The life that Barnum and Charity made for themselves in Bethel went well over the next two years. His lottery business continued to be profitable, and although the Yellow Store was less so, given his customers’ unreliability in paying up on their accounts, he managed to sell his share in it in early 1833. Soon after, in May, their first child, Caroline, was born. Barnum’s notoriety as a freedom-loving newspaper publisher was such that on the Fourth of July, the day before his twenty-third birthday, a large gathering of Democrats praised him at a dinner in nearby Newtown as one who had been “bitterly persecuted by the enemies of civil and religious freedom.” Even more flattering, perhaps, were toasts made in absentia at Federalist events on the same day, as his enemies decried Barnum for his newspaper’s homilies by calling him “reverend” and a “self-made priest.” These arrows apparently did not wound, and he used them to burnish his reputation, reporting them in the Herald of Freedom and Gospel Witness, as he was now calling his paper.
However, in late May 1834, the state legislature banned lotteries in Connecticut, and without this source of income, Barnum had to change course. He decided he could not afford to keep publishing the paper, and in November, having brought out 160 issues in three years, he stepped away. Given the large profits from the lottery business, he ought to have been in sound financial shape, but the lottery customers had also been less than honorable in paying their debts, so he now had “no pecuniary resources” other than attempting to make good on what he was owed. He blamed himself for his situation, writing that “the old proverb, ‘Easy come, easy go,’ was too true in my case.” Still, he was confident in his ability to earn money and believed he could start saving “at some future time.” For the present, he decided to move his young family from Bethel to a rented house on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, entering “that great city to ‘seek my fortune.’ ” But it would take many months, and an unlikely encounter, before he would find the way to his life’s work and the fortune that he sought.1
At first, things went so badly in New York that Barnum feared for the health of Charity and Caroline as he searched the want ads for an appropriate job. One ad he saw came from Scudder’s American Museum, suggesting that for a small investment the person who applied could be part of an “IMMENSE SPECULATION.” Barnum was intrigued because, as he wrote in his autobiography, “I had long fancied that I could succeed if I could only get hold of a public exhibition.” He had made a successful public spectacle of himself on the day he had been released from jail, but this was the first hint that he might want to make his living by promotion, exhibition, and showmanship. However, the speculation in question, a “hydro-oxygen microscope,” required an investment well beyond his means. Nothing else turned up in the want ads during the whole winter of 1835, and Barnum’s prospects in the city looked dim.
Finally, in the spring, several hundred dollars came his way from a debt collector in Bethel, who had succeeded in hounding some of Barnum’s long overdue accounts. With that small influx of cash, on May 1, 1835, Barnum opened a boardinghouse on nearby Frankfort Street catering to people he knew from Connecticut who were visiting the city. Business was steady enough that he could soon buy into a grocery store with a partner named John Moody on South Street, near the porterhouse where he’d worked during his earlier sojourn in Manhattan.2
Once the immediate need to feed his family was satisfied, Barnum had the freedom to think more about what he really wanted to do to make his way in the world. While he was thinking, the world made its way to him. “The business finally came,” he wrote. “I fell into the occupation, and far beyond any of my predecessors on this continent, I have succeeded.” This boast, which refers to his career as a showman, has the value of being true, and is somewhat softened, at least in a later edition of his autobiography, by Barnum’s admission that the event that would set his life on its course “was the least deserving of all my efforts in the show line.” By this he meant in part that the elements for its success were already in place and required little creative showmanship on his part—beyond a willing suspension of disbelief. But it also became the episode in his life of which he was the least proud, one that spurred him to begin to be the better sort of showman he would eventually become.3
In late July 1835, a man named Coley Bartram walked into the store that Barnum and Moody ran. Bartram was from Reading (now Redding), Connecticut, just a few miles south of Bethel, and knew both Moody and Barnum. As Bartram talked, it came out that he had recently sold an investment in a traveling act featuring an emaciated, incredibly ancient, black slave woman. What made her of interest to the public was the claim that she had been present more than a century before at the birth of George Washington in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and had been his nursemaid there when he was growing up. Her name was Joice Heth, and her act consisted of singing hymns and telling stories about the great man she had helped to raise.
