The hoax (as John later described it) succeeded. Shortly after its arrival, he was granted his discharge. Altogether, he had done “three months’ service—eleven days and two nights of which he had been on duty, and more than half the rest of the time upon the sick list in the hospital.”3
• • •
John’s aborted experience with the marines marked the end of his nautical ambitions. His life would remain strictly landlocked—though in later years, at the height of his notoriety, a rumor circulated that he had spent some time as a riverboat gambler on the Ohio and Mississippi during the early 1830s. It was even said that, during this interlude, he fought a gun duel with a wealthy planter over an octoroon mistress.4
There is good reason to doubt this sensational tale. One thing seems certain, however. If a duel did take place, it would have been conducted with the kind of handgun standard for such encounters in those days: the kind that required a painstaking process of reloading after discharging a single shot.
9
In pursuit of what one anthropologist describes as humanity’s most characteristic goal—creating ever more efficient weapons with which to dispatch other members of the species—gunsmiths had been attempting to devise a workable repeating firearm for several centuries before Samuel Colt’s birth.1 Various approaches were tried, among the least sensible of which was to load two bullets into the barrel of a gun and fire them successively with dual triggers. More practical (and far less apt to explode in the shooter’s hand) was the multibarrel design. Matchlock pistols with several barrels that could be rotated by hand were invented as early as the 1540s. By the eighteenth century, the “pepperbox” pistol—a percussion-cap firearm equipped with up to eight barrels that revolved with each pull of the trigger—represented the state of the art in rapid-fire technology. Unfortunately, while they didn’t require constant reloading, they were cumbersome, poorly balanced, and virtually impossible to aim with any accuracy.
The solution to the problem, as gunsmiths recognized from early on, was a pistol with a single barrel and a revolving cylinder that could be loaded with several balls. Though a few specimens of such weapons have been traced to the time of Charles I, it wasn’t until 1813 that a Boston mechanic named Elisha H. Collier produced a reasonably effective model: a flintlock pistol with a cylindrical breech that, when turned by hand, allowed a “succession of discharges from one loading” (as he described it). Unable to interest American investors in his invention, Collier moved to London, where he secured a patent and set up shop in the Strand. Though his weapons were expensive to manufacture and somewhat clumsy to operate, they could fire up to eight shots without reloading and were purchased in bulk by the British army. They were in wide use by His Majesty’s troops in India when Sam Colt’s ship arrived in Calcutta in the winter of 1831.2
• • •
“When truth becomes legend, print the legend.” The line is from John Ford’s 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of the classics of a genre whose iconic figures—from Owen Wister’s Virginian to Jesse James and John Wayne—are impossible to picture without Samuel Colt’s invention strapped to their hips. The truth of how he came up with that invention has long been a matter of controversy. One story claims that the idea sprang directly from his sympathy for Southern slave owners. At some point during his early adolescence, according to this tale, young Colt
happened to be near the scene of a sanguinary insurrection of Negro slaves, in the southern district of Virginia. He was startled to think against what fearful odds the white planter must ever contend, thus surrounded by a swarming population of slaves. What defense could there be in one shot, when opposed to multitudes, even though multitudes of the unarmed? The master and his family were certain to be massacred. Was there no way, thought young Colt, of enabling the planter to repose in peace? No longer to feel that to be attacked was to be at once and inevitably destroyed? That no resistance would avail were the Negroes once spirited up to revolt?
