I was born and reared in an atmosphere of merriment,” P. T. Barnum recalled in his autobiography, which he wrote at the ripe old age of forty-four. He entered the world on July 5, 1810, in the small village of Bethel, Connecticut, where “the associations of [his] youth” filled him with the ebullience and zest for living that stayed with him for more than eight decades. During all that time—as Barnum made his name in New York and London, in the capitals of Europe, and across the American continent—his birthplace never lost its grip on him. The people and peculiarities of life in small-town Connecticut, he wrote, were integral to any clear understanding of what “made me what I am.” After traveling the world, he would die just seventeen miles from his birthplace, in the city of Bridgeport.1
The single most remarkable characteristic of life in Bethel, in Barnum’s telling, was his neighbors’ propensity for practical jokes. Concocting pranks, setting them in motion, turning one another into victims, and then gossiping about the aftermath—this amounted to a chief form of entertainment in the village. The defining attribute of Barnum’s neighbors and family was a concentrated dose of a widespread regional trait often labeled “Yankee cuteness.” Cute, at the time, was not a word used to describe someone’s looks but a shortened form of the word acute, meaning clever or shrewd. It suggested a competitive sort of sharpness, an eagerness to outdo or flummox another person.
Yankee cuteness was often displayed in the business dealings of the region’s rural economy, which depended less on cash and more on barter. The value of goods offered was not fixed but determined by the interaction of buyer and seller. In this sense, cute was a term of approval when applied to oneself, and of disapproval when applied to others, just as the joy in a practical joke depends on which end of the transaction one is on.
Anyone in the village who wanted to stand out—or simply to find excitement amid the humdrum routines of village life—relied heavily on this form of wit. Cuteness, tall tales, and the well-planned joke were the place’s stock-in-trade, and even the victims of the more outlandish schemes easily overlooked the tinge of cruelty often attached to them. Given the small size of the village, the chances were good that everyone would have ample opportunity to be on one side of a practical joke or the other. So the pressure was always on to be a good sport—and to bide one’s time.
The man for whom Barnum was named, his maternal grandfather, Phineas Taylor, was a paragon of these qualities. Young Phineas Taylor Barnum, who went by Taylor, or more intimately by Tale, was often called a “chip of the old block,” referring in this case to his grandfather rather than his father. Phineas, known affectionately as “Uncle Phin” in the village, was well known for his ebullience and because he “would go farther, wait longer, work harder and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven.” One of his most famous and long-unfolding jokes, involving the value of a gift of property, would have his grandson Taylor on the receiving end—and its outcome would continue to affect Barnum throughout his life.2
Even so, Taylor adored his grandfather. The older man was the first person he could remember seeing. “I was his pet, and spent probably the larger half of my waking hours in his arms, during the first six years of my life,” often sucking on a lump of sugar that Phineas had given to him. Uncle Phin adored his namesake and demonstrated his affection not just with sweets but with showers of pennies, along with the admonition to always get the “lowest cash price” when spending them in a shop.3
Uncle Phin did have his serious side to balance out his mischievousness. He had been a soldier for four years during the Revolution, before acquiring a large amount of property in Bethel and its vicinity. He had represented Danbury (of which Bethel was a part) in the Connecticut legislature, and, closer to home, he ran lotteries, took the census, and, until his retirement at age seventy, served as a justice of the peace. Taylor’s mother, Irena, was one of four children born to Phineas and his first wife, Molly. Only one of the four children fully shared their father’s aptitude for joking, with Irena having the smallest measure of this quality, according to her son. “But what is lacking in all the children,” Barnum would later write, “is fully made up with compound interest in the eldest grandson”—meaning himself. Taylor’s paternal grandfather, Ephraim, a member of the fourth generation of Barnums in America, had been a militia captain in the Revolutionary War. His son Philo, Taylor’s father, was one of fourteen children. Philo himself had ten children by two wives, Irena being the second. So young Taylor grew up in a place filled with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and numberless cousins. In time he would also have four younger siblings.4
