In the year following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, thrusting evolution into the spotlight and contradicting the biblical story of humankind’s creation, Barnum had a new act that showed up in this ad—one of the most objectionable humbugs of his later years. “WHAT IS IT! WHAT IS IT! WHAT IS IT!” the advertisement cried out, and what it just might be, the ad claimed, was “the long-looked-for connecting link between man and monkey.” The exhibit featured an eighteen-year-old, mildly mentally challenged, and microcephalic black man named William Henry Johnson, who stood only four feet tall and weighed only fifty pounds. Barnum dressed him in a furry ape costume and fitted him with a long pole, supposedly an aid in the transition from walking on four legs to two. The showman had Johnson’s head shaved—the ape suit went neck high—and taught him to smile foolishly and speak, when he spoke at all, in screams or gibberish. A white lecturer presented him to the museum visitors, telling stories about his capture in Africa and the attempts that had been made to civilize him. Huge numbers of people paid their quarter in order to enlarge their scientific knowledge or reinforce their preconceptions about race, or both. Even as sophisticated an observer as the New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong went to the 1860 exhibit two days in a row soon after it opened, calling Johnson “clearly an idiotic negro dwarf,” but also “fearfully simian . . . a great fact for Darwin.”2
But, interestingly, as the white man talked, Johnson would subtly undermine him to the audience, with, as the New York Clipper put it, “many sly manoeuvers that lets in the light on the humbug terribly.” When he was first exhibited in February, a number of New York newspapers swallowed the story hook, line, and sinker, but soon they, like the Clipper, began to express their serious doubts. This followed the pattern that Barnum had eventually settled on in presenting a new “scientific” discovery: offer it as true, adding, as Barnum did in a pamphlet for the exhibit, that its authenticity had been confirmed by “some of the most scientific men we have”; encourage doubts to be raised; and then invite his paying customers to make up their own minds. In the ad, Barnum slightly distanced himself by describing the possibility that this was the missing link as something “pronounced by so many people”—not necessarily including himself. He had long before explained to Moses Kimball that the point of this sort of exhibit was not to say one way or another if the actor is “human or animal”: “We leave that all to the sagacious public to decide.” That is what made it a humbug, by Barnum’s definition, and not an outright fraud.3
Barnum’s involvement with missing-link exhibits preceded Darwin’s book, stretching back to about 1845, when he showed an orangutan at the American Museum and described it as a “link between man and brute.” Then, in 1846 in London, he tried to fob off a misshapen American actor as a “wild man.” A longish advertisement in the Times of London asked, “Is it an animal? Is it human? Is it an extraordinary freak of nature? Or is it the long sought for link between man and the Ourang-Outang?” The ad explained that the exhibit’s “What Is It?” moniker applied “because this is the universal exclamation of all who have seen it.” But there was not much time for exclamation because, within half an hour of the exhibit’s opening at the Egyptian Hall, a visitor recognized the actor and exposed the fraud. Barnum had been wary of this, writing to Kimball only the week before, “I half fear that it will not only be exposed, but that I shall be found out in the matter. However, I go it, live or die.”4
William Henry Johnson’s act was a final attempt at Barnum’s earlier ploy, and one that would succeed over a long period of time. In the more than six decades of Johnson’s career, which would last until his death in 1926, he would be viewed, according to one estimate, by a hundred million people. For many years after Barnum’s own death, Johnson was a prime exhibit for the Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Brothers shows and became one of the most famous circus characters of his day. Barnum apparently treated him well, sharing in the profits and even buying Johnson a house in Bridgeport, and there was real affection between the two men as their relationship continued well into Barnum’s own circus days in the 1880s.5
Nothing can or should mitigate the overtly racist nature of the “What Is It?” presentation and reception. In Barnum’s mind, if not in ours, this exhibit must have been different from that of Joice Heth, if only because the element of doubt was the very point of the exhibition, making it not the outright hoax that Heth’s act was. Barnum was never ashamed of exhibiting Johnson as he came to be of exhibiting Heth, and there was not the public outcry that there had been about Heth.
Among those who would see Johnson in his first year at the American Museum was the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, who was making a four-month tour of Canada and the United States, every moment of which was followed by the press. At the age of three, the prince had met Barnum and Tom Thumb at Buckingham Palace, and now he was nearly nineteen. On the third day of his October 1860 visit to New York, he and his royal entourage stopped at Barnum’s. The proprietor himself was off in Connecticut, so Greenwood, who was British by birth and nervous as a cat to receive the prince, showed him around. He hustled Albert Edward up to the second floor, where the first exhibit he saw was “What Is It?” “His Royal Highness manifested much curiosity” in it, the Tribune reported, and asked Johnson’s “keeper” to give his “regular account of the animal.” Then they went on to see the vast array of other displays, Greenwood leading with backward steps.6
As always, Barnum described the royal visit colorfully, if second-handedly:
The tall giant woman made her best bow; the fat boy waddled out and kissed his hand; the “negro turning white” showed his ivory and his spots; the dwarfs kicked up their heels, and like the clown in the ring cried “Here we are again!”; the living skeleton stalked out . . . ; the Albino family went through their performances; the “What is it?” grinned.7
At the end of a fairly brisk visit, which the New-York Times reporter said “seemed to afford him a great deal of amusement,” the prince turned to Greenwood and said, “I suppose I have seen all the curiosities; but where is Mr. Barnum?” Barnum’s own interpretation of this moment is that the prince, when hearing that Barnum was not in the museum, was actually saying, “We have missed the most interesting feature of the establishment.”8
Having himself missed this signature moment at his museum, Barnum hustled up to Boston, which was the last stop for the royal visitors before returning home. Albert Edward received him there at the Revere House, and when the showman reminded the prince of his visit to Buckingham Palace with Tom Thumb, the moment elicited a royal smile. Barnum tells a good story about being whisked through the streets surrounding the Revere House, crowded with royal watchers, because he had been mistaken for the presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas. When Douglas later campaigned in Bridgeport, a friend asked Barnum if he had ever seen the senator. Yes, Barnum’s story goes, “I said: ‘He is a red-nosed, blear-eyed, dumpy, swaggering chap, looking like a regular bar-room loafer.’ ” To which his delighted friend responded that that morning’s paper had said that Douglas was “the very image, in personal appearance, of P. T. Barnum.”9
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WHEN LINCOLN WAS IN NEW York for his Cooper Union speech, he had stayed at the Astor House, just across the street from Barnum’s American Museum, but he did not visit. Perhaps the widely publicized “What Is It?” exhibit was enough to keep the would-be president away. Even so, Lincoln would be linked to Barnum’s “What Is It?” during the presidential campaign, in the form of a Currier & Ives cartoon called “An Heir to the Throne or The Next Republican Candidate,” showing the diminutive Johnson with his pole standing between a disheveled Greeley and Lincoln holding his trademark split rail. In his speech balloon, Greeley introduces Johnson as “this illustrious individual in whom you will find combined all the graces and virtues of Black Republicanism” and proposes him as the next Republican presidential candidate after Lincoln. And in his speech balloon, Lincoln re
fers to Johnson as “this intellectual and noble creature” proving “to the world the superiority of the Colored over the Anglo Saxon race” and calls him “a worthy successor to carry out the policy which I shall inaugurate.” At least in this instance, however, it can be said that race-baiting in a presidential election campaign did not work as planned.10
