Barnum
Page 35
27. The letter was to Gideon Welles, editor of the Hartford (CT) Times, who would later serve as secretary of the navy under Lincoln. SL, p. 2, PTB to Gideon Welles, Oct. 7, 1832; PTB, pp. 42, 351n49; S&T, p. 90.
28. SL, p. 2, PTB to Gideon Welles, Oct. 7, 1832; PTB, pp. 42, 351n49; S&T, p. 90. Seelye married a Taylor; one of his sons became the president of Amherst College and a U.S. congressman, and another became the first president of Smith College.
29. On the day of his release, the Herald of Freedom contained a note saying in part, “We embrace the first opportunity to tender our warmest thanks to Mr. Crofut, (the Jailer), and his family, for their untiring exertions to render our stay with them as agreeable as the circumstances would permit.” Song lyrics: “Notated Music: Image 2 of Strike the Cymbal!,” Library of Congress, 1821, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sm1821.360050.0/?sp=2. S&T, p. 92; PTB, p. 44.
30. Herald of Freedom, Dec. 5, 1832.
TWO: THE NURSEMAID
1. PTB, p. 45; Life of PTB, pp. 141–42.
2. S&T, pp. 97, 99.
3. Ibid., pp. 102–3.
4. Ibid., pp. 103–4; J. David Hacker, “Decennial Tables for the White Population of the United States, 1790–1900,” Historical Methods 43, no. 2 (2010): 45–79.
5. Thompson, The Mystery and Lore of Monsters, p. 17. Thompson begins his study, “From the earliest period of the world’s history abnormal creatures or monstrosities, both human and animal, have existed from time to time and excited the wonder of mankind.”
6. Leslie A. Fiedler, “From Freaks,” in Donley and Buckley, The Tyranny of the Normal, pp. 11–25. S&T, pp. 104–5.
7. Ibid., pp. 105–6; SL, p. 8, letter to “Mr. Baker,” c. Mar. 1853; PTB, pp. 68–69. Saxon identifies William P. Saunders, whose name appears on the written agreement between Barnum and Lindsay but is then scratched out, as the likely source of the borrowed $500.
8. S&T, pp. 107–8.
9. New York Evening Star, Aug. 7, 1835; S&T, pp. 108–9.
10. “The Joice Heth Hoax,” New York Herald, Sept. 24, 1836.
11. Kunhardts, p. 20.
12. S&T, p. 112.
13. Ibid., p. 111. Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, pp. 30–43 discusses the freak show and racist qualities of the exhibition and reception of Joice Heth. The entire book focuses on the Heth affair, providing a great deal of context for it. Still, his harsh judgment of Barnum comes at least in part from his own reluctance to see Barnum in the context of his times, and Reiss tends to read Barnum’s fictional or satirical writings as pure fact.
14. Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, pp. 90–91; S&T, p. 113.
15. Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” American Studies at the University of Virginia, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/maelzel.html; Goodman, The Sun and the Moon, pp. 248–51.
16. S&T, p. 114; Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, p. 116. The gist of the story is true, but it may not have happened in Boston, and not for several more months. According to Reiss, “numerous details about the humbug are either misremembered or fabricated,” and once the automaton story did come out, Barnum was no longer touring with Heth, who was being shepherded by Lyman. But Reiss’s evidence proves only that the automaton allegation happened elsewhere, not that it didn’t happen in Boston as well.
17. Life of PTB, p. 171.
18. Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, pp. 135–36.
19. Richard Adams Locke was well known for an infamous hoax from the previous year. The Sun’s “Moon Hoax” claimed that John Herschel, the famous British astronomer, had built a telescope powerful enough to see creatures on the Moon, including bat-people and unicorns. Goodman’s The Sun and the Moon covers the hoax comprehensively.
20. The bet was for $350. Sun (New York), Mar. 1, 1836.
21. Life of PTB, p. 176.
22. Saxon, who has lived not far from Bethel for decades, continues to this day to search for any record of her burial or sign of her gravesite, without luck. Personal communication with author.
THREE: ON BROADWAY
1. Life of PTB, pp. 160, 171.
2. Ibid., p. 207.
3. Ibid., p. 193.
4. Ibid., pp. 187–88.
5. Ibid., pp. 208–9.
6. Ibid., p. 209.
7. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 640.
8. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, pp. 231–32; Life of PTB, p. 211.
9. Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It, p. 533, cited in PTB, p. 81.