In Taylor’s childhood, newspapers came to Bethel only once a week, and it took at least two days to get to the growing metropolis of New York, or “York,” as it was called. Bethel was still primarily a farming community, where hogs were let out to wander the streets, but the area had also become a center for the manufacture of hats and combs. Even so, just to get by in the village, let alone to prosper, required a willingness to hustle and to master a multiplicity of skills. Philo Barnum made his living, just barely, by farming, tailoring, running a store, keeping a tavern, and operating a freight delivery wagon and a livery stable. Taylor would remember that his mother and the other hardworking women in Bethel supported their families by “hetcheling their flax, carding their tow and wool, spinning, reeling, and weaving it into fabrics . . . knitting, darning, mending, washing, ironing, cooking, soap and candle making.” They also “picked the geese, milked the cows, made butter and cheese, and did many other things” to keep the household running. Few people in the village had carriages or even wagons, and horses were the way people transported grain to the mill or got to church on Sundays.5
The church itself was a modest building, which Taylor would later recall as “the old village meeting-house, without steeple or bell, where in its square family pew I sweltered in summer and shivered through my Sunday-school lessons in winter.” He also remembered “the old school-house, where the ferule, the birchen rod and rattan did active duty, and which I deserved and received a liberal share.” He began attending school at about age six and was “accounted a pretty apt scholar,” “unusually quick” at arithmetic. He remembered being called out of bed by his schoolmaster one night to calculate the number of feet in a load of wood. His teacher had bet a neighbor that Taylor could solve the problem in five minutes. When the neighbor gave him the dimensions of the load, the boy went to work, writing his calculations on the stovepipe, and beat the deadline by three minutes. His teacher and proud mother showed their “great delight,” and the neighbor was “incredulous.” Taylor’s later success in business would depend not just on this quickness in figuring. His linguistic abilities also turned out to be formidable and must have been innate, given how soon his schooling ended and how far they took him. His skill as a speaker and a writer would draw the world’s attention, and hold it.6
Taylor would write in his autobiography, “Head-work I was excessively fond of [as a boy, but] hand-work was decidedly not in my line.” He hated the drudgery of farm chores and apparently succeeded at doing them so reluctantly that he soon developed the reputation of being “the laziest boy in town.” His father “insisted that I could hoe and plough and dig in the garden as well as anyone else, but I generally contrived to shirk the work altogether.”7
But the problem was not laziness so much as lack of interest. What did interest him from an early age were money and its accumulation. “My organ of acquisitiveness must be large,” he would write, “or else my parents commenced its cultivation at an early period.”8
The pennies his grandfather gave Taylor began to add up, until Phineas took him at the age of six to the village tavern to exchange them for a silver dollar. The shiny disc seemed enormous in Taylor’s small hands, making him feel richer than he would ever feel again and also giving him the sense of being “absolutely independent of all the world.” He liked that feeling and wanted more. In time his grandfather began to pay him ten cents a day to ride the plow horse leading a team of oxen on his farm, but even that did not add up fast enough to satisfy young Taylor. The boy decided that for extra money he could start making sweets and selling them to soldiers on the days when the militia trained. Within a few years he could afford to buy sheep, a cow, and other property that “made me feel, at twelve years of age, that I was quite a man of substance.” All that kept him from being as rich as Croesus, he believed, was his father’s decision to make him buy his own clothing.
In January 1822, when Taylor was not quite twelve, a friend of his family’s passed through Bethel on the way to New York to sell “a drove of fat cattle.” The man mentioned that he was looking for a boy to help with the droving, and Taylor got the job. Thus came about his first chance to “go to York” and see the great city. For spending money on the adventure, his mother gave him a dollar. Once the man and boy arrived in the city, Taylor had a week on his own while the farmer was busy disposing of the cattle. Again, Taylor felt that a single dollar in his pocket made him immensely rich, but what followed was the usual lesson: that the excitement of a great city does not come cheap. He spent much of his time in a toy store, buying things, exchanging them at a loss, and buying other things until, over a period of several days, not only was his money gone, but he had, in his frenzy of acquisitiveness, bartered away his handkerchiefs and a pair of socks. When he returned home with no presents for his siblings and his mother noticed the missing articles of clothing, he was “whipped and sent to bed.” Still, for Taylor, the painful lesson was mitigated by the mere fact that he had “been to York,” which made him “for a long time quite a lion among the school boys.”9
Eventually, out of “sheer despair of making any thing better of me,” Philo Barnum put his son to work at a general store that he and a partner had built and stocked in Bethel. Taylor’s connection with his father was not as easy as that with his grandfather, but Philo had come to understand his son’s nature. The saving of pennies, the boyish acts of entrepreneurialism in the village, and the schooling on his trip to New York had prepared him well for work in the shop, even bringing out the boy’s natural theatricality. In this new setting, he was utterly transformed:
