by Yunte Huang
Whitman included the phrenologist among those he called “the lawgivers of poets”:
The sailor and traveler underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer,
The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist,
all these underlie the maker of poems, the Answerer.
Among the phrenological categories, Adhesiveness, the organ of friendship and social attraction, was of particular interest to Whitman, a sexually active gay man living in the prohibitive milieu of Victorian America. As he wrote in the poem “So Long”:
I announce adhesiveness, I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d,
I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.12
Whitman’s encounter with the Fowlers was not limited to a single head examination. Perhaps the Fowlers truly believed in their phrenological readings and saw real potential in the vivacious young man from Brooklyn. When other booksellers were reluctant to stock the obscure poet’s first book, in part due to its erotic excess, Fowler’s Phrenological Cabinet continued to keep it on the shelf and promote it for years. Undoubtedly, Whitman’s career as a poet was deeply entangled with phrenology and its American champions.13
Two other giants of American letters, Melville and Poe, were also steeped in phrenological thinking. Melville devoted several earnest chapters to the hot-button topic in Moby-Dick, declaring in chapter 79, “The Prairie”: “To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken.” Having chastised Gall and Spurzheim for failing “to throw out some hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man,” Melville went on to draw an unusual phrenological chart of the sperm whale, from forehead to nose, from skull to hump, concluding that, phrenologically speaking, “the great monster is indomitable.”14
Ever enthusiastic to probe the darkest recesses of the human heart, Poe wrote a rave review of a book on phrenology in 1836, claiming, “Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at. . . . It has assumed the majesty of a science.”15 In his own work, Poe also sprinkled phrenological gems generously, sparing no ink in describing the head shapes of the characters and discussing their corresponding faculties in such stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe’s own phrenological portrait, published by the Fowlers in their journal, stated: “His phrenological developments, combined with the fiery intensity of his temperament, serve to explain many of the eccentricities of this remarkable man.”16
Almost like a nineteenth-century Facebook database, a long gallery of phrenological portraits and readings was published and preserved by the Fowler brothers and their associates—profiles of famous as well as infamous Americans: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Louis Agassiz, Thomas Edison, John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie, as well as John Wilkes Booth, Lizzie Borden, and Leon Czolgosz.
Also on this long list appear the names of Chang and Eng, whose ontological ambiguity had baffled the world. But the Fowler brothers, as it turned out, were not the first to examine the head bumps of the Siamese brothers. After spending the winter of 1833 in the Deep South, Chang and Eng slowly moved northward like migrating birds as the weather warmed up. From Alabama, they traveled to Georgia in March 1834, followed by Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, and then Virginia, where they toured for two months in July and August. In September, they were booked, rather like a traveling Western show, by Rubens Peale, son of Charles Willson Peale, for display at his museums in New York, Albany, Philadelphia, and Baltimore for a period of twelve days in total, an arrangement that would become routine in the coming years. Fiercely independent, the twins were always proud of the fact that they never consigned themselves to be a permanent fixture at any museum or a part of any circus troupe. Their stints at the Peale museums gave them some needed respite from travel while providing a stable income. But they still kept their eyes on the road, and in the fall and winter of 1834, they continued to travel up and down the coastal states of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, enjoying varying degrees of success.
At some point, their old manager James Hale, with whom they had stayed in constant contact for advice on show business and financial matters, suggested that they visit Cuba—an idea that sounded quite appealing to them. Thus, in March of 1835, Chang and Eng took off for the island country for a month. Upon their return from Cuba in late April, the twins again had an engagement at the Peale Museum in New York, this time for more than a month. After resting their tired feet, Chang and Eng spent the summer months of 1835 peregrinating in northern New York and Canada, shuttling back and forth across the border several times.
In June, when they traveled along the Erie Canal, they received a phrenological reading in the town of Schenectady, New York, an area that was not just the “Burnt-Over District” in the wake of the Great Awakening, but also on the route of the Fowler brothers’ phrenology tour. According to a newspaper report, “The Editor of the Schenectady Reflector has taken the phrenological portrait of Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins. He professes to be an adept in the science, and therefore well qualified to judge of character.”17 The “Editor of the Schenectady Reflector”—in fact, the Schenectady Democrat and Reflector—was Giles Fonda Yates, a Schenectady native who had graduated in 1816 from nearby Union College with Phi Beta Kappa honors. Working as a lawyer and editor of the leading local paper, Yates became a phrenology enthusiast at some point and would give head exams to townsfolk or travelers.18
On a quiet Sunday, June 14, the famous Siamese Twins rolled into town in a hired coach from Albany, where they had exhibited at Peale’s Museum for two weeks. It was an unseasonably hot day for traveling, and the twins and their entourage had had to stop along the way to rest, spending twenty-eight cents on lemonade at a country store to quench their thirst.