Even as they stood chatting in the store, Bartram said, Heth was performing under the direction of Bartram’s former partner in Philadelphia. He produced an advertisement from the Pennsylvania Inquirer dated July 15, 1835, describing Heth as “one of the greatest natural curiosities ever witnessed,” not least because she was, the article claimed, 161 years old. The life expectancy in 1835 for a white woman hovered at around forty years, and it was less still for the average enslaved black woman. But Barnum does not remark in his autobiography or elsewhere on the implausibility of this claim of Heth’s longevity.
If nothing else, as a person already becoming adept at newspaper publicity, he must have marveled at the brashness of the clipping he had been handed. He had already been aware of Heth’s existence from articles in New York newspapers praising her as a “wonderful personage,” so when he heard from Bartram that his former partner was himself eager to “sell out” because “he had very little tact as a showman,” Barnum’s only thought was that he must go to Philadelphia at once. Perhaps Heth’s act would be the sort of public exhibition he had been looking for. “Considerably excited” at this prospect, off he went to meet Bartram’s former partner, a Kentuckian named R. W. Lindsay, and to see this marvel.4
Barnum’s impulse to exhibit a fellow human being who could arouse the interest of the public may seem shocking to a modern onlooker. Such traveling exhibitions, however, were common in nineteenth-century America. In a country that was still largely rural and at a time before railroads vastly improved the convenience of transportation, any impulse to entertain, educate, or bamboozle required extensive travel from town to town. Since colonial times in America, people far from cities could expect a stream of people passing through their villages—“strolling peddlers, preachers, lawyers, doctors, players and others,” as the subtitle of Richardson Wright’s Hawkers and Walkers in Early America has it. The Victorian era, in both England and America, would be a time of special enthusiasm on the part of audiences for traveling exhibitions, not least the exhibition of “curiosities.” For this was an era of increasing awareness of the wider world. The full abundance of the earth’s flora, fauna, and human culture was still only becoming apparent to the average American. Elephants, birds of paradise, orchids, species previously known only in myth were now touring the countryside.5
This same trend ushered in a heightened fascination with human exhibits as well. Leslie A. Fiedler explored in Freaks (1978) how societies throughout history have often imputed mythic status to people who are born looking vastly different from those around them—treating them as monsters or as omens for good or ill. In the nineteenth century, driven by this same impulse as well as a heightened worldliness, crowds flocked to see anyone who was unusually large or small, unexpectedly pigmented or lacking all pigment, or who was in any way out of the ordinary. Barnum’s era was a heyday for human exhibitions, and he was happy to play his part, slaking his audience’s desires to be impressed or confounded, to gawk and chatter, especially if he could present so-called curiosities that also knew how to perform a winning act. If the blind and aged Heth had indeed exceeded the normal female lifespan by a factor of four and been central to the national mythos, she would fit the bill.
When Barnum reached Philadelphia and met Heth, he was deeply impressed with her. It was not because she looked robust and vibrant—in Barnum’s eye, this would have made her story less plausible—but the opposite: “so far as outward indications were concerned,” Barnum recalled, “she might almost as well have been called a thousand years old as any other age.” She was “totally blind, and her eyes were so deeply sunken in their sockets that the eyeballs seemed to have disappeared altogether. She had no teeth, but possessed a head of thick, bushy gray hair. Her left arm lay across her breast, and she had no power to remove it.” Still, she seemed healthy despite outward appearances, and she talked up a storm, especially on the subject of religion. She sang “a variety of ancient hymns” and referred often to “dear little George,” telling good stories about him and declaring she had “raised him” during her time as a slave owned by George’s father, Augustine.6
Barnum asked Lindsay for some proof of who she was, and Lindsay produced a document that Barnum described much later as “a forged bill of sale”; it claimed that Augustine Washington had in 1727 sold Heth, then age fifty-four, to a neighbor for thirty-three pounds. When he first saw the purported document, Barnum noticed only that it had “the appearance of antiquity,” being yellowed and worn through at its folds. That, and Lindsay’s explanation that the long-ago sale had taken place to reunite “Aunt Joice” with her husband, who was one of the neighbor’s slaves, “seemed plausible,” Barnum wrote. Far more plausible is the idea that Barnum was so eager to take on the challenge of exhibiting her—despite the comparable eagerness of first Bartram and then Lindsay to be rid of her—that he was willing to be duped. Lindsay wanted $3,000 to transfer his rights to Heth but agreed to $1,000 if Barnum could produce the money within ten days. Barnum hustled back to New York, where he had $500 on hand. He managed to persuade a friend to lend him an equal amount based on the “golden harvest which I was sure the exhibition must produce.” Barnum also sold his share in the grocery to his partner Moody, presumably to acquire the means to begin promoting his exhibit.7
