The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (17 page)

the sun and the moon

stocks. Sunday mornings were spent in the town’s Presbyterian meeting-house, a church building without a steeple or a bell or, for that matter, a stove. During the New England winters, the congregation would shiver through the pastor’s two-hour sermons, providing a literal manifestation of the name by which such fervent believers were known among the less devout: bluenoses. When one of the brethren, imbued with the spirit of reform, proposed installing a stove in the church, the congregation voted down the notion overwhelmingly. “A pretty pass, indeed,” Barnum recalled the congregants grumbling, “when professing Christians needed a fire to warm their zeal.”

The presiding spirit of the town was Calvinist, the world seen as a dark, brooding place of sin and judgment, of souls foreordained by God to heaven or hell, where dead babies were condemned to damnation (because they had not yet had the opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as their savior) and the pope was understood to be the antichrist. All through Barnum’s childhood, Connecticut was in the grip of the nationwide religious revival that became known as the Second Great Awakening, meant to hasten the second coming of Christ; at night the low hills around Bethel often reverberated with the sounds of raucous camp meetings led by traveling preachers who promised eternal woe for those unfortunate souls not among God’s elect. Barnum himself attended many of these meetings as a boy, returning home almost smelling, feeling and tasting those everlasting waves of boiling sulphur, and hearing the agonizing shrieks and useless prayers of myriads of never ending sufferers, including mothers and their children, or perhaps children whose saved mothers were complacently watching their eternal agonies from the battlements of heaven, and with my eyes streaming with tears, and every fibre of my body trembling with fear, I have dropped upon my bended knees and fervently prayed this cold, stern God to let me die immediately, if thereby it was possible to save my soul and body from His endless wrath.

It was a vision of the world that Barnum found first terrifying and then infuriating, and against which he would struggle for the rest of his life.

Like Richard Adams Locke, P. T. Barnum was a religious freethinker (both men advocated the doctrines of Universalism, though only Barnum actually belonged to that denomination) who opposed the undue influence

– 98 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 99

The Prince of Ivy Island

of religious officials on civic life and enjoyed nothing more than holding them up to ridicule. Like Locke he propounded his beliefs first in newspaper editorials and later in pamphlets, including a widely distributed essay entitled
Why I Am a Universalist.
Even more forcefully, Barnum fought against the dark spirit of Puritanism by the example of his own life, which was richly devoted to joyfulness and laughter. God had granted people the gift of amusement, he contended; to deprive them of that pleasure—to reduce life, as had the stern churchmen of his childhood, to an endless round of drabness and drudgery—was little short of evil. It was a belief succinctly captured in the motto he had emblazoned on his private carriage when he came into wealth:
Love God and Be Merry.

P. T. Barnum had been named for his maternal grandfather, Phineas Taylor (his family members always called him Taylor), and from his namesake he inherited both his Universalism and his love of a good joke.

Bespectacled, with unruly hair and devilishly arched eyebrows, Phineas Taylor made his living buying and selling land, but his greater talent seems to have been for practical jokes. According to Barnum, his grandfather

“would go farther, wait longer, work harder and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven.” He enjoyed nothing better than sitting around the wood stove at the country store with the other local wags, telling tales of their adventures—the stories growing funnier, and more improbable, with each round of Santa Cruz rum or Holland gin—while endlessly devising practical jokes to play on each other and the store’s customers, sparing few their comic attentions, and all the better if the victim happened to be a clergyman. Phineas Taylor was said to be the first person the infant Barnum ever recognized (not surprising, given the hours he spent happily in his grandfather’s arms being fed lumps of sugar), and Taylor was unquestionably the guiding spirit of his life. The very first sentences of Barnum’s autobiography,
The
Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself,
were devoted not to his parents or the circumstances of his birth, but to Phineas Taylor.