I strutted behind the counter with a pen back of my ear, was wonderfully polite to ladies, assumed a wise look when entering charges upon the day-book, was astonishingly active in waiting upon customers, whether in weighing tenpenny nails, starch, indigo, or saleratus, or drawing New-England rum or West India molasses.10
As his enthusiastic creation of a clerking persona suggests, Taylor thrived in the give-and-take of the country store, where, as was often the case in the young Republic, prices were negotiable and barter was encouraged. Yankee cuteness reigned, and the faster talker on either side of a transaction tended to be the more successful. “I drove many a sharp trade with old women who paid for their purchases in butter, eggs, beeswax, feathers, and rags,” Taylor would remember, “and with men who exchanged for our commodities, hats, axe-helves, oats, corn, buckwheat, hickory-nuts, and other commodities.” His own sharpness was often matched by that of his customers, who would pack stones in bundles of rags to make them heavier or vow that a load of grain was several more bushels than it actually was. When he got older, Barnum would call these acts by his neighbors exceptions to the general rule of honesty, but they made him wary. This lesson and the one learned on the New York trip were the beginnings of his education as a businessman.11
Many of these memories of the grown-up Barnum are varnished with self-deprecatory amusement at his younger self. He reports, for example, that his sense of his own importance in his clerk’s role caused him to resent his other duties in the shop, such as sweeping, keeping the fire, and taking the shutters off the windows. Still, his father allowed him to augment his modest store salary by running a separate business, in the same store, of buying and selling candy for children, which he did with an even sharper focus than he gave to his general clerking. He also began to create private lotteries, something Uncle Phin had adopted as a sideline. Taylor’s grandfather had once concocted a wildly popular scheme in which every ticket resulted in a prize, an unheard-of offer, but in the end he had made his money by deducting 15 percent from each prize awarded. This was widely considered, with some admiration, to be “the meanest scheme ever invented,” resulting in his reputation as “a regular old cheat” and “the cutest man in those parts.” In Taylor’s lotteries, the top prize would be $5 or perhaps $10, and most tickets, as is usual in lotteries, would result in no prize at all. He found that he could easily sell tickets to the workers in the hat and comb factories, and if he sold them all, he could earn as much as 25 percent above his outlay.
His elder self speculates, then, that young Taylor’s eagerness to make money was both a born trait and one nurtured by his parents and his surroundings. Because people all around him, those in his family and more generally in Bethel, were scrambling to get by, their collective influence on him was enormous. Barnum’s outsized eagerness to enrich himself also seems to have had a unique psychological source. To see it, one need look only to Uncle Phin and his most protracted practical joke. The story goes that Taylor’s grandfather was so pleased to have a namesake that he immediately went out and bought a rich and beautiful farm and put it in his grandson’s name. By the time he was four, Taylor began to hear not only from his grandfather but also from his parents and others in the village of his “precious patrimony . . . the most valuable farm in Connecticut,” making him “the richest child in town.” Not a week went by without his grandfather mentioning the farm, and his father even asked Taylor if he would support the family after he came into his fortune. The boy would often assure his father “in the most perfect good faith” that he would “see that all the family wants were bountifully supplied.” In his dreams about the future source of his wealth, Taylor “not only felt that it must be a land flowing with milk and honey, but caverns of emeralds, diamonds, and other precious stones, as well as mines of silver and gold.”
This fantasy went on until the boy turned twelve and had an opportunity to visit his inheritance, on what was known as Ivy Island, which was not far from Bethel but was inaccessibly located in the middle of what is now known as East Swamp. Before the big day arrived, his mother solemnly warned him not to become overexcited when he saw his farm, nor to “feel above speaking to your brothers and sisters when you return.”
On the appointed day, his father took him out with a group of workers to hay a field near Ivy Island, and at the noon rest a hired man named Edward led Taylor to his enchanted spot. They had to cross the swamp to reach the island, and after he floundered through a long expanse of bogs, certain he would drown—and after he had fended off an attack by hornets and been painfully bitten—he finally reached his little piece of paradise, only to see a muddy flat landscape of “stunted ivies and a few straggling trees.” No flowing honey, no precious stones or metals. “The truth rushed upon me. I had been made a fool of by all our neighborhood for more than half a dozen years.” The land, he realized, was “not worth a farthing.” To add insult to injury, at that moment a “monstrous black snake” came menacingly their way, and Taylor and Edward hastily abandoned Ivy Island. When they got back to the hayfield, all the other workers burst into laughter, having been clued in on this strangely cruel and astonishingly drawn-out joke.
Still, when Taylor returned to Bethel late that afternoon, now just another young man without immediate prospects of wealth, his mother, grandfather, and neighbors would not let the pretense go and continued to act as if Ivy Island were a rich inheritance, not five useless acres. It was Yankee cuteness at its fullest, and meanest. These dashed expectations must have created in Barnum the drive to fill his pockets with silver and gold for the rest of his days.12
At the time of Taylor’s birth, Bethel was a Congregationalist village in a state where this was the official religion. He received his religious instruction under the stern influence of the Saybrook Platform, which for a century had consigned non-Congregationalists, including even children, to the conflagrations of Hell and considered the pope in Rome to be the Antichrist. Sour as these doctrines were, they were intensified by the Second Great Awakening, the post-Revolution revivalist movement that rejected the eighteenth century’s rationalism and deism. As a boy, Taylor attended the revival meetings that were ubiquitous during the awakening, often 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 . . . my eyes streaming with tears and every fibre of my body trembling with fear.”13
But within the boundaries of Taylor’s own family, religious faith was based more on love than fear. When he was fifteen, his maternal grandmother, while walking in her garden one day, stepped on a rusty nail, and her foot soon grew dangerously infected. Realizing she was at death’s door, she called her grandchildren around her and told them of the joy her religious belief had brought to her and how it made her unafraid of dying. She told them that the best way they could show their love of God was to love their fellow human beings. “I was affected to tears,” Barnum wrote, “and promised to remember her counsel.” Many years later, he still vividly recalled that deathbed scene and believed that his own life had been affected by his grandmother’s sincere faith and exemplary way of living and dying.
In 1826, a year after his grandmother’s death, Barnum’s father died of a lingering illness, leaving his family with debts in spite of the several businesses he had been running and the parcels of land he owned in and around Bethel. Now the eldest of five children, with the youngest only seven, Taylor remembered the family returning from the cemetery “to our desolate home, feeling that we were forsaken by the world, and that but little hope existed for us this side of the grave.” He was given the chance to pick his own guardian and chose his mother’s younger brother, Alanson Taylor, who was only about eight years older than he himself. Among Philo’s debts was one he owed to his own son, which was ruled ineligible even for the fifty-one cents on the dollar that the other creditors received. Taylor’s mother went to work in the inn that Philo had run, and “being industrious, economical, and persevering, she succeeded in a few years in redeeming the homestead.”14
The boy continued to work for a short time in his father’s store, but he soon went up the road a mile to the village of Grassy Plain to clerk at a different general store. His interest in conducting lotteries had grown, and in the new store he had the opportunity to create a lottery reminiscent of Uncle Phin’s famously outrageous one. He would offer a large number of prizes, but many of them would have a value less than the price of a ticket. The store had a quantity of blackened tinware that it could not sell, and Taylor himself bargained with a peddler to trade other slow-moving store items for a wagonload of green glass bottles, which he would use as rewards. In one of his first forays into advertising, he hand-wrote the headings on the flyers for the lottery in “glaring capitals,” claiming “MAGNIFICENT LOTTERY!” and “OVER 550 PRIZES!!!” Workers from a local hat factory streamed into the store to buy tickets, without paying too much attention to what the noncash prizes were. When the drawing occurred and the prizes were distributed, a good many of the “winners” went away with armfuls of green bottles and worthless tinware. “My grandfather enjoyed my lottery speculation very much,” Taylor later wrote with understated satisfaction. He was, indeed, a chip off the old block.15
At the Grassy Plain store, the competition between clerks and customers was even fiercer than in Bethel: “It was ‘dog eat dog’—‘tit for tat.’ ” Because “each party expected to be cheated, if it was possible,” Taylor had to develop a new level of skepticism, allowing himself, with his fellow clerks, to believe “little that we saw, and less that we heard.” He also became practiced in the art of cheating. “Our ground coffee was as good as burned peas, beans and corn could make, and our ginger was tolerable, considering the price of corn meal.” That his “conscience, morals, and integrity” were not utterly destroyed, he said, could be attributed only to his not working there longer than he did.16
In old age Barnum recalled his youth in Bethel fondly and expressed surprise at how many memories of the village, going back to his fourth year on earth, remained at his disposal. But however much the village shaped his personality, he, like many people, lived his life in reaction to his childhood. The Calvinist strictures of his early religion, the banter and gamesmanship of work in the shop, the lengths to which his family members would go for a prank—all created themes that stayed with him throughout the decades. In a speech he gave in 1881 upon returning to the village, Barnum lovingly unspools these memories and the names of dozens of relatives, friends, and neighbors who had inhabited Bethel a half century and more earlier. But by then he had long since left it far behind, choosing the chaotic bustle of New York and London and striving for many years to make his adopted home of Bridgeport—“the Park City,” as it is now ruefully known—into what would become the most populous, if not the most thriving, city in the state today.17
