Killer Colt

by Harold Schechter

  The same disheartening pattern repeated itself over the next year. In 1839 the company opened a retail shop at 155 Broadway. By this point—thanks in large part to Sam’s tireless PR efforts—the public was becoming increasingly aware of the lethal efficacy of his revolvers. One newspaper editorial, for example, proposed a simple test for anyone who doubted their superiority over old-fashioned flintlocks. Should a man find himself “engaged to meet another in single combat, and his antagonist apprise him that he will come armed with one of Colt’s repeating pistols, taking his station at forty yards, then to advance and fire at will, the friend of the old system, we think, would hesitate to meet the encounter with a single dueling pistol against one of Colt’s.”11 Despite such tributes, however, the high cost of the handguns—twenty-six dollars each versus six dollars for a pair of flintlock pistols—kept sales to a trickle at the Broadway store.

  Military contracts remained equally elusive, owing largely to the hidebound attitude of the head of the army’s ordnance department: Colonel George Bomford, an officer who “had reached that age and rank at which extreme rigidity sets in” and who (as Sam wrote in his reliably wretched manner) was “dedly oposed” to his newfangled firearms.12 Matters came to a head in June 1840. With virtually no commercial or governmental demand for Colt’s repeaters, the board of directors—whose members had been in more or less constant conflict with Sam over his profligate ways with company funds—made a fateful decision. Sam, in Washington at the time, learned about it in a letter from Pliny Lawton, who informed him that the directors had “resolved to stop a large portion of the works … and have been devising means to pay off the workmen.” Production had been halted at the Paterson gun mill.

  Under the circumstances, the news couldn’t have come as a total surprise to Sam. Still, it was a blow. And worse—much worse—was yet to come.

  15

  Like other members of the Colt family, John had become actively involved in Sam’s enterprise. In late 1837 he served as an agent for the Patent Arms Company, receiving several thousand dollars’ worth of rifles and holster pistols on consignment, most of which he succeeded in selling “to various dealers and speculators.”1 Even while engaged in this and other business, he managed to run a small accounting school in Cincinnati and to put in so much work on his text that it eventually grew to fifteen hundred pages. By the end of the year, determined to get the book in print, he gave up his teaching, suspended his commercial dealings, and devoted himself full-time to putting the manuscript into publishable shape. In the spring of 1838, it was ready to go to press.2

  By then, Cincinnati had established itself as a major publishing center—“the Literary Emporium of the West.” As early as 1826, with its population at just over sixteen thousand, the city’s printers were already issuing books in impressive numbers—nearly two hundred thousand primers, almanacs, songbooks, religious works, river guides, and more in that year alone. A decade later, that number had increased tenfold, with two million volumes pouring off the presses in the course of a single year. By the time John Colt had finished preparing his textbook, “Cincinnati publishers and dealers were famous throughout the West.”3

  Preeminent among these was a pioneering bookman named Ephraim Morgan, a Massachusetts native who had migrated to Ohio with his family at the age of fourteen. In 1827, after a long apprenticeship as a printer’s devil, he and two partners launched the Cincinnati Gazette, the city’s first newspaper. One year later, after quitting the paper in protest over its “policy of carrying advertisements for the return of fugitive slaves,” Morgan embarked on a highly successful five-decade career as a bookseller and publisher. By the time he retired, he had seen his printing operation expand from a small, water-propelled mill to an industrial powerhouse with a dozen steam-driven presses turning out millions of volumes per year. In 1836, eager to see his son, James, enter the trade, he helped the young man establish a publishing house with two partners. One of these was William Webster, son of the famous lexicographer. The other was a fascinating character named Nathan G. Burgess.4

  In later years, Burgess would become renowned as one of America’s earliest professional daguerreotypists. Among historians of photography, he is perhaps best known as a practitioner of that peculiarly Victorian craft, the making of artfully arranged postmortem portraits. In an article published in an 1855 issue of the Photographic and Fine Arts Journal, he offers detailed instructions on this delicate process, including tips for creating tasteful pictures of dead babies. (“If a portrait of an infant is to be taken, it may be placed in the mother’s lap and taken in the usual manner by a side light, representing sleep.”)5

  In 1836, however, the daguerreotype had not yet been introduced to the world, and Burgess was making his living as an agent for an eastern publisher. Traveling to Cincinnati on behalf of his employer, he joined with William Webster and James Morgan in establishing their own company. Within the space of two years, as partners came and went, the name of the firm underwent several corresponding changes: Webster, Burgess & Morgan became Burgess & Morgan, then Burgess & Crane, and finally, in 1838, N. G. Burgess & Co. It was under this imprint that Nathan Burgess brought out the first edition of John Colt’s accounting textbook.6

  Colt had high expectations for his book, anticipating “its adoption far and wide, and thence its providing him with a yearly income for life.”7 And, in fact, his text met with a gratifying reception. A review in the influential trade publication the Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review praised its novel approach and wealth of practical exercises, presented “with such clearness and simplicity as to render all of them perfectly comprehensible even to a child.”8 Prominent educators, merchants, and bankers in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York offered glowing testimonials, hailing Colt’s work as “the best we have ever examined” and “far superior to the treatises in common use.”