Barnum hurried back to Philadelphia with the $1,000, but just what did he purchase with it? Lindsay had entered into an agreement with Heth’s owner, John S. Bowling, also from Kentucky, to join him in taking Heth from city to city for a year, sharing in the profits or losses from exhibiting her. That agreement had been signed on June 10, 1835, but only five days later Bowling, who was not in good health, sold his rights to exhibit her to Coley Bartram, who, only a few days before he approached Barnum, sold them to Lindsay. Thus Lindsay then had the sole right to exhibit her. Barnum reproduces in his autobiography the text of the contract between himself and Lindsay, but different biographers have interpreted it in different ways. Some have argued that the contract suggests Barnum, a future abolitionist, now owned Heth, while others suggest that he was in effect “renting” her. In either case, it was a tangled and morally specious engagement; in his eagerness, Barnum was embarking on one of the most objectionable moneymaking schemes of his career, one that he would never quite live down.8
What is clear is that Barnum’s agreement gave him the legal right to show Joice Heth for the remainder of Lindsay’s year. If exhibiting Heth was Barnum’s first experience as a showman, it was not his first as a salesman, and he reckoned that promoting her act was not so different from selling lottery tickets or bargaining across a countertop over dry goods. Besides being a newspaperman himself, he had realized and exploited the power of advertising and press coverage to create public enthusiasm for his lotteries. With Heth, he wasted no time, and his instincts proved sound. On August 7, 1835, the day after he signed the contract with Lindsay, an article appeared in the New York Evening Star announcing that she would be arriving for exhibition at Niblo’s Garden, an attraction located on Broadway between Prince and Houston. Well-off New Yorkers went there to eat ice cream, drink coffee, lemonade, or something stronger, and listen to music or watch traveling entertainments amid the greenery, escaping the noise and squalor of the more densely urban streets to the south. The article puffed her as “a greater star than any other performer of the present day.” Barnum and William Niblo—an Irish immigrant known as Billy who had been a waiter in a pub before marrying the owner’s widow and acquiring the resources to start his own place—had agreed to split the profits from the exhibition, with the latter providing the venue and paying for the advertising. For his part, Barnum hired Levi Lyman, a “shrewd, sociable, and somewhat indolent Yankee” lawyer from the distant Finger Lakes town of Penn Yan, New York, to assist him in promoting and displaying Heth.9
Barnum and Lyman arranged for a private press showing at Niblo’s once Heth arrived from Philadelphia, inviting a number of local newspaper editors “to get the first peep at the new wonder of the world,” as Lyman described it later in a story for the New York Herald. For this later story, which appeared well after the episode was over, Lyman also provided the Herald with a list of how much he and Barnum paid that newspaper’s competitors to become “firm believers” in the claims they were making for her, the payments inducing “sudden conversions” in the editors. The incentives ranged, if Lyman is to be believed, from a high of $49.50 for the New York Courier and Enquirer to $5.67 for the more persuadable New-York Gazette & General Advertiser, and totaled more than $200. It was a good investment, apparently, because the papers outdid each other in trumpeting their lack of skepticism and journalistic integrity, and the crowds eagerly made the trip up to Niblo’s, where the gross amounted to about $3,000 for the two weeks she was on display.10
Barnum also attributed their early success to a short biographical sketch that Lyman wrote, relying largely on his imagination, which was published in a pamphlet Lyman sold for six cents, pocketing the profits. It featured a woodcut engraving of Heth in a neat bonnet and calico dress, her hands prominently displaying long, clawlike fingers and nails. Her hands were in reality twisted and arthritic, and one did have nails four inches long, but the woodcut portrayal was grotesque in a way meant to heighten public curiosity. The pamphlet included several of the early newspaper blurbs Barnum and Lyman had purchased, as well as “certificates” from people who had supposedly known her for a long time and testified to her piety and reliability. Barnum also had many posters and handbills printed, advertising “the nurse of Washington,” displaying the woodcut image, and featuring copy similar to that the newspapers used—quite likely because Barnum had written it for them. He also created “two ingenious, back-lit, out-of-doors Joice Heth transparencies two by three feet in size,” showing her name and the claim of “161 Years Old,” which would be displayed wherever she was appearing. In those days before electricity, the backlighting would have come from candles or oil lamps, which caused the thin paper of the printed posters to glow.11
