his weaponless state lent credence to the fact that he had not sought, nor anticipated, trouble of any kind when he left his home earlier that afternoon.
Nevertheless, Colt conceded that after several slight blows were exchanged, he was finally provoked, and forced to take initiative. He went directly onto the “offensive” after having been on the “defensive” for what he recalled as an unspecified length of time.
With no other choice, he now struck Adams violently with his closed fist. The men grappled with each other, and Colt was eventually shoved against the wall, his side pressed painfully into the sharp table corner.
There was a curious two-headed tool, half hammer, half ax, on the tabletop, what, he said, is called a broad hatchet. Why it was on his desk, or even in his office, Colt said he knew not and could not remember. Still, he admitted that he immediately seized hold of this instrument and instantly struck Adams several blows to the skull with its sharp edge.
Even after these, Adams continued to struggle. The wounded man grabbed a flowing silk kerchief, a type of ascot or stock, Colt wore around his neck, and began to twist. As it became tighter, Colt admitted, he went into a veritable frenzy. Fearing for his own life, he now struck repeatedly a cascade in and about Adams’ cranium with the tool, following these with several additional solid blows.
Adams finally stopped struggling but Colt could not stop himself, taken up now with an admitted hysteria. He continued the barrage until a knock on the door caused him to gain hold of himself.
“Hello?”
“Yes, Mr. Colt? You are wanted down on the receiving platform.”
When he heard the knock on the door and his name called, Colt confessed, he was instantly startled, then taken aback, suddenly coming to his true senses in regard to the magnitude of his deed. He stole to the door, fully conscious of turning the key so as to lock it.
He sat for a few moments, sick from what he had done and hoping no one had heard the noise of the fearful beating, sitting quietly, waiting whatever his fate may be.
“There was vast amounts of blood on the floor,” he recalled.
Afraid it would begin seeping down into the apothecary store below, he said, he swabbed the floor thoroughly with a towel he found hanging on a doorknob and wrung out the blood into a bucket of water that stood in the room.
“The pail was, I should think, at that time about one-third full of water, and the blood filled at least another third surely,” he wrote in his confession.
About this time a second knock fell on the door, to which Colt chose to pay no attention.
“Wondering what was best to do, I remained until dusk on a seat near the window in the office,” he remembered, “gazing on the body, forlorn, a silent space of time, I admit, with horrid reflection.”
The idea for the Colt revolving handgun came to John Colt’s brother, Samuel Colt, while the latter sailed on board a transoceanic liner to England. Traveling in the company of middle-born brother James, second of the three Colt brothers, Sam, the eldest, had positioned himself on the bridge, where he became entranced with the spinning of the ship’s spoked wheel. He spent the rest of the voyage carving a wooden prototype of a gun barrel capable of a similar spinning action. Upon docking at Leeds, the brothers booked immediate return passage, steaming directly back across the Atlantic to New York and their fortune.
According to John’s written confession, later published in its entirety in a supplement edition of Bennett’s Herald, on the night of the Samuel Adams murder, his brother was booked at the City Hotel on Chatham Street near the southern edge of City Hall Park, but when he stole out of his Chambers Street office and hurried south across the park to see him, Sam was engaged in negotiations in the hotel’s reading room with two gentlemen, one a Brit, the other a Russian, and only a few words passed between the brothers.
“I sat patiently,” John wrote, “trying to wedge a word in edgewise in an attempt to communicate my dire peril to my sibling, but to no avail. Serious money was being discussed and the terms were complicated. My brother has never gotten along well with the British, and the Russians are a total enigma to him,” John explained.
“Exasperated by my brother’s indifference, I finally stood, made a noise in my throat, and exited the hotel, scarcely noticed. I then retired to nearby City Hall Park, where I walked a bit. A turn I enjoyed wholehearted, serving to clear my head, heart, and lungs. My thoughts, I confess, kept coming back to the horrors of the excitement that had only recently transpired, the possible trial, the public censure, the false and foul reports that would inevitably be raised.
“I knew full well there would be those who would wish to take advantage of the nature of my situation, making the deed appear worse than it really was for the sake of a paltry pittance.
“I knew I must somehow disengage myself from all circumstance. After wandering in the park for more than an hour, I settled on a course of action and returned to my room.
“A crate stood in the offices, and I succeeded in stuffing Adams inside, being careful to wrap the body in canvas in order to absorb the excessive amounts of blood which was still leaking. The head, knees, and feet were still a little out, but by reaching down to the bottom of the box and pulling the body a little towards me, I readily managed to push the head and feet inside. The knees still projected somewhat, and I had to stand on them to get them down.
“With this task accomplished, I then fit the cover to the box and nailed it shut using the same hammer/hatchet tool with which I had dealt Adams the death blow. A poetic conceit, I concede, not lost on me.
“I then removed all clothing from the corpse to prevent identification, because my plans now included shipping the body south to New Orleans in a steamer. I therefore took the bloodied clothes, shredded them, and took them to the backyard privy, where I threw them in, together with Mr. Adams’ keys, wallet, money, pencil case, and all other incidentals.
“Thereupon I returned to my room, cleaned up the last of the blood, took the water pail, carried it downstairs, and threw its murky contents in the street, following with several pails of fresh water from the pump opposite the outer door of the building in order to wash away the reddish brown stains.
“After rinsing the pail, I then carried it back upstairs, returning it clean and two-thirds full of water to the room, opened the shutters as usual, drew a chair to the door, and leaned the back against the inside of the door underneath the knob as I closed it. I then locked the door with the key and went at once to the Washington Bath House on Pearl Street near Broadway.
“On my way, quite by coincidence, I met, of all people, Edgar Poe, in the city from Philadelphia on what he said was business.
“The man is an acquaintance,” Colt wrote, “but somewhat more than that. He was peering into a tea shop window on Ann Street. I invited him to accompany me to the bathhouse as my guest.
“As
