As if all of this were not enough to fete an incautious twenty-two-year-old who had not exactly suffered at the hands of the law, Barnum stepped from the Danbury hotel into a coach drawn by a six-horse team. Seated with him in the coach was a small band of musicians playing patriotic tunes, and a parade in his honor had formed to take him the three miles home to Bethel. A marshal carrying the Stars and Stripes led the parade, followed by forty people on horseback, and behind Barnum’s coach was a carriage carrying Reverend Fisk and the president of the day’s proceedings, followed by sixty more carriages filled with local people. As this impressive retinue got under way, cannon boomed on the village green and several hundred more people who were gathered there gave Barnum three cheers. When the carriage reached Bethel, the band played “Home Sweet Home,” and three more cheers went up as Barnum alighted. Thus a day begun in jail ended in well-orchestrated and raucous triumph.30
Neither Barnum nor anyone else said for certain who organized the many events of this day, or who chose the members of the Committee of Arrangements and its president. Barnum carefully did not give or take credit when he later described the celebration in detail in his memoirs, and without doubt it was in Barnum’s interest to imply that the day unfolded almost spontaneously, propelled by the enthusiasm of his neighbors for his cause and, indeed, for himself. After all, he had grown up in the village and had many, many relatives there and nearby. He had gone to church in the village, had clerked in its stores, still owned a store there, heavily advertised his lotteries, and now ran a newspaper from there. Democrats, Universalists, and others who thought as he did would naturally have wanted to support him. But odes and formal speeches do not occur on the spur of the moment, nor do bands and coaches arrive by chance, and even if the celebratory luncheon involved only dozens rather than hundreds of trenchermen, a provincial hotel would need fair warning to feed so many. Of the various tactics that Barnum would master as he became a successful showman, one was to know when to stand in the wings and when to step to the footlights to take a bow. It seems likely that in this case he was in both places at once.
Others might have thought to sponsor an ode or an oration, engage a chorus or a band, plan a banquet or a parade, envision three cheers rather than three cheers twice, and might have forgotten the cannon salute altogether. But not Barnum. Beginning on December 5, 1832, more would always be more, keeping sympathetic newspaper editors close would always be useful, commissioning songs and poems and speeches would ever enhance an occasion, mixing serious intentions with entertainment sure to draw a crowd would continue to be a good strategy for engaging the public, and his own notoriety would never fail to be a calling card ready at hand. Seemingly small but consequential details—like returning to the courtroom where he was convicted or overlaying it all with patriotic zeal—would never elude him. This day had all the earmarks of a Barnum production. It was the day when his career as a showman began.
TWO
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THE NURSEMAID
The life that Barnum and Charity made for themselves in Bethel went well over the next two years. His lottery business continued to be profitable, and although the Yellow Store was less so, given his customers’ unreliability in paying up on their accounts, he managed to sell his share in it in early 1833. Soon after, in May, their first child, Caroline, was born. Barnum’s notoriety as a freedom-loving newspaper publisher was such that on the Fourth of July, the day before his twenty-third birthday, a large gathering of Democrats praised him at a dinner in nearby Newtown as one who had been “bitterly persecuted by the enemies of civil and religious freedom.” Even more flattering, perhaps, were toasts made in absentia at Federalist events on the same day, as his enemies decried Barnum for his newspaper’s homilies by calling him “reverend” and a “self-made priest.” These arrows apparently did not wound, and he used them to burnish his reputation, reporting them in the Herald of Freedom and Gospel Witness, as he was now calling his paper.
However, in late May 1834, the state legislature banned lotteries in Connecticut, and without this source of income, Barnum had to change course. He decided he could not afford to keep publishing the paper, and in November, having brought out 160 issues in three years, he stepped away. Given the large profits from the lottery business, he ought to have been in sound financial shape, but the lottery customers had also been less than honorable in paying their debts, so he now had “no pecuniary resources” other than attempting to make good on what he was owed. He blamed himself for his situation, writing that “the old proverb, ‘Easy come, easy go,’ was too true in my case.” Still, he was confident in his ability to earn money and believed he could start saving “at some future time.” For the present, he decided to move his young family from Bethel to a rented house on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, entering “that great city to ‘seek my fortune.’ ” But it would take many months, and an unlikely encounter, before he would find the way to his life’s work and the fortune that he sought.1
At first, things went so badly in New York that Barnum feared for the health of Charity and Caroline as he searched the want ads for an appropriate job. One ad he saw came from Scudder’s American Museum, suggesting that for a small investment the person who applied could be part of an “IMMENSE SPECULATION.” Barnum was intrigued because, as he wrote in his autobiography, “I had long fancied that I could succeed if I could only get hold of a public exhibition.” He had made a successful public spectacle of himself on the day he had been released from jail, but this was the first hint that he might want to make his living by promotion, exhibition, and showmanship. However, the speculation in question, a “hydro-oxygen microscope,” required an investment well beyond his means. Nothing else turned up in the want ads during the whole winter of 1835, and Barnum’s prospects in the city looked dim.
Finally, in the spring, several hundred dollars came his way from a debt collector in Bethel, who had succeeded in hounding some of Barnum’s long overdue accounts. With that small influx of cash, on May 1, 1835, Barnum opened a boardinghouse on nearby Frankfort Street catering to people he knew from Connecticut who were visiting the city. Business was steady enough that he could soon buy into a grocery store with a partner named John Moody on South Street, near the porterhouse where he’d worked during his earlier sojourn in Manhattan.2
Once the immediate need to feed his family was satisfied, Barnum had the freedom to think more about what he really wanted to do to make his way in the world. While he was thinking, the world made its way to him. “The business finally came,” he wrote. “I fell into the occupation, and far beyond any of my predecessors on this continent, I have succeeded.” This boast, which refers to his career as a showman, has the value of being true, and is somewhat softened, at least in a later edition of his autobiography, by Barnum’s admission that the event that would set his life on its course “was the least deserving of all my efforts in the show line.” By this he meant in part that the elements for its success were already in place and required little creative showmanship on his part—beyond a willing suspension of disbelief. But it also became the episode in his life of which he was the least proud, one that spurred him to begin to be the better sort of showman he would eventually become.3
In late July 1835, a man named Coley Bartram walked into the store that Barnum and Moody ran. Bartram was from Reading (now Redding), Connecticut, just a few miles south of Bethel, and knew both Moody and Barnum. As Bartram talked, it came out that he had recently sold an investment in a traveling act featuring an emaciated, incredibly ancient, black slave woman. What made her of interest to the public was the claim that she had been present more than a century before at the birth of George Washington in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and had been his nursemaid there when he was growing up. Her name was Joice Heth, and her act consisted of singing hymns and telling stories about the great man she had helped to raise.
Even as they stood chatting in the store, Bartram said, Heth was pe
rforming under the direction of Bartram’s former partner in Philadelphia. He produced an advertisement from the Pennsylvania Inquirer dated July 15, 1835, describing Heth as “one of the greatest natural curiosities ever witnessed,” not least because she was, the article claimed, 161 years old. The life expectancy in 1835 for a white woman hovered at around forty years, and it was less still for the average enslaved black woman. But Barnum does not remark in his autobiography or elsewhere on the implausibility of this claim of Heth’s longevity.
