Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  The dusty museum itself, so crowded with objects, was a vast tinderbox, and soon the flames were leaping high into the sky. Every person inside escaped, some by making heroic leaps onto balconies and from there to the ground; one facetious report suggested that the giantess Anna Swan had to be hoisted down from a third-story window that was enlarged on the spot to get her through. The trained seal named Ned made its way out of the museum and through the crowd before it was safely captured. One bear supposedly climbed down a ladder to the ground, and some of Barnum’s rare birds were set free to fly away. But most of the animals in the large menagerie were not saved. Two recently arrived whales from Labrador, which were being exhibited on the second floor in a tank twenty-five feet in diameter, were sacrificed when firemen broke the tank’s glass walls so that the tons of Croton Reservoir water within might douse the fire below. The crowd outside could hear the pitiable sounds the whales made as they burned to death; monkeys, tigers, alligators, a kangaroo, and numberless other exotic animals perished in their cages, and some of the huge snakes that escaped their glass box were said to be seen slithering down stairways before they died.

  Newspapers reported that the crowds in the streets were more amused than horrified by the whole scene, eager to get free glimpses of Barnum’s albinos and other human curiosities as they escaped through the crowd. Spectators hollered out what passed for witticisms about the many animals, as well as objects of real value, that were being lost in front of them. Before the smoke and fire grew too dangerous, some objects were tossed from the windows to the streets below. Although most of Barnum’s many wax figures simply melted into fuel for the fire, the figure of Jefferson Davis did sail out a window, its petticoats exposed to the crowd, where it (or perhaps just its head, as one report had it), was hanged from a lamppost on Fulton Street, beside St. Paul’s Church. The crowd made merry reference to a line in the famous Union marching song “John Brown’s Body,” which spoke of hanging “Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.”

  Soon the roof collapsed, and the inside of the building was likened to the crater of an active volcano. Then, according to a report the next day in the New-York Times:

  At 1:30 came a crash resounding like the explosion of a powder magazine. The whole wall on the Ann-street side had fallen. A cloud of dust and smoke filled the air, making it dark as twilight, and rendering it impossible to descry objects at short distance.

  At 1:45 o’clock the Broadway front of the Museum fell in three different sections, one after the other. . . .

  Another section was left in the shape of an elongated triangle, and not unlike the steeple of a church. In a few moments this sunk slowly down, the point still remaining upright and in position until the whole section disappeared.3

  Barnum had not been in the city at the time of the fire and had heard about it through Samuel Hurd, his daughter Helen’s husband, who was now the assistant manager of the museum and who had been at his office on the second floor as it began. When the fire reached a point of no return, Hurd pulled several thousand dollars from his desk and, along with account books, added them to the “many thousand dollars” in Barnum’s safe, which was recovered after the fire, its contents spared. Upon escaping the building, Hurd telegrammed Barnum, who was giving a speech to the Connecticut legislature in Hartford, apprising him that the museum was engulfed and likely to be a total loss. Barnum wrote in his 1869 autobiography what newspaper reports at the time also said, that he read the telegram calmly, folded it up on his desk, and finished his speech—“in the coolest manner possible,” as even the Barnum-despising Herald put it. That night he returned to Bridgeport, spent the evening with his family, and waited until the next morning to go to New York. He checked in at the Astor House, which, unlike a number of other buildings in the neighborhood of the museum, had not been damaged by the fire.4

  Barnum held court in the hotel that morning, visited by sympathetic friends while offering a brave face to members of the press. In this gathering, the Herald wrote, “Mr. Barnum was the most buoyant of all. Instead of alluding to or mourning over his loss, he spoke of nothing but the prospectus for his new museum. This, he asserts, will surpass anything of the sort ever attempted.” Barnum vowed to move farther uptown and to construct a building that “will astonish the world.” His new menagerie would be triple the size of the one whose bones and ashes smoldered just across the street, and he would build a collection of curiosities unlike any “on this continent or any other.” Later that day he set up in the office of his other son-in-law, David Thompson, at 35 Chambers Street, where he issued a notice to the public promising to have a new museum in six months and to find a theater within a few days so that at least some of his performers and exhibitors could get back to work. Many of his anxious employees visited him that day; Barnum said the fire made 150 people temporarily jobless, and the Herald ran an item listing some sixty of them by name and job, including his longest-serving employee, the naturalist Emile Guillaudeu, who had been working for the museum and its predecessors since 1810. A theatrical benefit would soon be arranged for them at the Academy of Music—possibly Barnum’s idea, since the Herald printed this suggestion the next day in the midst of its reporting about the showman.5

