubstantiated story. In addition to the suicide, John’s last-minute marriage to Caroline—“the strange and somber bridal,” as one penny paper called it—had been a subject of intense speculation.
⁵
Most people assumed that John had wed his mistress for noble motives: to “redeem the character of the unfortunate woman” and to legitimize their out-of-wedlock son.
⁶
Bennett, however, claimed that there was another and far less admirable reason.

“Circumstances that have recently come into our possession,” wrote Bennett, had persuaded him that Colt and Caroline were actually married “in Philadelphia before the murder of Adams took place in this city. After this deed was committed, it became necessary that she should be used as a witness, and knowing that her testimony could not be received as the wife of Colt, she was introduced as plain Caroline Henshaw, and for the purpose of carrying out the deception as originally practiced, the marriage ceremony was again performed, in order to blind the eyes of the world to the previous transaction.”

To Bennett, this somewhat tortured story offered the only plausible rationale “for the commission of an act that, under any other circumstances, appears perfectly inexplicable.”
⁷
There was, however, another explanation for John and Caroline’s marriage, one so shocking that many years would pass before it was brought to light.

T
he infant son born to Caroline Henshaw had been named Samuel Colt, Jr.—a tribute, so the world assumed, to Sam’s steadfast devotion to his brother. For the rest of his life, Sam would look after the boy and his mother. His efforts on their behalf began shortly after John’s death, when he sought help from a woman who had long proven herself a friend to the outcast and oppressed: Lydia Maria Child.

Born outside of Boston in 1802, Child taught for a time at a girls’ school before achieving prominence as the author of the historical novel
Hobomok
, published when she was just twenty-two. A few years later, she founded the pioneering children’s magazine the
Juvenile Miscellany
, then turned out a series of popular domestic advice books, beginning with
The American Frugal Housewife
. By the mid-1830s, Child had taken up the radical causes of abolitionism and women’s rights. After moving to Manhattan in 1841, she became editor of the abolitionist newspaper the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
, to which she contributed a regular column, “Letters from New-York,” later collected into the best-selling volume of the same name.

As Child’s chief biographer notes, these city sketches were remarkable, among other reasons, for their haunting, deeply sympathetic “vignettes that encapsulated the daily lives of the poor”:

Child’s widely read piece on John Colt, originally published in the November 24, 1842, issue of the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
, not only dealt with another of her causes—the crusade against capital punishment—but went out of its way to stress the estimable traits of John’s character. “I mean no extenuation of the awful crime of John C. Colt when I say that, through the whole course of this terrible tragedy, he has shown the self-same qualities which men admire under the name of military greatness,” Child wrote. “The stern silence with which he shut up in his own breast his secrets and plans; his cool self-possession under circumstances that would have crazed a common brain; his bold defiance of the law, which he regarded as a powerful enemy; the strong pride which bore him up under a long imprisonment and prompted him to suicide; all these indicate such elements of character as military heroes are made of.” Mrs. Child also praised Sam, who “never forsook his disgraced and suffering brother; but sustained him throughout by his presence and sympathy; and made almost superhuman efforts to save him from his untimely end.”
²

Whether Sam and Mrs. Child were already friends when this essay was written is unclear, though the two shared a mutual acquaintance in Lydia Huntley Sigourney.
³
In any event, within two weeks of John’s suicide, Sam had approached Mrs. Child to solicit her aid in finding suitable living arrangements for his brother’s widow and the infant boy he was determined to “treat as if he were his own son.” We know of Sam’s visit from a letter that Child addressed to her friend John Sullivan Dwight on December 1, 1842. A former Unitarian minister and key figure in the Transcendentalism movement, Dwight was at the time a teacher of Latin and music at Brook Farm, the Utopian commune established at West Roxbury, Massachusetts—the founding members of which included Nathaniel Hawthorne.
⁴
Referring to Caroline, Mrs. Child wrote: