Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  Despite whatever glow this Havana respite cast upon Barnum’s mood, which was ever bright and cheerful, it did not prevent him from writing a truly unpleasant letter to the owners of the New York Sun about their rival and Barnum’s nemesis, James Gordon Bennett, and his wife. The couple happened to be in Havana at the same time, and even happened to take the same boat from Cuba to New Orleans as the Lind tour continued. Barnum’s letter, marked “Confidential,” accused Bennett of having been bought off with bottles of “champaigne” by a local aristocrat so that the Herald would provide favorable coverage of the Cuban government. It also reported Mrs. Bennett’s “strange antics in Havana,” namely hanging out regularly at a bar with “a gang of rollicking men gathered around her,” even though her husband had scolded her for frequenting the place. More cruelly, perhaps, he accused the Bennetts of unpopularity, reporting that she had had to cancel a ball in Havana because too few people would come and that on the steamer to New Orleans they had been snubbed by the ship’s other passengers, including Lind and Barnum himself. In a signed postscript to the letter, sent from New Orleans on February 10, 1851, Barnum revealed one of his ways of dealing with the press, writing to the Sun’s owners, the Beach brothers, “Please make what use you can of these facts & keep my name secret, though I hold myself responsible for all that I write.”13

  Lind gave a dozen concerts in New Orleans, then the party headed up the Mississippi on a steamboat that Barnum chartered to Natchez, Memphis, and on to St. Louis, where she gave five concerts before they went back down the river and then overland to Nashville and north to Louisville. From there they followed the Ohio upriver to Cincinnati for five more performances and finally to Pittsburgh, where the unruly nature of the crowd on the first night persuaded Lind to leave town early the next morning, forcing Barnum to cancel a second planned concert. Barnum followed Lind by steamer, stage, and rail to Baltimore, where Charity met him and Caroline. Because of exhaustion, Lind had to delay an announced benefit concert in Baltimore for two days, until May 1, raising $3,700 for the needy. She gave another benefit concert in Philadelphia on May 3, netting $5,000 there, and then everyone returned, with relief, to New York.

  Since arriving in the United States, Lind had given seventy-eight concerts for profit, forty-eight of them on the tour just ended, and another dozen for charity. Barnum too was weary after the long tour, and once Lind was back under the influence of her advisors in New York, and again hearing reasons to be discontented with his management, he recalled, “I . . . cared little what course they advised her to pursue.” Starting on May 7 at Castle Garden, she gave fourteen more concerts there or at Tripler Hall, and following one more performance in Philadelphia, her ninety-fifth in conjunction with Barnum, he offered her the opportunity to buy her way out of a commitment to seven more, and she agreed. She also had to pay him a flat fee of $25,000 for another fifty concerts projected in the original agreement. But by Barnum’s estimation—and he kept careful track of every penny—Lind netted $177,000 even after paying Barnum for her escape, while he grossed, after paying up her share, $536,000. Inflation makes an 1850 dollar worth about thirty times that today, so Lind’s nine months of work earned her roughly $5.3 million in today’s dollars. Barnum is less forthcoming about his other expenses in putting on the ninety-five concerts, but it seems safe to say that he made two or three times more than she did.14

  The outward cordiality of the business breakup suggests that both of them were ready to move on. He wrote, “After so many months of anxiety, labor and excitement, in the Jenny Lind enterprise, it will readily be believed that I desired tranquility.” After a half year away from Charity and his children, he seemed relieved at the prospect of renewed domesticity. The family spent a week at Cape May, New Jersey, and then returned home to Iranistan for the summer. The fortune he had acquired through the Jenny Lind tour would make any number of new ventures possible, but would also make him a target, as Lind was, for scores of people who wanted a piece of that fortune.15

  TWELVE

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  PUTTING OUT FIRES

  Even before he went out on the road with Jenny Lind, and while he was dedicating himself to family life, Barnum had been working at a dizzying number of ventures, some of which had now come to pass. When those projects relied on his instincts and experience as a showman, they tended to be successful. But when he was tempted by schemes in areas where he was less familiar, the results were uneven. Eventually, as his attention turned in so many directions and he bankrolled so many initiatives, his long run of good luck, stretching back to his purchase of his museum a decade earlier, would come to an end. But for several years he was able to overcome small setbacks, to sample his opportunities, and to learn from his mistakes. A series of ventures in the early 1850s reveals the breadth of Barnum’s interests and the range of risk he was comfortable with—as well as how capable he was at adapting once he’d pushed too far, eventually turning failure into future success.

