Killer Colt (6 page)

Though still a mere “stripling” of eighteen, John threw himself into the job with an efficiency and zeal that won the admiration of his far more experienced subordinates. “He was a favorite of every engineer. In less than ten days, his sheds were built, his tools all purchased and delivered, and thirty men at work; and in less than a month, a hundred. The section was universally pronounced the best managed on the line.”

After seven months—at the “very handsome salary” he was earning from his friend Mr. Everett—John was able to repay the fifty dollars he had borrowed from E. B. Stedman while retaining two hundred for himself. By then it was December 1828. “The cold had become unusually bitter,” and John’s “duties required exposure to every kind of weather, from day-break to night-fall.” Having begun to suffer from recurrent bouts of coughing—a precursor, he feared, to the disease that had already claimed his mother and older sister—John decided to leave.

Everett did his best to retain him, offering to raise his already hefty wage, but John would not be dissuaded. His success at overseeing the complex construction job had kindled his desire to acquire “such technical knowledge as might better qualify him either for an engineer or for a teacher; and he resolved to devote the sum he had earned to a winter’s study.” Repairing to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, he enrolled at the Wesleyan Academy, then under the leadership of the prominent Methodist minister Wilbur Fisk.

In a speech delivered shortly after he assumed his position in 1826, the Reverend Mr. Fisk had made plain his low opinion of the typical academic institutions of the day, which, in his stern view, were breeding grounds of sin and impiety. At other schools, he proclaimed, the student “meets the
filthy conversation of the wicked and learns to blaspheme. He meets the debauchee and learns incontinency. He meets the jovial companion and indulges the social glass. He meets the caviling infidel and learns to sneer at religion. In short, he leaves school more learned but frequently more corrupted, if not wholly ruined.”

Vowing that, under his stewardship, the Wesleyan Academy would “better guard the habits and morals of scholars than they are usually guarded in our common schools,” Fisk instituted strict “arrangements for good discipline”:

When even these measures failed, there was always the recourse of a public whipping “severe enough to do its work effectively.” The Reverend Mr. Fisk generally “inflicted these whippings himself; for his sincere kindness and strict self-control made it safer not to entrust such disagreeable duties to his subordinates.”
¹⁹

A few years earlier, it is likely that John himself would have done time in the dungeon or been lashed for his own good by the benevolent-hearted minister. But the intervening time had matured him, and he applied himself diligently to his studies—until disaster once again struck his family.

•   •   •

Exactly why Sarah Ann Colt chose to end her life is a matter of conjecture. One newspaper reported that she “quarreled with her step-mother, fled to the house of a neighbor, Widow May, and, at the end of two days, procured arsenic and put an end to her life.” According to another account, “The uncomplaining but high-spirited and acutely sensitive girl took a morbid view of her doom to labor and regarded it as humiliating, till at length her fortitude
and her mind gave way.” Yet a third source claimed that, like her brother John, Sarah Ann was subjected to unbearable “persecution” at home but, being female, could not, as he did, “fly into the world for refuge.” Instead “she found it in the grave.” Her youngest brother, James, on the other hand, would always believe that Sarah Ann had become “deranged” from excessive immersion in her studies—from applying herself “too closely to her books.”

As a member of that ill-fated sorority that Lydia Sigourney liked to refer to as “my dead,” Sarah Ann was, of course, memorialized in the sugary verse “Sweet Singer.” The tribute, however, offers no clues as to the cause of Sarah Ann’s death. Indeed, Mrs. Sigourney avoids the mention of suicide altogether, remarking only that—by the tenth anniversary of the disbanding of her Hartford school—Sarah Ann had become a “tenant of the narrow tomb,” and comparing the young woman’s “brief span” to a sparkling “drop of morning dew” inhaled by the “noon-day sun.”
²⁰

Whatever the reasons for Sarah Ann’s suicide, she must have been in dire emotional straits to subject herself to the torments of arsenic poisoning—to the unbearable nausea and vomiting, the uncontrollable, bloody diarrhea, the muscular convulsions and excruciating cramps. She died on March 26, 1829, at the age of twenty-one.

Of all her siblings, John was most devastated by the death of the sister “around whom twined every tendril of his heart.” In despair, he “flung aside his books. His ambition was quenched. Of the future he felt reckless. The word ‘home’ filled him with bitterness.”

