by Yunte Huang
It was also said that when Stoneman decided to draft some of the locals, the name of Eng Bunker was drawn from the lottery wheel. When Stoneman saw the conjoined twins, he had to let Eng go, because he could not take both. While most biographers have dismissed this story as apocryphal, some are willing to accord family lore a special place in history, including Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, who seem to cherish this too-good-to-be-true yarn.25
Either way, the impact of Stoneman’s Raid on the area was palpable for years to come. A local schoolgirl, Bettie Dobson, wrote in a letter to her sister, “I expected they would destroy every thang and burn the houses.”26 When that did not happen and Stoneman’s cavalry moved on to Hillsville, Virginia, western North Carolinians, thinking that the raid was over, breathed a sigh of relief.27 But the relief was short-lived, or simply an illusion. Not only did Stoneman’s forces, after wreaking havoc in Virginia, make a U-turn and return to North Carolina for more killing, looting, burning, and other wartime atrocities, for which the infamous raid on Salisbury is the best example. But also, the real consequences of the war would be felt only after the military conflict was over.
31
Reconstruction
The Civil War and Reconstruction represent in their primary aspect an attempt on the part of the Yankee to achieve by force what he had failed to achieve by political means . . . to make over the South in the prevailing American image and to sweep it into the main current of the nation.
—W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941)
The South after the war presented a bleak picture of destruction and destitution. The embers were slowly cooling off in Atlanta and Columbia, where the stench of unburied dead animals pervaded the air for months. Weeds overran barren fields at burned-out plantations. Railroads lay trackless, like bruised gums missing their teeth. The psychological damage went even deeper. The defeat would leave a permanent wound in the Southern consciousness, fostering a deep-seated defiance and enmity toward the Yankees, perpetuating a distrust of Yankee peddlers and sundry charlatans who had been hawking their notions to folks in the South. One of the twins’ fellow North Carolinians, an innkeeper who had lost his sons and whose house was burned by the Union Army, said it all, “They’ve left me one inestimate privilege—to hate ’em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve at night, to hate ’em.”1
Chang and Eng, however, could hardly afford to sit around all day just to hurl imprecations at the Yankees, whether in Siamese or Southern patois. They had large families to support, and their financial situation suddenly was dire. The war had decimated their major asset—the thirty-two slaves they had owned, worth $26,550 according to 1864 county tax records. Some of their former slaves, after a short-lived euphoria in the wake of Emancipation, returned to work for the twins, but they were now wage earners, thus increasing the overhead expenses for the farms. By 1870, the census taker noted at least five ex-slaves still living under the Bunker roofs: Peter Razy, listed as “farm laborer”; Aunt Grace, “maidservant”; and her three sons, Jacob, Jack, and James, all listed as “servants.” In the family photograph taken the same year, we can see at least two black faces. The one in the front row first right is most likely Aunt Grace, holding one of the Bunker kids. The middle-aged man in the back row, first left, looks African American.