10. Life of PTB, p. 215.
11. Saxon calls Adventures of an Adventurer “almost” a rehearsal for the autobiography (PTB, p. 88). That some contemporary scholars have read the work largely as a confession shows just how ambiguous a work it is and perhaps also says something about our eagerness to misread historical figures who embody times whose values do not live up to our own.
12. Life of PTB, pp. 215–16; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, pp. 316, 320.
13. Loyd Haberly, “The American Museum from Baker to Barnum,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 43, no. 3 (July 1959): 272–87, http://nyheritage.nnyln.net/cdm/pageflip/collection/NYHSR01/id/12552/type/compoundobject/show/12443/cpdtype/monograph/pftype/image#page/4/mode/2up; Orosz, Curators and Culture, pp. 132–33.
14. Haberly, “The American Museum from Baker to Barnum,” p. 287.
15. Life of PTB, p. 216.
16. Ibid., pp. 216–22.
17. At the end of the decade, the journalist George C. Foster said the light sent “a livid, ghastly glare for a mile up the street, and pushing the shadows of the omnibuses well nigh to Niblo’s. . . . That untiring chromatic wheel goes ever round and round, twining and untwining its blue, red and yellow wreaths of light in unvarying variety” (New York by Gas-Light, p. 71).
18. Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, p. 216.
19. PTB, p. 93.
20. Doesticks and Philander, Doesticks, p. 47.
21. Life of PTB, p. 225. Barnum removed this passage from Struggles and Triumphs, the 1869 version of his autobiography, where he is more defensive, justifying his more extreme efforts to publicize his public entertainments by saying such things were generally done, even if he did them with “more energy, far more ingenuity, and a better foundation for such promises” (S&T, p. 198).
22. Life of PTB, p. 223.
FOUR: THE MERMAID
1. New York Herald, June 24, 1841, and Sept. 25, 1841.
2. Life of PTB, pp. 234–36.
3. Ibid., p. 231.
4. Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid, pp. 36–48. William Clift no longer felt bound by his agreement to be silent about his findings when Captain Eades falsely advertised that he had vouched for the mermaid’s authenticity.
5. Life of PTB, p. 232.
6. Ibid., pp. 238–41.
7. Ibid., pp. 238–39. “The public appeared to be satisfied, but as some persons always will take things literally, and make no allowance for poetic license even in mermaids, an occasional visitor . . . would be slightly surprised.”
8. As late as 1845, Lyman asked Kimball if he could resume the role of Dr. Griffin and take the Fejee Mermaid on tour, so he didn’t rush off to Nauvoo. PTB, p. 123.
9. S&T, pp. 207–12.
10. Letter from PTB to MK, Feb. 5, 1843, Boston Athenaeum.
11. Ibid.
12. Harris, Humbug. Harris describes the controversy in Charleston in detail (pp. 64–67). Letters quoted are cited by Harris from Charleston Mercury, Jan. 21, 1843, and Feb. 5, 1843.
13. Letters from PTB to MK, Feb. 10 and 13, 1843, Boston Athenaeum.
14. Ibid., Feb. 21, Mar. 3 and 20, Apr. 4 and 8, 1843.
15. Ibid., Jan. 30, Feb. 10, Mar. 8, 1843.
16. Ibid., Oct. 4, 1843.
17. Ibid., Mar. 8, 1843.
18. Ibid., Mar. 22 and 29, Apr. 4, 1843.
FIVE: THE GENERAL
1. Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, pp. 10–15.
2. Life of PTB, p. 243.
3. Ibid., p. 244.
4. T
he History of Tom Thumb, published in 1621, was the first fairy tale to appear in print in English; Henry Fielding wrote a play called The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, published in 1731.
5. The Diaries of Julia Lawrence Hasbrouck, “December 8, 1842—‘Thanksgiving Day,’ ” https://frommypenandpower.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/december-8-1842-thanksgiving-day/.
6. Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, p. 119. If it was indeed a Thanksgiving Day turkey, Webb does not say so.
7. Kunhardts, p. 48; Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 23; Wallace, The Fabulous Showman, p. 74; Life of PTB, p. 244.
8. New York Herald, Dec. 9, 1842. Napoleon has been unfairly characterized as short. He was five-foot-seven, which would not have been considered short in his time.
9. Omaha Bee, Feb. 6, 1883, cited in Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 24; Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 23.
10. Life of PTB, p. 245.
11. SL, pp. 13–14, PTB to MK, Jan. 30, 1843.
12. Life of PTB, p. 393; PTB, p. 125. Saxon found information about Hitchcock in Universalist Church archives, including records showing that he returned to preaching for the last two decades of his life, after working on and off for Barnum for more than twenty years. Saxon notes that Hitchcock’s church obituary in 1883 says of this long connection with the showman only that the reverend, “for a number of years, was engaged in secular life.”
