In his autobiography, Barnum describes what a showing of Heth entailed:
Our exhibition usually opened with a statement of the manner in which the age of Joice Heth was discovered, as well as the account of her antecedents in Virginia, and a reading of the bill of sale. We would then question her in relation to the birth and youth of General Washington, and she always gave satisfactory answers in every particular. Individuals among the audiences would also frequently ask her questions, and put her to the severest cross-examinations, without ever finding her to deviate from what had every evidence of being a plain unvarnished statement of the facts.12
While on exhibit, Heth often smoked a pipe as she lounged on a bed in a house on Niblo’s grounds, as visitors passed through, shaking her hand and sometimes even taking her pulse, as if to test whether she were clockwork or flesh and blood. Heth was by all reports a convincing, charismatic performer. She laughed often at her own stories or at things her visitors said, and regularly broke into obscure, old-fashioned hymns that seemed to prove her advanced age. Barnum made the most of her religious streak, at times inviting ministers to hold public conversations with her, which appealed to the devout and added credibility to the proceedings. Much patriotic fuss was made in the advertising about her connection to the Father of Our Country, and Heth was prepared with anecdotes that, in truth, seemed less personal than derived from the widespread myths that had attached themselves to the first president. The generation of the Founders had now passed from the scene, and people were patriotically eager to be in the presence of this vestige of their greatness.
But it was her looks that seemed to draw the public most, a fascination with her physical attributes and how old she appeared to be. One article in the New York Evening Star described her as resembling “an Egyptian mummy just escaped from its sarcophagus.” Barnum claimed in the advertisements that she weighed only forty-six pounds, and observers often compared her immobile arms and long fingers, with those fingernails curving out several inches, to claws or paws. To say that the reactions of those who saw her were influenced by their racial views would be an understatement, and even the widespread acceptance of the preposterous claims about her age was connected to her race. Her longevity was thought to be at least partly attributable to having lived in the Africa-like warmth of the American South. Later, when she died in Connecticut during the winter, commentators used the circumstances to reinforce theories that black people were ill-adapted to survive northern climates.13
After her Niblo’s run in New York, Barnum and Lyman took Heth on to Providence and Boston. An article in the Providence Daily Journal on August 30 picked up a fictitious theme from Lyman’s pamphlet about Heth, in which he claimed that she had given birth to fifteen children and had an unspecified number of grandchildren, all now either freed or dead, but that five great-grandchildren remained enslaved in Kentucky. Their master, the pamphlet claimed, had agreed to free the five if he could receive two-thirds of the amount he had paid for them. “This work”—meaning the pamphlet itself—“together with what may be collected from exhibition, after deducting expenses, is expressly for that purpose, and will be immediately done whenever there can be realized the sum to do it.” The whole story was made up, which is despicable enough, and we know from Barnum that Lyman was pocketing the proceeds from the pamphlet. Because Providence and Boston were cities where abolitionist feelings were growing stronger, it is likely that Barnum planted the article in the Journal in order to deflect any questions about Heth’s own status as slave or free woman. The disingenuous story about freeing the great-grandchildren also implied that Heth herself was free, while Barnum avoided mentioning the subject directly in his advertising or newspaper promotions.
Barnum was in a sense testing his limits in this early endeavor, seeing how far he could push the truth to promote Heth. He was attentive to the flow of customers, keeping it going as long as possible and then moving on when it slowed; he was also learning that depriving the public of an exhibit could increase interest in a return engagement. Presumably this is why Barnum moved Heth from Niblo’s after only two weeks, despite the energetic campaign to promote her there, since he would soon bring her back to New York for another run. The false manumission article in Providence made it profitable to extend Heth’s time there for a week, and he would soon add an even more extreme—and dehumanizing, viewed from our own time—ploy to increase the patronage in Boston.
