Nutt, who was nearly fourteen years old, was, at twenty-nine inches, four inches taller than Tom Thumb had been when Barnum first met him, but over his years of success Tom had eventually grown taller and considerably more rotund. Nutt was what Barnum called “almost a fac-simile of General Tom Thumb as he looked half-a-dozen years before.” So much so that many people suspected Barnum of simply renaming Tom in order to create a new sensation. Eventually Barnum would allay most of these suspicions by bringing the two little men together on stage, but in the meantime he gave the Commodore the Tom Thumb treatment, creating costumes for him and constructing a carriage driven by Nutt’s brother and attended by a footman, both in livery, and pulled by two Shetland ponies. But this time Barnum was inspired by his new star’s surname to have the cab of the coach built in the shape of an English walnut, which would open on hinges, exposing the young Nutt within.
After Barnum signed Tom Thumb for a month of appearances with Nutt, beginning on August 11, 1862, the crowds came as usual, but Barnum asserted that many people still believed Nutt to be the real Tom Thumb and the real Charley Stratton to be a fake—“no more like the General than he was like the man in the moon.” Barnum found amusement in such people who “deceive themselves by being too incredulous.” A month after their joint appearance at the American Museum ended, Barnum accompanied both men to Washington as part of what was billed as “Barnum’s Museum, Circus, and Mammoth Amphitheatre,” which also featured the established museum exhibits of an Albino family from Madagascar and twelve performing grizzly bears under the direction of Grizzly Adams, as well as equestrian performances. In the newspaper ads, Nutt got billing above Tom Thumb, even though, as Margaret Leech dryly notes in her famous book about the wartime capital, Reveille in Washington, “Tom Thumb was the most admired general in town.”19
On the Sunday afternoon of October 19, the Evening Star reported, Barnum lectured on temperance for an hour on the grounds of the Capitol to “a large audience,” urging “total abstinence upon his hearers in a most convincing style.” Two days later, he and the Commodore called at the White House at the invitation of President Lincoln. When they arrived, they learned that the president was in a cabinet meeting but had asked to be interrupted when Barnum and Nutt showed up. The president “received us cordially, and introduced us to the members of the cabinet.” After a bit of joshing with secretaries Salmon P. Chase and Edwin Stanton, Nutt was addressed by the president himself, who bent over to tell the little commodore that if he ever engaged the enemy with his fleet and was in danger of being captured, “I advise you to wade ashore.” In a display of Thumbian wit, Nutt gave Lincoln’s long legs the once over and said, “I guess, Mr. President, you could do that better than I could.”20
Barnum remarked that this meeting took place during “dark days of the rebellion,” and indeed they were. The sad slaughter of Antietam had happened only a month before, and Lincoln had visited his worrisomely confident but cautious commander, Gen. George McClellan, near the bloodied battle town of Sharpsburg earlier in October. While Barnum was in Washington, his former neighbor Mathew Brady was displaying images in his New York studio that his men had taken at Antietam, giving the public its first photographic view of the wages of war. Although it had not been much of a victory, Antietam was victory enough for Lincoln to have announced without seeming desperate his intention to sign an Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of the new year.21
Still, with all his burdens, Lincoln always seemed ready to be amused, as were the members of his cabinet on this October day, and indeed in wartime Washington the public could find distraction in many more entertainments besides Barnum’s traveling show.
The war news only got worse for Lincoln and the Union as the autumn wore on. The president fired General McClellan in early November for his unwillingness to press the advantage over Robert E. Lee after Antietam, and in December the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, oversaw the “butchery” of his Union troops at the disastrous first battle of Fredericksburg. He would be relieved of his command at the end of January 1863.
In the meantime, Barnum was making moves that would result in one of the great distractions of the war years, which the New-York Observer would call, tongue in cheek, “the event of the century, if not unparalleled in history.”
