15 
The winter of 1831 was brutal, the worst in many years. Big snowstorms devastated the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to Maine. New York City was repeatedly buried under mountains of snow that heaped up to several feet. Violent northeaster gales hurled snowdrifts in all directions and drove in tides so high that wharves were overtopped and waterfront cellars were flooded. Mail delivery was disrupted. Sleds, sleighs, and horses had to be employed day and night to clean up the snow on the streets.
While the city was busy battling the weather on the night of March 19, an English shoemaker named Edward Smith carried a duplicate set of keys, walked into the City Bank of New York (the present-day Citibank) on Wall Street, and absconded with $245,000 in banknotes and Spanish doubloons. This was the first recorded bank heist in the United States. Smith, a denizen of the Lower East Side, was quickly nabbed, convicted of the crime, and sentenced to five years in Sing Sing.
Blizzards might provide a convenient cover for bank heists, but they were bad for showbiz. As James Hale wrote on March 16, 1831, to Susan Coffin, who had returned home to Newburyport, the receipts for the first two days of the twins’ exhibition came to only $55. “I hope to do better every day,” Hale wrote, trying to sound upbeat.1 But his hope was dashed when another storm hit the wider area, greatly diminishing traffic. Hale wrote to Mrs. Coffin again two weeks later: “The weather has been very stormy here . . . the walking is bad—We have not had forty ladies since we opened—they you know are our best customers, if we can get them—Our receipts have averaged but $20 per day—and two nights at the Theatre paid $50 per night amounting in all—15 days to 425 dollars.”2
A rare ray of sunshine arrived in the midst of the dreary weather and business doldrums. Chang and Eng received news from their mother, Nok. By now they had been away from Siam for almost two years. Even though they enjoyed their new lives in the West, homesickness for the two young men was palpable. The welcome messenger who delivered the news, along with a letter from their mother, was one Mr. Holyoke. As Hale described, “Mr. Holyoke came on Monday and gave Chang Eng news from their mother, also a letter from her which has been translated to them. They are now quite easy.”3 We do not know the contents of the letter, or whether it was written in Siamese or Chinese or English. Anyway, through layers of intermediaries, they could hear their mother’s words, like endearing echoes. It reminded them of their audience with the king a few years earlier, when words were whispered back and forth at the court through interpreters. It brought back memories of the hissing sound of raindrops falling on palm leaves, and the lazy lapping of waves on the muddy banks of the Meklong. For a moment, they had a sudden urge to go home. But they were not free, not yet their own men, according to the contract they had signed with Abel Coffin.
Feeling that they had tapped out the New York market and needing to change their locale, the small troupe—Hale, the twins, and a man named Tom Dwyer, who drove the buggy—decided to brave the weather and hit the road. What followed was a series of extended stays and whistle-stop visits in the Northeast, ranging from big cities to tiny hamlets, basically anywhere they could set up a show. A cross-check of Hale’s correspondence and newspaper reports gives us a glimpse into their taxing itinerary.
They reprised their visit to Philadelphia for three weeks in April, again using the Masonic Hall as their base. Hale was able to send Mrs. Coffin only $150 in receipts, partly due to the fact that the twins had been under the weather for a while. As Hale told Mrs. Coffin in a letter dated April 23, “Chang Eng have been very ill—a touch of the liver complaint—they are now heartier than ever—they were confined to the bed 4 days & under the Doctor’s hands.”4
Next they went to Baltimore, staying at the historic Fountain Inn, an imposing brick-clad Georgian structure with keystone façades, mahogany interiors, and a paved courtyard for coaches. The inn was said to have been George Washington’s favorite hostelry in town, where he had first stayed in May 1775 as a member of the Virginia delegation on his way to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. As the Baltimore Patriot reported on April 26,
The public are respectfully informed that these wonderful boys, having returned from Europe, will be exhibited for a few days only at their rooms, Fountain Inn, No. 7 Light Street. Any comment upon them is deemed unnecessary as their credit has been fully established by the reception they have met with, from the numerous, honorable and renowned gentlemen in England, as also from our own most distinguished countrymen. Hours of admission from 11 to 3, and 7 to 9 P.M. Admittance 50 cents—Children half price.5
Also on sale at the exhibition was the promotional pamphlet penned by Hale, An Historical Account of the Siamese Twins, along with a full-length lithographic portrait of the twins, which added another twelve and a half cents apiece to the receipts. The show in Baltimore seemed to have gone well, and their stay was extended to Saturday, May 14.