It was Phineas Taylor who first told the four-year-old Barnum about Ivy Island—five acres of land that his proud grandfather had bequeathed him as a gift for carrying his name, which he would inherit when he turned twenty-one. Though few details were forthcoming, according to everyone Ivy Island was the most valuable farm in Connecticut. Scarcely a week went by that the young Barnum was not reminded by someone of the value of his holdings. Phineas Taylor delighted in telling acquaintances,
– 99 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 100

the sun and the moon

whenever his grandson was around, that this was the richest boy in Bethel, for he was the owner of Ivy Island. Barnum’s father hoped he would see fit to support the family when he came into his inheritance; Barnum solemnly pledged that he would. His neighbors worried aloud that he would not want to play with their children because he was propertied and they were not; Barnum promised his playmates that he would give them a piece of Ivy Island so that they might become rich too.

One summer day when Barnum was twelve years old, he asked his father for permission to visit Ivy Island. To his surprise, his father replied that he would soon be mowing a meadow near there; he could come along and help out, and during lunchtime take a break to inspect his property.

For three nights Barnum was so excited he could barely sleep. His head was filled with visions of Ivy Island, which his youthful imagination had turned into a kind of storybook version of the biblical land of milk and honey, the landscape dotted with caverns overflowing with diamonds and emeralds, mines encrusted with gold and silver.

Finally the long-awaited day arrived. “Now, Taylor,” his mother advised him before he set off, “don’t become so excited when you see your property as to let your joy make you sick, for remember, rich as you are, that it will be nine years before you can come into possession of your fortune.”

All that morning Barnum worked the meadow with the men; noontime could not come fast enough. After a quick lunch under a shady tree, his father gave him permission to leave, enlisting one of the hired hands, an Irishman named Edmund, to lead the young man to his property. Edmund leaped into service, grabbing an ax to take along with them. When Barnum asked what the ax was for, Edmund replied that he thought the young man might like him to cut a few pieces of timber from Ivy Island, so that he might see how superior it was to any other. This answer seemed to Barnum perfectly reasonable, and the two started out.

As they reached the north edge of the meadow, he noticed that the ground was becoming damp; as they pressed on a bit farther, the ground turned muddy and before long it had dissolved into swampland. With each passing step earth increasingly gave way to water, and eventually Barnum was able to keep moving forward only by leaping from bog to bog, often missing his step and splashing down into water as high as his waist. The hot sun glinted off the water, shining on the tall ferns and cat-tails that grew everywhere; from all around came the hum and whir of unseen insects. Edmund, his stride longer and more assured, was already far
– 100 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 101

The Prince of Ivy Island

ahead. Once Barnum was set upon by a nest of hornets, one of which stung him on the nose, causing him to plunge into the water up to his neck. After a quarter hour of painfully slow trekking, his nose throbbing, his ankles aching, the boy finally saw Edmund waiting for him on dry land. With a last heave he crawled out of the swamp, covered with mud, gasping for breath, and, as he recalled years later, “looking considerably more like a drowned rat than a human being.”

There,
Edmund pointed out to him; there it was, on the other side of the creek. Now the real purpose of the ax was revealed, as Edmund used it to fell a small tree that he then laid over the creek, providing them a bridge to Ivy Island.

Edmund helped him across and Barnum was, at very long last, standing on his own property. He turned to look at what lay all around him, his heart sinking at the realization. The fabled Ivy Island, wellspring of so many childhood fantasies, was nothing more than a forlorn patch of land overgrown with ivy vines, from which protruded a few stunted trees.

It was so clear now: Ivy Island was the greatest of all his grandfather’s practical jokes, carefully prepared for the better part of a decade. In a sickening moment, too, Barnum understood the truth of the name Phineas Taylor had bestowed upon the land. Any place called
Ivy
Island, after all, would naturally be covered in ivy; and it could not be called Ivy
Island,
of course, unless it was completely surrounded by water. His own excitement and pride had prevented him from seeing that. How important he had felt then, and how foolish now. Imagine: diamonds and emeralds—in Connecticut! He could provide no help for his father, no gifts for his friends, and everyone but him had known it all along. In shame he cast his eyes downward, where to his horror he saw an enormous black snake slithering toward him, its head raised up, menace in its eyes. With a shout Barnum scurried back across the fallen tree to the other side of the creek. For the rest of his long life, he would never again set foot on Ivy Island.