Sitting in his empty office, Yates heard about the arrival of the twins. He felt a bit miffed because they had decided to advertise in his rival’s paper, the Schenectady Cabinet. What he cared about was not the loss of fifty cents in advertising money, but precious publicity. After the twins had settled in at the City Hotel, run by Mr. Matthews, Yates paid them a visit, carrying a set of calipers in his pocket. A silver-tongued lawyer, Yates managed to convince the twins to allow a phrenological reading, despite the strong Siamese aversion to letting others touch their heads for fear of bad luck. As he later reported, Yates gave the twins “a very good set of bumps,” complimenting them for their Mirthfulness, Benevolence, and Adhesiveness. One key finding of the examination was that the twins’ “cerebral development indicates different powers of intellect.” Based on that, Yates denied “the alleged identity of thought and feelings in the Twins.” He cited as supporting evidence the 1831 Lynnfield Battle, when Chang was said to have been the “refractory” of the two who reacted more violently to the insult by the mob.19
Yates’s amateurish reading and his assertion that the twins thought and felt differently would be disputed by the Fowler brothers, who would give them two official phrenological examinations. The first one took place in the fall of 1836. On that October day in New York City, when the leaves turned golden and the air filled with light and sparkle, Orson Fowler and his assistant, Samuel Kirkham, met up with the twins at the Washington Hotel on Broadway. Since their last examination by an obscure amateur, the twins had come to understand better the fad that had enthralled the nation. It seemed that everyone was eager to have a head-bump check—just as, in a few decades, Americans of every stripe would sit for their photographic portraits. In some ways, Fowler was less interested in the heads of the twins than trying to prove a point—that is, as he put it at the very beginning of the resulting report, the twins would “furnish another striking example of the truth of phrenological science.” Against the enemies and skeptics of his
cause, Fowler felt he could use the findings to prove the scientific nature of phrenology, for the conjoined bodies of Chang and Eng presented a unique opportunity. The Fowler brothers, who cowrote the report even though Lorenzo was absent from the exam, presented their case this way:
It is well known that their traits of character, including their feelings, passions, abilities, dispositions, modes of thinking, of acting, and so forth, are so much alike as frequently to start the pretense, and induce the belief, that they possess but one mind, or, at least, that, in consequence of the wonderful, physical connexion of their bodies, there exists between them a similar union of mind, or such a one as to cause both minds to think, feel, and act simultaneously and alike. Although this is a mere pretence, yet the foundation of it remained to be developed and explained by phrenology.
Unlike Yates, who amateurishly used his findings to dispel the common belief, the Fowlers started out with the unverified common assumption and ended up proving it with phrenological evidence: The twins were “found to be most wonderfully and strikingly alike, not only in size and general outline, but even in the minute development of nearly all the phrenological organs.” Their heads, in other words, were near alike as two pins.20 Strictly speaking, this report, published in 1837, was not a phrenological reading, for it contains no measurements, character analysis, or career predictions. The Fowlers were mostly interested in making their case against the charges of their opponents.
Eighteen years later, in 1854, when their cause had won the hearts and minds of most Americans—by then it was almost taken for granted that an applicant for a position as a train conductor or a jailer should present his phrenology chart as proof of his qualification—the Fowlers would perform another exam on the twins. This time, the report would be more detailed and, consequently, more revealing about the nature of phrenology as a racial discourse.
Like most phrenological readings, this one begins with the shape of the twins’ heads, which were described as “very peculiar,” for “nothing like it is ever found in the Caucasian head.” Sounding a note of condescension toward both women and racial minorities, the report went on to say, “We have never before seen, even in our women, as high, long, and full a moral lobe, along with as narrow a head at the ears, as those of these twins.” Again and again, the Fowler brothers ascribed phrenological results to racial differences and Siamese national character: “Their Benevolence is of the very largest order,” whereas “Veneration is much larger than we almost ever find it in our own race,” corresponding undoubtedly with “their nation’s extreme devotion to their religion.” Their Adhesiveness is also larger than any found in Caucasian men, and so is Parental Love or Inhabitiveness. “Judging from this,” the phrenologists opined, “they must be a most affectionate and domestic people.” Other national characteristics included small Hope and Conscientiousness, deficient Spirituality, moderate Mirth and Ideality, but very large Imitation. In conclusion, “Their organism, movement and texture, betoken a far less active, intense state of the nervous and cerebral systems, than is generally found in our own race. That is, their organic quality by no means comes up to the general average of the Caucasian variety.”21
In this phrenological reading, conducted when the Civil War was looming on the horizon, we can detect a more virulent form of racism dominating popular thought. Phrenology, as we now know, was a precursor to some of the eugenic theories and racial discourses that would come to characterize America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was, as Nathaniel Mackey puts it, “a white way of knowing,” a notion of racial determinism that assumed “human surfaces offer incontestable evidence of the qualities, capacities and traits not only of individuals but of groups.”22
Unsurprisingly, the Fowler brothers’ report was quite in keeping with some of the racially biased descriptions of the Siamese published by Western travelers during the same period. For instance, George Finlayson, the British surgeon on the Crawfurd Mission in 1821–22, applying principles of physiognomy and phrenology, made the following observations in his memoir: “The face of the Siamese is remarkably large, the forehead very broad, prominent on each side, and covered with the hairy scalp in greater proportion than I have observed in any other people.” Based on these descriptions, Finlayson concluded that the Siamese, reflective of a larger Asian population supposedly more suited to perform menial labor, “would appear to be admirably calculated to execute and to undergo the more toilsome and laborious, but mechanical, operations which are the usual lot of the laboring classes of mankind. They have the frame, without the energy of London porters. The greater number of them are indeed more distinguished for mechanical skill, and patience under laborious occupations, than for brightness of imagination or mental capacity.”23
In 1836, the same year when Orson Fowler was inspecting the heads of Chang and Eng in New York, William Ruschenberger, surgeon on the American mission, was applying calipers to the skulls of the Siamese in their native land. Here are some highlights from Dr. Ruschenberger’s phrenological examination:
The forehead is narrow at the superior part, the face between the cheek bones broad, and the chin is, again narrow, so that the whole contour is rather lozenge-shaped than oval. The eyes are remarkable for the upper lid being extended below the under, at the corner next to the nose, but it is not elongated like that organ in the Chinese or Tartar races. The eyes are dark or black, and the white is dirty or of a yellowish tint. The nostrils are broad, but the nose is not flattened, like that of the African. The mouth is not well formed, the lips projecting slightly.
