Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  Once everything “was finally completed to my satisfaction” and the family was ensconced, Barnum undertook “the old-fashioned custom of ‘house-warming.’ ” On November 14 a thousand guests, “including the poor and the rich,” arrived to inspect Iranistan, to see what $150,000 (the equivalent of a mere six hundred thousand tickets to the American Museum) and the exertions of five hundred craftsmen, laborers, and nurserymen could produce. But the finished house was not just the work of many hands, from the architects who made the drawings to the men who shoveled out the pond. It was also a work of imagination, of aspiration and inspiration, the dream come true of a boy from a country village in Connecticut who as a man had seen and absorbed the most elegant trappings of imperial Europe and re-created them only a few miles from that modest place of his nativity. Surely the showman was warmed by the admiration of those who came from near and far, and also perhaps by their envy. As for the house itself, if a thousand close-packed bodies could not warm the autumn chill, then its proprietor could easily open the dampers and feel the hot air rising from his gas-fired furnace.

  * * *

  NOW THAT CHARITY AND THEIR three daughters occupied Iranistan, there began an extended period when Barnum tried to stay home but didn’t always succeed. If it had not been obvious during her sojourn in Europe that Charity was no traveler, a less exotic trip she made with the family sealed her own intention to remain forever more a homebody. Some weeks before they moved into their new palace, Barnum had proposed a summer trip to Niagara Falls and Canada. They left on Barnum’s thirty-eighth birthday, July 5, and began shadowing the tour of a certain famous miniature general. Within two days of their departure, they attended one of Tom Thumb’s levees in Rochester, New York, and then joined him and his party crossing Lake Ontario to Kingston, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Caroline, at fifteen the eldest Barnum child, kept a journal of their trip, focusing on the fun she often had along the way with Tom, with whom she had become friends in Europe. Together, for instance, they blew bubbles out a hotel window in Kingston, below which a raucous crowd of his admirers had gathered. The Barnums and Strattons traveled up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, and then on to Quebec City, taking in the sights between Tom’s performances, before turning downriver and back to Kingston.15

  Charity had become sick while in Quebec, but although she was now mostly recovered, she urged her husband not to start immediately back across the lake to Rochester. If she had a sense of foreboding, it was well founded, because after Barnum hustled them onboard anyway, the ship ran into a tremendous storm. Caroline, who would be a favorite of her father throughout his life and like him in her sense of humor, wrote in her diary that her mother became so frightened by the storm that “she forgot to be sick.” The Barnums eventually reached dry land in Rochester and made their way to the American side of Niagara Falls. On August 3 they decided to cross by ferry to the Canadian side, but to do so required walking down 250 steps to get to the river, something Charity had to be encouraged to do. Halfway down, she grew dizzy and refused to go farther. Barnum and the girls, having grown resistant to her complaints, left her on her own. As Charity made her way alone back up the steps, she fainted, and some nearby men performed the gallant task of accompanying her back to her hotel. It is not hard to imagine the human torrent that Barnum, Caroline, and Helen received when they returned later in the day.

  Even leaving aside this dramatic example of Barnum’s inattention, Charity could hardly be blamed for any disenchantment with a family vacation that so closely resembled her unhappy experiences on tour with the Strattons in England and France. The exoticism of the new house in which her family now lived, with its evocations of Turkey, Persia, and China, could more than satisfy her underdeveloped interest in faraway lands. Her husband, having pledged himself to domesticity, would inhale it in a setting that reminded him each day of points on the globe where he had not yet been—the big world he was still culling for wonders to be displayed at his American Museum.