EARLY IN 1827 THE GRASSY PLAIN store closed, and Taylor went to work in far-off York, at a Brooklyn grocery owned by another Taylor, a relation from Danbury who also owned a comb factory and store. Before long, the kindly Oliver Taylor developed enough confidence in young Barnum, not yet seventeen, to send him out to purchase wholesale groceries, allowing him to pay cash at auctions or markets, buy in quantity along with other grocers to reduce the price, and in general refine the talent for trade that had begun in his father’s store. Buoyed by his aptitude and the enthusiasm of youth, Barnum soon decided to start a business of his own. “My disposition is, and ever was,” he wrote in his memoirs, “of a speculative character,” and he knew even then that he would only be happy working for himself. At about the time he decided to leave Oliver Taylor, though, he developed smallpox and had to spend several months in bed, after which he went back to Bethel to recover in his mother’s care, enjoying her “unremitting . . . exertions to make me comfortable” and catching up with old friends. When he returned to Brooklyn after a month at home, he gave Oliver notice and managed to pull together the money to buy a porterhouse for sale near the grocery. A porterhouse was a bar and steakhouse, which took its name from the brown beer offered there alongside other beverages. Despite his resolution to run his own business, in only a few months Barnum had the opportunity to sell the place at a profit, and he took it. He then got an offer to move across the river to work at a more established porterhouse on Peck Slip, near what is today the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge and was then the terminus for the Fulton ferry.18
This establishment, owned by David Thorp, had two advantages, in Barnum’s telling. First, it was a favorite of travelers from Danbury and Bethel, giving Barnum ample opportunity to see people from home. Second, Thorp allowed him time off when young friends came to town so Barnum could take them to the theater. “I had much taste for the drama,” he remembered, and soon “became, in my own opinion, a close critic, and did not fail to exhibit my powers in this respect to all the juveniles from Connecticut who accompanied me.” Here he began to develop his eye for theater and showmanship, and in time he would combine it with his already sound entrepreneurial instincts.19
But soon his fondness for home and the chance to run his own business drew him away from this happy period as a dashing young fellow in the big city. Uncle Phin seemed to miss his grandson as much as his grandson missed home, and he wrote to say that if Taylor would return to Bethel and open a business, he would make available at no cost half a carriage house he owned on Bethel’s main street. Taylor was happy to accept the offer, and so skedaddled home with the idea of opening a fruit and sweets store, augmented by a barrel of ale. The store debuted on May 5, 1828, and the first day’s take was a more than satisfactory $63. Soon Taylor expanded his offerings to include stewed oysters, toys, and inexpensive personal items such as combs, pocketknives, and pocketbooks. By the following spring, he had bought the building but not the land under it from his grandfather for $50.20
Uncle Phin was not the only person pulling Barnum back to Bethel in those days. Barnum also heard a siren call from a young woman named Charity Hallett, who worked in a tailor shop and whom he had met while clerking at Grassy Plain a year and a half before. On one auspicious Saturday night back then, after a fierce thunderstorm, Barnum was asked to accompany to Bethel a “fair, rosy-cheeked, buxom-looking girl, with beautiful white teeth.” This was Charity, known as “Chairy.” As they rode on horseback the mile from Grassy Plain to Bethel, Barnum was so charmed by her that, despite the storm, he wished the distance had been even farther, especially when a stroke of lightning gave him a clear look at her. After getting her safely home, he wrote, “that girl’s face haunted me in my dreams that night.” Barnum saw her in church the next morning and on subsequent Sundays until he left the job at Grassy Plain. When he had returned home from Brooklyn to his mother’s care in Bethel, he had managed to see the “attractive tailoress” several times, which did not “lessen the regard which I felt for the young lady, nor did they serve to render my sleep any sounder.”21
Now, in the summer of 1828, having opened his store in Bethel, he again sought Charity out, and it soon seemed that “my suit was prospering.” She was nearly two years older than he and came from a large family in Fairfield, Connecticut, that was not well off, a situation that got worse when her father decamped, perhaps across the sound to Long Island. But Charity and Taylor were a nicely matched couple: in addition to being from large Connecticut families and sharing a churchgoing habit, both were modestly educated but clever. Both had dark hair and dark eyes and strong, pleasing faces—his having escaped unscarred from smallpox—with hints of the fleshiness to come.