  Barnum demonstrated admirable energy, optimism, and concern for his workers, and his surefooted handling of the public-relations aspect of the disaster is astonishing if unnervingly cool-headed. He knew to act immediately, taking control of the situation, thanking his many customers and promoting the new museum he would create, while also skillfully taking advantage of the eager interest of the press in covering a disaster and its aftermath and availing himself of the natural sympathy that would flow his way after so great a calamity.

  Neither the cause of the fire nor where it started has ever been definitively proven. Barnum placed its origins in a boiler room; the New-York Times put it in an adjacent building’s basement furnace; Samuel Hurd said it was under a staircase; the museum treasurer, H. O. Tiffany, said it originated in three different places at once, suggesting deliberate sabotage. Was the cause mechanical or arson? Southern arsonists had already attacked the museum once, and rumors that it might be attacked again would only have been fueled by the prominence of the exhibit of Jefferson Davis in petticoats. If that wax figure was the cause, it was the most expensive exhibit Barnum ever mounted.6

  * * *

  AS THE END OF THE war drew near, Barnum’s growing political consciousness and ever-present industriousness took him in an unlikely direction. He decided to run for political office. His distaste for his Copperhead neighbors in New York and Connecticut had grown as the war proceeded, and his now strong belief in abolition led him to agree to run as a Republican or Union candidate from the town of Fairfield for the Connecticut legislature. “I did this,” he wrote in his autobiography, “because I felt that it would be an honor to be permitted to vote for the then proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States to abolish slavery forever from the land.” He was successfully elected in April 1865, and he immediately got to work.

  Connecticut’s General Assembly quickly and unanimously voted to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, making Barnum’s wish come true two days after he took office on May 2. But an amendment to the state’s own constitution proposing to drop the word white from the qualifications to vote “was violently opposed by the Democratic members,” Barnum wrote. On May 26, 1865, the freshman legislator from Fairfield rose in favor of the amendment. He spoke passionately, not holding back his partisan potshots, and ruminated on how a party calling itself Democratic could be so opposed to democracy. He was proud of the speech, devoting thirteen pages of his autobiography to quoting what even at that length was only a summary of it, because, as he explained in a letter three days later, “the opposition interrupted me and put me on my mettle, & I gave them an hour and a half without tiring anybody.”7

  In the speech, which was widely quoted and praised in the newspapers, Barnum energetically move
d to fulfill the obligations for which so many Union troops had died. He attempted to rise above the racism of his time, asserting that in his travels through the South he had observed “that the slaves, as a body, are more intelligent than the poor whites.” He left little doubt in the minds of his listeners that his commitment to enfranchise black people living in Connecticut was unflinching and unwavering. More meaningfully, the speech served its purpose in the legislature, and the amendment passed. Nonetheless, when it was put before a state referendum in the fall, it failed by about five thousand votes. Black citizens in Connecticut would get the vote only with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870, and the word white would not be removed from the state constitution until 1876.8

  In the General Assembly, Barnum chaired both the agriculture and the state house committees, and he led a fight against railroad interests in the state government. He worried that the New York and New Haven Railroad, which served his part of the state, would use its monopoly status and political clout to hike prices for Connecticut commuters, as had been done with other commuter lines into New York. The railroad lobby, however, was already so deeply lodged in the legislature that Barnum and his allies fought them day in and day out on many fronts. Despite his lasting reputation as a cynic, his anger over the way the railroad could buy legislators was undoubtedly genuine, as was his interest in protecting voters and extending the right to vote in the state.