13. All from Boston Athenaeum.
14. New York Herald, Dec. 1, 1843.
15. Daily ads in Jan. 1844 in the New York Herald, Tribune, and Commercial Advertiser. Commercial Advertiser, Jan. 18, 1844; (Washington) National Intelligencer, Jan. 22 and 30, 1844.
16. New York Herald, Jan. 19, 1844; Kunhardts, p. 53.
17. National Intelligencer, Jan. 22, 1844.
18. Life of PTB, pp. 246–47; New York Atlas, Mar. 17, 1844, cited in Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, p. 60.
19. New York Atlas, Mar. 17, 1844, cited in Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, p. 60; S&T, pp. 242–43.
20. In the 1855 autobiography he changes the order to “regret and joy,” and in the 1869 version he does not characterize the tears at all.
SIX: THE QUEEN
1. Life of PTB, pp. 249–50.
2. Ibid., pp. 252–53.
3. Fitzsimons, Barnum in London, pp. 72–73.
4. Ibid., p. 73; James Stonehouse, New and Complete Hand Book for the Stranger in Liverpool (Liverpool: Henry Lacey, 1844), p. 184.
5. Fitzsimons, Barnum in London, pp. 74, 78–79; Illustrated London News, Feb. 24, 1844.
6. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 13.
7. Life of PTB, pp. 255–56. In a letter to the New York Atlas (Mar. 31, 1844) cited in Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, p. 61, Barnum writes that the purse contained twenty gold sovereigns, worth twenty pounds sterling.
8. New York Atlas, Apr. 24, 1844; Fitzsimons, Barnum in London, pp. 87–88; Catalogue of Catlin’s Indian Gallery (New York, 1837), p. 35; A Descriptive Catalogue of Catlin’s Indian Gallery (New York, 1845), p. 3. Catlin catalogues from Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.
9. George Catlin, Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (London: Self-published, 1852); PTB to MK, July 29–Aug. 1, 1844, Boston Athenaeum.
10. Life of PTB, p. 56.
11. Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 3.
12. The offending dog was likely not a poodle but one of the queen’s collies, named Sharp, which was well known for its bad temperament. Helen Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), p. 36.
13. Barnum’s anecdote about the first visit to Buckingham Palace: New York Atlas, June 9, 1844. Life of PTB, pp. 256–59; S&T, pp. 250–53.
14. PTB, p. 132; SL, pp. 24–25, PTB to Edward Everett, Mar. 23, 1844.
15. Times (London), Apr. 7, 1844.
16. Life of PTB, p. 263.
SEVEN: THE CONTINENT
1. Morna Daniels, “Paris National and International Exhibitions from 1798 to 1900: A Finding-List of British Library Holdings,” 2013, Electronic British Library Journal, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2013articles/article6.html. Barnum writes in the later version of his autobiography that during this visit he also often watched Robert-Houdin perform his magic act at the Palais Royal, but those performances did not begin until the following year, so Barnum must have seen him on a subsequent visit to Paris (S&T, p. 260). Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Memoirs (London: Chapman and Hall, 1860), pp. 148–50, 173, 184.
2. New York Atlas, Aug. 18, 1844; Hector Berlioz Website, “Berlioz in Paris,” http://www.hberlioz.com/Paris/BPOlympique.html.
3. Life of PTB, p. 264; S&T, p. 291.
4. Smith, “A Go-Ahead Day with Barnum,” pp. 86–101.
5. Irving, Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book, p. 273.
6. Smith, “A Go-Ahead Day with Barnum,” pp. 91–92.
7. S&T, p. 294.
8. New York Atlas, June 16, 1844.
9. PTB, pp. 137–38; New York Atlas, Dec. 29, 1844.
10. New York Atlas, Nov. 24, 1844; PTB, pp. 37–38.
11. New York Atlas, Jan. 5, 1845, in Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, p. 76. “Codfish aristocracy” has its origins as a description of people in Massachusetts who got rich quick from commercial fishing. A more general meaning refers to anyone with recently acquired wealth.
12. Ibid., July 21, 1844; Feb. 16, 1845; Apr. 20, 1845.
13. PTB, p. 223.
14. Illustrated London News, Apr. 26, 1845, p. 258. The report mistakenly says that Queen Victoria had given Tom the watch.