As yet he knew little of mechanics; in firearms, he was aware of nothing more efficient than the ordinary double-barreled pistol and fowling-piece. But even loading and reloading these involved a most perilous loss of time. Could no mode be hit upon of obviating the danger of such delay? The boy’s ingenuity was from that moment on the alert.3
Dismissing this account as a racist fabrication, various firearm historians insist that Colt conceived his idea after seeing some of Elisha Collier’s flintlock revolvers in India. Alternatively, these scholars suggest, he may have viewed some ancient specimens of repeating handguns on display in the Tower of London “when the Corvo docked in the Thames” on its return trip to the United States.4
Colt himself steadfastly denied that he had been inspired by Collier’s weapons. Indeed (so he claimed), he did not become aware of their existence until years later, during a subsequent voyage to England. His idea, he insisted, was wholly original to himself, an epiphany that came to him on board the Corvo, when—so the story goes—he was “watching the action of the ship’s wheel” and suddenly “realized that the same method of locking the wheel in a fixed position could be applied to a revolving firearm.”5
This tale became the standard version, the official creation myth recounted throughout the later nineteenth century in books like Famous Leaders of Industry: The Life Stories of Boys Who Have Succeeded—inspirational texts intended to teach young men “what an individual can accomplish by ability and indomitable energy and perseverance.”6
Did the idea for his revolver really burst upon the mind of sixteen-year-old Sam Colt one day as he watched the first mate at the wheel of the Corvo? Perhaps so. Still, the story seems a little too pat, like one of those eureka moments so beloved by the makers of Hollywood biopics. It is undeniably true, however, that at some point during the voyage, Colt used his fifty-cent jackknife and a chunk of scrap wood to whittle a crude model of his invention. It was among his effects when the Corvo dropped anchor off Boston on a late spring morning in 1831.7
10
By the fall of 1831, Sam Colt, barely seventeen years old, had already found his calling. His brother John, four years his senior, was still casting about for his.
After securing his discharge from the marines, John made his way to New York City, where he clerked in the law office of his cousin Dudley Selden, a prominent Manhattan attorney, a future U.S. congressman, and a man who—during John’s most desperate hours—would play a critical role in his life. John’s duties, which demanded extensive reading in Blackstone and other standard legal texts, reawakened his hunger for formal schooling. At the end of a year, with his cousin’s blessing, he headed north to enroll in the University of Vermont.1
Though its curriculum covered everything from Greek prosody to moral philosophy to elocution, the university had always stressed the study of mathematics, an emphasis reflected in its official seal, which featured a prominent pictorial representation of the Pythagorean theorem.2 Besides practical (or, as it was then called, “vulgar”) arithmetic, required courses included Logarithms and Algebra, Geometry and Euclid’s Elements, Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, and Conic Sections. Though John pursued his studies with no particular professional goal in mind, he did discover a special aptitude for mathematics—a skill that would serve him well in the coming years.
Those years would be filled with a dizzying variety of pursuits as John, after leaving the university in the summer of 1832, wandered the country in search of his fortune. He tried his hand as a fur trader in Michigan. Land speculator in Texas. Schoolteacher in Kentucky. Soap manufacturer in New York. Dry-goods merchant in Florida. Sales agent for a grocery wholesaler in Georgia. Even party promoter (as it would now be called) in New Orleans, organizing masquerade balls during Mardi Gras season.3
Some of these ventures were more profitable than others. (He reportedly pocketed more than thirteen hundred dollars from the galas he staged in New Orleans.)4 None of them, however, satisfied his larger financial ambitions—or his grow
ing desire to make a mark in the world.
• • •
It was during his summer stay in Louisville that John Colt finally settled on his vocation, the lifework that would—so he was convinced—secure him both wealth and renown. The field he chose was utterly devoid of glamour; even today its practitioners are stereotyped as joyless drones. Colt himself acknowledged that he could think of no other subject that was “calculated to excite so little interest” in the general public.5 And yet it was a subject that could inspire him to heights of near-poetic eloquence—a field he embraced with a passionate enthusiasm and promoted with a crusader’s zeal. That field was accounting.
