The single most remarkable characteristic of life in Bethel, in Barnum’s telling, was his neighbors’ propensity for practical jokes. Concocting pranks, setting them in motion, turning one another into victims, and then gossiping about the aftermath—this amounted to a chief form of entertainment in the village. The defining attribute of Barnum’s neighbors and family was a concentrated dose of a widespread regional trait often labeled “Yankee cuteness.” Cute, at the time, was not a word used to describe someone’s looks but a shortened form of the word acute, meaning clever or shrewd. It suggested a competitive sort of sharpness, an eagerness to outdo or flummox another person.
Yankee cuteness was often displayed in the business dealings of the region’s rural economy, which depended less on cash and more on barter. The value of goods offered was not fixed but determined by the interaction of buyer and seller. In this sense, cute was a term of approval when applied to oneself, and of disapproval when applied to others, just as the joy in a practical joke depends on which end of the transaction one is on.
Anyone in the village who wanted to stand out—or simply to find excitement amid the humdrum routines of village life—relied heavily on this form of wit. Cuteness, tall tales, and the well-planned joke were the place’s stock-in-trade, and even the victims of the more outlandish schemes easily overlooked the tinge of cruelty often attached to them. Given the small size of the village, the chances were good that everyone would have ample opportunity to be on one side of a practical joke or the other. So the pressure was always on to be a good sport—and to bide one’s time.
The man for whom Barnum was named, his maternal grandfather, Phineas Taylor, was a paragon of these qualities. Young Phineas Taylor Barnum, who went by Taylor, or more intimately by Tale, was often called a “chip of the old block,” referring in this case to his grandfather rather than his father. Phineas, known affectionately as “Uncle Phin” in the village, was well known for his ebullience and because he “would go farther, wait longer, work harder and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven.” One of his most famous and long-unfolding jokes, involving the value of a gift of property, would have his grandson Taylor on the receiving end—and its outcome would continue to affect Barnum throughout his life.2
Even so, Taylor adored his grandfather. The older man was the first person he could remember seeing. “I was his pet, and spent probably the larger half of my waking hours in his arms, during the first six years of my life,” often sucking on a lump of sugar that Phineas had given to him. Uncle Phin adored his namesake and demonstrated his affection not just with sweets but with showers of pennies, along with the admonition to always get the “lowest cash price” when spending them in a shop.3
Uncle Phin did have his serious side to balance out his mischievousness. He had been a soldier for four years during the Revolution, before acquiring a large amount of property in Bethel and its vicinity. He had represented Danbury (of which Bethel was a part) in the Connecticut legislature, and, closer to home, he ran lotteries, took the census, and, until his retirement at age seventy, served as a justice of the peace. Taylor’s mother, Irena, was one of four children born to Phineas and his first wife, Molly. Only one of the four children fully shared their father’s aptitude for joking, with Irena having the smallest measure of this quality, according to her son. “But what is lacking in all the children,” Barnum would later write, “is fully made up with compound interest in the eldest grandson”—meaning himself. Taylor’s paternal grandfather, Ephraim, a member of the fourth generation of Barnums in America, had been a militia captain in the Revolutionary War. His son Philo, Taylor’s father, was one of fourteen children. Philo himself had ten children by two wives, Irena being the second. So young Taylor grew up in a place filled with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and numberless cousins. In time he would also have four younger siblings.4
In Taylor’s childhood, newspapers came to Bethel only once a week, and it took at least two days to get to the growing metropolis of New York, or “York,” as it was called. Bethel was still primarily a farming community, where hogs were let out to wander the streets, but the area had also become a center for the manufacture of hats and combs. Even so, just to get by in the village, let alone to prosper, required a willingness to hustle and to master a multiplicity of skills. Philo Barnum made his living, just barely, by farming, tailoring, running a store, keeping a tavern, and operating a freight delivery wagon and a livery stable. Taylor would remember that his mother and the other hardworking women in Bethel supported their families by “hetcheling their flax, carding their tow and wool, spinning, reeling, and weaving it into fabrics . . . knitting, darning, mending, washing, ironing, cooking, soap and candle making.” They also “picked the geese, milked the cows, made butter and cheese, and did many other things” to keep the household running. Few people in the village had carriages or even wagons, and horses were the way people transported grain to the mill or got to church on Sundays.5