* * *
BARNUM LEARNED IN THE FALL of 1862 of a perfectly proportioned and charming female little person, and he hurried to engage her. Her name was Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump, and she was twenty years old, thirty-two inches tall, well educated, and plumply attractive enough that Barnum dubbed her the “Queen of Beauty.” She had worked briefly as a schoolteacher in her hometown, but a cousin had lured her to perform as a singer and dancer, appearing alongside a giant on a riverboat plying the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Barnum put out the usual stories of her reluctance to be signed, even for a handsome sum, and of his full use of his persuasive powers in sealing a deal with her parents, themselves fourth cousins from a well-regarded family in Middleborough, Massachusetts.
In his autobiography, Barnum wrote that once he had her under contract he kept her out of sight at the house of one of his daughters in New York, while he had a “splendid wardrobe” made for her, including “scores of the richest dresses” and “costly jewels.” Then he arranged for her introduction to the New York press at appearances at the St. Nicholas Hotel in late December, where she drew raves for her beauty and composure. By early January she was appearing at the museum, and “from the day of her début she was an extraordinary success.” In an advertisement on January 13, Barnum claimed that a hundred thousand people had been to see her in her first week on display, during which she had worn a different new dress each day.22
Tom Thumb had given an interview to the Bridgeport Standard in October 1862, expressing his hope “one of these days to get married,” and at the age of twenty-five and as a man of real means, he was a suitable match for Lavinia. Barnum devoted many pages of his 1869 autobiography to the courtship that came to pass between Tom, who supposedly fell in love with the Queen of Beauty at first sight, and Lavinia, who supposedly had no interest in marriage and therefore had to be won over by the persistent general. The implication in this long telling was that the wooing was stately and dignified, although largely consisting, in Barnum’s description, of Tom’s showing off his wealth to her. But on January 13 those same newspaper ads announced the impending wedding. Barnum claimed that the wooing happened while Lavinia was appearing at the museum, where Tom first met her, after which he went straight to Barnum’s office and declared, “I believe she was created on purpose to be my wife!” But Barnum mistakenly recorded that her levees at the museum had begun in the autumn; instead they had begun on January 5. He likely got this wrong on purpose to make the courtship seem longer than it was, because if it was as short as seems evident—possibly less than two weeks—it would tend to support the suspicion that Barnum had arranged the marriage, a suspicion he raised and denied in the autobiography. His protracted tale of the courtship was also meant to absolve him of these charges and prove that the marriage was a love match. In the end, the marriage would prove to be sturdier and happier than many, even if Barnum had indeed been rushing it along.23
The great event was set for February 10, after which, Barnum claimed in his ads, Lavinia would retire to the country house of her wealthy new husband, so if the public wanted to see her at all, they had better do it quickly. Barnum recalled, “Lavinia’s levees at the Museum were crowded to suffocation, and her photographic pictures were in great demand.” Sales of cartes-de-visite images of the Queen of Beauty amounted to $300 a day, and Barnum was taking in more than ten times that much each day at the ticket office. To further promote the “fairy wedding,” as Barnum began to call it, he displayed Lavinia’s wedding dress in a store window on Fifth Avenue, and he had photographs made by Mathew Brady of the bride and groom in their wedding outfits. Bishop Horatio Potter of the Episcopal Diocese of New
York first agreed to officiate, and named Trinity Church across from Barnum’s museum as the venue, but the rector of that church said no, and at the last minute the bishop himself announced that “too much publicity [had been] given to the affair,” and backed out. So the setting was changed to the Gothic, James Renwick–designed Grace Church up Broadway across from Brady’s new studio, and Tom Thumb’s own minister, Rev. Junius Willey from Bridgeport, did the honors.24
On the spring-like day of the great event, carriages began to arrive at the church at 11 a.m., having passed through streets crowded with onlookers and closed to other traffic between Ninth and Twelfth Streets on Broadway, which was lined on both sides with policemen. As the organ pumped out the overtures to William Tell and Oberon, the Tannhäuser grand march, and more, into the church filed governors and congressmen and the wives of John Jacob Astor III, William Henry Vanderbilt, and the warring newspapermen Bennett and Greeley. Perhaps the most surprising guest in the glittering crowd was, among a number of generals in attendance, Burnside, who had only days before been cashiered by President Lincoln. “The gallant soldier looked well and hearty,” the front-page story in the New-York Times reported the next day, “and received the evident regard of the audience with ease and dignity.” One wonders what his reception might have been had he not foolishly sacrificed the lives of thousands of Union soldiers at Fredericksburg only two months earlier.