A year later, Lincoln was back in New York as president-elect, on his way from Springfield to Washington to be inaugurated. This time he stayed at the Astor House with his family, and Barnum pushed through the crowds in the hotel late on the beautiful mild afternoon of February 19 to invite them to visit the museum the next morning. The president-elect replied that “he would certainly attend” at some point the next day. To which, the Herald reports, as always adding a bit of brassiness to the showman’s tone, Barnum responded, “Don’t forget. You’re ‘Honest Old Abe’; I shall rely upon you, and I’ll advertise you.” Barnum was as good as his word, rushing the ad into the papers, but perhaps because of Barnum’s attempt to use him as a marketing tool, or more likely because he was pretty seriously in demand, Lincoln himself did not go to the museum, but Mrs. Lincoln and their children did visit.11
Barnum’s own views on politics and slavery had evolved over the years, even if his eagerness to make money off the “What Is It?” exhibit never changed. “I began my political life as a Democrat,” he wrote in his 1869 autobiography, and he claimed in an 1865 speech to have voted for every Democratic presidential candidate from Jackson to Pierce. But “Bloody Kansas” in 1854 “shook my faith in my party,” and by 1860, with secession and war looming, he had become a Republican, joining the antislavery party that had emerged in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He was publicly pro-Lincoln, and when a local group of Wide Awakes, the movement of young Republicans in support of Lincoln, announced a plan to direct one of their torch-lit marches from the center of Bridgeport to Lindencroft, Barnum bought enough candles to light up every window in the house, demonstrating his support with “a flood of light,” while his Democratic neighbors showed their opposition by keeping their houses dark.12
After the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, northerners who sympathized with Secession began to hold “peace” rallies. At these events, a white flag would often be flown above the Stars and Stripes. Barnum’s region of Connecticut was especially active in this way, and so he decided to accompany about twenty like-minded friends to attend one of the meetings happening ten miles north of Bridgeport, in Stepney, “and hear for ourselves whether the addresses were disloyal or not.” As they were leaving Bridgeport, they came upon two omnibuses carrying about twenty-five three-month militia volunteers who had just been mustered out and returned from the war. They and a number of other Bridgeporters were also headed to Stepney in a skeptical frame of mind. Barnum’s crew beat the slower omnibuses to the “very large gathering” and were present when, as the preacher was delivering his benediction, the omnibuses appeared over a hill, filled with the soldiers hollering pro-Union cheers and displaying Union banners.
In a later account written by William A. Croffut, who had been at Bull Run as a correspondent for the Tribune, and a local divinity student and future journalist named John Moses Morris, the soldiers went straight to the flagpole where the peace flag, white with a black eagle and the word PEACE, had just been raised, as well as “an ancient Jackson war-flag.” As a soldier shimmied up the hickory pole and tore down the offending flags, the rally’s speakers fled the stage in a panic—“Bull Run on a small scale”—and hid in a nearby cornfield. The soldiers then raised Old Glory and carried Barnum on their shoulders to the stage, where he delivered “a speech full of patriotism, spiced with the humor of the occasion.” The loyalists in the crowd passed pro-Union resolutions and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Among others who spoke was another member of the Bridgeport contingent, Elias Howe Jr., the sewing-machine magnate. Some of those at the peace rally had somewhat betrayed the cause of peace by drawing weapons, but the soldiers managed to disarm a few of them, though not before at least one pistol was fired. In his speech, Howe, who despite his great wealth would soon serve as a private in the war, told the crowd, “If they fire a gun, boys, burn the whole town, and I’ll pay for it!”