Barnum and Lyman’s preparations for the Boston showing were as assiduous as those for New York and Providence. One newspaper editor, Joseph Buckingham, wrote, “JOICE HETH. These are the words, which, printed in large capitals, and posted at every corner in the city, announce an exhibition at Concert Hall.” Buckingham’s Boston Courier had accepted paid advertisements for the exhibit, and as Barnum tells it, “the newspapers had heralded her anticipated arrival in such a multiplicity of styles, that the public curiosity was on tip-toe.” Not all of those styles were flattering, however. The editor of the conservative Boston Atlas complained, “We have been annoyed the last week by a score of puffs dropped in our communication box—in poetry and prose,” promoting Heth. The editor went on to say that a “more indecent mode of raising money than by the exhibition of an old woman—black or white—we can hardly imagine.” Regardless, the initial crowds were so large that the room in the Concert Hall proved inadequate, and a fellow exhibitor in the building’s ballroom had to be “induced” to vacate.14
That exhibitor was Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a Bavarian engineer and inventor who for nearly two decades had toured in Europe and then the United States with “the Turk,” a life-size, chess-playing automaton dressed in a white turban and baggy Turkish pants. The automaton would match wits with and generally beat challengers from the audience, and years of speculation about how the hoax was done ended when a young writer named Edgar Allan Poe saw the act several times in Richmond, Virginia, and wrote a piece correctly speculating that a man hidden in a box onstage directed the automaton’s moves.15
Barnum wrote about Maelzel in his autobiography, “I looked upon him as the great father of caterers for public amusement,” and because of this he often spoke with the older man, who eventually invited Barnum to team up with him. Barnum declined but would soon draw inspiration from Maelzel’s contraption. The crowds were big at the Concert Hall for several weeks, thanks to a drumbeat of “novel advertisements and unique notices” in the papers, but then the numbers started to fall off. Here Barnum came close to admitting one of his notorious humbugs, implying that he himself had placed a notice in a Boston newspaper calling out Heth as a hoax. The article said that she was not a 161-year-old slave, and “not a human being” at all, but “simply a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together.” Heth was a machine, induced to speak, laugh, and sing hymns by the work of a ventriloquist—a particularly cruel line of publicity in an era when black Americans were already roundly dehumanized, though it’s unclear whether or not this ever crossed Barnum’s mind. In his autobiography, he wrote that the Turk “prepared the way for this announcement” and that the result was hundreds of new visitors, as well as old visitors who wanted to see whether they had been duped on their original visit. “Our audiences,” Barnum wrote, “again largely increased.”16
Barnum, Lyman, and Heth bounced around New England for the next month, then returned to Niblo’s Garden in late October at the same time a fair put on by the American Institute of the City of New York was under way there. Many of the upward of one hundred thousand visitors to the fair had come from out of town, and a healthy number of those, after examining the new products on display—ten thousand exhibits ranging from artificial flowers to threshing machines—crossed the garden to see Joice Heth as well. Barnum would accompany Heth on only one more trip, to Albany, and after that she was in Lyman’s charge, beginning with an exhibit in the Bowery aimed at a more working-class New York audience than the one at Niblo’s.
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Around the time of his own departure, Barnum hired a woman to serve as Heth’s nurse and attendant on the road. After her New York showing, and a return to New England, Heth’s travels soon had to be suspended. She had not been able to get over a cold, and after an exhibition in New Haven in late January, Barnum had her moved, along with her nurse, to his half brother Philo’s house in Bethel to try to recuperate. There, Barnum wrote, “she was provided with warm apartments and the best medical and other assistance.” Nevertheless Heth’s sickness intensified, and she died in Bethel on February 19, 1836.17
Philo Barnum had Joice Heth’s body shipped to his brother in New York, and it arrived by horse-drawn sleigh at Barnum’s boardinghouse on February 21. If Heth really did have relatives other than the ones Lyman had invented, nobody knew where they were, and if John Bowling, off in Kentucky, still technically owned her, he apparently did not offer to pay for her burial or ask that her body be returned to him. Barnum could have tried to seek out relatives himself, or he could have immediately given her a respectable burial. Instead he chose an entirely different approach, which would increase both his profits and his infamy.
Over the course of Barnum’s promotion of Heth, he had courted demand for an autopsy upon her death to answer the question of her age (and humanity) once and for all. Upon the coffin’s arrival in New York, he went to visit a well-regarded surgeon and anatomist he knew, who had looked Heth over during one of her showings at Niblo’s and at the time expressed an interest in autopsying her should she die. Barnum and the physician, David L. Rogers, agreed that the procedure would take place on February 25, and Rogers, who had undertaken some high-profile jobs of this sort in the past, had no objection to Barnum’s selling tickets to those who would like to watch him at work.18
Ads with such sober headlines as “ANATOMICAL EXAMINATION” invited the public to join those with a somewhat legitimate medical interest in viewing the dissection, for which Barnum rented an amphitheater in the City Saloon on Broadway. It was a large enough space to accommodate the fifteen hundred people who paid Barnum fifty cents apiece to watch the procedure. Among those he invited were representatives of the clergy. Richard Adams Locke, a descendant of John Locke and the editor of the penny paper the New York Sun, was a pal of Dr. Rogers and thus was given an exclusive in covering the event.19
Rogers, who had been skeptical of the age claims for Heth when he first saw her, now found that she had not died from the effects of a cold or the cold weather but from tuberculosis, and that she had been, as Locke reported, no “more than seventy-five or, at the utmost, eighty years of age!” The relatively good condition of all her major organs other than her lungs had led Rogers to this confident determination. Locke’s story, which appeared in the next day’s Sun, ran under the headline “Precious Humbug Exposed” and did not spare the grisly details of the old woman’s dissection. Locke let Barnum off the hook publicly, concluding that he had been duped alongside everyone else. This was the case that Barnum had made to Rogers and Locke immediately after the autopsy, and he would stick to this story in his autobiography.