If nothing else, as a person already becoming adept at newspaper publicity, he must have marveled at the brashness of the clipping he had been handed. He had already been aware of Heth’s existence from articles in New York newspapers praising her as a “wonderful personage,” so when he heard from Bartram that his former partner was himself eager to “sell out” because “he had very little tact as a showman,” Barnum’s only thought was that he must go to Philadelphia at once. Perhaps Heth’s act would be the sort of public exhibition he had been looking for. “Considerably excited” at this prospect, off he went to meet Bartram’s former partner, a Kentuckian named R. W. Lindsay, and to see this marvel.4
Barnum’s impulse to exhibit a fellow human being who could arouse the interest of the public may seem shocking to a modern onlooker. Such traveling exhibitions, however, were common in nineteenth-century America. In a country that was still largely rural and at a time before railroads vastly improved the convenience of transportation, any impulse to entertain, educate, or bamboozle required extensive travel from town to town. Since colonial times in America, people far from cities could expect a stream of people passing through their villages—“strolling peddlers, preachers, lawyers, doctors, players and others,” as the subtitle of Richardson Wright’s Hawkers and Walkers in Early America has it. The Victorian era, in both England and America, would be a time of special enthusiasm on the part of audiences for traveling exhibitions, not least the exhibition of “curiosities.” For this was an era of increasing awareness of the wider world. The full abundance of the earth’s flora, fauna, and human culture was still only becoming apparent to the average American. Elephants, birds of paradise, orchids, species previously known only in myth were now touring the countryside.5
This same trend ushered in a heightened fascination with human exhibits as well. Leslie A. Fiedler explored in Freaks (1978) how societies throughout history have often imputed mythic status to people who are born looking vastly different from those around them—treating them as monsters or as omens for good or ill. In the nineteenth century, driven by this same impulse as well as a heightened worldliness, crowds flocked to see anyone who was unusually large or small, unexpectedly pigmented or lacking all pigment, or who was in any way out of the ordinary. Barnum’s era was a heyday for human exhibitions, and he was happy to play his part, slaking his audience’s desires to be impressed or confounded, to gawk and chatter, especially if he could present so-called curiosities that also knew how to perform a winning act. If the blind and aged Heth had indeed exceeded the normal female lifespan by a factor of four and been central to the national mythos, she would fit the bill.
When Barnum reached Philadelphia and met Heth, he was deeply impressed with her. It was not because she looked robust and vibrant—in Barnum’s eye, this would have made her story less plausible—but the opposite: “so far as outward indications were concerned,” Barnum recalled, “she might almost as well have been called a thousand years old as any other age.” She was “totally blind, and her eyes were so deeply sunken in their sockets that the eyeballs seemed to have disappeared altogether. She had no teeth, but possessed a head of thick, bushy gray hair. Her left arm lay across her breast, and she had no power to remove it.” Still, she seemed healthy despite outward appearances, and she talked up a storm, especially on the subject of religion. She sang “a variety of ancient hymns” and referred often to “dear little George,” telling good stories about him and declaring she had “raised him” during her time as a slave owned by George’s father, Augustine.6
Barnum asked Lindsay for some proof of who she was, and Lindsay produced a document that Barnum described much later as “a forged bill of sale”; it claimed that Augustine Washington had in 1727 sold Heth, then age fifty-four, to a neighbor for thirty-three pounds. When he first saw the purported document, Barnum noticed only that it had “the appearance of antiquity,” being yellowed and worn through at its folds. That, and Lindsay’s explanation that the long-ago sale had taken place to reunite “Aunt Joice” with her husband, who was one of the neighbor’s slaves, “seemed plausible,” Barnum wrote. Far more plausible is the idea that Barnum was so eager to take on the challenge of exhibiting her—despite the comparable eagerness of first Bartram and then Lindsay to be rid of her—that he was willing to be duped. Lindsay wanted $3,000 to transfer his rights to Heth but agreed to $1,000 if Barnum could produce the money within ten days. Barnum hustled back to New York, where he had $500 on hand. He managed to persuade a friend to lend him an equal amount based on the “golden harvest which I was sure the exhibition must produce.” Barnum also sold his share in the grocery to his partner Moody, presumably to acquire the means to begin promoting his exhibit.7
