The Blackest Bird (13 page)

D
uring his time in the Tombs, John Colt never suffered. Rarely did he seem rattled, bothered, or unsure.

The Colt family never dreamt John would be found guilty of the capital act of homicide, much less condemned. When he finally went to trial in the winter of 1842, they hoped for a verdict of self-defense or, at worst, manslaughter. Justice in the city had traditionally been available to the wealthiest for a price. It was John’s misfortune, however, to have committed what his lawyers called “this lamentable act” in the midst of a reform movement.

Following the murder of Mary Rogers, citizens of exaggerated morality and heightened conscience began to find their way to elevated positions of opinion and power in the public discourse. With the death of Mary Rogers still unsolved and the more recent crime against Samuel Adams, these reformers pitted themselves in opposition to those corrupt agents of the law who readily made themselves available, according to the reformers, to be bought off by wealth, privilege, power, and/or sex, in the form of sin and evil.

Certain editors, particularly Horace Greeley at the
Daily Tribune
, railed his fellow citizens to take a stance, to fight the good fight
against the evils of corruption, indiscriminate power, and entitled class.

Greeley, although against capital punishment (and the eating of animals), saw himself on an evangelical mission on behalf of virtue and decorum, and had publicly dedicated his print to the moral, social, and political well-being of the people.

At the rival
Herald
, James Gordon Bennett scoffed at what he termed “this posturing.”

“Greeley is nothing more than a galvanized New England squash,” Bennett charged.

Bennett’s most important single journalistic precept was that a newspaper publisher should make a great deal of money. Before the trial, he unearthed and printed gleefully all kinds of purported dirt in regard to John Colt, including that he had been a Mississippi knife fighter, a gambler, and had once even seduced away the comely quadroon mistress of a riverboat captain, only to abandon the harlot after he had had his fill with her.

But sensing a change in the wind—and never failing to recognize an opportunity to sell a great many more newspapers—just before the trial was to begin, Bennett seamlessly changed direction, to take sides with the sainted souls.

wondered he in the
Herald
, utilizing its boldest black ink.

Seeing their chance and seizing it, even more self-appointed do-gooders, men of God, temperance kings, and self-styled preachers, now quickly enlisted in the crusade, making their own demands for equal rights and proper justice for all under the law, rich and poor alike.

John Colt became the symbol of whom these demagogues demanded example needed to be made. Not only had Colt murdered the tradesman Samuel Adams, but it was also now endlessly written in
the public prints how he was living in sin and taking advantage of the innocent young woman Caroline Henshaw.

Still worse, the unmarried Miss Henshaw, it was now publicly revealed, was with child.

Bennett, with his knack for indignant superiority, led the community in calling for John Colt’s blood in retribution for his moral denigration.

To fight back, the Colt family hired a team of lawyers to represent John’s case at his trial in the Essex Street police court. Leader of the bank of three attorneys was Colt family cousin Dudley Selden, a former representative to the Democratic Congress in Washington. Second-in-command was John Morrill, earlier that year the successful defender of the “female physician” Ann Lohman, known better by her nom d’abortion, Madame Restell. Last but not least was transplanted activist New York attorney Robert Emmet, son of the fiery Irish rebel Thomas Emmet.

The three law hounds were rumored to have been retained with a onetime payment of two thousand dollars, and promised an additional eight thousand dollars in stock in Samuel Colt’s new arms manufacturing company.

There was never a question that Colt had killed. He had admitted so graphically after his arrest in his very public confession published by Bennett in the
Herald
. But his legal team’s allegation was that his response to Adams’ aggression was one of self-defense, that he had been insulted, then attacked, and it was only when he was himself being choked and in danger of losing his life that he picked up the lethal instrument off his desk, in order to protect himself, and unfortunately, what the two-headed tool was was half hammer, half hatchet, and the result turned morbid before he even knew what it was he was doing.

Judge William Kent presided at the trial that promised much sensationalism. As conjectured in the public prints, controversy centered on the point of law was Colt’s act murder or manslaughter?

Gossip on the street swirled about the feasibility of an insanity plea for the accused. Middle Colt brother James Colt fed a story to Bennett that insanity ran in the Colt family. He cited the case of their sister, confessing she had poisoned herself to death.

John himself, James contended, had several times become insane.

The trial began pretty much by rote. John was attracting so much vitriol and bad publicity his team of three defenders tried to have the press banned from the courtroom.

To no avail.

Judge Kent ruled that it would indeed have been strange in the vast and vibrant city of New York if such a murder had not precipitated such shock and outrage.

“But I have no doubt,” declared he from the bench, “that this court will remain uninfluenced by contamination from without.”

A number of witnesses were called to attest to the character of Samuel Adams, including his clergyman, who most earnestly told a parable to the court about how one Sunday the murdered printer was moved to tears by his sermon.

There was no talk of insanity.

Instead, Selden, Morrill, and Emmet followed a course for self-defense. Samuel Adams was a hothead, they alleged. If John Colt had been bent on murder, he would certainly have carried with him that day one of his brother’s pistols, several of which he owned.