The next morning, Barnum showed up at the offices of the Sun and told Locke that he was now persuaded that Heth had not been as old as claimed, and thus had had no direct connection to George Washington in his youth. In an article in the paper about Barnum’s office visit, Locke wrote that the showman “took our exposure of the humbug with perfect good humor.” While Barnum cozied up to the influential editor, his compatriot Levi Lyman was approaching a pricklier newspaperman, James Gordon Bennett, the Scottish-born editor of the New York Herald. In the most brazen twist to the whole story, Lyman persuaded Bennett that the autopsy itself had been a hoax, that Heth was still alive and even currently on display in Connecticut. The dead woman that Rogers had dissected was thus not Heth but a woman identified only as “Aunt Nelly” from Harlem. Barnum wrote that Bennett “proceeded to jot down the details as they were invented by Lyman’s fertile brain.” In the next day’s Herald, Bennett, his good sense overwhelmed by his competitive fury, reprinted the story from the Sun and headlined it “Another Hoax!” He called the Sun story “rigmarole” and exclaimed—in italics yet—“Joice Heth is not dead.” Locke and the Sun naturally defended their story, calling Bennett a “despicable and unprincipled scribbler” editing a “loathsome little sheet.” Bennett was slow to realize that Lyman, probably with Barnum’s encouragement, had made a fool of him, even proposing a large bet with Locke over whether Heth was still alive. Sales of both newspapers undoubtedly benefited from the dispute, as the public continued to wonder where the truth rested.20
But even this was not the end of the Heth affair. The following September, Barnum wrote, Bennett ran into Lyman on the street and “proceeded to ‘blow him sky high’ ” for lying to him. Lyman laughed it off as a “harmless joke” and offered to make it up to the editor by telling him, once and for all, the whole story of the Heth affair from beginning to end—“the veritable history of the rise, progress, and termination of the Joice Heth humbug.” In Barnum’s account, Bennett not only forgave Lyman on the spot but led him back to the office and once again began taking notes for a series of four front-page stories (ending without explanation before the chronological narrative was finished) that amounted to “a ten times greater humbug” than Lyman’s first offering. Bennett’s long, successful newspaper career and his famously irascible nature would suggest that his forgiveness and this new failure of skepticism could not have come easily. But the prospect of having the last word with a newspaper-buying public still obsessed with Joice Heth must have proven irresistible.
Lyman’s narrative had it that Barnum had found Heth on a Kentucky plantation, pulled her teeth, taught her the George Washington stories, and increased her purported age as he moved her from city to city. Many members of the public embraced this version of the affair, false though it was, which would have repercussions for Barnum throughout his career and up to the present day. But in his autobiography Barnum was willing to make the same sort of calculation that Bennett had, pointing out, “Newspaper and social controversy on the subject (and seldom have vastly more important matters been so largely discussed) served my purpose as ‘a showman’ by keeping my name before the public.”21
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IN THE TWO PRINCIPAL VERSIONS of Barnum’s autobiography, he told this story of Heth in detail, showing an eagerness to persuade the reader at every turn that he honestly believed her to be what he said she was. Those who paid to see her, he wrote, were not simply amused by her novelty but decided for themselves that she was genuine. We undoubtedly live in a more skeptical age than the America of two centuries ago, but even factoring in both a more general naïveté and the racism of the era, the notion of a 161-year-old woman seems so unbelievable that it is hard to take Barnum at his word about his own gullibility.
As Barnum grew as a showman, he developed a more refined and humane view of his relationship to both his performers and his audience. He settled into an approach where the fakery was not a scam or an attempt to fool his customers into believing that something false was true, but in which they were drawn into the humbug by sharing the knowledge of the hoax. The deal he would make with his audiences in the future was that they would be entertained and that they would get their money’s worth, either by enjoying the state of doubt in which one of his exhibits placed them or by sharing in the pleasure of distinguishing between what was false and what was true. Barnum’s insistence throughout his life that he was not duping his customers with Joice Heth is the best evidence that, indeed, he was—that he had not yet understood what his relationship to his audience should be.
The far more complicated question, however, has to do with Barnum’s connection to Heth herself. He is at best ambiguous about whether he bought the rights to exhibit Heth from Bowling or whether he actually purchased her. But is renting a slave really so different, morally, from owning one? At this time it was still legal to own a slave in the South, but not in New
York or his native Connecticut, and it was not illegal to bring a slave to a free state for prescribed periods. Growing up in a modest Connecticut village and working in middle-class businesses in New York, the young Taylor had not in his first quarter-century had much exposure to slavery. At this time in his life, his attitudes toward race were typical of white Americans at the time, meaning deplorable, as his willingness to exploit the racially tinged curiosity of his audience suggests. But however racist most Americans both north and south were in the middle of the 1830s, a considerable number of them had long believed, especially after the American Revolution, that slavery was both immoral and intolerable. Barnum was not in this number, and if he was willing to look the other way about the claims he made for Heth, he was equally willing to avert his eyes from the human reality of “Aunt Joice,” as he often called her. (The term feels patronizing today but was often used in his time for older women of any race.)
As Barnum aged, his attitudes toward race would become more enlightened. He shows respect for Heth in his autobiography, and nothing suggests that he treated her less than well while she was in his possession. His hiring a nurse for her when she became frail evinces a concern for her, although his motive was without doubt to protect his investment, and he clearly hoped that she would recover and go back on the road. Barnum wrote that he bought a mahogany coffin and saw to it that Heth was “buried respectably” in Bethel, but it can’t be ignored that he shamelessly exploited her death before any such burial.22
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