Ruschenberger, who would later practice in Philadelphia and become involved in the autopsy of Chang and Eng, went on to detail exact measurements of “four purely Siamese heads.” Based on these phrenological numbers, the doctor, his conclusions portending more racially charged stereotypes of Asians in the next century, reached verdicts that resembled those of the Fowlers and Finlayson in racial views: “The Siamese, like all Asiatics of low latitudes, are disposed to indolence, and to the indulgence of the animal propensities. . . . They are mean, rapacious, and cruel; and never betray any of that high-toned generosity of feeling which wins our admiration or demands our respect. . . . The only commendable quality of the Siamese character, so far as I could learn, is their filial respect. . . . Like all ignorant and uneducated people, they are superstitious.”24
As if it was not enough for Ruschenberger to degrade the character of the Siamese as a group, he went even further to tarnish the reputation of Siam’s most famous representatives, robbing Chang and Eng of the only virtue he had generously granted the Siamese—filial piety. In his Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, Ruschenberger told this story:
We sat on the floor smoking and sipping tea for an hour or two with Piadadè, whom we found to be a mild good-hearted old man. The famous Siamese Twins were a theme of conversation. . . . “Where are the twins?” was asked of every one who visited the shore. Piadadè shook his head: “Their poor mother cry plenty about those boys. They say, they make plenty money—no send never any to their poor mother.” In fact, they have in Siam the character of being dissipated and unfilial.25
When his two-volume travelogue was published in 1838, Ruschenberger’s mention of the Siamese Twins caught the eye of a few newspaper editors, who reprinted the above snippet or paraphrased it, to the consternation of Chang and Eng.26
Despite these racially charged phrenological readings, ethnographic stereotypes, and character smears, the Siamese Twins were determined to pursue their happiness and liberty just as all white Americans, native or foreign-born, did, only with more grit and gusto. Even the most imaginative phrenologist, perhaps one gifted with a Whitmanesque vision, could not have prophesied a shocking new development in their singular American story.
23
Wilkesboro
On a blissfully tranquil June morning in 1839, when the dogwood rioted in bloom and the honeysuckle drooped in heavy masses, a rickety buggy whisked into the dus
ty street of Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
A sleepy “holler” nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Wilkesboro lay on a lush, fertile land rimmed by the Yadkin River, whose headwaters in the mountains were nicknamed “the Tigris and the Euphrates of the Carolinas.” Native Americans called the Yadkin the Sapona River, after the Saponi tribe.1 Approaching Wilkesboro from the west, the Yadkin did a head fake and then snaked around the village, surging over the rocky bed. The roaring river was so limpid that when a Tory captain during the Revolutionary War tried to elude capture by hiding under water, he was easily spotted by his pursuers. The village center, built on the south side of the river, was a loose cluster of dull frame buildings, including a nondescript courthouse that had been built in the 1820s, a couple of churches, a jail, and a doctor’s office. What truly distinguished this village center from countless others was a stately oak standing on a corner of the courthouse lawn. Known locally as the “Tory Oak,” it had served during the American Revolution as a gibbet for five Tories hanged by Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, one of the founding fathers of Wilkesboro.
As if sensing the palpable presence of the historic tree, which had remained stalwart through the currents of time, the single-horse buggy stopped under the giant oak’s sprawling shade. A small, tattered door opened, and out came, nimbly, the famous Siamese Twins. Patting the dust off each other’s shoulders and recovering a bit from the rocky ride over mountain roads, the conjoined duo scanned the courthouse square with their squinting eyes. “Freaks!” yelled a snotty-nosed kid, stopping a few scattered pedestrians dead in their tracks. Everyone stared. The twins stared back, as they had done thousands of times, in cities as glamorous as London, Paris, and New York, and in seedy towns whose names they had long forgotten. Would this village by the Yadkin River become yet another insignificant smudge in their business ledger, with cash receipts and miscellaneous expenses squared off and balanced out?