His knowledge of the subject derived from several sources. It is likely that he was exposed to the basics of business math as early as grammar school, since American children of his era were commonly taught to “cast accounts” as part of their elementary education.6 In the following years, he practiced bookkeeping as an apprentice in Connecticut, taught practical mathematics in the South, and became adept at balancing ledgers in the course of his varied and far-flung mercantile pursuits. By the time he reached Louisville, he had evidently become proficient enough not merely to undertake a series of public lectures on double entry bookkeeping but also to entertain thoughts of a grand project: a volume, addressed to the young nation’s booming population of merchants, manufacturers, and tradesmen, that would offer a simplified way to master the science of accounting.
That summer in Louisville, “he devoted himself exclusively to the subject,” reading whatever texts he could get his hands on, making extensive notes, and refining his own approach through lectures and teaching.7 It quickly became apparent to him that his magnum opus would require a significant amount of time to complete. To support himself in the meanwhile, he resumed his former pursuits, “devoting himself to trade and speculation in the West and the South.”8
• • •
Sometime after his watershed summer in Louisville—the exact date is impossible to determine—John’s peregrinations landed him in Cincinnati, where he would live on and off for the next several years.
In the fifty years since its founding, Cincinnati had undergone a remarkable transformation. Beginning as little more than a forest clearing—a rudimentary settlement that “seemed better suited for the raccoons, opossums, and wildcats that infested it than for human habitation”—it swiftly grew into a major mercantile and manufacturing center. By the time of John Colt’s arrival, the raw frontier village had blossomed into the largest and most flourishing trading hub in the Ohio Valley:
The easterner, mingling with the crowds in the Cincinnati streets and observing the handsome buildings, could forget “the nursery slanders about backwoods and boors.” A compactly built city stood where before had been merely another Ohio river clearing. The quay, paved with limestone and extending three hundred yards along the river, was jammed during the busy seasons of the year; drays and wagons of every kind brought passengers and freight to and from the landing where steamboats arrived and departed hourly. Overlooking the lower level of the city stood rows of rectangular blocks of houses, occasionally relieved by the gilded spires of the churches, and few conspicuous mansions of the rich. Clouds of smoke poured from chimneys of the Queen City’s steam foundries, and behind the city rose the hills, hazy and indistinct, a few houses on their wooded summits.9
In this buzzing hive of commerce, John found a receptive audience for his orations on the “practical importance and scientific beauty” of double entry bookkeeping. It was an era when public lecturing served as a form not only of mass education but also of popular entertainment. Communities throughout the country—as many as four thousand towns, villages, and cities, according to the estimate of one historian—boasted lyceum societies that sponsored regular addresses on a staggering range of topics. In one season alone, for example, the residents of a small city in Maine could attend “lectures on astronomy, biology and physiology, the principles of geology, conversation, reading, the cultivation of memory, popular delusions concerning the Middle Ages, Iceland, the equality of the human condition, the true mission of women, the domestic life of the Turks, the problem of the age, and the origin of letters.” Colt’s talks on bookkeeping were typical of this phenomenon, the product of an age when the lyceum lecture served “to satisfy the seemingly insatiable craving for ‘useful knowledge’ ” among the American public.10
Several of John’s speeches would later be published as an appendix to his book. They are revealing documents. Informed by a sweeping erudition, they trace the history of accounting from its reputed origins in the ancient Middle East to its development in medieval Italy, and invoke sources from Seneca and Pliny to Sir Walter Scott and Samuel Johnson. Given the inherent dryness of the subject, the lectures are also remarkable for their sheer fervor.
Colt saw accounting as a branch of knowledge peculiarly suited to America, a young, enterprising country rapidly “advancing to become the greatest maritime and commercial nation in the world.” In his lofty view, the teaching and learning of double entry bookkeeping promoted the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, allowing the individual to “enjoy the blessing of enlightened life” by helping him achieve “money, property, and possessions.” In a society committed to democratic principles and material pursuits, it was a subject that should be “taught in every common school.” In contrast to the study of literature—which instilled in the young a dangerous love for “the corrupting fiction of a novel”—the science of bookkeeping had a “daily and indispensable use, valuable alike to the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the statesman and the man of business.”