Forsaking his studies, he resolved to leave the country and “pass the rest of his days in some foreign land.”
²¹

FORTUNES TRAIL

T
o say that people cope with grief in different ways may be a platitude, but it’s no less true for that. Those who knew Samuel Colt best testify that he cherished the memory of his long-deceased sisters to the very end of his life.
¹
To be sure, his reaction to Sarah Ann’s suicide was less dramatic than John’s. Indeed, to all outward appearances, her shocking death had little impact on him at all. Certainly it did nothing to deflect him from his immediate pursuits. But his reaction says less about the love he bore for her than about the fierce single-mindedness that (as with other men of genius) was one of Sam Colt’s most salient traits.

•   •   •

Exactly when Sam became obsessed with the mechanics of undersea warfare is unknown, though his official biographer claims that water mines—“aquatic pyrotechnics,” in the quaint locution of the day—were the great inventor’s “first love,” predating even his fascination with repeating firearms.
²
Perhaps, as another authority speculates, Sam’s interest in these weapons was stimulated by accounts of the so-called Battle of the Kegs, a celebrated Revolutionary War episode in which watertight oaken kegs, packed with gunpowder and rigged with flintlock detonators, were floated down the Delaware River in an attempted attack on British vessels moored in the Philadelphia harbor. The incident was immortalized in a ballad that Sam reportedly heard as a young boy from his grandfather Major Caldwell:

As Sam later testified, he was also aware at an early age of Robert Fulton’s experiments with aquatic explosives. Later renowned as the inventor of the commercial steamboat, Fulton was an early proponent of undersea warfare whose experiments with “submarine bombs” (as he called them) were widely publicized in his book
Torpedo War
. Published in 1810, this work included illustrated instructions for the manufacture of copper-encased water mines that would (theoretically) detonate upon contact with an enemy ship. The very first engraving in the book—a picture that, by Sam’s own admission, made a deep impression on him as a boy—showed a tall-masted brig being blown out of the water by one of Fulton’s devices.
⁴

Though there’s no way of knowing when Sam himself began to dream
about destroying boats with “submarine bombs,” it is clear that by the time he was fifteen, he was already mulling over the possibility of detonating gunpowder underwater by means of an electrical current, transmitted from a simple battery via a tarred copper wire. His first known attempt to put this idea into practice occurred just six months after the death of Sarah Ann, during a summer break from Amherst Academy. Displaying the showman’s flair that would serve him so well throughout his career, Sam evidently distributed a crudely printed handbill trumpeting his intended contribution to the town’s Independence Day festivities:

Sam’s advertisement succeeded in drawing a sizable crowd of spectators, including a crew of neighborhood apprentices who “walked some way to see the sight.” Unfortunately, the promised spectacle turned into something of a bust. According to one eyewitness, “an explosion was produced, but the raft was by no means blown sky-high.” Still, however disappointing as a pyrotechnical display, Sam’s experiment did produce one significant result. “Curious regarding the boy’s explosive contrivances,” one of the apprentices, a brilliant twenty-one-year-old machinist named Elisha K. Root, introduced himself to the young inventor. It was the start of a long relationship that would have enormous consequences not only for the two men but for the American industrial system itself.
⁵

•   •   •

By the following spring, Sam found himself dreaming of a life before the mast—an aspiration cherished, according to the author of
Moby-Dick
, by countless young men of the time. “Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?” observes Herman Melville, another child of privilege whose family suffered severe financial reversals that ultimately led him to seek a sailor’s life.
⁶

Writing to her stepson at Amherst Academy in June 1830, Mother O. S. Colt (as Olivia signed herself) informed him that a family friend, the Boston textile entrepreneur Samuel Lawrence, had spoken to the owner of a ship named
Corvo
, which was scheduled to leave shortly for a ten-month
cruise to the Orient. “Mr. Lawrence,” Olivia assured Sam, “had no doubt but you could have the Situation desired aboard that Ship … provided you qualify your self.”

With her stepson about to venture forth into the wider world, Olivia took the opportunity to dispense the kind of counsel that parents have been ladling out to young men since at least the days of Polonius: