18. Life of PTB, p. 306; Shultz, Jenny Lind, p. 161; Times (London), Aug. 21, 1850.
19. Holland and Rockstro, Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt, vol. 2, p. 411.
20. Life of PTB, p. 307.
21. New-York Daily Tribune, Sept. 2, 1850.
22. Life of PTB, pp. 307–8.
23. The kingdoms of Sweden and Norway were united under the Swedish crown for much of the nineteenth century, and the kingdoms had a united flag as well as individual flags. The Herald reported that in this instance the united flag of Sweden and Norway was flown.
24. New York Herald, Sept. 2, 1850.
TEN: TEMPLES OF ENTERTAINMENT
1. New York Herald, June 16, 1850.
2. The availability of ice water and good ventilation mattered on summer days in New York. Barnum and the owners of other theaters promoted in their ads both fresh air and ease of escape in case of fire. See the Bowery Theatre ad in New York Herald, July 4, 1850.
3. Barnum’s American Museum Illustrated (New York: William Van Norden & Frank Leslie, 1850), p. 2.
4. The Nation, Aug. 10, 1865, cited in PTB, pp. 107, 362n52; PTB, p. 105.
5. Speculation has it that a Boston Unitarian minister, Rev. John Pierpont, wrote the original story but remained anonymous because of the low reputation of theater (Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, “The Drunkard,” http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/sentimnt/drunkardhp.html); SL, p. 39, PTB to MK, Feb. 2, 1848; SL, p. 42, circular letter, June 1850. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, p. 119, points out that the play also appeared at the National and Bowery theaters at the same time.
6. New-York Daily Tribune, June 19, 1850.
7. J. B. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901), pp. 350–51, cited in PTB, p. 334.
8. National Park Service, “Castle Clinton,” https://www.nps.gov/cacl/learn/historyculture/index.htm; National Park Service, Manhattan Historic Sites Archive, “Castle Clinton National Monument,” http://www.mhsarchive.org/castle-clinton.aspx?dir=cacl.
9. New-York Daily Tribune, Sept. 12, 1850.
10. New York Herald, Sept. 12, 1850; Shultz, Jenny Lind, pp. 194–95.
11. S&T, p. 341; PTB, pp. 174–75; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, pp. 43–44; Shultz, Jenny Lind, p. 202. Shultz writes that the proprietor of the New York Hotel claimed to have paid Barnum $1,000 a day if Lind stayed there, and that Barnum repeated this sort of arrangement throughout her tour.
12. New-York Daily Tribune, Sept. 23, 1850; Bulman, Jenny Lind, p. 254.
13. As Saxon points out, it is odd that this second friend did not see the publicity value in bidding for the first ticket. He was the patent-medicine purveyor Benjamin Brandreth, a household name for decades in the nineteenth century, famous from the mass advertising of his products, and as one of the pioneers of mass advertising, an early model for Barnum (PTB, pp. 76, 169). Rosenberg, Jenny Lind in America, pp. 44–45, says that Colonel Ross did attend each of the Lind concerts in Havana the next spring. Lind’s comment: Field, Memories of Many Men, p. 220.
14. Rosenberg, Jenny Lind in America, pp. 44–49.
15. New York Herald, Oct. 14, 1850.
16. Ibid.; Rosenberg, Jenny Lind in America, pp. 57–64.
ELEVEN: BEFORE THE FALL
1. Letter from Lind to Judge Henric Munthe, Oct. 2, 1850, in Holland and Rockstro, Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt, vol. 2, p. 420; New York Herald, Oct. 15, 1850.
2. Life of PTB, p. 319; Shultz, Jenny Lind, p. 223.
3. Letter from Lind to Amalia Wichmann, Dec. 5, 1850, in Holland and Rockstro, Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt, p. 423.
4. Field, Memories of Many Men, pp. 216–19.
5. SL, pp. 50–51, PTB to Joshua Bates, Oct. 23, 1850.
6. Smith, The Theatrical Journey-Work, p. 7; S&T, pp. 378–79.
7. Barnum had hoped to present Lind to America in what would have been called Jenny Lind Hall, which at a cost of $100,000 was being built and decorated on Broadway at the foot of Bond Street. The hall, which Barnum expected to seat 5,600, would be one of the largest theaters in New York, but it was not ready until October, by which time Lind had left the city on her nationwide tour. So it was instead named Tripler Hall for the two Tripler brothers who had built it. Barnum implied in advertisements that the hall was his project, and it’s possible he invested in it, but the Tripler brothers were at least temporarily its owners. Lind did appear there in late October. By her final performance in the hall in 1852, and her penultimate one in America, it was under new management, as was Lind herself. New York Herald, Oct. 15 and Oct. 25, 1850.