But this was a day of celebration, and at last Barnum could be seen making his way up the center aisle to a seat at the front of the church, along with the families of the betrothed, soon followed by Commodore Nutt and Minnie Warren, who was Lavinia’s sister and also a dwarf, and then the “Loving Lilliputians,” as the Times labeled them. As the bride and groom passed by, the Times unkindly reported, “A sense of the ludicrous seemed to hit many a bump of fun and [an] irrepressible and unpleasantly audible giggle ran through the church.” But once the service began, the crowded church pews and the ceremony proceeded with appropriate dignity. For once, Tom Thumb did not play an audience for laughs but said his vows clearly and reverently. After Lavinia spoke her own vows with her usual composure, and the Rev. Thomas House Taylor, rector of Grace Church, dispensed the benediction, “the General honestly kissed his wife,” the Times wrote. That honestly was perhaps a reference to the “many millions” of kisses he had sold over the years.
Down the aisle the two strode to the sounds of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and out again into the “breath-expurgating, crinoline-crushing, bunion-pinching mass of conglomerated humanity,” held back by a double row of policeman bordering a tapestry that had been laid down the steps of the church and out to the waiting carriage. More policemen helped the nuptial vessel move out of the clamorous crowd surrounding the church and down Broadway. Hundreds of people ran after the carriage, and the sidewalks and overlooking windows were crowded for the whole ten blocks until the party reached the site of the reception, the elegant Metropolitan Hotel at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, beside Niblo’s Garden.
Although Barnum had paid for the wedding, he had somehow resisted selling tickets to the church service itself, even though as much as $60 had been offered for a pew seat. The same could not be said of the reception, where tickets were priced at $75, and even so, Barnum said, several thousand people paid up and twice as many who wanted to buy tickets were turned away. On arriving at the hotel, the newlyweds went up to their room, where Lavinia changed from her wedding gown to an ornate taffeta reception dress, both of which Barnum had paid for. When the happy couple returned to the reception, they were hoisted onto a grand piano, where they could greet the members of the throng and be seen by them. Soon Nutt and Minnie were lifted alongside, and the four were as much on display as the many wedding gifts in one of the hotel parlors, some of which, including jewelry and silver, were locked in glass cases to protect them from sticky fingers.
A wedding cake weighing eighty pounds, atop which stood a sugary Egyptian temple, had been confected for the reception, and more than two thousand guests went home with a small box containing a piece of it. After two hours the newlyweds retired to their room and the guests dispersed. Later that evening the New-York Excelsior Band appeared outside the hotel, where some five hundred spectators soon joined them. After their serenade, Tom appeared on the balcony of his room to give a gracious little speech of thanks to the band and to everyone who had celebrated with him and his bride that day.
