The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (19 page)

Bethel, however, turned out to be not as sweet a home as he had hoped.

Though he had some supporters, the Seelye case had agitated the community, unearthing a not very deeply buried vein of Puritanism there. His store was struggling, largely because of his customers’ debts, which Barnum was often kind-hearted enough to forgive or simply too amiable to pursue. (“By friendship,” he wrote in the margin of his accounts book, canceling one debt; “by being a damn clever fellow,” he wrote, canceling another.) In January 1833, one month after his triumphant release from jail, he sold the Bethel store, having concluded that the mercantile life was not, as he put it, “my natural sphere.” Five months later Charity gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Caroline, a joyous event for the couple but one that also deepened Barnum’s financial woes. Making matters worse, the following year the Connecticut legislature prohibited lotteries, his primary source of income; the Temple of Fortune was forced to shut down, leaving him with numerous unpaid debts. His own fortune, accumulated almost overnight, had vanished just as quickly—and the
Herald of Freedom,
a source of personal satisfaction but never a going concern, was draining away whatever funds he had left. On November 5, 1834, he put out his last issue.

Without his store or newspaper, Barnum’s ties to Bethel were growing thin. The village had been a wonderfully intimate sideshow in which to make a debut, to discover his voice and develop his talents, but now he required the brighter lights, and larger audiences, that could only be provided by the main stage. That winter he and Charity packed up their belongings and said their good-byes. Having already gained and lost one fortune, Barnum headed to New York City to seek another.

At the age of twenty-four P. T. Barnum was tall and sturdy, his broad frame having not yet taken on the impressive stoutness of his later years.

He still did not know exactly what line of work he would pursue, but he

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had come to recognize something important about himself: that he was no longer interested in any job offering a fixed salary, but only one that would allow him to earn money according to his own abilities. For by this time Barnum surely sensed the greatness that lay within him. He had, he knew, been blessed with an unusual amount of energy, as well as a bottomless curiosity, an intelligence not always distinguishable from cunning, and an outsized ambition that had inevitably pushed him beyond the few scattered homesteads of Bethel. And it may have been dawning on him, too, that he had an unexpected gift: the uncanny ability to read the public’s desires, to know what people wanted even before they knew it themselves, a talent so rare and profound that it would not be inappropriate to call it genius.

The Barnums took up lodging in a house on Hudson Street, and he set out to look for work. For a time he found employment as a “drummer”

for a cap store on Chatham Street, earning a small commission for every paying customer he persuaded to come in; the job came naturally for someone as gregarious as he, but all the while he kept searching for something better. Every morning at sunrise, just as the newsboys were piping their first sleepy cries, he handed over a penny for the
Sun
and opened the paper to the “Wants” section. “Fortunes equalling that of Croesus, and as plenty as blackberries, were dangling from many an advertisement,” Barnum would later recall, but all the opportunities, when he pursued them, turned out to be not as golden as had been promised. Time and again he trudged up dark, rickety stairways inside dingy waterfront boardinghouses, only to find that he was required to invest his own money in the production of some new invention, or patent medicine, or other get-rich-quick scheme of dubious merit. One time he applied for a job as a bartender at Niblo’s Garden. The owner, William Niblo, was willing to hire him, and though he needed the job very badly Barnum turned it down, balking at Niblo’s condition that he remain for at least three years: even then, at his lowest ebb, he was leaving himself available for greater things.

In the spring of 1835, after receiving several hundred dollars for old debts from the Bethel store, Barnum opened a boardinghouse on Frankfort Street. It quickly became a popular destination for travelers from Connecticut, and soon he used the profits from the boardinghouse to buy an interest in a grocery store on South Street. At last he was earning a steady income, able now to support his family, but he could not help feeling dissatisfied again. He was back in the same mercantile trade he had disavowed in Bethel, one that he knew was not well suited to his talents or disposition.

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He felt himself, for perhaps the first time in his life, adrift. Still, he continued attending to the boarders with Charity, continued to mind the store, all the while keeping his eyes open, waiting for something to happen.

In July an acquaintance from Connecticut named Coley Bartram came to shop at Barnum’s grocery store. The men got to chatting, and soon discovered that they shared a taste for speculative opportunities. Bartram told Barnum that he had recently sold his interest in, as he put it, an extraordinary Negro woman. Her name was Joice Heth, and he believed her to be 161

years of age; even more extraordinary, he believed that she had been the nursemaid of none other than George Washington. Together with a business partner, R. W. Lindsay, Bartram had purchased the rights to exhibit Joice Heth; Mr. Lindsay was now going it alone in Philadelphia, but he had little enthusiasm for the life of a showman and was eager to sell the contract and return home to Kentucky. Perhaps Barnum might be interested?

Bartram pulled out the July 15, 1835, edition of the
Pennsylvania Inquirer
and directed his attention to an advertisement displayed there. Barnum read it with growing excitement:

CURIOSITY.—The citizens of Philadelphia and its vicinity have an opportunity of witnessing at the Masonic Hall, one of the greatest natural curiosities ever witnessed, viz., JOICE HETH, a negress aged 161 years, who formerly belonged to the father of George Washington. She has been a member of the Baptist Church one hundred and sixteen years, and can rehearse many hymns, and sing them according to former custom. She was born near the old Potomac River in Virginia, and has for ninety or one hundred years lived in Paris, Kentucky, with the Bowling family.