  Indeed, the speech he was giving when he received the terrible telegram about the museum fire was in favor of a measure regulating how the railroads could increase commuter fares; that bill “was carried almost with a ‘hurrah’ ” by the state house. Barnum later noted with satisfaction that the measure “annually adds many dollars to the assessment roll of Connecticut,” since a large number of new citizens bought land along the railroad as a result. Barnum ran for the legislature again the next spring, mainly, he asserted, because a director of the New York and New Haven Railroad had vowed that he would not be elected again. Yet he prevailed, and served a second term as a representative for Fairfield. It was less eventful than the first, but Barnum acknowledged that it “was very agreeable” to him.9

  In 1867, for the third spring in a row, his party asked him to run for office, this time for the U.S. Congress in a district including Fairfield and Litchfield counties. His Democratic opponent turned out to be a rich industrialist and a distant cousin, William H. Barnum, who would go on to have a long career in Democratic politics, even serving as a U.S. senator from Connecticut.10

  The battle of the Barnums was hard fought and not particularly clean. P.T. made use of his contacts in the Bridgeport and New York press to publicize an anonymous letter from a potential constituent in Litchfield alleging that William H. was planning to spend $50,000 to buy votes in the election and challenging P.T. to “fight fire with fire.” Despite the letter’s anonymity, and therefore the possibility that P.T. or a supporter had written it, papers published both it and P.T.’s high-minded reply, to which he primly appended the Connecticut statute forbidding the bribery of voters.

  Now that he was operating on a larger stage than in his previous campaigns, he ran into objections based on his long career as a purveyor of humbugs. The Nation, not a Democratic organ, published a long rant in the middle of the campaign bemoaning what it saw as a postwar failure to count character as the most important trait of political leaders, and used Barnum as the current example. Although the magazine’s writer praised him for his antislavery and pro-Union positions as well as his defense of “sobriety and good order”—allowing “that he has public spirit and is a good neighbor” (faint praise, that)—he wrote that none of this atoned for Barnum’s “having been for twenty or thirty years a depraving and demoralizing influence.” It was the old argument about Barnum, that he was a humbug and that he not only felt unashamed of his behavior, but even reveled in it and the riches it brought him. The heart of their charge against him, finally, had to do with his “vulgarity.”11

  A less somber and self-satisfied attack came on March 5 from Mark Twain, then thirty-one and recently returned from the West, imagining in the pages of a New York newspaper “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress,” which Twain was able to obtain, the conceit went, by “Spiritual Telegraph.” The introduction to the speech predicted that Barnum “will find the House of Representatives a most excellent advertising medium” and suggested that “he can dove-tail business and patriotism together to the mutual benefit of himself and the Great Republic.” In the imaginary speech itself, Representative Barnum managed to go on at length about all the attractions of his museum, not failing to mention (twice) that peanuts were for sale throughout the building, and calling for the impeachment of “the dread boss monkey”—that would be President Andrew Johnson—and the restoration of “the Happy Family of the Union.” Twain’s effort in an evening paper in New York probably had no impact on voters in Connecticut, but the eventual outcome of the race did call into question the efficacy of the Spiritual Telegraph.12

  On April 1, Connecticut voters went for Democratic candidates across the state, reacting in part against issues such as the one Barnum had backed in the legislature proposing black suffrage. The state’s Republican governor, Joseph Roswell Hawley, who had risen to the rank of brigadier general during the Civil War, was himself defeated that day. Hawley blamed the nomination of Phineas T. Barnum as the Connecticut Republican Party’s “great blunder,” but he still defended Barnum as “a better man than many out of the state suppose. He is one of those fellows who have double characters, one professional & scoundrelly, the other private, church-going, decorous, and utterly abstinent from pocket-picking. . . . But he was a burden.”13

  Barnum lost handily to his distant cousin, but worse than the loss, as he wrote, was the contest itself: “The filth and scandal, the slanders and vindictiveness, the plottings and fawnings, the fidelity, treachery, meanness, and manliness, which by turns exhibited themselves in the exciting scenes preceding the election, were novel to me.” He did not have what it took to “make a lithe and oily politician” and had not chosen in the campaign “to shake hands with those whom I despised, and to kiss the dirty babies of those whose votes were courted.” Still, this would not be his last foray into elective politics.14

