At the Grassy Plain store, the competition between clerks and customers was even fiercer than in Bethel: “It was ‘dog eat dog’—‘tit for tat.’ ” Because “each party expected to be cheated, if it was possible,” Taylor had to develop a new level of skepticism, allowing himself, with his fellow clerks, to believe “little that we saw, and less that we heard.” He also became practiced in the art of cheating. “Our ground coffee was as good as burned peas, beans and corn could make, and our ginger was tolerable, considering the price of corn meal.” That his “conscience, morals, and integrity” were not utterly destroyed, he said, could be attributed only to his not working there longer than he did.16
In old age Barnum recalled his youth in Bethel fondly and expressed surprise at how many memories of the village, going back to his fourth year on earth, remained at his disposal. But however much the village shaped his personality, he, like many people, lived his life in reaction to his childhood. The Calvinist strictures of his early religion, the banter and gamesmanship of work in the shop, the lengths to which his family members would go for a prank—all created themes that stayed with him throughout the decades. In a speech he gave in 1881 upon returning to the village, Barnum lovingly unspools these memories and the names of dozens of relatives, friends, and neighbors who had inhabited Bethel a half century and more earlier. But by then he had long since left it far behind, choosing the chaotic bustle of New York and London and striving for many years to make his adopted home of Bridgeport—“the Park City,” as it is now ruefully known—into what would become the most populous, if not the most thriving, city in the state today.17
* * *
EARLY IN 1827 THE GRASSY PLAIN store closed, and Taylor went to work in far-off York, at a Brooklyn grocery owned by another Taylor, a relation from Danbury who also owned a comb factory and store. Before long, the kindly Oliver Taylor developed enough confidence in young Barnum, not yet seventeen, to send him out to purchase wholesale groceries, allowing him to pay cash at auctions or markets, buy in quantity along with other grocers to reduce the price, and in general refine the talent for trade that had begun in his father’s store. Buoyed by his aptitude and the enthusiasm of youth, Barnum soon decided to start a business of his own. “My disposition is, and ever was,” he wrote in his memoirs, “of a speculative character,” and he knew even then that he would only be happy working for himself. At about the time he decided to leave Oliver Taylor, though, he developed smallpox and had to spend several months in bed, after which he went back to Bethel to recover in his mother’s care, enjoying her “unremitting . . . exertions to make me comfortable” and catching up with old friends. When he returned to Brooklyn after a month at home, he gave Oliver notice and managed to pull together the money to buy a porterhouse for sale near the grocery. A porterhouse was a bar and steakhouse, which took its name from the brown beer offered there alongside other beverages. Despite his resolution to run his own business, in only a few months Barnum had the opportunity to sell the place at a profit, and he took it. He then got an offer to move across the river to work at a more established porterhouse on Peck Slip, near what is today the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge and was then the terminus for the Fulton ferry.18
This establishment, owned by David Thorp, had two advantages, in Barnum’s telling. First, it was a favorite of travelers from Danbury and Bethel, giving Barnum ample opportunity to see people from home. Second, Thorp allowed him time off when young friends came to town so Barnum could take them to the theater. “I had much taste for the drama,” he remembered, and soon “became, in my own opinion, a close critic, and did not fail to exhibit my powers in this respect to all the juveniles from Connecticut who accompanied me.” Here he began to develop his eye for theater and showmanship, and in time he would combine it with his already sound entrepreneurial instincts.19
But soon his fondness for home and the chance to run his own business drew him away from this happy period as a dashing young fellow in the big city. Uncle Phin seemed to miss his grandson as much as his grandson missed home, and he wrote to say that if Taylor would return to Bethel and open a business, he would make available at no cost half a carriage house he owned on Bethel’s main street. Taylor was happy to accept the offer, and so skedaddled home with the idea of opening a fruit and sweets store, augmented by a barrel of ale. The store debuted on May 5, 1828, and the first day’s take was a more than satisfactory $63. Soon Taylor expanded his offerings to include stewed oysters, toys, and inexpensive personal items such as combs, pocketknives, and pocketbooks. By the following spring, he had bought the building but not the land under it from his grandfather for $50.20
Uncle Phin was not the only person pulling Barnum back to Bethel in those days. Barnum also heard a siren call from a young woman named Charity Hallett, who worked in a tailor shop and whom he had met while clerking at Grassy Plain a year and a half before. On one auspicious Saturday night back then, after a fierce thunderstorm, Barnum was asked to accompany to Bethel a “fair, rosy-cheeked, buxom-looking girl, with beautiful white teeth.” This was Charity, known as “Chairy.” As they rode on horseback the mile from Grassy Plain to Bethel, Barnum was so charmed by her that, despite the storm, he wished the distance had been even farther, especially when a stroke of lightning gave him a clear look at her. After getting her safely home, he wrote, “that girl’s face haunted me in my dreams that night.” Barnum saw her in church the next morning and on subsequent Sundays until he left the job at Grassy Plain. When he had returned home from Brooklyn to his mother’s care in Bethel, he had managed to see the “attractive tailoress” several times, which did not “lessen the regard which I felt for the young lady, nor did they serve to render my sleep any sounder.”21
Now, in the summer of 1828, having opened his store in Bethel, he again sought Charity out, and it soon seemed that “my suit was prospering.” She was nearly two years older than he and came from a large family in Fairfield, Connecticut, that was not well off, a situation that got worse when her father decamped, perhaps across the sound to Long Island. But Charity and Taylor were a nicely matched couple: in addition to being from large Connecticut families and sharing a churchgoing habit, both were modestly educated but clever. Both had dark hair and dark eyes and strong, pleasing faces—his having escaped unscarred from smallpox—with hints of the fleshiness to come.
