by Yunte Huang
As if turning others into the Siamese Twins were not enough, Twain would eventually act in character himself. On December 31, 1906, more than twenty years after the deaths of Chang and Eng, Twain put on a Siamese Twins performance with the aid of a young man at a New Year’s Eve dinner party on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Both dressed in white and tied together by a pink sash, which stood for the connecting band, the pair had their arms around each other. Harking back to teetotaler Eng in “Personal Habits” and upright Angelo in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain’s character pleaded the temperance cause while his twin brother kept nipping from a flask:
We come from afar. We come from very far; very far, indeed—as far as New Jersey. We are the Siamese Twins. . . . We are so much to each other, my brother and I, that what I eat nourishes him and what he drinks—ahem!—nourishes me. . . . I am sorry to say that he is a confirmed consumer of liquor—liquor, that awful, awful curse—while I, from principle, and also from the fact that I don’t like the taste, never touch a drop.
As he continued to stump for reform and his twin continued to nip, the alcohol apparently influenced both. The two began to stagger around the stage, the speech slowly becoming a slurring jumble:
Wonder’l ’form we are ’gaged in. Glorious work—we doin’ glorious work—glori-o-u-s work. Best work ever done, my brother and work of reform, reform work, glorious work. I don’ feel jus’ right.
According to a report on the front page of the New York Times the next day, Twain’s skit brought down the house so noisily that he could not continue the “lecture.”16 As the telharmonium, an electrical device invented by Thaddeus Cahill that year, transmitted the music of “Auld Lang Syne” from Broadway, the dinner guests and the host bade farewell to another year gone by, a year when Twain famously and openly lamented that the minstrel show had “degenerated into a variety show” and that he missed the good old days of the “real negro show,” days when he was roaming the Wild West, when the tam and bones of Birch, Wambold, and Backus caused uproarious laughter that shook Frisco harder than the big quake that year, and when the real Siamese Twins and their dog-gone “authentic” imitations drew in crowds as thick as flies.
Twain might have been carried away by nostalgia, but it is certainly true that whether appearing as yellowface characters in a minstrel skit or acting in person in a freak show, the Siamese Twins were a big attraction in the West, even in a period when the political crisis leading to the Civil War dominated the news. As the Daily Alta California reported on December 15, 1860, “The interest in these wonders of nature continues unabated.” Or, a week later, when they moved north along the Sacramento River to hit the gold-mine towns newly populated by modern-day Argonauts, the Sacramento Daily Union—which would one day give Twain a head start as a writer—reviewed Chang and Eng’s show on December 22: “The Siamese Twins held their levée at the Forrest Theater yesterday afternoon and evening, and were visited by a large number of citizens. They are introduced to the audience by their agent, who gives a brief sketch of their history, etc.; after which, they mingle with their visitors, conversing freely and pleasantly, in good English.”17
There were also reports that the twins advertised among the Chinese, using Chinese-language flyers to attract the “Celestials” to their exhibition tent.18 We don’t know how successful those efforts were, for the Chinese had been driven out of the minefields by white prospectors. A lethal combination of unfair tax laws targeting the Chinese and anti-Chinese violence had made mining an unfeasible choice of profession for these Chinese immigrants, thus giving birth to a saying that would echo throughout the nineteenth century, “no Chinaman’s chance.” In fact, Twain had gone to California because he had lost his job as a journalist in Nevada after he had expressed sympathy for abused “Chinamen.” Standing no chance in mining, Chinese men, who had never done domestic chores like washing clothes and cooking in their native China (those jobs were for women), opened laundromats and fast-food joints in order to earn a living. As laundrymen toiling away with steam and starch, or as cooks stir-frying endless orders of chop suey, they would have been unlikely attendees at the Siamese Twins’ shows.