The church itself was a modest building, which Taylor would later recall as “the old village meeting-house, without steeple or bell, where in its square family pew I sweltered in summer and shivered through my Sunday-school lessons in winter.” He also remembered “the old school-house, where the ferule, the birchen rod and rattan did active duty, and which I deserved and received a liberal share.” He began attending school at about age six and was “accounted a pretty apt scholar,” “unusually quick” at arithmetic. He remembered being called out of bed by his schoolmaster one night to calculate the number of feet in a load of wood. His teacher had bet a neighbor that Taylor could solve the problem in five minutes. When the neighbor gave him the dimensions of the load, the boy went to work, writing his calculations on the stovepipe, and beat the deadline by three minutes. His teacher and proud mother showed their “great delight,” and the neighbor was “incredulous.” Taylor’s later success in business would depend not just on this quickness in figuring. His linguistic abilities also turned out to be formidable and must have been innate, given how soon his schooling ended and how far they took him. His skill as a speaker and a writer would draw the world’s attention, and hold it.6
Taylor would write in his autobiography, “Head-work I was excessively fond of [as a boy, but] hand-work was decidedly not in my line.” He hated the drudgery of farm chores and apparently succeeded at doing them so reluctantly that he soon developed the reputation of being “the laziest boy in town.” His father “insisted that I could hoe and plough and dig in the garden as well as anyone else, but I generally contrived to shirk the work altogether.”7
But the problem was not laziness so much as lack of interest. What did interest him from an early age were money and its accumulation. “My organ of acquisitiveness must be large,” he would write, “or else my parents commenced its cultivation at an early period.”8
The pennies his grandfather gave Taylor began to add up, until Phineas took him at the age of six to the village tavern to exchange them for a silver dollar. The shiny disc seemed enormous in Taylor’s small hands, making him feel richer than he would ever feel again and also giving him the sense of being “absolutely independent of all the world.” He liked that feeling and wanted more. In time his grandfather began to pay him ten cents a day to ride the plow horse leading a team of oxen on his farm, but even that did not add up fast enough to satisfy young Taylor. The boy decided that for extra money he could start making sweets and selling them to soldiers on the days when the militia trained. Within a few years he could afford to buy sheep, a cow, and other property that “made me feel, at twelve years of age, that I was quite a man of substance.” All that kept him from being as rich as Croesus, he believed, was his father’s decision to make him buy his own clothing.
In January 1822, when Taylor was not quite twelve, a friend of his family’s passed through Bethel on the way to New York to sell “a drove of fat cattle.” The man mentioned that he was looking for a boy to help with the d
roving, and Taylor got the job. Thus came about his first chance to “go to York” and see the great city. For spending money on the adventure, his mother gave him a dollar. Once the man and boy arrived in the city, Taylor had a week on his own while the farmer was busy disposing of the cattle. Again, Taylor felt that a single dollar in his pocket made him immensely rich, but what followed was the usual lesson: that the excitement of a great city does not come cheap. He spent much of his time in a toy store, buying things, exchanging them at a loss, and buying other things until, over a period of several days, not only was his money gone, but he had, in his frenzy of acquisitiveness, bartered away his handkerchiefs and a pair of socks. When he returned home with no presents for his siblings and his mother noticed the missing articles of clothing, he was “whipped and sent to bed.” Still, for Taylor, the painful lesson was mitigated by the mere fact that he had “been to York,” which made him “for a long time quite a lion among the school boys.”9
