John Caldwell Colt (March 1, 1810 – November 18, 1842), the brother of Samuel Colt, was an American fur trader, bookkeeper, and law clerk. He served briefly as a U.S. Marine, forging a letter to get himself discharged after three months. After numerous business ventures, he became an authority concerning double-entry bookkeeping and published a textbook concerning the subject, which had 45 editions and remained in continuous publication until 13 years after his death.
In 1842, Colt was convicted of the murder of a printer named Samuel Adams, to whom Colt owed money for the publication of a bookkeeping textbook. Colt killed Adams with a hatchet the year previous to his arrest in what he claimed was self-defense, but he had afterwards concealed the crime by disposing of the body. When the body was discovered, Colt was the first suspect. The trial became a sensation in the New York news because of his family name, the manner of disposal of the corpse, and Colt's somewhat arrogant demeanor in the courtroom. Colt was found guilty and sentenced to hang, but killed himself on the morning of his execution.
Conspiracy theories circulated about the suicide, with some holding that Colt had in fact escaped from prison and staged a body to look like his own. One publication alleged that a family member smuggled the knife used in the suicide into his cell. Others stated that Colt was living in California with his wife, Caroline. None of these allegations were ever proven. Edgar Allan Poe may have based the short story "The Oblong Box" partly on the murder of Adams, and Herman Melville alluded to the case in his short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener".
Early life
John Colt was born in Hartford, Connecticut. His father was Christopher Colt, a farmer who had relocated his family to Hartford when he changed professions and became a businessman. His mother was Sarah (née Caldwell), with whom Christopher had eight children. Two died during childhood; the eldest sister, Margaret, died of tuberculosis when John was 13 years old. John's brother Samuel Colt founded the Colt's Manufacturing Company.
When John was nine, his father sent him to Hopkins Academy; the next year, the father took him out again, partly because the boy was in constant trouble and partly because the father had lost his fortune in the Panic of 1819.
Colt's mother died of tuberculosis when he was age 11. He and his siblings were then cared for by their father's sister, Lucretia Colt Price, until Christopher remarried two years later to Olivia Sargeant.
Christopher had three more children with Olivia. As they now had financial difficulties, Olivia insisted that her stepchildren work rather than receive schooling. The Colt brothers' one surviving sister, Sarah Ann, acted as a surrogate mother of sorts until she was sent off to a relative's house to work as a menial. John was known to keep locks of hair belonging to her and Margaret all through his life.
At age 14, Colt started work as an assistant bookkeeper for the Union Manufacturing Company in Marlborough, Connecticut. He quit the job and moved to Albany, New York, in less than a year. He returned to Hartford during 1826 and studied at an academy for three months. During 1827, he found employment as a mathematics teacher at a ladies seminary in Baltimore, Maryland, for a year. During 1828, he became a supervisory engineer for a canal near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The next year, his sister Sarah Ann killed herself by swallowing arsenic; one newspaper account stated it was due to a fight with her stepmother and another said she "took a morbid view of her doom to labor" until her "fortitude and her mind gave way". Devastated by this loss, John vowed to "leave the country and pass the rest of his days in some foreign land". In despair, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. His orders were for a Mediterranean cruise on the U.S.S. Constitution; illness prevented him from serving on the ship, and he worked as a clerk in Norfolk, Virginia, for a man referred to as Colonel Anderson.
Colt spent three months as a marine and was disillusioned with the military lifestyle; clerking in a humid port was not the adventurous life he had envisioned. He was still very ill, but not ill enough for a medical discharge, so he forged a letter in the name of George Hamilton, a farmer from Ware, Massachusetts, stating that his underage son had enlisted falsely with the name of John Colt. He mailed the letter to his brother James and asked him to mail it to Colonel Anderson from Ware. Anderson discharged Colt within days of receiving the letter, citing Colt's illness as the reason and not fraudulent enlistment.
Upon his discharge, Colt spent a year as a law clerk for his cousin Dudley Selden. At the same time, he became a riverboat gambler and was challenged to a duel concerning a shared mistress. Although the duel was never fought, this incident became part of Colt's reputation as a rough gambler. He traveled to Vermont during 1830 as a debate coach for the University of Vermont, at Burlington, Vermont; however, he quit after a year due to symptoms of tuberculosis. Colt then traveled to the Great Lakes region to recuperate and bought a farm in Michigan on Gooden's Lake; however, tubercular symptoms began again and he soon left for Cincinnati, Ohio, where he became a teacher of one of the first correspondence courses in America; he also became part of a group known for Bohemianism, and considered John Howard Payne and Hiram Powers among his friends.
He attempted many business ventures throughout the United States: land speculator in Texas, soap manufacturer in New York, grocery wholesaler in Georgia, fur trader, dry-goods merchant in Florida, and an organizer of Mardi Gras masquerade celebrations in New Orleans.
Double-entry bookkeeping While teaching in Louisville, Kentucky, during 1834, Colt began lecturing on "Italian Book-keeping", or double-entry bookkeeping. He toured the United States giving a series of lectures concerning the topic and by 1837 had begun writing a textbook concerning the subject.
His textbook The Italian science of double-entry book-keeping: simplified, arranged and methodized, received good reviews. Colt had the book published in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, and by 1839 more than 200 schools were using it. Colt eliminated the word "Italian" from the title for the second edition and included transcripts of his lectures in the newer editions; the book had 45 printings and was in publication until 1855.
Soon after publishing the first edition of his textbook, Colt became partners with the publisher, Nathan G. Burgess, using the name Colt, Burgess & Co, in Cincinnati, Ohio. The new business almost became bankrupt after publishing An Introduction into the Origin of Antiquities in America by John Delafield Jr. The scholarship of the text was dubious, and the book was available by subscription only. Hoping for a better market for Delafield's book, Colt relocated to 14 Cortlandt Street in New York during 1839. The office doubled as Colt's residence, and Colt made his own shipping crates there.
Murder of Samuel Adams
On September 17, 1841, a New York printer named Samuel Adams went to meet Colt to collect a debt due for some textbooks that Adams had printed for him. The two disagreed about the final amount owed; sources indicate that it was a discrepancy of $1.35. According to Colt, Adams began choking him with his cravat. In self-defense, Colt reached for what he thought was a hammer to fend him off, but the weapon was actually a hatchet. Colt struck Adams four or five times with the weapon, causing Adams to drop to the floor.
Upon seeing that Adams was dead, Colt cleaned up the blood. The next morning (September 18), Colt placed the body into a large shipping crate and packed it with salt. He then addressed it to a non-existent address in New Orleans and hired a car-man named Barstow to deliver it to a ship named the Kalamazoo, scheduled to leave the next morning.
After a day or so, Adams' family began searching the city for him, publishing notices in several newspapers such as the New York Courier and Enquirer and the New York Weekly Tribune notifying people that he was missing. A neighbor of Colt's, Asa H. Wheeler, told Adams' father-in-law, Joseph Lane, that he had heard noises in Colt's office that sounded like a fight followed by a crash to the floor. Peering in the keyhole, he saw someone "bending over something on the floor". Wheeler later secured a key from the landlord and saw that a large packing crate was missing and that the floor had been scrubbed. On September 22, 1841, Colt visited Adams' print shop inquiring about the status of his books and the whereabouts of Adams. Adams' bookbinder, Charles Wells, told Colt that the last time Adams had been seen was on the way to visit Colt himself. Colt made no reply to the implied allegation, and excused himself.
Lane, Wheeler, and an employee of Adams named John Loud examined Adams' ledgers for any transactions involving Colt and went to the mayor of New York City, Robert Hunter Morris, with the evidence. Other witnesses said that Adams was last seen entering Colt's apartment on September 17 and that Colt had a crate delivered by a carman the next day. The mayor asked the Superintendent of Carts, William Godfrey, to locate the carman in question and determine the location of the crate. Godfrey found Barstow, who told him the parcel had been delivered to the freighter Kalamazoo.
The Kalamazoo was still in port, delayed from sailing by a storm. The New York police, accompanied by the city's mayor and the carman, boarded the ship and asked if the crate was still in the cargo hold. The decomposing body had already started emitting a strong odor, which ship hands had assumed was a poison put out to kill rats. The stevedore opened the crate, revealing a half-clothed male corpse wrapped in a shop awning, bound with rope and packed with salt. A scar on the body's leg and a single gold ring identified the body as Adams.
Arrest and trial Colt was arrested on September 23 by New York Police and the city's mayor. Adams' gold pocketwatch engraved with an image of the U.S. Capitol was found among his possessions. The trial began on January 13, 1842. Colt was represented by a team of three attorneys managed by his cousin Dudley Selden (for whom Colt had clerked), John Morrill and Robert Emmett. The three were paid in stock from Samuel Colt's new company: Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey. The Chief Prosecutor was James R. Whiting, district attorney for New York County. The presiding judge was William Kent.
Tried by the press The Colt-Adams Murder trial dominated the popular press at the time and exceeded news of another New York murder, that of Mary Rogers. The press depicted Colt as a former professional riverboat gambler who had public affairs with women and a common-law wife and who committed perjury to enlist in and quit the Marines. Although the nature of the crime and the fact that Colt cohabited with an unmarried pregnant woman, Caroline Henshaw, added to the publicity, most of it was due to John Colt's relationship to Samuel Colt. Coverage appeared in New York papers such as The Sun, which incorrectly labeled a picture of P.T. Barnum purchased from the Albany Evening Atlas as a picture of Adams. Religious magazines such as The Catholic Herald, Evangelical Magazine, Episcopal Recorder and Gospel Advocate used the story to demonstrate such problems as the "lack of morality in the home".