In the weeks from late May to July, the troupe visited Portsmouth, New Haven, Hartford, Salem, Worcester, and a cluster of villages in the area. Apparently the fifty-cent admission charge was rather steep for small-towners, so Hale tried two strategies to attract more visitors. He put an ad in local papers that read, “As it is thought by some that the price of admission (the same as has invariably been charged in large cities) is too high, all gentlemen who visit the Twins, and after having seen them still think as aforesaid, will receive their gratification without money and without price. ‘The Union must be maintained.’ ”6 And when this discount scheme did not spur enough activity, he put another notice in the papers: “In order that none need be disappointed in witnessing the ‘Greatest Curiosity of nature ever known,’ the admission will be reduced to 25 cents only.”7
In that scorching summer of 1831, the twins, traveling in New England, did have some competition—not from another human oddity but from an Ourang Outang, recently imported from Batavia by one Captain Shirley. Also hailed as a “Great Natural Curiosity,” the three-year-old female creature was on display in Boston while the twins were canvassing villages outside the city. The way the newspapers publicized the Ourang Outang bore a strong resemblance to the way they had reported on the twins less than two years earlier, as seen in this excerpt from the Boston Transcript:
The brig Harley, Captain Shirley, which arrived here 3d inst. from Batavia, has on board a young female Ourang Outang. She has suffered much on the voyage and is very sick. She is greatly affected by cold, and keeps a blanket constantly wrapped about her. She has been visited by Dr. Smith, the Quarantine Physician, who examined her, felt her pulse and ordered milk to be given to her, which occasioned a temporary revival of her spirits. She is still able to walk, although she totters from weakness. When she stands erect her hands nearly touch the ground. She eats, drinks and spits, like a human being.
The article went on to say that this was the first successful attempt to “introduce one of these remarkable animals alive into this country.” An earlier attempt to import an Ourang Outang had resulted in one dead in the harbor upon arrival. Despite the death, all was not lost, for the skeleton was “frequently exhibited by Dr. Smith at his annual Anatomical Lecture.”8
The Siamese Twins, after all, were not animals, even though in the eyes of the gawkers who paid fifty cents or less to see them in a small parlor of a country inn or a crowded ballroom of a city hotel, they were as exotic and freakish as an Ourang Outang. They needed a break from the backbreaking schedule of exhibitions, away from the maddening crowd. Especially when heat waves hit New England, the showrooms, unaired and stuffy with sweat and scent, had become rather like animal cages, increasingly unbearable. Finally, much to their relief, the twins were allowed a brief hiatus from road travel. At the end of July, they retired to Lynnfield, Massachusetts, for what a local paper reported as “a little relaxation and amusement, boarding at the Hotel, and going out occasionally for the purpose of fishing, shooting, etc.”9
Peace, however, was the last thing they could find in this otherwise sleepy town of a few hundred souls. And their hunting guns ended up pointing not at wild birds in the sylvan woods but at not-so-civilized humans who regarded the twins—as if anticipating the drama of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter—as less than human. One incident was so dramatic that it merits a lengthy quote from one of the newspaper reports, entitled “Commonwealth vs. Chang and Eng”:
Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, were arrested on a Warrant from a Magistrate for a breach of the Peace at Lynnfield, on Monday last, and bound over to be of good behavior and to keep the Peace, in the sum of two hundred dollars.
They have for a few days past been rusticating for recreation and staying at the Lynnfield Hotel, so as to enjoy the sports of fishing on the pond and shooting in the woods. The neighboring inhabitants have had a very eager curiosity to catch a glimpse of their movements while on their excursions, and have sometimes been rather troublesomely obtrusive to the Siamese, whose object was seclusion. Last Saturday afternoon they were in the fields, shooting, each with his fowling piece: a considerable number, 15 or 20, idle persons, followed to observe their motions, and some of the men or boys were probably obtrusive and impertinent. Two persons from Stoneham, Col. Elbridge Gerry, and Mr. Prescott, went toward them in the field, after they had been harassed and irritated considerably by others—the attendant of the Siamese requested these persons to keep off, and by way of bravado threatened that, if they did not, the Siamese would fire at them. The Colonel opened his waistcoat and dared them or him to fire, but they did not,—the Colonel then indiscreetly accused them or him of telling a lie,—the attendant spoke to the Siamese about the charge of lying,—they exclaimed, “He accuse us of lying!” and one of them struck the Colonel with the butt of his gun,—the Colonel snatched up a heavy stone and threw it at the Siamese, hit him on the head, broke through his leather cap, and made the blood flow,—the Siamese then wheeled and fired by platoon at the Colonel, who was horribly frightened, as most other people would have been, though it turned out afterward that their pieces were charged only with powder. The noise and smoke were just as great as if they had been loaded with ball. The Siamese went immediately into the Hotel and loaded with ball,—the Colonel and Mr. Prescott, learning this, were greatly alarmed, and endeavored to keep out of the way; Mr. Prescott fled to the barn and secreted himself in a haymow. The Colonel went to Danvers and lodged a complaint against the Siamese and their attendant, a young Englishman, for breach of the peace. An officer went to arrest them, but by the interposition of a gentleman, who happened to be at the Hotel, a truce was concluded.
On Monday, however, Prescott made complaint to Mr. Justice Savage of this town, and they were taken before him and bound over.
