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In the winter of 1849-1850 the town of Boston was rocked by the murder of one of its most prominent citizens.  Dr. George Parkman belonged to one of the city’s wealthiest families and was personally rumored to be worth in the neighborhood of half a million dollars.  He was one of Boston’s best-known moneylenders and could often be seen walking the streets as he collected his rents.

The last time anyone saw Parkman alive was on November 23, 1849.  At 1:45 that afternoon a witness observed Parkman, clad in a purple vest and top hat, walking into Harvard Medical College.  He never came out.

Parkman’s family grew increasingly anxious as the days passed without sign of him.  They contacted the police and printed up thousands of fliers asking for information about him.  Then, on November 30, the janitor at Harvard Medical College made a grisly discovery: the dismembered remains of a human body, which had been bricked up in a wall behind the privy in one of the college’s dissection vaults.  The police were summoned, and a partially burned male torso was discovered locked in a trunk.  The coroner, with help from Mrs. Parkman, identified the remains as those belonging to George Parkman.

The main suspect in the case was Dr. John Webster, a professor at Harvard Medical College.  Deeply in debt, Webster had borrowed several hundred dollars from Parkman, using a collection of minerals as collateral.  Still desperate for cash, Webster also borrowed $1200 from Robert G. Shaw (father of the man who would one day lead Massachusetts’ 54th Regiment during the Civil War), using the same set of minerals as collateral for that loan, too.  Parkman had been furious when he learned of the collateral double-dipping and had gone to Harvard Medical College to confront Webster about it the day he disappeared.  

Webster was indicted for murder on January 26, 1850.  His trial began on March 19 of that year.  Because both the accused and deceased were prominent men in Boston, and because of the gruesome nature of the crime, the trial was sensational and generated massive interest in Boston and around the nation.  Thanks to the new technology of telegraphy, news of the trial was carried in papers around the country.  The newspaper Lincoln took, Springfield’s Illinois Daily Journal, was one of them.  On March 23, 1850 the Journal noted “a despatch from Boston, dated 20th March says – Webster’s trial commenced yesterday.”[1] 

Over the next two weeks the Daily Journal gave periodic updates about the ghastly trial.  A dispatch from Boston of the 22nd summarized the testimony pertaining to the identification of Parkman’s remains.  On the 27th the paper reported that “everything looks dark for Dr. Webster this morning,” as all the evidence seemed to indicate that the doctor was guilty of “a crime too fiendish for devils.”[2] On April 1st the Daily Journal described the trial’s closing arguments, which Webster listened to as “the perspiration rolled from his forehead in large drops, though he did not lose control of himself.”[3] Finally, on April 2, news came from Boston that Webster was found guilty and sentenced to hang.[4] John Webster was executed on August 30, 1850.

Lincoln was Springfield throughout the course of the Webster trial and no doubt would have read about it in the Daily Journal.  He might have had a particular interest in the case as an attorney who occasionally defended accused murderers.  It is clear that the subject of the Webster murder trial was talked about in the Lincoln home, because Lincoln’s seven-year-old son Robert took a macabre interest in Webster’s hanging.  The day after Webster’s death, one of Lincoln’s friends, David Davis, wrote home to his wife: “Poor Dr. Webster was hung yesterday.  It is terrible for his family.  Lincoln says that his little boy has been counting the days, that Dr. Webster has to live & Thursday he said that Thursday was the last night he had to live.  Rather singular that the event should so mark itself…on a child of seven years.”[5]

Two days later Lincoln, and perhaps the precocious Robert, read the Daily Journal’s account of John Webster’s last day on earth: how he breakfasted on tea and bread before ascending the scaffold with firmness; how only thirty people were permitted into the jail yard, but hundreds more watched from windows and rooftops; how a prayer was read and the prisoner was escorted to the scaffold, and finally, how at 9:40 a.m. “the last duty was performed” and “Webster died without a struggle.”[6]

[1] Springfield Illinois Daily Journal, 23 March 1850.
[2] Ibid, Springfield Illinois Daily Journal, 27 March 1850. 
[3] Springfield Illinois Daily Journal, 1 April 1850.
[4] Springfield Illinois Daily Journal, 2 April 1850.
[5] David Davis to Sarah Davis, 31 August 1850, Davis Family Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
[6] Springfield Illinois Daily Journal, 2 September 1850.