15. S&T, pp. 262–64.
16. Ibid., p. 264.
17. Illustrated London News, May 24, 1845, p. 334.
18. PTB to “Friend Risley,” Aug. 8, 1845, “Document: P. T. Barnum Letter Copybook, 1845–1846,” Barnum Museum, http://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/60002%3A185#page/1/mode/2u; S&T, pp. 268–69; PTB, p. 148.
19. PTB to “Friend Stratton,” Aug. 6, 1845, Barnum Museum; SL, pp. 32, 34, PTB to Moses Kimball, Apr. 30 and Aug. 26, 1845. New York Atlas, Jan. 18, 1846, cited in PTB, p. 147.
20. Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, vol. 2, p. 795; S&T, pp. 303, 307; Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 154.
21. PTB to MK, Jan. 4, 1847, Boston Athenaeum.
EIGHT: AT HOME
1. PTB to “Mrs. B,” Aug. 13, 1845, Barnum Museum.
2. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 25, 1846; Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, p. 114.
3. Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 64; PTB, p. 148.
4. SL, p. 35, PTB to MK, Aug. 18, 1846.
5. PTB, p. 150; SL, pp. 35–37, PTB to MK, Aug. 18, 1846, and Mar. 30, 1847. The Great Western, the steamship on which he had returned to New York in April, was one he would often take to cross the Atlantic, in spite of having bad relations with its captain, who at one point threatened to place Barnum in irons for too strenuously arguing about who should be conducting Sunday services on the ship.
6. PTB to MK, Jan. 4, 1847, Boston Athenaeum.
7. PTB, p. 150; Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 71; PTB to MK, Jan. 4, 1847, Boston Athenaeum.
8. Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, p. 795, cited in Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, p. 73.
9. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jan. 29, 1849.
10. SL, pp. 37–38, PTB to MK, Mar. 30, 1847.
11. PTB, p. 372n4; Life of PTB, pp. 401–3.
12. Boston Daily Atlas, Nov. 2, 1846; S&T, p. 309.
13. PTB, p. 372n7; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 31, 1848.
14. S&T, p. 311.
15. Caroline Barnum, “Diary, July 5–Aug. 11, 1848,” Bridgeport Public Library, cited in PTB, pp. 153–54 and Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, pp. 79–80.
16. A. H. Saxon, ed., Tom Thumb Performs in Danbury (Extracts from the Oak Cottage Diary of James White Nichols) (Fairfield, CT: Jumbo’s Press, 2010), pp. xxiv–xxviii.
17. Life of PTB, pp. 366–78.
18. S&T, p. 313. A newspaper story at the time reported that Barnum and Kimball spent only $3,500 for the museum and that “both of them had long been in treaty for it, and but for a compromise between them, it would probably have brought from 30 to $40,000” (Boston Courier, Dec. 3, 1849).
19. Life of PTB, pp. 109, 359–62.
20. Sun (New York), Jan. 13, 1884, cited in P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Fifty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, author’s edition (Buffalo, NY: Courier, 1884), Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005687804;view=1up;seq=411.
21. Ibid.
22. Life of PTB, pp. 349–51.
23. Daily National Whig (Washington), Mar. 26, 1849, reprinting an item from the Newark, N. J., Advertiser. A good brief description of the expedition is in Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002), pp. 396–404. Chaffin writes that Kit Carson said of the guide who led the relief detail, “In starving times no man who knew him ever walked in front of Bill Williams” (p. 402).
24. New York Herald, Apr. 18, 1849.
NINE: THE VOICE
1. Shultz, Jenny Lind, pp. 117–18; “Jenny Lind,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://archive.org/stream/encyclopaediabri16chisrich#page/716/mode/2up/search/Lind; Times (London), May 5, 1847.
2. Bulman, Jenny Lind, pp. 158, 164.
3. New York Herald, July 25, 1847.
4. S&T, pp. 215–16.
5. Bulman, Jenny Lind, p. 20.
6. Life of PTB, pp. 296–97.
7. Times (London), May 11, 1849.
8. Bulman, Jenny Lind, pp. 195–219; Shultz, Jenny Lind, pp. 131–44.
9. Bulman, Jenny Lind, pp. 220–21, 225.
10. Shultz, Jenny Lind, pp. 147–48.
11. Ibid., pp. 152–55; Leech, Reveille in Washington, pp. 290–91.
12. Life of PTB, pp. 298–304.
13. Shultz, Jenny Lind, p. 154.
14. Life of PTB, pp. 302–6.
15. Boston Daily Atlas, Feb. 21, 1850; S&T, p. 327.
16. North Star (Rochester, NY), Feb. 22, 1850.
17. New York Express, cited in Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, Aug. 20, 1850; Life of PTB, p. 309.