Concluding the otherwise straight-faced narrative, the anonymous writer could not resist the temptation to toss in a little gem of badinage: “It cannot be said to be any great hardship to the Siamese to be bound over, for from the day of their birth they have been under bond.”10
One of the parties involved in this incident, Colonel Elbridge Gerry, was a relative of Elbridge Thomas Gerry (1744–1814), one of the nation’s founding fathers. That elder Gerry, much maligned for his aristocratic haughtiness, had served for two terms as governor of Massachusetts before becoming James Madison’s vice president. It was during his contentious governorship that he bestowed upon the great democracy the obnoxious term and practice of “gerrymandering.” Unable to live up to the legacy of his illustrious ancestor, Stoneham’s Colonel Gerry nonetheless felt the need to defend his family name and personal honor not only during his confrontation with the twins but also afterward. He soon wrote a letter to the local paper to present his side of the story, “to state the facts as they were.” According to the colonel, the blame lay squarely on the twins and their attendant, and it was the evil trio who had viciously attacked a man minding his own business and defending his honor. “I thought the conduct of the three highly improper, and that they deserved to be punished—particularly the young Englishman (whom they called William) who attended ‘the twins,’ as he was the origin and cause of the affray.”11
Dubbed the “Lynnfield Battle” by the newspapers, this incident, occasioning plenty of jibes and jests, might have brought much-needed comic relief to the readers during a summer lull. For the twins, however, the event was a sobering reminder of their precarious position. A later newspaper report painted a far more sinister picture of what had actually transpired, the fact being that they were being hounded by the nineteenth-century equivalent of paparazzi. According to this writer, who simply signed his article as “Carlo”:
In the first place, while the twins were amusing themselves with shooting in the fields, attended by their servant, a lad of about eighteen years of age, (Mr. Hale being absent,) a mob of from twenty to thirty persons gathered about them, following them from place to place, and dodging after them in the woods. They repeatedly requested the people not to follow them, but without effect. They were as zealous as if in pursuit of a wild beast. This hunt lasted all the afternoon. About night-fall, as they were returning to the hotel, their followers began to insult them, calling them “damned niggers,” and using, in a most foul and disgraceful manner, opprobrious epithets in relation to their mother, which excited them in a high degree; and before anything was done on their part, their pursuers cried out, “Let’s take away their guns and give ’em a thrashing.”12
It seems that the twins were first pursued like “a wild beast” by a curious mob that, in face of resistance, turned verbally abusive and threatened physical violence. Such a mob scene foreshadowed the anti-Chinese riots that would run rampant in the United States in the postbellum decades. In 1871, twenty-one Chinese were shot, hanged, or burned to death by white mobs in Los Angeles. In 1885 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a mob of 150 disgruntled white miners, armed with rifles, stormed into the Chinese quarters and killed twenty-eight Chinese and burned the district to the ground. In fact, the word hoodlum comes from the anti-Chinese cry of “huddle ’em,” a signal for mobs to surround and harass the Chinese, as they did here with the Siamese Twins: “Let’s take away their guns and give ’em a thrashing.”13 And to call them “damned niggers” and conflate them with blacks was further indication that the cause of this “affray” in the peaceful New England town was as much curiosity chasing as racism. Once again, the twins were regarded as racial freaks.
According to the mysterious author Carlo, the twins had their final say in the matter, demonstrating their unsurpassable wit by turning their courtroom appearance into a carnival of laughter. To defend themselves in front of the judge, one of the twins addressed Mr. Prescott, the plaintiff: “You swear you fraid o’ me; you fraid I kill you, shoot you—at same time you know I have guns—you see I shoot you if I choose—I ask you civilly not to follow me—you wont let me go away—you call me and my mother hard name—and yet you swear you fraid I kill you. Now, suppose I see a man in my country, in Siam—he goes out into woods, and sees a lion asleep—he say ‘Oh! I fraid that lion kill me’—what I think of that man if he go up and give that lion a kick and say ‘get out you ugly beast?’ I wish you’d answer me that.” Amusing as it was, the twins’ pidgin-flavored rhetorical flourish did not, however, convince the honorable judge, improbably named Savage, who fined them two hundred dollars for the assault and disturbance of the peace.14
With their vacation ruined by a mob, the twins had to move on. Enduring horrendous heat in a tiny buggy, they arrived in Newburyport, hometown of the Coffins. Their visit inspired local poet Hannah F. Gould to pen a poem that was published in the town paper, The Newburyport Advertiser. Simply titled “To the Siamese Twins,” the first stanza runs:
Mysterious tie by the Hand above,
Which nothing below must part!
Thou visible image of faithful love—
Firm union of heart and heart—
The mind to her utmost bound may run,
And summon her light in vain
To scan the twain that must still be one—
The one that will still be twain!15
Though no Emily Dickinson, who was but an infant in the summer of 1831, Gould did share with the future belle of Amherst a fondness for using a dash at the end of a line and the penchant for puns and metaphysical musings. Like Dickinson, Gould was also a spinster, staying unmarried to provide companionship for her widowed father, a Revolutionary War veteran. In fact, she had just begun writing poetry in her thirties, “first entertaining Newburyport citizens with mock-epitaphs of local celebrities, then contributing pieces to magazines and annuals,” as she did here with the poem dedicated to the twins.16 She would gain quite a reputation as the author of religious, historical, commemorative, and antislavery poems, many of which appeared in The Liberator, the abolitionist flagship journal edited by fellow Newburyport resident William Lloyd Garrison.
In some ways, the twins, arriving in Newburyport in late August of 1831, walked into a tempest of national significance without the slightest inkling of the storm clouds ahead.