In the first few days after the wedding, they would visit Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. While in Washington, they were invited to a reception in their honor in the East Room of the White House, where President and Mrs. Lincoln hosted members of the cabinet, generals, senators, “and many other gentlemen of distinction,” along with their families. When the president offered his congratulations to the pair, who had donned again the clothes in which they had been married, he took Lavinia’s hand “as though it were a robin’s egg, and he were afraid of breaking it.” So remembered the journalist Grace Greenwood, who was present at the event. The president kidded Tom Thumb that he himself was now in the little general’s shade, since Tom “was now the great center of attraction.” When the president asked how he, “as a military man,” would be conducting the war, Tom responded, “My opinion is that my friend Barnum would settle the whole affair in a month.”25
A. H. Saxon suggests that “the wedding was,” for the showman, “too great a coup to let the public ever forget it.” Barnum had a pamphlet prepared that described the whole affair in detail, not omitting many of the newspaper accounts, and distributed it and highly profitable souvenir photographs wherever the four members of the bridal party appeared, which in the next decade was almost everywhere in the United States, England, and Europe and on a three-year world tour that included India, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. Until 1867 Barnum would continue to be the primary sponsor of the Tom Thumb wedding tour, but then Tom started his own company and, now only a shareholder, Barnum saw his profits shrink considerably. Barnum knew that Tom didn’t need him anymore, since he had his own very competent manager, and later Barnum would write to Tom and Lavinia to thank them for “friendship and fidelity to me,” admitting, “You could easily have thrown the old man overboard long ago.”26
FIFTEEN
* * *
* * *
FIRE!
After Lincoln’s reelection on November 8, 1864, as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s incendiary march through Georgia to the sea was under way, the Confederate government in Richmond, working with operatives in Canada, hatched a plot to send dozens of agents into New York to set the city ablaze in retribution. Richmond had appropriated $20,000 to support this quixotic effort. The hope was that the many Copperheads in the city (where the vote had gone two to one against Lincoln) would rise up from the ashes in general rebellion and unite New York with the Confederate cause.
The agents, who were equipped with black leather valises containing turpentine and bottles of phosphorus, checked into at least thirteen of the city’s most prominent hotels with the intention of dousing their rooms in the turpentine and uncorking the combustible phosphorus. They also set fires, or tried to, on docks along the Hudson, and in lumberyards and other places of business, including Niblo’s Garden, the Winter Garden, and Barnum’s American Museum. The fires, set on November 24 and 25, mostly failed to catch, and those that did caused only minor damage rather than the general conflagration the Rebels hoped for. The fire at Barnum’s was started at 9 p.m. on November 25 on the main building’s fifth floor, while a performance was under way in the Lecture Hall below. The flames were soon put out, but not before a cry of “Fire!” led to the chaotic emptying of the theater, with some people sliding down iron pillars supporting the balconies. Thanks to the quick and calm response of museum employees, however, no injuries and only a few torn dresses resulted. Barnum’s response was to create and display a wax figure of the captured Rebel arsonist Robert Cobb Kennedy, who would be executed the following spring
for his role in the citywide attack.1
The fire, the panic, and the calm response of Barnum’s staff presaged a much more catastrophic event at the museum eight months later, and Barnum’s eagerness to put the museum’s waxworks in action again might have been a contributing factor. The spring of 1865 was among the most momentous seasons in the history of the nation, with General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, and the capture of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, in Georgia on May 10. Northern newspapers and many cartoons reported falsely that Davis had been caught wearing his wife’s petticoats. Barnum capitalized on the patriotic zeal of the press by creating a wax figure he called “The Belle of Richmond,” depicting Davis in a bonnet and a plaid dress. Barnum was soon running newspaper advertisements announcing that “JEFF.DAVIS IN PETTICOATS” was at the museum. But the Belle’s run would not be a long one. Less than two months later, soon after noon on July 13, fire broke out somewhere in the bowels of the museum, and within half an hour “forked tongues of flames were darting through every window, wreathing the painted medallions outside with chaplets of fire, and sweeping away at a single touch the veracious canvas representations of the whales, giantesses and alligators within.”2
As Barnum’s employees tried to save some of the museum’s purported million objects, and as visitors made off with them as keepsakes, a large crowd gathered on Broadway and the other streets around the museum, so densely packed that when the first of what would be thirty fire companies arrived at the scene, it caused “some severe accidents.” The police tried to push the crowd back, but when one of the steam-powered fire engines let off a blast that sounded like an elephant’s trumpet, panic flared among those still thronging the streets and people were trampled. Despite the chaos, nobody was killed.
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