  As Barnum had been renovating and expanding the American Museum in 1850, he was also working on a plan he had hatched the previous year to start a new circulating show, “a great travelling museum and menagerie.” His partners included Tom Thumb’s father, Sherwood Stratton, and a circus man named Seth B. Howes, whom Barnum put in complete charge of the new venture, not having “time nor inclination to manage such a concern” himself. Barnum could hardly have chosen a better man for the job than Howes, who is sometimes called the father of the American circus. He was born five years after Barnum on a farm less than fifteen miles from Bethel, in Brewster, New York. His much older brother Nathan had started a small traveling circus when Seth was eleven, and Seth performed in it on horseback and helped with the management. He would be connected with one circus after another for most of the next quarter century, up until his association with Barnum. In 1848 he and his brothers started the Great United States Circus, considered then to be the biggest of its kind ever assembled in this country. After Howes worked with Barnum, he would import a hippodrome from Paris and establish it on Broadway, and then he managed a circus in England for seven years, returning home to help start what would be called the Great European Circus. Like Barnum, he also managed individual performers, working with Tom Thumb and also with Eng and Chang, the Siamese Twins, whom he took on a year-long tour in 1853. After he left circus life, Howes made a princely fortune in real estate in Chicago, at one point owning the land that is now Hyde Park, and retired to Brewster, where he built on his family’s property a lavish, turreted, stone castle of a house that he called Morningthorpe.1

  What would be called P. T. Barnum’s Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie was still being put together when in 1850 the three partners sent a ship to Ceylon with the goal of capturing or buying a “herd” of a dozen elephants and “such other wild animals as they could secure.” The Regatta sailed out through the Narrows in May, carrying five hundred tons of hay to be stored on St. Helena, halfway between New York and Ceylon, to be used as feed on the journey home. After a year, the Regatta returned to New York with ten of the thirteen elephants it had set off with from Ceylon. One of the elephants was captured with a calf, which with its dam survived the passage to America, where it became the steed of Tom Thumb in the caravan. Barnum’s agents had also acquired a huge Burmese bull in Ceylon, and brought back a native elephant handler, now transformed as a promotional matter into the chief of a “wild and wandering tribe” from the island. Six lions would also be on parade in the traveling show, along with other beasts “selected at immense cost,” and a cortege of 110 horses and ninety riders. A large selection of curiosities from the American Museum would accompany this menagerie from town to town, and a tented pavilion large enough to accommodate fifteen thousand people would be erected at the end point of the procession, which would pass through the streets accompanied by a brass band and a military band. Admission to the exhibition would be Barnum’s usual charge of twenty-five cents.2

  Barnum
did not seem to regret the death of the three elephants in shipment from Ceylon, perhaps because so many others had perished during their procurement. “Large numbers” had been killed, Barnum reported, dwelling not on the loss of life but on the “most exciting adventures” and “numerous encounters of the most terrific description” that proved necessary in the capture of those thirteen. It seems that his agents had not been able to buy elephants, so they had hired dozens and dozens of local people to help them drive the animals into places where they could be captured. To capture as many as he requested, however, required being willing to kill or maim many more.

  This is one of those places in Barnum’s story where a modern sensibility must struggle to understand him. Our own sense of moral responsibility toward elephants and other large mammals led directly to the closure of the circus that bore Barnum’s name for 125 years after his death. For most of those years most people did not see the harm in parading elephants and other wild animals and doing what was necessary to train them to be performers. In his day, procuring wild beasts and shipping them long distances involved harsh realities that Barnum accepted without apparent regret, and keeping them alive after they came under his care was also a challenge. The financial incentive existed to make the whole process of exhibiting wild beasts more humane and efficient, and Barnum would hire people with the expertise to make this happen. But he also resigned himself to the frequent deaths of the beasts in his care, more readily than we would expect today. Still, while he never hesitated to mention the expense and trouble this aspect of his business created, he was circumspect about sharing with his audience how many elephants were killed in the process of capturing his troupe. His early advertising for the Asiatic Caravan said only that the elephants captured in the Ceylon jungle had been subdued and made no mention of those killed in the process.

  Once the Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie was out on the road in the spring of 1851, Barnum was willing to use his wealth for ventures beyond showmanship, trying his hand as an investor. By summer’s end, he had a visitor in Bridgeport representing a new British invention called a fire annihilator, which would put out fires without using water, by suffocating them with steam and chemical vapors. The overstatement in its name should have been a warning to Barnum, the master of overstatement, but its British and American pedigrees soon persuaded him to invest. After visiting Washington, where he met with former congressman Elisha Whittlesey, who had become the first comptroller of the U.S. Treasury and was angling to hold the American patent for the Phillips Fire Annihilator, Barnum agreed not only to invest but to become an officer in the company that was set up to sell it to Americans. He also became its “general agent,” meaning he was involved in sales but also in creating franchises across the country and in opening a New York office for the business. According to Barnum, he collected only a small percentage of the $180,000 that was soon pledged to the enterprise but personally guaranteed that amount and urged investors to hold the bulk of their money until a grand demonstration of the annihilator should take place.3

  W. H. Phillips, the British inventor of the contraption, would be present with Barnum for the public display of its annihilating powers. After a successful demonstration before about thirty people on December 17, 1851, on Hamilton Square, in the remote precincts of Manhattan at Sixty-Ninth Street and Third Avenue, the big trial was set for the same place on the following day. Barnum’s advertisements and fliers brought a crowd of some three thousand spectators on a bitterly cold afternoon to watch as fires were set to the shell of a house constructed for the demonstration and then to marvel as the annihilators did their work. Phillips’s plan, as he would write to the papers the next day, had been to start two separate fires, one small and one large. But after a fairly unimpressive first fire was quickly snuffed out by four annihilators, rowdies in the crowd swarmed into the house, tossed a number of pre-positioned annihilators out the windows (seriously injuring one small boy), and then themselves set the house ablaze. Phillips, who was knocked down twice trying to get the intruders out of the house, refused to intervene as it now burned down. Members of the crowd called out the familiar refrain “Where’s Barnum?” as a chorus of “Humbug” also rose above the ashes. A small group carried one of the annihilators to a nearby pub, where they chalked the name Barnum on it and hung it above the door to much laughter. A piece in the Tribune the next day was headlined, with a jaunty disregard for spelling, “Annihilition of the Fire Annihilator.” Despite Phillips’s call for another demonstration, Barnum returned the money he had already collected and eventually sold his share in the company. Although Phillips would succeed in getting an American patent for the machine, on October 31, 1852, the factory in Battersea where the Fire Annihilator Company built and stored its product itself caught fire, and neither the annihilators nor an old-fashioned bucket brigade could save the building. Passengers of steamboats passing by on the Thames were reported to have been “greatly inconvenienced” by the showers of steam the burning annihilators emitted. The factory fire would be the fire annihilator’s fatal blow.4

  The number of business schemes presented to him during this period, Barnum wrote, had “neither limit nor end,” and most were “as wild and unfeasible as a railroad to the moon.” Many of these speculators assumed that Barnum’s greed was bottomless and that he would have no compunction about lending his name to any sort of swindle. But he often responded to these proposals, he wrote, by saying that what he wished for, far more than money, was tranquility. Still, he was amused by the variety and persistence of the offers that came his way. In his 1869 autobiography he described a few of them, sharing his own witty responses. The last came from a fellow who wanted to use camels to carry people overland to California: “I told him that I thought asses were better than camels, but I should not be one of them.”5