As time went on, P. T. Barnum seems to have been able to laugh with the others at the fun that had come at his expense; in Bethel the laughter about Ivy Island would not fade away for another five years. Still, as the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks noted in his essay on Barnum, “One seldom hears of a grandfather outwitting an infant in arms, of a mother conspiring to jeer at her own offspring, of a whole family, in fact, inviting the village to make game of its youngest and most helpless member.” It is
– 101 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 102

the sun and the moon

surely too simple to surmise that Barnum’s later vocation as a showman, and his undying love of the hoaxes that he termed humbugs, arose from a need to fool others as he had once, as a boy, been so grievously fooled—

but an event as remarkable as this one could not have failed to leave traces on its young victim. The motives of his family members in maintaining the long deception must not have been malicious; they loved their Taylor deeply, and none of them more than the man who had purchased the land and set the joke into motion. With Ivy Island these Connecticut Yankees were, in a sense, welcoming the young man into the tribe; and like all tribal initiations this one contained important lessons, no less powerful for being unspoken. This, the people of Bethel were telling him, is how life is: things are rarely as they seem, and fortunes are not handed over to the undeserving. Shrewdness, like temperance and prudence, is a virtue. Keep your wits about you, lest you fall prey to others.

That knowledge, as deep and solid as land, was Barnum’s inheritance.

Not long after the Ivy Island incident, Barnum’s father, Philo, opened a country store in Bethel and brought in his son to work as a clerk. Though it may be too strong to call Philo a ne’er-do-well, he had already tried and failed at a variety of trades, and when he died a few years later he left behind him a drawer full of unpaid debts—among them one to his own son, who had to work extra hours to earn the money to buy the shoes he wore to his father’s funeral. Perhaps Philo was concerned that his son would follow in his own wayward path; even as a teenager Barnum showed an aversion to manual labor and clearly was never going to earn a living, as most of the village men did, in field or factory. In any case, Philo’s decision proved to be an inspired one. Behind the counter of a store, Barnum proved to be efficient and capable, and no longer easily fooled; he was, in the widely used phrase of the day, up to snuff. Before long he was running the store by himself—his father had gone on to open a tavern, where he spent most of his time—and he reveled in the new adult responsibility, displaying a merchant’s proud strut, his pen thrust jauntily behind his ear, as he weighed out ten-penny nails or drew from large kegs of molasses and rum. (“I suppose I have drawn and bottled more rum than would be necessary to float a ship,” Barnum would later say.) As was typical of the period, the store carried just about everything needed for running a household, from groceries and dry goods to hard-ware and a thousand small items known collectively as notions. For

– 102 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 103

The Prince of Ivy Island

these the customers paid variously in cash, credit, and, most challengingly, barter, which meant that rates of exchange had to be quickly figured, involving not just butter and eggs but also beeswax, feathers, and ax handles. Nor was the offer of trade always on the up-and-up; sometimes the sharp young proprietor would measure a farmer’s truckload of oats or rye only to find it several bushels shy of the number claimed, or cut open a bundle of rags, solemnly declared by the woman who brought it in to contain entirely linen and cotton, only to discover worthless woolens, or that the bundle’s weight had been augmented by a pile of gravel or ashes.

In
The Humbugs of the World,
his high-spirited dissection of cons and tricksters past and present—séance rappers, faith healers, lottery sharks, diviners, false prophets, and numerous others—Barnum included a section on food adulteration, expensive products ingeniously stretched or even replaced with cheaper ones: black tea made green by being cooked with plaster of Paris and Prussian-blue paint powder; cayenne mixed with corn meal and salt; pepper blended with dust; coffee ground up with chicory root, dandelion root, peas, beans, parsnips, even horse livers, all of them baked to the proper color and consistency. Much of this information he seems to have garnered from direct experience during his years as the proprietor of a country store in the Nutmeg State—the very name of which was derived from the legendarily crafty Yankee peddlers who were said to sell fake nutmegs carved out of wood. “Otter” hats might be made from beaver or rabbit; clocks ran slow or fast, if at all; and fabric colors billed as “fast” more accurately foretold the speed with which they ran in the wash. Incidents of deception were surprisingly common, and a storekeeper had always to be on the qui vive, even when dealing with townspeople who were seemingly above reproach. Barnum loved to tell the story of a grocer who doubled as the deacon of the town’s church. One morning, before breakfast, he called down to his clerk: “John, have you watered the rum?”