  Whatever hard feelings the trip to Canada had produced or brought to a head in the marriage, the family seemed to be able to move beyond them and start to enjoy one another’s company in the months that followed. On September 19, Barnum, Charity, and Caroline attended one of Tom’s levees in Danbury, about thirty miles north of Bridgeport. It had begun at 10 a.m., and after it was over, the three accompanied Tom by carriage to the home of James White Nichols, a close friend of Philo Barnum’s who also counted “Tale” as a friend. Nichols kept a diary for many years and in it described this day in some detail. Barnum carried Tom into Oak Cottage, as the Nichols house was called, where the little man expressed his eagerness for dinner and showed it by running about, eyeing the cheeses and peering into a pot where chickens were stewing. After the initial greetings, everyone went out into the yard, where Barnum passed the time by tossing into the air apples he found under a tree, warning Tom, “All that’s up must come down / On the head or on the ground.” Tom scurried around to avoid being brained, eventually hiding beneath Charity’s apron. The meal was still being prepared, so Nichols led the party to the crest of a nearby hill, Barnum carrying Tom on his back. There they enjoyed the view until, “hearing a call for dinner from the house, we descended the hill, the little General being carried in Barnum’s arms at a speed almost equal to a locomotive.” Barnum tossed his small burden through a window of the house, and Tom was led right to the dining room, where he waited for the rest of the party. When they entered, he called out, “Come on, Barnum, I’m here.” To which Barnum responded, “Ah, the general is something like me, he’s not bashful.” Over dinner Barnum reverted to his role as the straight man for his little companion, who “indulged in all manner of jokes and sarcasms on his friend and protector Mr. Barnum.” Nichols found Barnum polished by his time in Europe, and the Barnum women amiable and diverting. After dinner, Tom, now ten years old, fished a cigar “almost as big as himself” out of Barnum’s pocket and smoked it with “gusto” until he had to set off for Danbury for another performance.16

  At Iranistan, Barnum took up the role of country squire with all the energy he expended on other parts of his life, soon buying a nearby parcel of a hundred acres of land suitable for gentleman farming. There he would keep milk cows and swine, plus an assortment of chickens, geese, swans, ducks, and pheasant. On the strength of this purchase, his neighbors elected him president of the local agricultural society, a job he held for the next six years. In his memoirs he poked fun at himself in this role, relating that, when he was asked to address the society in 1849, he realized that he knew next to nothing about farming, so instead “I gave them several specimens of mistakes which I had committed, and entreated them to profit by my errors.” Besides giving speeches, Barnum’s chief role as the society president was to oversee the annual agricultural fair. He could not help but bring his showman’s flair to the job, deciding one year, when “a celebrated English pickpocket” was arrested at the fair, to put him on display the next day, after passing out handbills advertising this new attraction. Barnum modestly pointed out, “Our treasury was materially benefited by the operation.” He would bolster his arcadian credibility when he bought several acres of land just to the west of his Iranistan property and fenced it, creating a deer park featuring Rocky Mountain elk, reindeer, and other species.17

  Barnum wrote of this period of his life, “I am frequently in New-York, and occasionally in other great cities, yet I am never so happy as when I return to my ‘homestead.’ ” Of course, like any other comparable period in his life, this one was also filled with dizzying activity. He went to New York each week to check up on the American Museum. And in 1849 he opened a museum in Philadelphia, at Seventh and Chestnut Streets, called P. T. Barnum’s Museum of Living Wonders. He spent many weeks there around the opening, sometimes joined by Charity and Caroline. The new enterprise was briefly in direct competition with his former partners the Peales, and when their establishment went out of business he and Kimball together bought
its collection at a “sheriff’s sale, for five or six thousand dollars,” and divided the exhibits between Kimball’s in Boston and his own in New York.18

  Still, while he remained engaged with his museums, Barnum implied that he was otherwise mostly at home. This stretch of time in the late 1840s was one of real contentment, of devotion and recommitment to family rather than to the intense striving that had come before it.

  One source of his satisfaction was a dramatic change he made in his life upon returning from Europe, a change that led to better relations with Charity and to greater patience with domestic life in general, as well as a commitment to something bigger and more meaningful than growing rich and achieving fame. This shift was Barnum’s pledge to give up alcohol and promote the cause of temperance. That he would take this new path at the highest point yet in his professional career, at a time when many people feel that success has confirmed their worth and redeemed their sins, makes it all the more striking.