  Several hundred public schools and seminaries were quick to adopt the book, which rapidly went through various revisions and reprintings. Some editions carried an appendix containing several of Colt’s public lectures, while others were issued in two separate formats: a larger one (priced at $1.50) for “Teachers and Clerks,” and a more compact version (costing $1) for students.9

  In the end, The Science of Double Entry Book-Keeping would go through no fewer than forty-five editions and earn its author a lasting place in the history books. Or rather, in two very different sorts of history books: the kind dealing with the development of the accounting profession in the United States, and the kind chronicling the nation’s most notorious homicides.10

  16

  Shortly after the publication of his accounting text, John—adding to his already dizzying array of commercial and speculative ventures—entered into a business partnership with Nathan G. Burgess who, like other publishers of the time, also ran a small book and stationery store.1 Besides devoting themselves to the marketing of Colt’s work, they gambled on a major undertaking, investing a sizable sum to bring out a deluxe edition of a book called An Inquiry into the Origin of the Antiquities of America by John Delafield, Jr.

  A prominent New York banker actively involved in the city’s cultural life, Delafield had apparently become fascinated by pre-Columbian civilizations during a visit to Cincinnati, when he viewed a number of archaeological curiosities on display at Dorfeuille’s Western Museum.2 His book, produced during the breaks between his many other professional and social affairs, marshaled a wide range of highly dubious evidence (including geographical calculations based on the presumed location of Mount Ararat, where “Noah’s ark came to rest upon the receding of the Flood”) to prove that the aboriginal inhabitants of Mesoamerica were descended from the Cushites of ancient Egypt. Adding to this exercise in pseudo-scholarship was an egregious appendix by an amateur historian named James Lakey that offered “A Brief Inquiry into the Causes of the Superiority of Man in the Northern Hemisphere over Those of the Southern Hemisphere.” Quite lavishly produced for its time and place, the
volume was illustrated with ten engraved plates, five of them hand colored, plus a foldout facsimile of the Aztec document known as the “codex Boturini”—measuring no less than nineteen feet in length.3

  Offered by subscription only, Delafield’s book proved to be a major disappointment to its publishers. Its failure wiped away most of the profits from John’s accounting text and put the fledgling firm of Colt, Burgess & Co. (as it was now called) into a deep financial hole. Burgess later testified that the two partners lost one thousand dollars—equivalent to roughly twenty-three thousand dollars today—on the venture.4

  Believing that he might find a larger market for the Delafield book in New York City, Colt relocated to 14 Cortlandt Street, Manhattan, in April 1839, renting a small office that doubled as his residence. For the most part, he devoted himself wholly to his business affairs, single-handedly performing all the “duties of such establishment,” including the construction of the wooden packing cases used to ship his wares. The “few friends who frequented his office” would later recall “the array of boxes and profusion of paper strips, and the nails, and the hatchet or hammer, and other tools—and [Colt’s] appearance, stripped to his shirt with his sleeves rolled up” as he assembled the crates.5

  John’s efforts on behalf of Delafield’s book brought only middling results. The bulk of his income continued to come from his own accounting text, which he found himself continually updating. Evidence suggests that—perhaps because of the extreme financial burden he and Burgess had incurred by bringing out the costly and unprofitable Antiquities—John’s behavior was increasingly troubled at this time.

  Working tirelessly from daybreak to nightfall while living “in the most frugal manner,” he began to seek respite from his labors in a local tavern. On one occasion, after a long night of imbibing punch with a friend, he found himself in jail after breaking into a law office on the Battery. His official biographer and leading apologist would later attribute this incident to an innocent “blunder”—a matter of John’s having drunkenly mistaken the attorney’s office for his own. The explanation would be more convincing if John hadn’t found himself in other legal difficulties during this period of his life.6

  Temporarily abandoning New York, John next opened a bookstore on the corner of Fifth and Minor streets in Philadelphia. While there, he was the target of a lawsuit by the Cincinnati publisher (and father of Nathan Burgess’s original business partner) Ephraim Morgan, who accused John of swindling him out of nearly six hundred dollars.7

  Though the details of this case have been lost to history, one fact about John’s life during this interlude in Philadelphia is certain: He became intimately involved with a beautiful, if uneducated, “female in humble life” named Caroline Henshaw, who worked in a corset maker’s shop.8 In early 1841, after six months in Philadelphia, he returned to New York City and took up residence at a boardinghouse in Lower Manhattan run by a Captain and Mrs. Hart. Soon afterward, Caroline joined him there, passing as John’s wife. By then, she was several months pregnant.9

  17

  Even after the Patent Arms Company ceased producing new weapons, Sam Colt clung fiercely to the hope of salvaging his business. That possibility, already remote, grew even more unlikely with the news out of Florida. After putting Colt’s repeating carbines to heavy use in the grueling campaign against the Seminoles, Colonel Harney’s Second Dragoons—initially so enthusiastic about the guns—had reached a devastating conclusion. “I am very sorry to report that your arms have proved an entire failure when put to the test of actual service,” wrote one officer, detailing problems that ranged from exploding cylinders and bursting barrels to accidental discharges and jammed cap primers.