CHANG AND ENG BUNKER FAMILIES, 1870
The war had also wiped out their other financial investments. Shrewd as they were, the twins did not anticipate the fall of the Confederacy and the attendant collapse of its currency. At the beginning of the war, they had enjoyed a steady income from loans made in Confederate money. They had thought they were making a killing when Confederate money went on a fire sale. According to the New York Sun, the twins “had a good deal of money loaned out on the best securities in the early part of the war when Confederate money went down to about 15c a bushel. Their debtors hastened to liquidate their obligations and redeem their securities with the worthless stuff which they could not refuse.” After the war, the twins were stuck with loads of Confederate notes that were valuable only as souvenirs. In fact, the same article in the Sun ended with a sales pitch, more or less as a jab at the twins’ plight: “Any person wishing to purchase a huge quantity of Confederate notes at very low rates will do well to address Chang-Eng Bunker, Esq., Mount Airy, Surry County, North Carolina.”2 This notice drew the attention of at least one New York collector, J. C. Shields, who immediately was enticed to write a letter to the twins, expressing interest in a deal: “Sirs, I noticed an advertisement on the 10th inst in the Sun that you had a lot of confederate money for sale. If you have please send me a statement of how you sell it as I would like to purchase some. I have a great many curiosities and I would like to add some of each denomination of confederate money to my curiosities.” The collector added a P.S.: “If satisfactory my friends will purchase a lot.”3
We don’t know whether Chang and Eng ever replied to Mr. Shields. Even if they did, his purchase would not have been enough to help them begin recouping their losses. Let the numbers speak for themselves: During the war, the twins’ combined worth hovered around $34,000. After the war, in 1866, the Mount Airy tax assessor estimated Chang and Eng’s total worth to be about $9,300, of which $7,000 was in the value of land and the other $2,300 in actual currency and miscellaneous possessions. While they might not have been as desperate as the eighty-five thousand widows and two hundred thousand fatherless children left behind by the deaths of 260,000 Confederate soldiers, they were, for the first time in more than three decades, strapped for cash.
While worthless currency sold as collectibles would not improve their finances in any appreciable way, there remained one curio that might still be construed as a valuable asset: their conjoined body. Hence, now in their mid-fifties, they had no choice but to hit the road again as itinerant showmen.
In those bleak postwar years, the twins partnered with an assortment of managers and promoters who had checkered histories—the war’s devastation had brought out the charlatanism in almost everyone. Or, as the Chinese would say, “The circumstance creates a character.” The first manager was one Simon Bolivar Zimmerman, a Baltimore native and formerly wealthy railroad investor who had settled in North Carolina and then lost everything in the war. He was so debt-ridden and ashamed of his own parlous state that he would hide in a hotel room when the twins toured in Baltimore. Working together with Zimmerman was his brother-in-law, Henry Armand London, an eighteen-year-old war veteran who “had been selected at Appomattox as the courier to carry General Lee’s last order of the war, an order stating that Lee was surrendering and that all troops must cease fire.”4 When the shows run by these two inexperienced brothers-in-law did poorly, the twins sought a new manager and found an entrepreneurial New Yorker named Judge H. P. Ingalls. We don’t know whether Judge Ingalls’s title was professional or a self-aggrandizing label, invented in much the same way that the two confidence men in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn conveniently assumed the titles of king and duke on a raft drifting down the Mississippi. In any case, the putative judge was a far more capable manager than his predecessors. With an eye for publicity, Ingalls arranged for a photo session at the studio of Mathew Brady in New York. Having captured for posterity such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses Grant, and Walt Whitman, as well as countless soldiers, living and dead, Brady was the most renowned photographer of the Civil War era. On this occasion, sometime in the spring of 1866, Chang and Eng brought their wives and two of their children, Patrick and Albert, to New York to sit for a Brady photograph.
Realizing that the Siamese Twins were a hotter commodity than he could handle himself, Ingalls then set them up with the ultimate impresario, P. T. Barnum. By the time Ingalls approached the circus avatar in 1868, Barnum had suffered a patch of bad luck. On December 17, 1857, a fire had destroyed Iranistan, an Oriental-themed mansion Barnum had built in Bridgeport, Connecticut, inspired by George IV’s Oriental Pavilion and Kublai Khan�
�s Xanadu. Part Byzantine, part Moorish, part Turkish, Iranistan was one of those exotic celebrity “dream homes” that ever so occasionally, through their outlandishness, have become part of the historical American identity. Iranistan was a precursor to such overblown monstrosities as Orson Fowler’s octagonal mansion, William Randolph Hearst’s eponymous castle, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, Michael Jackson’s Neverland, and Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, itself a corrupted reinvention of heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post’s 128-room mansion.