  In the autumn of 1847, during the months of touring with Tom Thumb after their return from Europe, Barnum dropped in at the New York State Fair, where Tom was holding levees in Saratoga Springs. “I saw so much intoxication,” he wrote, “among men of wealth and intellect, filling the highest positions in society.” He asked himself then and there if he too might be on the road to becoming a drunkard. Barnum had been around alcohol all his life, and both he and his father had sold it in quantity. But even when he had worked as a young man at a porterhouse in Manhattan, at a time in life when many people are most susceptible to the temptations of Bacchus, he claimed never to have drunk more than a pint of anything alcoholic. Even now, he told himself, he drank spirits only when he was with friends. But then, he admitted, he was with friends almost every day. He decided at the fair to give up “spirituous liquors as a beverage,” by which he meant distilled liquors. At this point, he saw no harm in wine, which he had enjoyed immensely in Europe, where he “had been instructed . . . that this was one of the innocent and charming indispensables of life.” In a retrospective interview in the New York Sun when he was seventy-three years old, Barnum was asked, “Did you drink much prior to 1847?”19

  “Well, I wouldn’t have allowed anybody to tell me so,” he responded, “but when I look back over that time I know now that I did.” He went on to say that, as proud as he was of Iranistan when it was built, he was “ten times prouder of my wine cellar than of anything else I had.” Even after giving up spirits, he drank a bottle of champagne, wine, or beer each day at the midday dinner, resulting in “after-dinner feelings” and a reluctance to do any business in the afternoons. When his mother-in-law would accuse him of being “heady” at those meals, he would get offended and threaten “to go back to whisky” if she said it again, because “I really considered myself quite a temperance man.”20

  He was at least enough of a temperance man, never mind the wine and beer, that in 1851 he invited a friend, the Rev. E. H. Chapin, to travel from New York to Bridgeport to deliver at a local church a lecture on the perils of alcohol. As part of his talk, the reverend addressed the question of the “moderate drinker,” which Barnum realized was a pretty fair description of himself, although Chapin didn’t intend it that way, believing Barnum’s invitation to speak meant that he was already a teetotaler. Instead the speech made Barnum realize “the bad example I was setting,” and there followed a sleepless night at Iranistan.

  “The next morning, I had my coachman knock the necks off all the champagne bottles I had in my cellar, some five or six dozen,” Barnum said, and “pour their contents upon the ground.” He gave away “the port and other medicinal wines” and sent the liquors back to the merchant. “I then called upon Mr. Chapin, asked him for the teetotal pledge, and signed it.”

  When he returned home and told Charity what he had done, he wrote, “I was surprised to see tears running down her cheeks.” She “astonished” him by saying that she had cried on many nights, worrying that his “wine-bibbing was leading me to a drunkard’s path.” He continued, “I reproached her for not telling me her fears, but she replied that she knew I was self deluded, and that any such hint from her would have been received in anger.” That he could reproach her and she could profess to be afraid of his reaction adds more paint strokes to the unflattering self-portrait of the husband Barnum had become in the months and years before taking the pledge. Still, making a resolution not to drink and then keeping it took both discipline and self-awareness and constituted another serious effort to turn his marriage and himself around. When he made the pledge, he remembered late in life, “that was the end of my drinking.” And indeed, as best as can be known, he drank no more.21

  The feeling of relief that came from forswearing alcohol gave his life a new sense of purpose. “I had been groping in darkness,” he remembered, “was rescued, and I knew it was my duty to try and save others.” On the very day he signed the pledge, he managed to gather more than twenty pledges from his neighbors. Like any evangelist, and true to his industrious nature, he was now full of the spirit and could not stop spreading it. First, he talked up temperance to everyone he saw in Fairfield and Bridgeport, then he went out to the nearby villages and towns, and then he spent the winter of 1851–52 traveling around the state of Connecticut, “at my own expense,” seeking converts. He estimated that these early efforts turned hundreds if not thousands of people to the temperance creed. Soon he was lecturing in other states and in New York City and Philadelphia. His effectiveness as a temperance speaker, at a time when public lectures were a popular and respectable form of entertainment, now matched the literary abilities he had displayed in his letters from Europe to the Atlas. If his skill as a promoter had made him notorious and his newspaper letters had made him famous, then the lectures were a bid to be taken seriously.