  Among the projects Barnum did take on at about this time was one that reached back to his roots in the newspaper business. He and the brothers Alfred and Henry Beach, who had given up joint editorship of the Sun, each invested $20,000 to found a weekly illustrated newspaper, modeled on the Illustrated London News. Barnum was a worthy third to these two members of a newspaper family, having established the Herald of Freedom two decades before and in his career since having been intimately involved with the newspapers of his and other cities, as advertiser, writer, source, and friend or enemy of prominent editors. The first issue of the Illustrated News appeared on the first day of 1853, and although the circulation grew to exceed 150,000 (and by Barnum’s estimation its number of readers reached half a million), it closed after forty-eight issues. The paper ambitiously aspired to cover “Intelligence, Literature, Art, and Society.” Its chief engraver was Frank Leslie, whose own subsequent illustrated weekly paper would become an American mainstay and an important chronicler of the Civil War. The first editor of the Illustrated News was an excitable literary man named Dr. Rufus Griswold, and his assistant was Charles Godfrey Leland, a young journalist who later became a prominent folklorist. It was generally believed by “the entire American press” that Barnum’s interest in the paper was to create a frictionless vehicle for promoting his own interests, and Leland himself claimed in his memoirs to have been sufficiently concerned about it to explain to the showman that “this would ere long utterly ruin the publication.” Leland credited Barnum for avoiding that path, so much so “that in his own paper he was conspicuous by his absence.” Barnum assisted his editors by soliciting articles from the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, who was in America at the time, and his old friend Edward Everett, who as U.S. minister to Great Britain had set up the first meeting between Tom Thumb and Queen Victoria and was, at the time Barnum wrote to him, U.S. secretary of state.6

  According to Leland, Barnum also liked to stop by the office to share his latest joke or puzzle and to help him fill a regular humor column. “There was a great deal of ‘boy’ still left in Barnum,” Leland recalled, adding that Barnum would delight in sitting down to hear the be
st bits from the next column. Leland was unstinting in his admiration for Barnum, even though his tenure as editor of the Illustrated News (where he soon replaced Griswold) was brief and in his memoirs he emphasized how hard he was worked and how little he was paid. When he once complained to Barnum about his salary, Barnum doubled it, which still left Leland lagging behind what others in the newspaper business were being paid. But given that Barnum had put out the Herald of Freedom by himself, and given the older man’s general indefatigableness, Barnum was probably not the person to feel great sympathy for how hard Leland was working.7

  The Illustrated News ran its last issue on November 26, 1853, and Barnum had again lost money. But he soon allowed himself to be drawn into another investment in Manhattan, one that at least depended in part on his skills as a showman. The famous Crystal Palace exhibition in London’s Hyde Park in 1851 had inspired a group of New York businessmen to erect their own Crystal Palace in what was then called Reservoir Square and is now Bryant Park, located behind the main New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Barnum wrote that he was approached by the initial group of investors but declined to participate, because he thought it was too soon for New York to try to emulate the successful world’s fair in London. Besides, he thought the site, “four miles distant from the City Hall, was enough of itself to kill the enterprise,” being too far from the population center of the city. But the investors were undeterred by Barnum’s doubts and went ahead without him. The American Crystal Palace had a footprint following the Greek-cross plan of a central square with four equal wings, topped by a dome a hundred feet in diameter, the whole built of iron and glass, with enough wood to make it as flammable as the British original would turn out to be. The exhibition opened on July 14, 1853, with President Franklin Pierce as the featured speaker, but by the following winter the novelty had worn off sufficiently for its owners to approach Barnum again in the belief that he and his old friend John Genin, the now quite-rich hatter, could revive it. Barnum again “utterly declined,” but in almost no time he somehow found himself the president of the enterprise and a big investor in it. He immediately planned a “re-inauguration” ceremony, a Fourth of July celebration, and other Barnumesque events. But after three months of his focused attention, he realized that the enterprise was doomed, so he resigned.8