Over the next year, their affection for each other grew. Barnum’s mother felt that Charity was not a socially desirable match for her son (“The girl had not got money enough to suit her ideas,” she said), but those who knew Charity believed just the opposite, that “she was altogether too good for Taylor Barnum.” Barnum wittily asserted that he “perfectly agreed with them in their conclusions and . . . proved it by asking her hand in marriage.” She consented, and in October 1829 they were married at her uncle’s house in New York, with members of her family present, but not of his. The newlyweds returned to Bethel, moving in with the family with whom Charity had been living. Taylor’s mother pretended that she knew nothing of the marriage, apparently upset that it had taken place in secret. But he went to visit her every day, and within a month she asked him to bring his wife to visit on a Sunday, and a reconciliation occurred.22
In June 1830 Barnum purchased three acres “a few rods south of the village,” and there he had a house constructed for Charity and him to live in. The house, two and a half stories tall, cost just over $1,000 to build. By the next spring, at about the same time they moved in, Barnum had another structure built in Bethel, this one intended to accommodate a country store on its first floor and a family on the floors above. The Yellow Store, as it was known, opened in the summer of 1831, selling dry goods, groceries, and hardware—“everything from Bibles to brandy.” Barnum started the business with his uncle and guardian Alanson Taylor, but within a few months Barnum bought out his uncle, explaining diplomatically, “Like most persons who engage in a business which they do not understand, we were unsuccessful in the enterprise.” Barnum alone didn’t fare much better. He had trouble collecting what was owed him, and even advertised in the newspaper a warning that he was prepared to sue in order to collect. By the spring of 1832 he was looking for a buyer for the business; it took a year to find one.23
While the dry goods store stumbled, Barnum’s other interests found footing. Since his return to Bethel, he had become ever more avidly involved in the lottery business. After starting with his own small-scale, local offerings, he began working with large statewide lotteries, from whom he would buy tickets in bulk, and employing agents, among them his Uncle Alanson, who also became his partner in this new venture, to sell them across the land. By early 1830 he had lottery offices in Bethel, Danville, Norwalk, Stamford, and Middletown. For the first time, he made widespread use of “printer’s ink” to publicize his lottery sales, and soon newspapers “throughout the region teemed with unique advertisements.” He also had tens of thousands of handbills and circulars printed “with striking prefixes, affixes, staring capitals, marks of wonder, pictures, etc.,” and his main lottery office, which he called the Temple of Fortune, was plastered with gold signs and colorful placards. The purpose of this publicity maelstrom was not just to draw attention but also to emphasize that his customers were luckier than those who bought from other agents. At one point the business became so successful that his agents were bringing in as much as $2,000 a day in sales.