8. The Republic (Washington), Dec. 18, 1850.
9. Daily Union (Washington), Dec. 18, 1850; Field, Memories of Many Men, p. 220.
10. S&T, pp. 356–57.
11. Life of PTB, pp. 327–28.
12. Field, Memories of Many Men, p. 219. He writes of Belletti, “The barytone of the troupe which accompanied her . . . was madly in love with her, and he used to lie in bed all day, weeping and howling over his unrequited affection.” Kunhardts, p. 91; Life of PTB, p. 326.
13. SL, p. 56, PTB to Moses S. and Alfred Ely Beach, Feb. 10, 1851.
14. Life of PTB, pp. 342–43.
15. Ibid., p. 341.
TWELVE: PUTTING OUT FIRES
1. Life of PTB, p. 348; William L. Slout, Olympians of the Sawdust Circle: A Biographical Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century American Circus (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 1998), p. 136.
2. Life of PTB, pp. 348–49; advertisement in Hartford (CT) Weekly Times, May 24, 1851, reproduced in S&T after p. 390.
3. S&T, pp. 410–12.
4. New York Herald, Dec. 19, 1851; New-York Daily Tribune, Dec. 19, 1851; Southern Press (Washington, D.C.), Dec. 20, 1851; George P. Little, The Fireman’s Own Book: Containing Accounts of Fires throughout the United States as Well as Other Countries (New York: Self-published, 1860), p. 283.
5. S&T, pp. 415, 417.
6. SL, pp. 61–62, PTB to William Makepeace Thackeray, Nov. 29, 1852; pp. 63–64, PTB to Edward Everett, Feb. 7, 1852.
7. S&T, pp. 412–13; Leland, Memoirs, pp. 200–211.
8. S&T, pp. 412–14.
9. SL, p. 80, PTB to MK, Sept. 4, 1854.
10. SL, p. 81, PTB to MK, Sept. 6, 1854. Redfield apparently rushed it out for the holiday gift season, and this version of the book is generally described as the 1855 edition.
11. PTB, p. 19.
12. SL, p. 83, two letters to various editors, copies of which were written both in his hand and by others. See, for example, The Jeffersonian, Oct. 26, 1854, which published an anecdote about one of his brothers, “From the Autobiography of P. T. Barnum.”
13. If there had been hard feelings between Barnum and Redfield that fall, they might have been attributed to Barnum’s having sold European rights to the book without letting Redfield know. Evening Star (Washington), Nov. 13, 1854.
14. PTB, p. 9. See also Saxon, Barnumiana (1995), p. 15.
15. New-York Times, Dec. 12 and Dec. 16, 1854; New York Herald, Dec. 12, 1854; PTB, p. 12.
16. Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, Mar. 10, 1855; “Revelations of a Showman,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Feb. 1855, pp. 187–201; Punch, Sept. 1, 1855, p. 89, all cited in Harris, Humbug, p. 228. In fact there was a minor push to offer Barnum as a candidate for U.S. president in 1888, but nothing came of it.
17. Trumpet and Universalist Magazine, Mar. 24, 1855, cited in PTB, p. 14.
THIRTEEN: A RUINED MAN
1. Life of PTB, pp. 383–85; PTB, pp. 192–93. Timothy Dwight IV was a former president of Yale College; quoted from his Travels in New-England and New-York (London: William Baynes and Son, 1828). S&T, p. 421. William Noble would go on to form the first regiment of Connecticut Volunteers during the Civil War. He was seriously wounded at Chancellorsville and spent a month in Bridgeport recuperating sufficiently to lead what was left of his regiment into Gettysburg after the
Confederates had been driven out. Still later in the war he was captured and sent to the infamous Andersonville prison in Georgia, as a colonel the highest-ranking Union officer sent there, and after four months was released in a prisoner exchange. Bridgeport History Center, Lehman, Eric D., “General William Henry Noble.” https://bportlibrary.org/hc/barnum-and-related-items/general-william-henry-noble/.
2. Life of PTB, p. 385.
3. S&T, pp. 423–26; Chauncey Jerome, History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years (New Haven, CT: F. C. Dayton Jr., 1860), pp. 106–16.
4. S&T, p. 426.
5. Ibid., p. 441.
6. PTB, p. 198; SL, p. 91, PTB to “My dear Doctor,” Feb. 2, 1856.
7. New York Post, Feb. 14, 1856; S&T, p. 440.
8. S&T, pp. 427; SL, pp. 91, 93, PTB to unidentified correspondent, Feb. 2, 1856 and to William H. Noble, Apr. 24, 1856.
9. SL, p. 92; S&T, pp. 445–47.
10. Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), vol. 4, p. 541, letter to Lidian Emerson, Dec. 30, 1855; Kunhardts, p. 123; Daily Dispatch (Richmond, VA), Feb. 19, 1856.