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In June of 1849 Abraham Lincoln received a letter from his despondent friend David Davis, Judge of the 8th Judicial Circuit in Illinois.  Lincoln at that time had just finished his first and only term in the US Congress and was scrambling for an appointment as Commissioner of the General Land Office, a powerful position with a fat salary.  The normally loquacious Davis wrote him a brief letter promising his support, then finished glumly “The untimely death of my poor friend Colton has overwhelmed me with grief.”[1]

Davis had known Colton since the early 1830s, when they were both young men studying law in Lenox, Massachusetts.  Both Davis and Colton moved west, eventually settling in Bloomington, Illinois, where they formed a legal partnership that lasted until 1844, when Colton relocated to St. Louis.  Davis and his wife “loved him as a brother & the death of but few in the world would have afflicted us more,” Davis lamented.[2]  Although Lincoln did not share the close bond with Colton that the distraught Davis did, he nevertheless knew him well, having met him in the courtroom more than twenty times.

Colton was the unlucky victim of a freak accident at the heart of what can only be described as a perfect storm of misfortune that struck St. Louis in mid-May, 1849. 

St. Louis at that time was bustling with activity.  Located at the confluence of the Missouri and Missisippi rivers, St. Louis was the last major urban center where emigrants headed for the California gold rush could stop and get supplies.  All those extra people in the city’s boundaries did nothing to help the problems of poor sanitation and overcrowding that plagued most 19th century metropolises.  In the early spring Asiatic cholera broke out, and by the warm, humid May it had killed more than 4,000 of the town’s citizens.

Wells Colton did not die of anything so pedestrian as cholera.

Adding to the city’s misfortunes, on May 17 the steamboat “White Cloud,” docked near the north business district, caught fire and burned through her moorings.  The floating inferno drifted down river, colliding with and setting fire to 22 other steamboats, plus several flatboats and barges, before coming to rest on the riverbank just opposite Locust Street.

Wells Colton also did not die in a steamboat fire.

The heat from the conflagration that was once the “White Cloud” was so intense that one of the buildings on the levee caught fire.  The flames leapt from building to building, consuming four blocks along the levee before spreading westward.  The fire reached several hundred feet in the air and could be seen for miles as it devoured block after block of wooden buildings.[3]

Wells Colton did not die in the fire on land, either.

No, Wells Colton was simply out for a stroll with a friend from the office and had the misfortune to walk right past a house that was being blown up to try to contain the fire.  A large fragment of wood struck him “between the point of his shoulder & his neck with such force as to Splinter his collar bone making a hole as large as your first which reached to his lungs.”[4]

Of course the wound was fatal, but poor Colton had no idea at first that he was done for.  He sent Davis a heartbreakingly pathetic letter on Monday the 20th of May.  Because his dominant left hand was all but useless, he wrote with his right hand, the handwriting was a laborious scrawl, the page torn roughly from the tablet.  Nevertheless, Colton was either unwilling or unable to grasp the gravity of his situation and remained stubbornly optimistic that he would survive, writing Davis that he expected “to be bed fast for many weeks.”  He summed up with the last and greatest understatement of his life: “A hard lick.”
He solidered on for three more days, but by Thursday it became cler to all that his lungs were damanged to the point where he could hardly breathe.  A visiting friend "saw too plainly that all was over with him," but Colton himself was not willing to believe that he would die until the following morning.  "You never saw a man who was so unwilling to give up this world," his friend observed, "he said to me just before his death he could hardly realize that he had to part from me, that it did not seem to him like he was really going to die although he knew he could not live."  When the end finally came on Friday morning, May 24, 1849, Colton "died easy, without a Struggle."[5]   

1David Davis to Abraham Lincoln, 6 June 1849, Davis Family Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL.
2 David Davis to Julius Rockwell, 26 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.
3Thomas Lynch, The Volunteer Fire Department of St. Louis, 1819- 1859, (St. Louis: R. & T.A. Ennis, 1880), 85-87.
4 David Davis to Julius Rockwell, 26 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.
5W.H. Barksdale to David Davis, 2 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.

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