His lottery work did not just teach him about the efficacy of advertising. It also began to develop his insight into the complicated nature of his customers, a realization that outwardly respectable people might have interests that were not entirely respectable. Buying a lottery ticket was, after all, a form of gambling, something that the powerful churches looked down upon. Yet lotteries were popular not only among many churchgoers but also, as Barnum reported, with “a number of clergymen and deacons,” whom he counted among his “private customers.” In his autobiography, he told the story of a pious husband, “a frequent exhorter at prayer meetings,” and his wife, who would each buy a ticket from him secretly on the condition that he not tell the other spouse, who was presumed to be “opposed to such things.” The peaceful coexistence of piety and the pie-in-the-sky nature of lotteries might say more about human nature than about any particular historical period, but it also suggests a change in the social order of the day, in which ordinary New Englanders were yearning for something more from their lives than what was being offered from the Sunday pulpit.24
BARNUM’S OWN REACTION TO THE role of religion in public life was becoming more pronounced. He was growing skeptical of the fervor of the revival era. Beyond the hypocrisy related to gambling habits was the incongruous coexistence in Bethel and elsewhere of strong religious views and strong drinking habits. He’d long seen that “even at funerals the clergy, mourners and friends drank liquor,” at the same time that alcohol was denounced from the pulpits. Barnum would never be shy about pressing his opinions on others, but even as he had barely reached voting age, he grew publicly concerned about the “religious frenzy” spreading through the land, featuring large numbers of people, especially young people, converting to the churches where revival meetings took place. He was equally troubled by talk among “certain overzealous sectarian partisans” of the creation of a Christian political party advocating that only believers should get the vote, which suggested that the boundary between church and state might disappear.
Connecticut had disestablished the Congregational Church in 1818, but the church still held sway in matters of politics and governing. Like his grandfathers on both sides and his father, Barnum was a Universalist and a Democrat and firmly held to the Jeffersonian ideal of separation of church and state. He decided to spread his views in letters to a weekly paper in Danbury—a paper that soon would be associated with his Uncle Alanson. When his writing was refused, Barnum “became exceedingly indignant” and took his rejections as evidence that the religious influence had already become “so powerful as to muzzle the press.” With that, ever eager to take the initiative, he decided to publish his own newspaper to promote his views.25
Just after he turned twenty-one, on July 5, 1831, Barnum bought a printing press and type sets, and by October 19 of that year he had published in Bethel the first number of his Herald of Freedom, a weekly four-page broadsheet. Thanks to cheap postage, improvements in technology, and an increasingly literate populace with a growing interest in the world, starting a small newspaper, especially one that had a particular audience in mind, was not an expensive proposition. By 1828 the city of New York itself supported 161 papers, their readers drawn not only to news from the neighborhood and the larger world but also to particular political, ethnic, or religious perspectives.26
If the lottery business had acquainted Barnum with the power of publicity, he now discovered the power of publishing his own paper. Just below the masthead on the front page of the Herald of Freedom were the words “P. T. BARNUM . . . PUBLISHER.” Suddenly he had acquired a whole new level of visibility in his community and beyond. (He later said the paper was circulated nationally.) However, Barnum soon turned visibility into notoriety. Eight months after that first edition appeared, he managed to attract a libel suit from none other than his Uncle Alanson, who had in the meantime purchased the Danbury paper that had rejected Barnum and become its editor, renaming it the Connecticut Repository. In his own paper, Barnum slammed his uncle regularly and with real ardor, accusing him of advocating for the church-state merger and of telling lies about those with whom he disagreed. In response to Barnum’s accusations, Alanson sued. The case never went to trial “on account of the absence of witnesses,” as Barnum wrote in a letter to a fellow newspaper editor, but a second libel action, “brought by a butcher in Danbury, a zealous politician, whom I accused of being a spy in the caucus of the Democratic Party,” eventually cost Barnum several hundred dollars in damages.27
It was a third case, however, that turned Barnum into a regional hero, at least to those who agreed with him. This third libel prosecution was brought on behalf of a Congregationalist neighbor and fellow merchant named Seth Seelye, whom Barnum accused in the Herald of Freedom of “taking usury of an orphan boy.” A conservative judge named David Daggett, who was also a Yale law professor and an avowed Federalist, heard the case. Judge Daggett (whom Barnum referred to in a letter as a “lump of superstition”) took an active part in the prosecution. In one outrageous example of the overreach of a state religion, Barnum was not permitted to mount the stand because of his Universalist beliefs. At the recommendation of the judge, he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to forfeit a bond of $100 and pay court costs, or serve sixty days in jail.