All who have seen this extraordinary woman are satisfied of the truth of the account of her age. The evidence of the Bowling family, which is respectable, is strong, but the original bill of sale of Augustine Washington, in his own handwriting, and other evidence which the proprietor has in his possession, will satisfy even the most incredulous.

At once Barnum felt himself cease to drift. All the disappointments of the previous few months, all those wretched interviews with charlatans and cheats, seemed now somehow worthwhile, because they had brought him to this: this was what he had been waiting for all along. Immediately he began to consider potential venues in which Joice Heth might be shown in New York, discarding some possibilities, keeping others.

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William Niblo had just added a beautiful saloon to his restaurant, and perhaps he would be interested in exhibiting her there—this female Methuselah. She could sing some old-time hymns during her performances, which would endear her to audiences, but she should also relate stories of how she had helped raise General Washington, for people would love to hear about the father of his country when he was just a boy. Barnum could feel his imagination filling like a sail, propelling him forward.

Years later, looking back on the Joice Heth affair, recalling the many layers of deception it had entailed, P. T. Barnum would say that the exhibition had been “the least deserving of all my efforts in the show line.” It was the only one that caused him even the slightest bit of shame. Even so, he still felt a certain affection for the Heth tour because it had been his first, the one that established him as a showman. There had been other attractions, of course, in those early years: Signor Vivalla and his spinning plates; Henry Hawley, with his Western tall tales; John (“Master”) Diamond, the best of all the Ethiopian breakdown dancers; clowns, singers, magicians galore. Without the start Joice Heth had given him, however, he never could have gotten the museum six years later—Barnum’s American Museum, the largest and most glorious jewel in his crown.

But of course, looking back on it, there had been another deception as well, one with roots even more ancient. It was the fall of 1841, when he first chanced to discover that Scudder’s American Museum was up for sale. He knew at once—just as he had known when he first heard from Coley Bartram about Joice Heth’s contract—that he must have it. Still, as always, there was the problem of money. His most recent variety acts had failed, and he had been reduced to writing advertising copy for the Bowery Am-phitheatre. But he was determined not to let this opportunity pass him by.

A wealthy merchant named Francis W. Olmsted owned the building on Broadway in which the museum’s collections were displayed; Barnum decided that the clearest route to the purchase went through him. So he sat down and wrote a letter to Olmsted, informing him that he wished to buy the collections. He admitted that he had no cash to put down, but he pointed out that he had things perhaps even more valuable: tact and experience, and a devotion to business. He suggested that Olmsted buy the museum’s collections himself and sell them to Barnum on a payment schedule; Barnum would additionally pay rent for the use of the entire building, providing the convenience of a single permanent tenant. If he missed even a single payment,
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P. T. Barnum, the self-styled “Prince of Humbugs.
”

(Courtesy of the New York Public Library.)

he promised, he would vacate the premises and make no claim on whatever had already been paid. “In fact, Mr. Olmsted,” Barnum continued with all the earnestness at his disposal, “you may bind me in any way, and as tightly as you please—only give me a chance to dig out, or scratch out, and I will either do so or forfeit all the labor and trouble which I may have incurred.”

Barnum carried the letter to Olmsted’s suite of rooms on Park Place and handed it to a servant. Then he returned home and waited anxiously for a reply. After two days it came: Mr. Olmsted would see him the following day.

Barnum arrived punctually for the meeting, which pleased his host.

Francis Olmsted was an older man with an austere, aristocratic demeanor; beneath that exterior, however, Barnum thought he could detect a certain openheartedness, even traces of good humor, that made him feel surprisingly comfortable. The two men sat down, and Olmsted asked Barnum to tell him about himself. Barnum related the details of his upbring-ing in Bethel, his background in business, the exhibitions he had managed.

Olmsted eyed him closely. “Who are your references?”

“Any man in my line,” Barnum replied at once. He rattled off several names, prominent among them William Niblo, who had become a good friend after the Joice Heth exhibition, and Moses Yale Beach, the publisher

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of the
Sun,
who had recently bought the paper from Benjamin Day—the
Sun
had always been a reliable source of free publicity.

Olmsted asked Barnum to have the men visit him the next day. The day after that, he should return again to receive his answer.

Barnum somehow managed to get through the next two days, his attention entirely focused on the morning when he would arrive again at Park Place to learn his fate.

“I don’t like your references, Mr. Barnum,” Olmsted announced as soon as he had entered the room.

Barnum was momentarily confused. Could any of his friends have be-trayed him? Did one of them want the collections for himself? He murmured only, “I regret to hear it.”

Olmsted’s grave expression gave way to a smile. “They all speak too well of you,” he said, adding with a laugh, “In fact, they talk as if they were all partners of yours, and intended to share the profits.” Then, turning to business, he laid out the terms of the deal: the rooms to be leased, the rent to be paid, the accountant who would oversee the payments. It was all acceptable to Barnum. He could barely believe it: the American Museum was at last within his grasp.

But there was one thing more, continued Olmsted. Promises were all well and good, but he needed some form of collateral, something of value to ensure his side of the deal. It had to be something that, if necessary, Olmsted could claim outright—nothing with a mortgage on it. “If you only had a piece of unencumbered real estate that you could offer as additional security,” Olmsted told him, “I think I might venture to negotiate with you.”