  Though Sam insisted that the defects in those models had subsequently been fixed, the damage was done. In February 1841, John Ehlers—a major investor who had managed to take control of the company—sent Sam a dispiriting message: “Our sales are little better than nothing.” Within the year, the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson would be defunct.1

  Even before the company underwent its final collapse, however, the ever-resilient inventor, now twenty-seven years old, had begun to focus his prodigious energies on a new project. Or, rather, to redirect them toward an old project he had kept in abeyance while pursuing his gun business: the development of “submarine explosives,” an interest of Sam’s dating back to his adolescence, when he had attempted to blow a raft “sky high” on Ware Pond as part of the town’s Fourth of July festivities.

  • • •

  The possibility of using underwater mines to defend the nation’s harbors had taken on a new urgency in the spring of 1841, owing to increasing tensions between the United States and Great Britain over a crisis that came to be known as the McLeod affair.

  Several years earlier, a group of insurgents in upper Canada, intent on establishing a republican government, had attempted an armed rebellion against British rule. Their leader was the fiery reformer, newspaper editor, and former mayor of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie. After a few skirmishes—culminating in a rout of Mackenzie’s forces in March 1837—the rebel leaders fled to the United States, took refuge on a small island in the Niagara River, and began making preparations for an invasion of upper Canada. To provision themselves, they chartered a little steamer called the Caroline, which operated out of Buffalo, and ferried men and munitions to the island from the American shore.

  When the insurgents began launching attacks on the Canadian village of Chippewa, the British mustered a large force under the command of a colonel named McNabb, who resolved to cut off the rebels’ supply line by destroying the Caroline. On December 29, 1837, an expedition of five small boats, carrying a party of heavily armed men, set out for this purpose under the cover of night. Finding the Caroline moored to the wharf at Fort Schlosser on the American side of Niagara Falls, the attackers, wielding muskets and swords, clambered on board and drove the crew from the vessel. They then towed the ship out onto the river, set it ablaze, and sent it drifting over the falls. During the melee, one of the Caroline’s crew members, a New Yorker named Amos Durfee, was shot through the head and killed.

  Three years later, at a tavern in upstate New York, a Canadian deputy sheriff named Alexander McLeod drunkenly boasted that he had not only taken part in the destruction of the Caroline but was the man who shot Durfee. He was promptly arrested by New York authorities and indicted for arson and murder. The British government demanded his immediate release on the grounds that, at the time of the incident, McLeod had been “acting in the necessary defense of his country against a treasonable insurrection, of which Amos Durfee was acting in aid at the time.” The Supreme Court of the State of New York, however—ruling that “the attack upon the Caroline was an offense against the laws of the state and the life and property of her citizens, and came within the jurisdiction of her courts”—refused to let him go. The decision to proceed with McLeod’s trial aroused widespread outrage among the people of Great Britain, whose government began to mobilize for war.2

  While this escalating international crisis caused alarm in many quarters, Sam Colt saw it as a godsend, a chance to sell the military—no longer interested in his small arms—on a unique new weapons technology: his so-called submarine battery. This device, the precise workings of which Sam kept shrouded in secrecy, consisted of “a tin tube containing anywhere from one hundred to two hundred pounds of black powder that was anchored to the sea floor at a predetermined depth. To detonate the mine, Colt proposed using a spark created by an underwater electromagnetic cable.”3

  In June 1841, Sam traveled to Washington, DC, set himself up at Fuller’s Hotel, and proceeded to compose a letter that—judging from its perfect orthography—clearly was set down on paper for him by someone who could actually spell. In it, Sam boasted that, after years of “study & experiment,” he had devised a system for “effectually protecting our Sea Coast”—a method that, “if adopted for the service of our government, will not only save them
millions in outlay for the construction of means of defense, but in the event of foreign war, will prove a perfect safeguard against all the combined fleets of Europe without exposing the life of our citizens.”

  Without entering into specifics, Colt proclaimed that his invention enabled him “to effect the instant destruction of either Ships or Steamers, at my pleasure on their entering a harbor, whether singly or in fleets … All this I can do in perfect security and without giving an invading enemy the slightest sign of danger.” Emphasizing the economic benefits of his system—which could protect a “harbor like that of New York” for “less than the cost of a single steamship” and required only “one single man to manage the destroying agent against any fleet that Europe can send”—he requested a government appropriation of twenty thousand dollars to arrange a demonstration of his submarine battery before the Cabinet. He then sent the letter to President John Tyler.4

  It was a particularly hectic time for Tyler, who had ascended to the presidency only months earlier following the untimely death of William Henry Harrison. (The record holder for the shortest presidency in U.S. history, Harrison had insisted on delivering his two-hour inauguration speech in freezing rain without either a hat or a coat; one month later, he was dead of pneumonia.) When Tyler failed to respond to the letter, Sam turned to two supporters who could provide him with an entrée to the chief executive. One was Senator Samuel L. Southard of New Jersey, previously secretary of the navy under presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. The other was John Howard Payne.

  • • •