11. S&T, pp. 434–37.
12. S&T, p. 429; New-York Daily Tribune, June 4, 1856; New York Herald, June 5, 1856.
13. S&T, p. 431; New-York Daily Tribune, June 4, 1856.
14. Lewis, Across the Atlantic, pp. 24–25.
15. SL, pp. 95–96, PTB to Benjamin Webster, Dec. 20, 1856; S&T, p. 450.
16. S&T, pp. 458, 454–57; SL, p. 97, PTB to Rev. Abel C. Thomas, Mar. 9, 1857.
17. S&T, pp. 460–65, 469–70.
18. Ibid., pp. 474–75.
19. Ibid., pp. 475–76; Grantham Journal, Oct. 29, 1859.
20. S&T, pp. 477–79; Freedley, A Practical Treatise on Business, pp. 306–12.
21. S&T, pp. 831–36.
22. Ibid., p. 478.
23. Times (London), Dec. 30, 1858. A recent example of a historian repeating the squeaky voice myth is Edwin G. Burrows in his 2017 book, The Finest Building in America (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 147.
24. S&T, p. 479.
25. Saxon says that about sixty of these one hundred speeches were given outside of London (PTB, p. 202). Birmingham (U.K.) Daily Post, Jan. 27, 1859; Cambridge (U.K.) Independent Press, Feb. 26, 1859.
26. S&T, pp. 481–83.
27. SL, p. 102, PTB to MK, June 25, 1859.
28. New York Herald, Oct. 11, 1859. Numerous ads appear in newspapers in New York, Baltimore, Washington, and elsewhere in late 1859 and 1860. SL, p. 104, PTB to Sol Smith, Apr., 4, 1860; S&T, p. 493.
29. S&T, pp. 494–99.
30. New York Herald, Mar. 27, 1860.
31. S&T, pp. 519, 669–70; PTB, p. 214.
FOURTEEN: THE WAR AND A WEDDING
1. New-York Tribune, Mar. 27, 1860.
2. Strong, Diary, vol. 3, p. 12, Mar. 2, 1860, cited in PTB, p. 99; Kunhardts, p. 149.
3. New York Clipper, cited in Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, p. 158; New-York Tribune, Mar. 1 and Mar. 30, 1860; Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, p. 135; SL, p. 35, PTB to MK, Aug. 18, 1846.
4. PTB, p. 98; Times (London), Aug. 29, 1846; Life of PTB, p. 346.
5. PTB, p. 99; Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 141. Bogdan, a sociologist, claims, “No scientist or [mental health] professional of the nineteenth century is on record as calling any freak show distasteful.”
6. The New-York Times ran more than two hundred stories about the prince’s visit to North America. For his visit to New York, the Times, Herald, Tribune, and Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 3, 1860.
7. S&T, pp. 514–15.
8. New-York Times, Oct. 14, 1860; S&T, p. 516.
9. S&T, p. 517.
10. New-York Daily Tribune, Feb. 27, 1860; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
11. New York Herald, Feb. 21, 1861.
12. S&T, p. 566.
13. Ibid., pp. 567–69. Barnum quotes at length from W. A. Croffut and John M. Morris, The Military and Civil History of Connecticut During the War of 1861–65 (New York: Ledyard Bill, 1868), pp. 107–9; New-York Daily Tribune, Aug. 25, 1861.
14. SL, p. 113, PTB to Abraham Lincoln, Aug. 30, 1861.
15. SL, pp. 86–87, PTB to Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, c. Apr. 1855.
16. PTB, p. 217.
17. S&T, p. 570.
18. Ibid., pp. 531–32. See, for example, New York Herald, Jan. 21, 1862.
19. S&T, p. 534; Leech, Reveille in Washington, p. 222.
20. Evening Star (Washington), Oct. 21, 1862; S&T, pp. 535–36.
21. Robert Wilson, Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 137.
22. S&T, pp. 541, 543; New-York Tribune, Jan. 13, 1863.
23. Stratton, Sketch of the Life, p. 9; S&T, pp. 541–57; New-York Tribune, Jan. 5 and Jan. 13, 1863.
24. S&T, pp. 557–62; New-York Times, Feb. 11, 1863.
25. Evening Star (Washington), Feb. 12, 13, and 14, 1863; Grace Greenwood, from Abraham Lincoln: Tributes from His Associates (New York: Clarke Sales Co., 1895), p. 111; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Mar. 7, 1863.
26. PTB, p. 209; Lehman, Becoming Tom Thumb, pp. 154–57.
FIFTEEN: FIRE!
1. New York Herald, Nov. 27, 1864; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 903; Evening Star (Washington), Nov. 26, 1864; National Intelligencer, Dec. 1, 1864.
2. “On This Day,” New-York Times, May 27, 2001.
3. New-York Times, July 14, 1865.
4. S&T, pp. 589–91; New York Herald, July 15, 1865. As it happened, Union general Joseph Hooker had watched the fire from the Astor House, where he had been staying.