Over the next year, their affection for each other grew. Barnum’s mother felt that Charity was not a socially desirable match for her son (“The girl had not got money enough to suit her ideas,” she said), but those who knew Charity believed just the opposite, that “she was altogether too good for Taylor Barnum.” Barnum wittily asserted that he “perfectly agreed with them in their conclusions and . . . proved it by asking her hand in marriage.” She consented, and in October 1829 they were married at her uncle’s house in New York, with members of her family present, but not of his. The newlyweds returned to Bethel, moving in with the family with whom Charity had been living. Taylor’s mother pretended that she knew nothing of the marriage, apparently upset that it had taken place in secret. But he went to visit her every day, and within a month she asked him to bring his wife to visit on a Sunday, and a reconciliation occurred.22
In June 1830 Barnum purchased three acres “a few rods south of the village,” and there he had a house constructed for Charity and him to live in. The house, two and a half stories tall, cost just over $1,000 to build. By the next spring, at about the same time they moved in, Barnum had another structure built in Bethel, this one intended to accommodate a country store on its first floor and a family on the floors above. The Yellow Store, as it was known, opened in the summer of 1831, selling dry goods, groceries, and hardware—“everything from Bibles to brandy.” Barnum started the business with his uncle and guardian Alanson Taylor, but within a few months Barnum bought out his uncle, explaining diplomatically, “Like most persons who engage in a business which they do not understand, we were unsuccessful in the enterprise.” Bar
num alone didn’t fare much better. He had trouble collecting what was owed him, and even advertised in the newspaper a warning that he was prepared to sue in order to collect. By the spring of 1832 he was looking for a buyer for the business; it took a year to find one.23
While the dry goods store stumbled, Barnum’s other interests found footing. Since his return to Bethel, he had become ever more avidly involved in the lottery business. After starting with his own small-scale, local offerings, he began working with large statewide lotteries, from whom he would buy tickets in bulk, and employing agents, among them his Uncle Alanson, who also became his partner in this new venture, to sell them across the land. By early 1830 he had lottery offices in Bethel, Danville, Norwalk, Stamford, and Middletown. For the first time, he made widespread use of “printer’s ink” to publicize his lottery sales, and soon newspapers “throughout the region teemed with unique advertisements.” He also had tens of thousands of handbills and circulars printed “with striking prefixes, affixes, staring capitals, marks of wonder, pictures, etc.,” and his main lottery office, which he called the Temple of Fortune, was plastered with gold signs and colorful placards. The purpose of this publicity maelstrom was not just to draw attention but also to emphasize that his customers were luckier than those who bought from other agents. At one point the business became so successful that his agents were bringing in as much as $2,000 a day in sales.
His lottery work did not just teach him about the efficacy of advertising. It also began to develop his insight into the complicated nature of his customers, a realization that outwardly respectable people might have interests that were not entirely respectable. Buying a lottery ticket was, after all, a form of gambling, something that the powerful churches looked down upon. Yet lotteries were popular not only among many churchgoers but also, as Barnum reported, with “a number of clergymen and deacons,” whom he counted among his “private customers.” In his autobiography, he told the story of a pious husband, “a frequent exhorter at prayer meetings,” and his wife, who would each buy a ticket from him secretly on the condition that he not tell the other spouse, who was presumed to be “opposed to such things.” The peaceful coexistence of piety and the pie-in-the-sky nature of lotteries might say more about human nature than about any particular historical period, but it also suggests a change in the social order of the day, in which ordinary New Englanders were yearning for something more from their lives than what was being offered from the Sunday pulpit.24
* * *
BARNUM’S OWN REACTION TO THE role of religion in public life was becoming more pronounced. He was growing skeptical of the fervor of the revival era. Beyond the hypocrisy related to gambling habits was the incongruous coexistence in Bethel and elsewhere of strong religious views and strong drinking habits. He’d long seen that “even at funerals the clergy, mourners and friends drank liquor,” at the same time that alcohol was denounced from the pulpits. Barnum would never be shy about pressing his opinions on others, but even as he had barely reached voting age, he grew publicly concerned about the “religious frenzy” spreading through the land, featuring large numbers of people, especially young people, converting to the churches where revival meetings took place. He was equally troubled by talk among “certain overzealous sectarian partisans” of the creation of a Christian political party advocating that only believers should get the vote, which suggested that the boundary between church and state might disappear.