Eventually, out of “sheer despair of making any thing better of me,” Philo Barnum put his son to work at a general store that he and a partner had built and stocked in Bethel. Taylor’s connection with his father was not as easy as that with his grandfather, but Philo had come to understand his son’s nature. The saving of pennies, the boyish acts of entrepreneurialism in the village, and the schooling on his trip to New York had prepared him well for work in the shop, even bringing out the boy’s natural theatricality. In this new setting, he was utterly transformed:
I strutted behind the counter with a pen back of my ear, was wonderfully polite to ladies, assumed a wise look when entering charges upon the day-book, was astonishingly active in waiting upon customers, whether in weighing tenpenny nails, starch, indigo, or saleratus, or drawing New-England rum or West India molasses.10
As his enthusiastic creation of a clerking persona suggests, Taylor thrived in the give-and-take of the country store, where, as was often the case in the young Republic, prices were negotiable and barter was encouraged. Yankee cuteness reigned, and the faster talker on either side of a transaction tended to be the more successful. “I drove many a sharp trade with old women who paid for their purchases in butter, eggs, beeswax, feathers, and rags,” Taylor would remember, “and with men who exchanged for our commodities, hats, axe-helves, oats, corn, buckwheat, hickory-nuts, and other commodities.” His own sharpness was often matched by that of his customers, who would pack stones in bundles of rags to make them heavier or vow that a load of grain was several more bushels than it actually was. When he got older, Barnum would call these acts by his neighbors exceptions to the general rule of honesty, but they made him wary. This lesson and the one learned on the New York trip were the beginnings of his education as a businessman.11
Many of these memories of the grown-up Barnum are varnished with self-deprecatory amusement at his younger self. He reports, for example, that his sense of his own importance in his clerk’s role caused him to resent his other duties in the shop, such as sweeping, keeping the fire, and taking the shutters off the windows. Still, his father allowed him to augment his modest store salary by running a separate business, in the same store, of buying and selling candy for children, which he did with an even sharper focus than he gave to his general clerking. He also began to create private lotteries, something Uncle Phin had adopted as a sideline. Taylor’s grandfather had once concocted a wildly popular scheme in which every ticket resulted in a prize, an unheard-of offer, but in the end he had made his money by deducting 15 percent from each prize awarded. This was widely considered, with some admiration, to be “the meanest scheme ever invented,” resulting in his reputation as “a regular old cheat” and “the cutest man in those parts.” In Taylor’s lotteries, the top prize would be $5 or perhaps $10, and most tickets, as is usual in lotteries, would result in no prize at all. He found that he could easily sell tickets to the workers in the hat and comb factories, and if he sold them all, he could earn as much as 25 percent above his outlay.
His elder self speculates, then, that young Taylor’s eagerness to make money was both a born trait and one nurtured by his parents and his surroundings. Because people all around him, those in his family and more generally in Bethel, were scrambling to get by, their collective influence on him was enormous. Barnum’s outsized eagerness to enrich himself also seems to have had a unique psychological source. To see it, one need look only to Uncle Phin and his most protracted practical joke. The story goes that Taylor’s grandfather was so pleased to have a namesake that he immediately went out and bought a rich and beautiful farm and put it in his grandson’s name. By the time he was four, Taylor began to hear not only from his grandfather but also from his parents and others in the village of his “precious patrimony . . . the most valuable farm in Connecticut,” making him “the richest child in town.” Not a week went by without his grandfather mentioning the farm, and his father even asked Taylor if he would support the family after he came into his fortune. The boy would often assure his father “in the most perfect good faith” that he would “see that all the family wants were bountifully supplied.” In his dreams about the future source of his wealth, Taylor “not only felt that it must be a land flowing with milk and honey, but caverns of emeralds, diamonds, and other precious stones, as well as mines of silver and gold.”
This fantasy went on until the boy turned twelve and had an opportunity to visit his inheritance, on what was known as Ivy Island, which was not far from Bethel but was inaccessibly located in the middle of what is now known as East Swamp. Before the big day arrived, his mother solemnly warned him not to become overexcited when he saw his farm, nor to “feel above speaking to your brothers and sisters when you return.”