Whether or not the twins were able to meet up with local Chinese, they had kept in contact with their families back home in North Carolina and continued to concern themselves with seemingly mundane details of husbandry on their farms. In a rare extant letter penned by the twins themselves, Eng wrote:
Dear wife and children we wanted to know very much how are you coming on. we have not hear from you for 6 weeks. we got two letters from you since we left. i hope you has done hauld the corn from Mr. Whitlock before now Tell Mary to take care of catle & pigs—i wanted to know very much how mill coming on—most likely we will be back in march—maybe not till may or june—you must tell Mary to have every thing carige on wright— leave a truk in n york with Mr. Hale he send it home by way of Marmadow tell Mr. Gilmer if we have any thing to hauld from their to have our truk bring it on too—nothing in them but shoese & coat for Mary—We has not seen much gold yet but hope to get some befor long—i must bring this close—Hope this will fine you all well & happy take good care of the five—write soon to this Place your has ever E.19
Pretty soon they would have more than cattle and pigs to worry about. At the end of 1860 and the beginning of 1861, after the election of Abraham Lincoln, daily headlines in the newspapers portended a national crisis on the horizon. In fact, on the days after the historic election and before the twins had left New York for the West Coast, Chang and Eng had already seen their own names linked in the news to the crisis. While minstrel artists had exploited the twins’ image for entertainment, the raging national debate over the fate of the union had also used the conjoined twins as a most salient and powerful metaphor. As seen in this political burlesque printed in the New York Tribune,
The “Union” in Danger—Chang threatens to secede—There is a report in circulation that a dreadful quarrel took place between the Siamese twins, at the American Museum, on the 7th inst. It seems that Chang, who is a North Carolinian and a secessionist, had insisted upon painting the ligament black which binds them together. To this Eng objected, preferring the natural color; whereupon Chang resolved to “sever the union” with Eng, which he declared to be “no longer worth preserving.” Eng, who is of a calmer temperament, finally persuaded him to wait a little—until the 4th day of March next. Dr. Lincoln, a pupil of the celebrated Jackson, was called in, who gave his opinion that the operation would be dangerous for both parties, and said the union must and shall be preserved. A system of non-intercourse will probably be adopted—each party preserving to himself the privilege of biting his own nose off.20
Alluding to Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4 and his famous speech about the imperative of preserving the union, the newspaper satire made full use of the symbolic valence of the Siamese Twins in American lexicon and cultural lore. In the coming days, as the North and the South veered closer to a calamitous clash, newspapers invoked the conjoined twins again and again as an allegory for the union, as the Baltimore American did in the following verbal skit, likening secession to a supposed separation of Chang and Eng:
If one of the Siamese brothers, disgusted with his life-long contact with the other, rudely tears himself away, snapping asunder a bond that God and nature intended to be perpetual, he inflicts upon himself the same precise injury that he inflicts upon his fellow. Each spouting artery, each quivering muscle, each wounded nerve that he tears in the lacerated side of his discarded companion, has an exact counterpart in his own equally lacerated side. He commits fratricide and suicide at once.21
With a storm brewing, the twins could no longer linger in the West looking for gold. On February 11, 1861, they boarded the steamer Golden Age and started their homecoming journey. Always steadfast in their own bond, Chang and Eng had no idea how strong the state of the national union was, or how the catastrophe would wreak havoc in their conjoined life while also tearing the country apart.
Part Five
THE CIVIL WAR AND BEYOND
(1860–1874)
UNION AND CONFEDERATE DEAD, GETTYSBURG BATTLEFIELD, PENNSYLVANIA, JULY 1863
30
Seeing the Elephant
In the wee hours of April 12, 1861, when shots were fired at Fort Sumter outside Charleston, South Carolina, the Siamese Twins were sleeping in bed in Mount Airy, likely next to one of their wives. Recuperating from their recent California trip, they were at that moment about three hundred miles from this flashpoint of history.
Their subsequent wartime experience, however, was not so peripheral. Indeed, no one in the country could escape the impact of the fraternal bloodbath that would cost 620,000 lives, the rough equivalent of six million in proportion to today’s population. To quote again from the Baltimore American, the newly waged war was like the Siamese Twins being violently ripped apart, “fratricide and suicide” all at once.
Just days after the Confederate attack, President Lincoln called for volunteers to form an army to restore the Union. He also ordered a blockade of the Southern ports. In response, the Confederate Congress declared war on May 6. North Carolina, where the sentiment for secession was far from unanimous, joined the Confederacy on May 20 and became, in fact, the last state to secede. Both Union and Confederate sides were confident about victory, anticipating a conflict of only transitory duration. In fact, the first Union soldiers were recruited for just three months, whereas North Carolina’s first troops were signed up for only six months. In Surry County, Chang and Eng’s home area, citizens congregated at the courthouse in Dobson to volunteer for fighting the Yankees. One militiaman, boasting of the skills of his pals in hunting and riding, claimed that “Southerners could whip the Yankees with cornstalks.” Another local boy, joining the new cavalry company and marching through the main street, bragged about bringing back “Abe Lincoln’s ears.” Reminded of his boast after the war, the militiaman, who miraculously was still alive, laid the blame squarely on the darn Yankees: “But they wouldn’t fight with cornstalks.” As for the local farm boy who wanted to clip Honest Abe’s ears, his body was shipped back home, having given what Lincoln would solemnly call the “last full measure of devotion,” albeit to “The Lost Cause.”1