Connecticut had disestablished the Congregational Church in 1818, but the church still held sway in matters of politics and governing. Like his grandfathers on both sides and his father, Barnum was a Universalist and a Democrat and firmly held to the Jeffersonian ideal of separation of church and state. He decided to spread his views in letters to a weekly paper in Danbury—a paper that soon would be associated with his Uncle Alanson. When his writing was refused, Barnum “became exceedingly indignant” and took his rejections as evidence that the religious influence had already become “so powerful as to muzzle the press.” With that, ever eager to take the initiative, he decided to publish his own newspaper to promote his views.25
Just after he turned twenty-one, on July 5, 1831, Barnum bought a printing press and type sets, and by October 19 of that year he had published in Bethel the first number of his Herald of Freedom, a weekly four-page broadsheet. Thanks to cheap postage, improvements in technology, and an increasingly literate populace with a growing interest in the world, starting a small newspaper, especially one that had a particular audience in mind, was not an expensive proposition. By 1828 the city of New York itself supported 161 papers, their readers drawn not only to news from the neighborhood and the larger world but also to particular political, ethnic, or religious perspectives.26
If the lottery business had acquainted Barnum with the power of publicity, he now discovered the power of publishing his own paper. Just below the masthead on the front page of the Herald of Freedom were the words “P. T. BARNUM . . . PUBLISHER.” Suddenly he had acquired a whole new level of visibility in his community and beyond. (He later said the paper was circulated nationally.) However, Barnum soon turned visibility into notoriety. Eight months after that first edition appeared, he managed to attract a libel suit from none other than his Uncle Alanson, who had in the meantime purchased the Danbury paper that had rejected Barnum and become its editor, renaming it the Connecticut Repository. In his own paper, Barnum slammed his uncle regularly and with real ardor, accusing him of advocating for the church-state merger and of telling lies about those with whom he disagreed. In response to Barnum’s accusations, Alanson sued. The case never went to trial “on account of the absence of witnesses,” as Barnum wrote in a letter to a fellow newspaper editor, but a second libel action, “brought by a butcher in Danbury, a zealous politician, whom I accused of being a spy in the caucus of the Democratic Party,” eventually cost Barnum several hundred dollars in damages.27
It was a third case, however, that turned Barnum into a regional hero, at least to those who agreed with him. This third libel prosecution was brought on behalf of a Congregationalist neighbor and fellow merchant named Seth Seelye, whom Barnum accused in the Herald of Freedom of “taking usury of an orphan boy.” A conservative judge named David Daggett, who was also a Yale law professor and an avowed Federalist, heard the case. Judge Daggett (whom Barnum referred to in a letter as a “lump of superstition”) took an active part in the prosecution. In one outrageous example of the overreach of a state religion, Barnum was not permitted to mount the stand because of his Universalist beliefs. At the recommendation of the judge, he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to forfeit a bond of $100 and pay court costs, or serve sixty days in jail.
“I chose to go to prison,” Barnum wrote to Gideon Welles, editor of the Hartford Times, “thinking that such a step would be the means of opening many eyes.” Indeed, he continued, because of the trial, “the excitement in this and the neighboring towns is very great, and it will have a grand effect.” His purpose in writing Welles was to tell him that another newspaper editor would be covering the matter at length, as would the Herald of Freedom, of course, and to ask Welles to “make such remarks as justice demands.” His ability to marshal not just his own paper but also the goodwill of others was a harbinger of things to come. It was the first clear example of his flair for drawing attention to his beliefs, his enterprises, and himself.28
In his memoirs, he writes that he was allowed to have his cell in the Danbury Common Jail fitted out with wallpaper and carpet, which is surely a rarity in the annals of imprisonment. While in jail he was allowed to continue editing his newspaper, to write numbers of letters, and to receive so many friends that he found their ceaseless visits burdensome. These communications with the world beyond the cell also allowed him not only to stir up local newspaper coverage but also to engineer what can only be called a local holiday to celebrate his release. A group called the Committee on Arrangements was formed. They met him at the jail on the morning of his last
day there, December 5, 1832, and strolled with him across the village green to the very room in the courthouse where he had been tried. The crowd was so large—Barnum’s paper reckoned it at fifteen hundred souls, and even at half that size it would have been immense—that those who could not fit in the building formed a parting sea for him to pass through. Once settled in there, he was honored with an ode composed for the occasion and a speech defending freedom of the press called “The Nation’s Bulwark,” written and declaimed by a prominent lecturer, the Rev. Theophilus Fisk, himself the editor of the New Haven Examiner. There followed the hymn “Strike the Cymbal” (“Crime & sadness, yield to gladness, Peace! the heav’nly powrs pro-claim”), after which a crowd of “several hundred gentlemen,” Barnum recalled, retreated to the nearby hotel of one G. Nichols and enjoyed “a sumptuous dinner . . . toasts and speeches.” The twelfth toast, we are told, described Barnum as “a terror to Bigots and Tyrants—a young man just on the threshold of active life whom neither bolts, nor bars, nor prison walls, can intimidate.”29
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