“I chose to go to prison,” Barnum wrote to Gideon Welles, editor of the Hartford Times, “thinking that such a step would be the means of opening many eyes.” Indeed, he continued, because of the trial, “the excitement in this and the neighboring towns is very great, and it will have a grand effect.” His purpose in writing Welles was to tell him that another newspaper editor would be covering the matter at length, as would the Herald of Freedom, of course, and to ask Welles to “make such remarks as justice demands.” His ability to marshal not just his own paper but also the goodwill of others was a harbinger of things to come. It was the first clear example of his flair for drawing attention to his beliefs, his enterprises, and himself.28
In his memoirs, he writes that he was allowed to have his cell in the Danbury Common Jail fitted out with wallpaper and carpet, which is surely a rarity in the annals of imprisonment. While in jail he was allowed to continue editing his newspaper, to write numbers of letters, and to receive so many friends that he found their ceaseless visits burdensome. These communications with the world beyond the cell also allowed him not only to stir up local newspaper coverage but also to engineer what can only be called a local holiday to celebrate his release. A group called the Committee on Arrangements was formed. They met him at the jail on the morning of his last day there, December 5, 1832, and strolled with him across the village green to the very room in the courthouse where he had been tried. The crowd was so large—Barnum’s paper reckoned it at fifteen hundred souls, and even at half that size it would have been immense—that those who could not fit in the building formed a parting sea for him to pass through. Once settled in there, he was honored with an ode composed for the occasion and a speech defending freedom of the press called “The Nation’s Bulwark,” written and declaimed by a prominent lecturer, the Rev. Theophilus Fisk, himself the editor of the New Haven Examiner. There followed the hymn “Strike the Cymbal” (“Crime & sadness, yield to gladness, Peace! the heav’nly powrs pro-claim”), after which a crowd of “several hundred gentlemen,” Barnum recalled, retreated to the nearby hotel of one G. Nichols and enjoyed “a sumptuous dinner . . . toasts and speeches.” The twelfth toast, we are told, described Barnum as “a terror to Bigots and Tyrants—a young man just on the threshold of active life whom neither bolts, nor bars, nor prison walls, can intimidate.”29
As if all of this were not enough to fete an incautious twenty-two-year-old who had not exactly suffered at the hands of the law, Barnum stepped from the Danbury hotel into a coach drawn by a six-horse team. Seated with him in the coach was a small band of musicians playing patriotic tunes, and a parade in his honor had formed to take him the three miles home to Bethel. A marshal carrying the Stars and Stripes led the parade, followed by forty people on horseback, and behind Barnum’s coach was a carriage carrying Reverend Fisk and the president of the day’s proceedings, followed by sixty more carriages filled with local people. As this impressive retinue got under way, cannon boomed on the village green and several hundred more people who were gathered there gave Barnum three cheers. When the carriage reached Bethel, the band played “Home Sweet Home,” and three more cheers went up as Barnum alighted. Thus a day begun in jail ended in well-orchestrated and raucous triumph.30
Neither Barnum nor anyone else said for certain who organized the many events of this day, or who chose the members of the Committee of Arrangements and its president. Barnum carefully did not give or take credit when he later described the celebration in detail in his memoirs, and without doubt it was in Barnum’s interest to imply that the day unfolded almost spontaneously, propelled by the enthusiasm of his neighbors for his cause and, indeed, for himself. After all, he had grown up in the village and had many, many relatives there and nearby. He had gone to church in the village, had clerked in its stores, still owned a store there, heavily advertised his lotteries, and now ran a newspaper from there. Democrats, Universalists, and others who thought as he did would naturally have wanted to support him. But odes and formal speeches do not occur on the spur of the moment, nor do bands and coaches arrive by chance, and even if the celebratory luncheon involved only dozens rather than hundreds of trenchermen, a provincial hotel would need fair warning to feed so many. Of the various tactics that Barnum would master as he became a successful showman, one was to know when to stand in the wings and when to step to the footlights to take a bow. It seems likely that in this case he was in both places at once.
Others might have thought to sponsor an ode or an oration, engage a chorus or a band, plan a banquet or a parade, envision three cheers rather than three cheers twice, and might have forgotten the cannon salute altogether. But not Barnum. Beginning on December 5, 1832, more would always be more, keeping sympathetic newspaper editors close would always be useful, commissioning songs and poems and speeches would ever enhance an occasion, mixing serious intentions with entertainment sure to draw a crowd would continue to be a good strategy for engaging the public, and his own notoriety would never fail to be a calling card ready at hand. Seemingly small but consequential details—like returning to the courtroom where he was convicted or overlaying it all with patriotic zeal—would never elude him. This day had all the earmarks of a Barnum production. It was the day when his career as a showman began.