It was to the same Lost Cause that Chang and Eng would devote their resources, loyalty, and manpower. As slaveholding landed gentry, they sided steadfastly with the Confederacy. Since acquiring citizenship, they had taken a lively interest in national politics and local elections. They were described as “zealous followers of Henry Clay and the Whig party,” although they felt threatened by the members of the anti-Catholic and xenophobic wing of the party who would later reinvent themselves as the Know-Nothings.2 When journeying in the Northern states prior to the war, the twins often had had trouble controlling their indignation against the Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850 and enforced by the federal government. When the final conflict came, as Judge Graves put it, “in all questions of a sectional character the feelings and sentiments of Chang and Eng were all strongly with the South, with whose people and institutions they had become so thoroughly identified.”3
Living in a remote area of the country, however, the twins were not directly affected by the bloodshed during the first two years. North Carolina proved to be a minor arena for military conflicts, having witnessed only seventy-three skirmishes and eleven battles during the Civil War. One year into the war, the twins, according to county records, were still financially stable and comfortable, with Eng possessing 300 acres of land and nineteen slaves, and Chang owning 425 acres and eleven slaves. By 1863, tax records showed that Eng was still worth $17,850 and Chang was worth $16,130. And during these war years, Chang and Adelaide gave birth to two more children, Jesse Lafayette in April 1861 and Margaret Elizabeth in October 1863. Never far behind, Eng and Sarah also had two children, Georgianna Columbia in May 1863 and Robert Edward in April 1865. The last one was born just days after the war ended and named after the Confederate hero General Robert E. Lee, whom the twins greatly admired.4
While Chang and Eng continued to enjoy financial prosperity and domestic bliss, they could not avoid the impact of the war on the community. To finance the unexpectedly protracted conflict, the state levied an increasingly heavy tax on the citizens. The Conscription Act, passed by the Confederacy on April 16, 1862, also threatened the peace of mind in every household. North Carolina contributed a total of 111,000 troops, 19,000 of them draftees, to the Confederate Army. For western North Carolina, a region known for its economic self-sufficiency, with scant need for external goods and services, the loss of manpower was disastrous for its way of life. As a result of volunteer enlistment and a compulsory draft, the community was in dire need of artisanal workers, “men whose skills as blacksmiths, millers, carpenters, tanners, and shoemakers could be dispensed with or readily imported.” In nearby Ashe County, citizens of the Horse Creek district had to petition the governor to release Morgan Testerman, a local craftsman, from conscription. “Arguing that the Confederacy would be better served by employing Testerman as a carpenter than as a soldier,” the petitioners detailed the tasks for which Testerman’s specialized skills were required, including “the manufacture of spinning wheels, chairs, tables, bedsteads, farming tools, and in particular the construction of a new gristmill, of which, they contended, the Horse Creek neighborhood was urgently in need.”5 The Union blockade created other hardships, particularly when salt became unavailable. An essential dietary condiment, salt was also needed for the preservation of pork, beef, and vegetables. By the end of 1862, the staple was selling for $30 a bushel in the local market. To make matters worse, the mountain region was hit by near-drought conditions in the summer of 1862, leading to a scarcity of corn and other necessary staples. As winter set in, famine suddenly loomed as a real possibility. Compounding the misery, fugitives, draft dodgers, and deserters of all stripes and convictions found a haven in the remote mountain ranges lying between North Carolina and Tennessee. The “bushwhackers” constantly rampaged through the area, robbing, looting, and even murdering defenseless citizens.
The psychological effects would be even harder to handle. The scale of carnage was shocking—the Civil War is often regarded as the first warfare of the modern era, pitting mechanized weaponry against human flesh. The reports from the battlefields were gruesome and chilling. In a two-day battle at Shiloh, Tennessee, in April 1862, a total of twenty-four thousand soldiers died, surpassing the combined American casualties in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War. Ambrose Bierce, who fought at Shiloh on the Union side, described the battlefield as a smoking jungle covered in pools of blood, with trees reduced to blasted stumps, and “knapsacks, canteens, haversacks distended with soaken and swollen biscuits, gaping to disgorge, blankets beaten into soil by the rain, rifles with bent barrels or splintered stocks, waist-belts, hats and the omnipresent sardine-box.” A seemingly endless wasteland of dead horses presented a horrific tableau, the stench of rotten flesh making the scene that much more horrendous. But most appalling of all was the human suffering. Bierce went on: “Men? There were men enough; all dead apparently, except one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon to await the slower movement of the line—a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time. He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.” One of Sergeant-Major Bierce’s men, not usually known for his courage, asked whether he should put his bayonet through this “fine giant,” the dying fellow soldier. Bierce was “shocked by the cold-blooded proposal.”6 It is this kind of reprehensible cruelty of war and unspeakable human misery that has led one historian
, Drew Gilpin Faust, to call America during the Civil War a “republic of suffering.”7 Out of the 111,000 Tar Heelers who went to war and “saw the elephant,” 40,275—or more than one-third—would not return. It proved to be the greatest loss of lives suffered by any Confederate state. Apparently it was far from a barnyard fight with cornstalks, as some Southerners had expected.
While “seeing the elephant” was a popular phrase signifying a battle-tested experience, the soldiers fighting the War Between the States would have seen real pachyderms stomping the battlefields if President Lincoln had accepted a generous offer from the king of Siam, a bizarre interlude in the goriest chapter of American history. Before the war, King Mongkut—better known to Americans as the Asian monarch who hired the British governess Anna Leonowens to educate his harem of concubines and kids—had addressed two letters to President James Buchanan, along with gifts that included a sword, a photograph of His Majesty and one of his favorite princesses, and two long tusks from Siamese elephants. In the letters, the king expressed wishes to send over a stock of elephants to be raised in America and deployed as means of transportation in war or peace, as they had been used in Siam for centuries.