CHANG AND ENG BUNKER AND THEIR WIVES AND CHILDREN
The destruction of Iranistan was merely the opening salvo in a chain of fires. On July 13, 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War, Barnum’s American Museum went up in flames, leveling the five-story marble structure as well as nine nearby buildings. Many animals perished in the inferno, including two whales that were boiled alive in their tanks, a fate also suffered by the “Man-Eater” alligator. Those critters that managed to get out—pythons, anacondas, birds, and human freaks—created pandemonium in Lower Manhattan. The rumor that a lion was running loose on Broadway caused a minor stampede, and the police had to be called to calm the crowd. The total loss caused by this Noah’s Ark inferno was estimated at a million dollars.5 Never easily defeated, however, Barnum opened a new museum in 1866, also on Broadway, only blocks away from the original location. But barely two years later, on March 3, 1868, the new museum burned to the ground, again ruining Barnum financially.
A paragon of American optimism, Barnum looked for ways to begin anew. He became a partner in the around-the-world venture of two of his former employees, Lavinia and Tom Thumb, two midgets now happily married. When Ingalls called to discuss the Siamese Twins, Barnum felt that, as much as he loathed working with the tough-as-nail twins, there was money to be made. The feeling of reluctance was mutual; if the twins had disliked Barnum before, the Civil War had only made them distrust the Yankee braggart even less. Just like their previous partnership, the union of Barnum and the twins was solely a marriage of convenience. According to Judge Graves, the health of Eng’s oldest daughter, Kate, “a young lady of brilliant and well cultivated mind,” was growing more delicate, following a pattern in which Eng’s second daughter, Julia, had died at the age of twenty-two in 1865. Deeply concerned about Kate’s condition, the twins had considered taking her to England to consult with doctors.6 Using Ingalls as the intermediary, the twins struck a deal with Barnum to arrange a British tour. At Barnum’s insistence, Anna Swan, a Nova Scotian “giantess” of seven foot five and a half inches tall, who previously had been “Barnumized” at his museum, would join the twins and their daughters on the tour.
As chilly winds whipped off the Hudson River, the twins boarded the steamer Iowa, with both Kate and Chang’s daughter Nannie in tow, and departed New York on December 5, 1868, for Great Britain. Prior to the departure, twenty-one-year-old Nannie described the scene at the dock in her diary: “When we crossed the ferry at Jersey City many people flocked around us crying here are the ‘Siamese Twins and their wives.’ ”7 Apparently the starstruck mob, willing to believe almost anything, mistook the two young women for the twins’ wives.
It was a rough and bitter season for transatlantic travel. Both girls, on their first trip abroad, got seasick. Kate was worried about her health, fearing that “possibly she might never return to their home.” Nannie, not inured to the wear-and-tear of a circus tour, “felt a great repugnance to going before the public,” which they would have to do when they arrived in Britain. The twins, however, having spent a lifetime of travel under far more primitive conditions, not only got their sea legs but also tried to enjoy the ocean voyage by playing chess, smoking cigars, and chatting amiably with other passengers.
After going ashore fourteen days later in Liverpool, itself a port city tarnished by its dependence on the slave trade, they immediately proceeded to Edinburgh, where Mr. Cassidy, an agent commissioned by Barnum, was waiting. Nannie left a wide-eyed description of the Scotland she saw for the first time: “We looked around on the hills of Scotland with wonder and admiration. The solitary peaks rising out of a vast plain without any chain of hills or mountains as is the case in America. Scotland is a beautiful country indeed, quite romantic in appearance.” But the sense of wonder quickly dissipated when the Bunker quartet debuted in Edinburgh on December 21. Here is Nannie’s diary entry for that dreadful day: “Was a very disagreeable rainy day. For the first time in my life I was compelled to go before the public. I felt quite embarrassed when the hour came. It was not as I had imagined. We had very few visitors in the forenoon but the number increased quite rapidly during the afternoon & evening receptions.”