On the appointed day, his father took him out with a group of workers to hay a field near Ivy Island, and at the noon rest a hired man named Edward led Taylor to his enchanted spot. They had to cross the swamp to reach the island, and after he floundered through a long expanse of bogs, certain he would drown—and after he had fended off an attack by hornets and been painfully bitten—he finally reached his little piece of paradise, only to see a muddy flat landscape of “stunted ivies and a few straggling trees.” No flowing honey, no precious stones or metals. “The truth rushed upon me. I had been made a fool of by all our neighborhood for more than half a dozen years.” The land, he realized, was “not worth a farthing.” To add insult to injury, at that moment a “monstrous black snake” came menacingly their way, and Taylor and Edward hastily abandoned Ivy Island. When they got back to the hayfield, all the other workers burst into laughter, having been clued in on this strangely cruel and astonishingly drawn-out joke.
Still, when Taylor returned to Bethel late that afternoon, now just another young man without immediate prospects of wealth, his mother, grandfather, and neighbors would not let the pretense go and continued to act as if Ivy Island were a rich inheritance, not five useless acres. It was Yankee cuteness at its fullest, and meanest. These dashed expectations must have created in Barnum the drive to fill his pockets with silver and gold for the rest of his days.12
At the time of Taylor’s birth, Bethel was a Congregationalist village in a state where this was the official religion. He received his religious instruction under the stern influence of the Saybrook Platform, which for a century had consigned non-Congregationalists, including even children, to the conflagrations of Hell and considered the pope in Rome to be the Antichrist. Sour as these doctrines were, they were intensified by the Second Great Awakening, the post-Revolution revivalist movement that rejected the eighteenth century’s rationalism and deism. As a boy, Taylor attended the revival meetings that were ubiquitous during the awakening, often returning home “almost smelling, feeling and tasting those everlasting waves of boiling sulphur, and hearing the agonizing shrieks and useless prayers of myriads of never ending sufferers . . . my eyes streaming with tears and every fibre of my body trembling with fear.”13
But within the boundaries of Taylor’s own family, re
ligious faith was based more on love than fear. When he was fifteen, his maternal grandmother, while walking in her garden one day, stepped on a rusty nail, and her foot soon grew dangerously infected. Realizing she was at death’s door, she called her grandchildren around her and told them of the joy her religious belief had brought to her and how it made her unafraid of dying. She told them that the best way they could show their love of God was to love their fellow human beings. “I was affected to tears,” Barnum wrote, “and promised to remember her counsel.” Many years later, he still vividly recalled that deathbed scene and believed that his own life had been affected by his grandmother’s sincere faith and exemplary way of living and dying.
In 1826, a year after his grandmother’s death, Barnum’s father died of a lingering illness, leaving his family with debts in spite of the several businesses he had been running and the parcels of land he owned in and around Bethel. Now the eldest of five children, with the youngest only seven, Taylor remembered the family returning from the cemetery “to our desolate home, feeling that we were forsaken by the world, and that but little hope existed for us this side of the grave.” He was given the chance to pick his own guardian and chose his mother’s younger brother, Alanson Taylor, who was only about eight years older than he himself. Among Philo’s debts was one he owed to his own son, which was ruled ineligible even for the fifty-one cents on the dollar that the other creditors received. Taylor’s mother went to work in the inn that Philo had run, and “being industrious, economical, and persevering, she succeeded in a few years in redeeming the homestead.”14
The boy continued to work for a short time in his father’s store, but he soon went up the road a mile to the village of Grassy Plain to clerk at a different general store. His interest in conducting lotteries had grown, and in the new store he had the opportunity to create a lottery reminiscent of Uncle Phin’s famously outrageous one. He would offer a large number of prizes, but many of them would have a value less than the price of a ticket. The store had a quantity of blackened tinware that it could not sell, and Taylor himself bargained with a peddler to trade other slow-moving store items for a wagonload of green glass bottles, which he would use as rewards. In one of his first forays into advertising, he hand-wrote the headings on the flyers for the lottery in “glaring capitals,” claiming “MAGNIFICENT LOTTERY!” and “OVER 550 PRIZES!!!” Workers from a local hat factory streamed into the store to buy tickets, without paying too much attention to what the noncash prizes were. When the drawing occurred and the prizes were distributed, a good many of the “winners” went away with armfuls of green bottles and worthless tinware. “My grandfather enjoyed my lottery speculation very much,” Taylor later wrote with understated satisfaction. He was, indeed, a chip off the old block.15
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