  * * *

  MARK TWAIN WAS ABLE TO imagine Barnum puffing his museum in Congress because, as he promised the public, Barnum had opened a second museum within weeks after the first one burned. Nine days after the fire, two shows benefiting his employees played at the Academy of Music, where everyone involved, from the performers and musicians to the carpenters and machinists, donated their time to the cause. Barnum spoke at both showings, announcing that some of his artists would be appearing very soon at the Winter Garden on Broadway at Bond Street and that he was refurbishing the site of the old Chinese Museum, up Broadway between Spring and Prince Streets, to open a new but temporary museum. As the Herald reported about his appearances at the Academy, “Barnum was greeted with much applause during the delivery of his remarks, which he interlarded with characteristic anecdotes and the development of a philosophy strictly of the Barnum school.” For example, he told the packed houses that he believed the fire had been sent by Providence to rid his name and that of his museum of the stench of humbug.15

  One week later, on July 28, 1865, his Winter Garden show opened, featuring an orchestra, the presentation by his mimes of a theatrical called “The Green Monster,” and a family of trapeze artists performing “Astounding Aerial Flights”—all twice daily. By September 5 the new museum was ready for a preview for the press and important friends. As Barnum and Samuel Hurd took their guests through the newly arranged space, the visitors saw that it was bigger than the old museum, divided into “five roomy saloons and a theatre or a lecture room” on four floors taking up the entire block. Besides featuring a few wax figures saved from the fire, and Ned the Learned Seal (“which by the way has grown considerably since his rescue,”
the Sun observed), Barnum’s New Museum offered a new and larger “Happy Family,” an aquarium, model steam engines, a glass-blowing shop, a shooting gallery, new cosmorama pictures and stereoscopes, and a reported 100,000 new curiosities, stuffed fauna, and minerals. Barnum also returned with a wide array of “human curiosities,” touting a Cherokee Indian with no arms, Anna Swan and other giants, a woman weighing 660 pounds, and the Circassian beauties. Most remarkable, perhaps, was that Barnum had in so short a time constructed a new Lecture Room, with a stage fifty feet wide, red velvet seats and benches to accommodate 2,500 customers, and a huge drop curtain featuring painted images of Barnum and Jenny Lind flanking a representation of the old museum and the words, “It still lives, and rises Phoenix like from the ashes.” Although Barnum’s architect-builder admitted that there was still much to do, the museum opened for business the next morning.16

  Barnum’s ability to sink so much money into the new museum after losing so much in the severely underinsured old one was owed partly to his longtime nemesis, James Gordon Bennett of the Herald. Bennett wanted to construct a new building for the newspaper on the old American Museum land and paid Barnum $200,000 for the eleven years left in his lease. Bennett then decided to buy the land itself, but somehow when his agents came up with an offer, they neglected to subtract the $200,000 for the lease, so when Bennett sealed the deal, he in effect leased the building at the same time he was buying it. Bennett tried to wriggle out of the purchase and had his lawyer send for Barnum to inform him that he wanted his lease money back. To which Barnum memorably replied, “Nonsense, I shall do nothing of the sort, I don’t make child’s bargains.” Bennett would eventually lose a suit by the owner of the land compelling him to pay the $500,000 he had agreed in writing to spend on the property. The day after Barnum’s meeting with Bennett’s lawyer, an ad for his Winter Garden show failed to run as scheduled in the Herald. Hustling over to the newspaper’s office to find out why, Barnum was told that the Herald would no longer accept his advertising. Even this, though, Barnum parried. He quickly called a meeting of an association of New York theater managers, with the result that they all agreed to stop advertising in the Herald and to stop using the newspaper’s facilities for printing playbills, a lucrative add-on that Bennett had insisted upon as a condition of running their ads. For the next two years, all the principal theaters in New York headed all their ads in the other New York papers with the words, “This Establishment does not Advertise in the New York ‘Herald.’ ” At the end of the two years, the theater managers felt they had made their point and began to advertise with Bennett again. All of them, that is, except Barnum.17