A few days later, she again confided her frustrations, some of them racial in nature: “All day we were housed up receiving visitors, a thing exceedingly irksome to me when I think of the many beautiful things of antiquity I could see if I could go out. I never felt so indignant in all my life as I did this afternoon. One man I will not say gentleman—asked me if my grandmother or grandfather was a negro. I was so angry I could scarcely speak but was compelled to say nothing.” Another visitor, a lady “far advanced in age & somewhat childish in manner,” lectured her on the subject of religion and on the welfare of her soul’s salvation, completely oblivious to the fact that Nannie had been raised by a mother and an aunt who were devout Christians. The old lady must have thought that the girl was a chip off her father–uncle’s pagan block and therefore needed salvation.
Having been the object of curiosity all their lives, the twins knew well how to deal with the slings and arrows of the visitors. But for Nannie and Kate, bred in the foothills of the Appalachians, it was hard to handle the embarrassment of exhibiting themselves in public. This was, however, of no concern to the impresario who had arranged these shows from across the Atlantic. Barnum, irked by the fact that he could not claim credit for having discovered the twins, made only one passing reference to them in the nine versions of his autobiography: “I sent them to Great Britain where, in all the principal places, and for about a year, their levées were continually crowded.” And he would not miss any opportunity to attribute the success to his own advertising skills and gimmicks, as he added: “In all probability the great success attending this enterprise was much enhanced, if not actually caused, by extensive announcements in advance, that the main purpose of Chang–Eng’s visit to Europe was to consult the most eminent medical and surgical talent with regard to the safety of separating the twins.”8
Whatever Barnum claimed, the real purpose for the twins’ Scottish sojourn was to consult the doctors about Kate’s condition. Therefore, outside the busy exhibition schedule, they took her to see the physicians at the prestigious medical school of the University of Edinburgh. The diagnosis was grim: consumption, a disease that before the discovery of penicillin was the equivalent of a death sentence. The doctors stated that her condition was “so far advanced that in all human probability their skill would be unavailing and that the only aid which they could hope to render would be simply mitigate the suffering of the invalid.”9
The news shattered the twins, especially Eng, who already had lost a daughter to the malady. They had counted themselves lucky to see their sons return from the war, but they could not seem to win the battle against disease. It reminded them of those agonizing days in Siam when, as two green youths, they had seen cholera, the “Curse of Asia,” claim their father, and there was nothing they could do.
“Papa and uncle are quite bad off with colds and coughs,” Nannie wrote in her diary. The doctors knew that the Bunkers were no ordinary patients; they were medical specimens. One of the Edinburgh physicians came to call on them almost immediately after their arrival, and his interest had less to do with the general welfare of Kate and the twins than with his own academic pursuits. Like the many doctors before him, Sir James Simpson, a professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, had a stellar résumé and an impeccable reputation. The first physician to use ether in ob
stetrics, Simpson had also invented a forceps named after him. The result of Simpson’s meeting with the twins and the subsequent examination was a paper, titled “A Lecture on the Siamese Twins and Other Viable United Twins,” published in the British Medical Journal in 1869. However, Simpson’s report revealed no radical departure from the voluminous medical and quasi-medical literature on Chang and Eng that had predated his examination. Four decades after the twins’ arrival in the West, doctors had in essence run out of things to say about these rare specimens. Simpson tried to use the most advanced electrical lighting technology to probe into the mysterious band connecting the twins, but to no avail. Failing to reveal anything new, the renowned physician ended up describing instead the exotic appearance of the Siamese Twins after their years of acclimation in America: “Dressed, as they are, in the ordinary American fashion, with the hair cut short, and talking English, as they do, with the American accent, they retain little or nothing of the appearance of Eastern subjects; except their black hair and their features.”10
Just like some of the gawkers who no longer found the twins shocking to their senses, the medical doctors also seemed to have exhausted their curious speculations about the conjoined twins alive. To gain more medical knowledge about them would require going deeper into their bodies. The doctors and the gawkers alike waited for the twins to perform their final act.