  * * *

  WHILE HE WAS STRIVING TO redefine himself as a better man at home and a moral exemplar in public, he still had a bit of the old Barnum to get out of his system. In the late 1840s, then, he perpetrated one of his last famous humbugs. The summer after returning from Europe, while accompanying Tom Thumb to Cincinnati, Barnum saw a local exhibition of a small horse covered with a curly, wool-like coat but lacking a mane or any hair on its tail—“withal,” as Barnum put it, “a very curious-looking animal.” Of course he had to have the beast. But he wasn’t sure, yet, what to do with it, so he kept it out of sight in a barn in Bridgeport. The following winter, he had an idea.22

  John C. Frémont, the famous explorer known as The Pathfinder, was undertaking his penultimate great expedition in the West, attempting to find a route for the transcontinental railroad through the southern Rockies that would be passable even in winter. Frémont was a national hero who would soon run for president, so his expedition in southern Colorado was well covered in the press. In March 1849 Barnum managed to place a wholly fictitious news story claiming that a St. Louis merchant had received a letter from someone in Frémont’s party reporting that they had captured, after a chase of three days, a “nondescript” animal looking somewhat like a horse but having the tail of an elephant and the speed of a deer. This would be Barnum’s chance to make use of the animal fattening in his barn at home. What he did not know was that, within only a few more days, real reports would arrive in the East revealing that Frémont’s expedition had met with disaster in December and January, while trying to push forward through unusually deep snow and extraordinary cold, sometimes as low as thirty degrees below zero. Ten members of his original party of thirty-two had died of exposure or hunger, and everyone had suffered greatly. Men had been forced to eat their mules, then the leather tack for the mules, and had even boiled ropes for sustenance. A rumor later surfaced that when the leader of one small relief detail separated from the main group had died, his companions had eaten his frozen flesh.23

  The news of the expedition created, Barnum wrote, using an unfortunate metaphor, a “ravenous” appetite for “something tangible from Col. Frémont.” Although Barnum’s scheme had been
hatched before the sobering facts arrived, he apparently gave no thought to canceling his humbug out of respect for what the expedition had gone through. The public was in such a frenzy that “they would have swallowed any thing, and like a good genius I threw them not a ‘bone,’ but a regular tit-bit, a bon-bon—and they swallowed it at a single gulp!” His punning is almost gleefully disrespectful, but in fairness to Barnum, he wrote these words many years later, and it should be noted that Frémont himself spent little time grieving for his men; he was soon off to California chasing the discovery of gold near a ranch he had recently bought in the Sierra foothills.

  By the middle of April, Barnum had rented a hall at 290 Broadway to exhibit “Col. Frémont’s Nondescript or Woolly Horse,” which, the ads said, combined characteristics of an elephant, deer, horse, buffalo, camel, and sheep. Following his usual pattern, Barnum warned in advertisements that the animal would be on display for only a few days before being shipped off to the Royal Gardens in London. Then, conveniently, a new ad announced that the ship was not ready to sail, so the public would have three more days to see the “anagogetical” animal. (Where Barnum came up with this obscure bastardization of the word anagogical, which means “mystical” or “allegorical,” is anybody’s guess.)Although the Woolly Horse never made it to London, it did tour some “provincial towns” and then went to Washington, where Barnum’s agent was arrested at the urging of Frémont’s father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, for falsely charging a quarter to see the horse. The case was dismissed, however, which allowed Barnum to add to his receipts until he decided, out of deference to the powerful senator, to put the horse out to pasture. Thus, even in these transitional years for Barnum, when he began to yearn for a measure of respectability, he could not resist the allure of a headline-grabbing humbug.24