Barnum hurried back to Philadelphia with the $1,000, but just what did he purchase with it? Lindsay had entered into an agreement with Heth’s owner, John S. Bowling, also from Kentucky, to join him in taking Heth from city to city for a year, sharing in the profits or losses from exhibiting her. That agreement had been signed on June 10, 1835, but only five days later Bowling, who was not in good health, sold his rights to exhibit her to Coley Bartram, who, only a few days before he approached Barnum, sold them to Lindsay. Thus Lindsay then had the sole right to exhibit her. Barnum reproduces in his autobiography the text of the contract between himself and Lindsay, but different biographers have interpreted it in different ways. Some have argued that the contract suggests Barnum, a future abolitionist, now owned Heth, while others suggest that he was in effect “renting” her. In either case, it was a tangled and morally specious engagement; in his eagerness, Barnum was embarking on one of the most objectionable moneymaking schemes of his career, one that he would never quite live down.8
What is clear is that Barnum’s agreement gave him the legal right to show Joice Heth for the remainder of Lindsay’s year. If exhibiting Heth was Barnum’s first experience as a showman, it was not his first as a salesman, and he reckoned that promoting her act was not so different from selling lottery tickets or bargaining across a countertop over dry goods. Besides being a newspaperman himself, he had realized and exploited the power of advertising and press coverage to create public enthusiasm for his lotteries. With Heth, he wasted no time, and his instincts proved sound. On August 7, 1835, the day after he signed the contract with Lindsay, an article appeared in the New York Evening Star announcing that she would be arriving for exhibition at Niblo’s Garden, an attraction located on Broadway between Prince and Houston. Well-off New Yorkers went there to eat ice cream, drink coffee, lemonade, or something stronger, and listen to music or watch traveling entertainments amid the greenery, escaping the noise and squalor of the more densely urban streets to the south. The article puffed her as “a greater star than any other performer of the present day.” Barnum and William Niblo—an Irish immigrant known as Billy who had been a waiter in a pub before marrying the owner’s widow and acquiring the resources to start his own place—had agreed to split the profits from the exhibition, with the latter providing the venue and paying for the advertising. For his part, Barnum hired Levi Lyman, a “shrewd, sociable, and somewhat indolent Yankee” lawyer from the distant Finger Lakes town of Penn Yan, New York, to assist him in promoting and displaying Heth.9
Barnum and Lyman arranged for a private press showing at Niblo’s once Heth arrived from Philadelphia, inviting a number of local newspaper editors “to get the first peep at the new wonder of the world,” as Lyman described it later in a story for the New York Herald. F
or this later story, which appeared well after the episode was over, Lyman also provided the Herald with a list of how much he and Barnum paid that newspaper’s competitors to become “firm believers” in the claims they were making for her, the payments inducing “sudden conversions” in the editors. The incentives ranged, if Lyman is to be believed, from a high of $49.50 for the New York Courier and Enquirer to $5.67 for the more persuadable New-York Gazette & General Advertiser, and totaled more than $200. It was a good investment, apparently, because the papers outdid each other in trumpeting their lack of skepticism and journalistic integrity, and the crowds eagerly made the trip up to Niblo’s, where the gross amounted to about $3,000 for the two weeks she was on display.10
Barnum also attributed their early success to a short biographical sketch that Lyman wrote, relying largely on his imagination, which was published in a pamphlet Lyman sold for six cents, pocketing the profits. It featured a woodcut engraving of Heth in a neat bonnet and calico dress, her hands prominently displaying long, clawlike fingers and nails. Her hands were in reality twisted and arthritic, and one did have nails four inches long, but the woodcut portrayal was grotesque in a way meant to heighten public curiosity. The pamphlet included several of the early newspaper blurbs Barnum and Lyman had purchased, as well as “certificates” from people who had supposedly known her for a long time and testified to her piety and reliability. Barnum also had many posters and handbills printed, advertising “the nurse of Washington,” displaying the woodcut image, and featuring copy similar to that the newspapers used—quite likely because Barnum had written it for them. He also created “two ingenious, back-lit, out-of-doors Joice Heth transparencies two by three feet in size,” showing her name and the claim of “161 Years Old,” which would be displayed wherever she was appearing. In those days before electricity, the backlighting would have come from candles or oil lamps, which caused the thin paper of the printed posters to glow.11
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