So mathematically elegant, so intellectually stimulating was the system of double entry bookkeeping that young men who devoted themselves to it were certain to have their “views enlarged,” their “minds expanded.” In addition, it possessed a powerful moral dimension. A knowledge of bookkeeping, Colt argued, “fastens upon the mind the respect we owe to others’ rights, and the bounden duty man owes to himself and his dependents. It points to justice, honor, and honesty. It is a daily beacon prompting to frugality; an hourly admonisher of the ruinous effects of sluggishness, carelessness, and extravagance.”11
There was one final benefit to be derived from a mastery of double entry bookkeeping. Colt stressed it repeatedly in his talks. In light of later events, his remarks take on a terrible irony.
According to this “mercantile philosopher” (as Colt styled himself), double entry bookkeeping was the method best suited to document business transactions and thus to provide an irrefutable record of the financial dealings between debtors and creditors. As such, it was the surest way to prevent “frauds, collisions, and disputes.”
11
In the decades to come, all too many disputes would be resolved not with the help of John Colt’s beloved system of double entry bookkeeping but with the invention that his younger brother conceived on board the brig Corvo. Indeed, in its most famous incarnation, Sam Colt’s six-shooter would be known by a name that proclaimed its uniquely effective ability to settle arguments once and for all: the Peacemaker.
That sleek, lethal implement—“the gun that won the West”—was a far cry from the carved wooden model that Sam brought home from his maiden voyage. Even that rough contrivance, however, represented a revolutionary step in handgun design, “a multishot weapon … that allowed its user to automatically rotate the cylinder by the simple action of cocking the hammer.”1
Given the money they had already invested in his seaman’s gear, Sam’s parents—particularly his ever-prudent stepmother—expected him to embark on a second voyage without undue delay. A distant relation of Olivia’s, Captain Abner Bassett of New London, Connecticut, was happy to offer him a place on board his merchantman, scheduled to depart shortly on an extended voyage.2 By then, however, Sam had lost interest in the sailor’s life. When he crossed the ocean next, he would travel as a businessman, propelled by the dream t
hat would drive him for the rest of his days.
• • •
In February 1832, just eight months after the Corvo returned to port, Sam left home again, this time via stagecoach for Washington, DC. Packed among his belongings were a pair of crude but functioning prototypes of his invention—one a pistol, the other a rifle—both equipped with rotating cylinders constructed according to his innovative design. They had been built by a local gunsmith named Anson Chase, hired largely because he worked fast and cheap.3 Also in Sam’s possession was a letter of introduction to Henry L. Ellsworth, a Hartford native shortly to become commissioner of U.S. patents.
Details of this journey are exceedingly sparse; only a single piece of evidence pertaining to it still exists. This document does, however, shed considerable light not only on the purpose of the trip but also on a trait of Sam Colt’s that would stand him in excellent stead in the coming years: his salesman’s gift for ingratiating himself with men who could advance his ambitions.
The document is a brief note from Henry Ellsworth to Christopher Colt, Sr., reporting on Sam’s visit. Dated February 20, 1832, it reads: “Samuel is now here getting along very well with his new invention. Scientific men & the great folks speak highly of the thing—I hope he will be well rewarded for his labors. I shall be happy to aid him. He obtained $300 here at the bank with my endorsement.”4
Impressed as he was by young Colt’s invention, Ellsworth counseled him to put off filing “for a patent until he had improved the experimental models.”5 Sam realized that to perfect his firearm would require far more money than the loan he had obtained with Ellsworth’s backing. (Indeed, over the next three years, he would invest “a total of $1,362.73 in the production of ten pistols, seven rifles, and one shotgun”—an amount equivalent to more than $34,000 in today’s money.)6 And so, sometime in late 1832, the eighteen-year-old inventor embarked on a career that has always proved extremely lucrative to its most successful practitioners. He became a popular entertainer.
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