Before that was necessary, the Bridgeporters decamped, with what was left of the white peace flag dragging in the mud behind one of the omnibuses. But the soldiers remained in a riotous mood, and when they returned to Bridgeport and a crowd of several thousand people had appeared in the streets by evening, they sacked the offices of the Bridgeport Farmer, a Democratic, pro-secession newspaper. Barnum had wired several New York papers about the events of the day, ending his first dispatch by saying that the soldiers had been talked out of attacking the Farmer office, but a short time later, at 8:30 p.m., he sent a second telegram saying that the newspaper “ha[d] just been gutted. . . . The windows were smashed, the type all thrown into the streets, and the presses destroyed.” He wrote in his autobiography, “I did not approve of this summary suppression of the paper, and offered the proprietors a handsome subscription to assist in enabling them to renew the publication.” One of the editors escaped over rooftops during the riot, fleeing to Canada and eventually ending up in Augusta, Georgia. The other did restart the Farmer.13
Less than a week later, after the arrest of one of the principal peace-meeting activists on orders of Secretary of State William H. Seward, Barnum wrote to President Lincoln from Lindencroft, reporting that the arrest had “rendered Secessionists so scarce, I cannot find one for exhibition in my museum” and praising the effectiveness of the administration’s “strong arm.”14
As early as 1855, Barnum had written to the militant abolitionist Unitarian preacher Thomas Wentworth Higginson, telling him that Charity “attends the Unitarian church, but her hatred of slavery is so strong that they are too tame for her.” His own views on slavery had been affected by his travels in the South, where he had “grown to abhor the curse from witnessing its fruits.” His letter to Higginson continued, “I have spent months on the cotton plantations of Mississippi, where I have seen more than one ‘Legree.’ ” It is more likely that his experience of cotton plantations anywhere could be measured in hours or days rather than in months, and this letter was not the time to confess his own brief ownership of slaves and the beating of one of them. But it seems clear that his opinion had evolved since 1845, when he told the group of Scots on a steamboat to Glasgow that the views of some abolitionists were more reprehensible than the institution itself. He also told Higginson in his 1855 letter, “I am quite your disciple as to woman’s rights,” and asked if Higginson could put him in touch with the suffragist Lucy Stone, whom he would like to invite to Bridgeport, having listened to her speak on the topic in New York and been “enchained to the seat” during her lecture.15
Friends he had made in the temperance movement influenced this general liberalizing of Barnum’s views. Several of these friends were preachers who were also deeply involved in abolition, women’s suffrage, and other causes. Barnum himself remained a fervent member of the Universalist Church and increasingly acted on his religious principles. And his own financial humbling had also made him more cognizant of the hardships others faced, and more sympathetic to them.
As the existence of the peace-movement Democrats in Connecticut implies, the North was anything but united in the cause of Union, let alone abolition and rights for women. Barnum’s ardent antisecessionism and disdain for Copperheads, as the peace Democrats came to be known, undoubtedly cost him business. But throughout the war the museum supported the Union, offering a series of patriotic, war-themed dramas beginning with one called Anderson, which dealt with Maj. Robert Anderson’s failed attempt to hold on to Fort Sumter. Barnum also filled the museum with artifacts from the war, created wax figures of Union generals who were in the news, and even commissioned an automaton of a young Union soldier on crutches. A living twelve-year-old Union drummer boy who had been injured at Fredericksburg drummed at the
museum, and the glamorous northern spy Pauline Cushman spoke there as well.16
So closely was Barnum associated with the federal side of the war that after the Draft Riots in New York in 1863, soldiers sometimes volunteered to guard Lindencroft, which was rumored to be in danger of being torched by southern sympathizers. The soldiers even gave him flares that he could shoot up in the event of an attack, warning those at the Bridgeport arsenal to come to his rescue. Barnum explained that he did not have to use them until much later, when a burglar alarm went off in the house one night and he sent up flare after flare, so that “the whole place was as light as day.” Half-dressed but fully armed neighbors streamed into his yard to offer assistance, and Barnum claimed that in the light of the flares they could see two burglars making their escape. An engraving that portrays this scene appeared in his 1869 autobiography.17
Barnum’s enthusiasm for show business never faltered, even as the war progressed. In the spring of 1861, at about the same time Fort Sumter was under siege, he learned of a little person from New Hampshire whom he wanted to exhibit, repeating the routine he’d developed with Charley Stratton. After months of negotiations with the boy’s father, a prospering farmer in Manchester, Barnum signed a five-year contract to exhibit the boy, named George Washington Morrison Nutt, for a modest amount. Barnum immediately christened him Commodore Nutt and floated the fiction that he was still trying to sign him up, prompting other promoters to make handsome competing offers. In advertisements meant to look like a press account, Barnum chronicled the offers of these competitors and released a letter of his own directing his agent to acquire Commodore Nutt, offering his father up to $30,000 for a three-year contract, plus all expenses. Other newspapers picked up this account verbatim, and soon Barnum’s new exhibit was going by the name the “$30,000 Nutt.”18
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