The prosecution made curious response. “How do we know Samuel Adams was not in fact killed by a pistol ball to the skull?” they questioned. “The doctors who examined the corpse may have been wrong in regard to the murder weapon.”

This unusual foray by the prosecution at first mystified the defense.

Needing to parry the tactic, Selden called his cousin Samuel Colt to the stand. Colonel Colt approached, carrying two of his revolvers. The first was a large blue Paterson, the second a smaller pocket model.

A thick book, it appeared to be a leather-bound and embossed copy of
Barnaby Rudge
, was set up at several paces and Colonel Colt asked
to shoot at the volume so that it might be ascertained what kind of holes the pistol balls would make.

He fired the larger gun. The noise of its discharge caused much shock in the gallery. But the bullet penetrated only nine pages, although dimpling twenty-four more. The second round, from the pocket pistol, made very little impression at all on the same book.

In the gallery, James Gordon Bennett jumped to his feet and stormed from the courtroom.

he cried in a hysterical extra edition that hit the streets within hours that very afternoon. “What did this little bit of theater prove, if anything?”

Not so, denied the defense, although not refuting they were being paid for their efforts, at least in part, with stock certificates in the Colt company.

Back and forth went the arguments in front of Judge Kent until a resolution was finally decided upon. Although the defense vigorously objected to this proposed solution as well, the judge ruled the body of Samuel Adams must be exhumed. The corpse should then be decapitated, and the head alone brought to court in order to fit the hatchet blade to the fatal wounds, once and for all making certain if the curious two-headed tool was indeed the murder weapon.

“However painful it might be,” Judge Kent charged over the howled objections of Morrill and Emmet, “justice must be served, and the head produced.”

The next day the coroner, Dr. Archer, sat calmly in court with the murder victim’s head in his lap until he was called to the witness
stand. On request, amidst barely restrained pandemonium, he held the severed head high and exhibited to the jury that the hatchet blade fitted the wounds perfectly, proving it was indeed the offending weapon.

John hid his eyes during this exhibition, but his fate was sealed. Throughout the course of the trial he had remained unrepentant and stoic. In his summation to the jury, the prosecutor, James Whiting, charged this was emblematic of his cold-bloodedness. In addition, Whiting made caustic reference to Colt’s immoral relation with Caroline Henshaw, the fact that they were unmarried and expecting a child in little more than a month’s time, a fact he knew would weigh heavily on the jurors’ minds.

“God forbid I should say anything against her,” spoke Whiting in his summation. “She is about to become a mother, and if there is anyone who would pray for this man, it is she.”

The prosecutor here fixed John Colt with an unveiled eye. “She approached his bed, he threw her from him. She knew she was not his wife, and she dared not press it. But do not blame her, do not blame this slight girl, blame the one whose heart is such that he could seduce her, and keep her in abjection. Had she been his wife, he could have poured his sorrows in her ear; she would have clung by him; she would have gone with him to his prison; she would have accompanied him even to the gallows. But he chose not to marry her. Let this be a warning to women: Let them learn not to put their earthly and eternal happiness in the keeping of such a man as this.”

Afterwards, Judge Kent delivered his final instructions to the jury. He told the twelve that since John Colt had already confessed to killing Samuel Adams, the task they had at hand was only to decide if he was guilty of manslaughter or guilty of cold-blooded murder.

“John Colt’s gay air,” he said, “his careless air, his coolness, the firm manner in which he walks the precipice, this must be judged exclusively to determine if it is sufficient to bring him in guilty of murder.”

After ten hours of deliberation, the jury returned their verdict at four o’clock on a Sunday morning, the second week of February 1842.

The decision: John C. Colt, guilty of murder.

Even after the devastating conviction the Colt family did not lose heart. They appealed. Paraded in were hordes of prominent sycophants and accomplished citizens, called upon by the family to lend voice in support of the terrible circumstance. Publisher G. P. Putnam, two of the four Harper brothers, James Fenimore Cooper, who had only recently published to great acclaim
The Last of the Mohicans,
former actor and lyricist John Howard Payne (no relation to Mary Rogers’ once betrothed, Daniel Payne, the suicide), the eminent Washington Irving, city poet laureate Fitz-Greene Halleck, and
Knickerbocker Magazine
editor
Lewis Gaylord Clark, to name but a few.

Even the eminent Charles Dickens was enlisted from overseas to write a letter in support, which he did forthwith, anointing the murder “The Tragedy.”

Eventually Governor William Seward himself traveled down from Albany to the Tombs to personally visit with the condemned and the Colt family, positioning himself within the green velvet shrouds of John’s death row cell, speaking in whispers with the three Colts, Samuel, James, and John.

But in the end, after the state supreme court denied the final appeal, the governor could only apologize, wishing God’s speed to the youngest of “the formidable Colt brothers,” as he called them, because even by him, His Excellency Governor William Henry Seward of the great Empire State of New York, regrettably, nothing more could be done. The court’s sentence of death was to be enacted at 5 p.m. on November 18, 1842.