5. New York Herald, July 16, 1865.
6. Kunhardts, p. 190; New-York Times, July 14, 1865.
7. S&T, pp. 575–88; SL, p. 133, PTB to Theodore Tilton, May 29, 1865.
8. Hartford (CT) Courant, May 4, 2015.
9. S&T, pp. 607–8.
10. William H. Barnum would become most famous, or infamous, for his long tenure as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, during which in the 1880 presidential election he distributed a letter he knew to be fraudulent in which Republican candidate James A. Garfield purportedly wrote that he was in favor of Chinese immigration, an unpopular stance. The letter was a major “October surprise” that, although false, nearly cost Garfield the election. Cousin Barnum in 1876 earned the sobriquet “Seven Mule” for having used those words as a code in a telegram instructing its recipient to take $7,000 from a secret presidential campaign fund. For his actions in both of these presidential elections he was widely mocked as the worst kind of unprincipled political hack. Stan M. Haynes, President-Making in the Gilded Age: The Nominating Conventions of 1876–1900 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), p. 106.
11. “The Two Hundred Thousand and First Curiosity in Congress,” The Nation, Mar. 7, 1867, pp. 190–92.
12. New York Evening Express, Mar. 5, 1867, reprinted in Twain, Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, pp. 210–13. As it happens, in November 1880, Twain would give a speech and dedicate a satirical poem making fun of “Bill [i.e., William H.] Barnum” (Twain Quotes, “Mark Twain Takes a Swipe at ‘Seven Mule’ Barnum,” November 6, 1880, http://www.twainquotes.com/BillBarnum.html).
13. Hawley was breveted as a major general after the war before returning to civilian life. Letter from Joseph Roswell Hawley to Richard Henry Dana Jr., Apr. 2, 1867, cited in PTB, pp. 223–24.
14. S&T, pp. 609–10.
15. New York Herald, July 22, 1865.
16. Sun (New York), Sept. 6, 1865. The official opening did not come until November 13. Once the tours were given, Barnum had the curtain raised, exposing tables of food and drink on the stage. The showman invited his guests up, asking them to be actors in “a very clever gastronomical performance,” as the Sun reporter put it.
17. S&T, pp. 615–24.
18. Ibid., pp. 638–39, 643–45.
19. Ibid., p. 673.
20. Emerson, “The Barnums.”
21. S&T, p. 645.
22. Ibid., p. 647; New-York Tribune, March 3, 1868.
23. S&T, p. 646.
24. New York Herald, Mar. 3, 1868; S&T, p. 646; New-York Tribune, Mar. 4, 1868; Emerson, “The Barnums.”
SIXTEEN: SHOW FEVER
1. S&T, p. 651.
2. New York Herald, Aug. 31, 1868; New-York Tribune, Sept. 1, 1868.
3. S&T, chapters 45 and 46, pp. 660–74, are titled “Sea-side Park” and “Waldemere”; the quote beginning “a regiment” is on p. 671.
4. Ibid., p. 672.
5. PTB to George H. Emerson, May 23, 1868, and to Whitelaw Reid, May 20, 1869, cited in PTB, p. 19. Whitelaw Reid would also serve as U.S. ambassador to France and to the Court of St. James’s, and in 1892 would run unsuccessfully for vice president of the United States on the ticket of incumbent president Benjamin Harrison. Reid was still settling in at the Trib at the time Barnum approached him for advice and was having the usual newspaperman’s doubts about whether he should be doing something else: “I am sometimes haunted by my old feeling,” he wrote to his friend the future president James A. Garfield, “that I might better be at magazine or book work, if I could afford it.” The work with Barnum, then, would have been a short respite during which he could scratch that itch. Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid, Vol. 1 (London: Thornton, 1921), p. 146.
6. Sun (New York), Sept. 24, 1869; Bellows Falls (VT) Times, Nov. 19, 1869.
7. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, p. 20.
8. PTB, p. 160.
9. Barnum, Funny Stories, pp. 332–35.
10. Clemens, Mark Twain’s Sketches, pp. 215–21.
11. S&T, pp. 484–87, 676–79; PTB, p. 227.
12. PTB, p. 232. Castello’s last name was often spelled Costello.
13. Coup, Sawdust & Spangles, foreword; SL, pp. 162, 163, 165, PTB to W. C. Coup, Oct. 8, 1870, and to Moses Kimball, Nov. 22, 1870, and Feb. 18, 1871.
14. S&T (1872 ed.), pp. 856–57.
15. S&T, p. 681.
16. S&T, p. 682; S&T (1872 ed.), pp. 861–64; Sun (New York), Nov. 11, 1871.
17. S&T, pp. 683–84; S&T (1873 ed.), pp. 762–63; PTB, p. 239.
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