In his autobiography, Barnum describes what a showing of Heth entailed:
Our exhibition usually opened with a statement of the manner in which the age of Joice Heth was discovered, as well as the account of her antecedents in Virginia, and a reading of the bill of sale. We would then question her in relation to the birth and youth of General Washington, and she always gave satisfactory answers in every particular. Individuals among the audiences would also frequently ask her questions, and put her to the severest cross-examinations, without ever finding her to deviate from what had every evidence of being a plain unvarnished statement of the facts.12
While on exhibit, Heth often smoked a pipe as she lounged on a bed in a house on Niblo’s grounds, as visitors passed through, shaking her hand and sometimes even taking her pulse, as if to test whether she were clockwork or flesh and blood. Heth was by all reports a convincing, charismatic performer. She laughed often at her own stories or at things her visitors said, and regularly broke into obscure, old-fashioned hymns that seemed to prove her advanced age. Barnum made the most of her religious streak, at times inviting ministers to hold public conversations with her, which appealed to the devout and added credibility to the proceedings. Much patriotic fuss was made in the advertising about her connection to the Father of Our Country, and Heth was prepared with anecdotes that, in truth, seemed less personal than derived from the widespread myths that had attached themselves to the first president. The generation of the Founders had now passed from the scene, and people were patriotically eager to be in the presence of this vestige of their greatness.
But it was her looks that seemed to draw the public most, a fascination with her physical attributes and how old she appeared to be. One article in the New York Evening Star described her as resembling “an Egyptian mummy just escaped from its sarcophagus.” Barnum claimed in the advertisements that she weighed only forty-six pounds, and observers often compared her immobile arms and long fingers, with those fingernails curving out several inches, to claws or paws. To say that the reactions of those who saw her were influenced by their racial views would be an understatement, and even the widespread acceptance of the preposterous claims about her age was connected to her race. Her longevity was thought to be at least partly attributable to having lived in the Africa-like warmth of the American South. Later, when she died in Connecticut during the winter, commentators used the circumstances to reinforce theories that black people were ill-adapted to survive northern climates.13
After her Niblo’s run in New York, Barnum and Lyman took Heth on to Providence and Boston. An article in the Providence Daily Journal on August 30 picked up a fictitious theme from Lyman’s pamphlet about Heth, in which he claimed that she had given birth to fifteen children and had an unspecified number of grandchildren, all now either freed or dead, but that five great-grandchildren remained enslaved in Kentucky. Their master, the pamphlet claimed, had agreed to free the five if he could receive two-thirds of the amount he had paid for them. “This work”—meaning the pamphlet itself—“together with what may be collected from exhibition, after deducting expenses, is expressly for that purpose, and will be immediately done whenever there can be realized the sum to do it.” The whole story was made up, which is despicable enough, and we know from Barnum that Lyman was pocketing the proceeds from the pamphlet. Because Providence and Boston were cities where abolitionist feelings were growing stronger, it is likely that Barnum planted the article in the Journal in order to deflect any questions about Heth’s own status as slave or free woman. The disingenuous story about freeing the great-grandchildren also implied that Heth herself was free, while Barnum avoided mentioning the subject directly in his advertising or newspaper promotions.
Barnum was in a sense testing his limits in this early endeavor, seeing how far he could push the truth to promote Heth. He was attentive to the flow of customers, keeping it going as long as possible and then moving on when it slowed; he was also learning that depriving the public of an exhibit could increase interest in a return engagement. Presumably this is why Barnum moved Heth from Niblo’s after only two weeks, despite the energetic campaign to promote her there, since he would soon bring her back to New York for another run. The false manumission article in Providence made it profitable to extend Heth’s time there for a week, and he would soon add an even more extreme—and dehumanizing, viewed from our own time—ploy to increase the patronage in Boston.
Barnum and Lyman’s preparations for the Boston showing were as assiduous as those for New York and Providence. One newspaper editor, Joseph Buckingham, wrote, “JOICE HETH. These are the words, which, printed in large capitals, and posted at every corner in the city, announce an exhibition at Concert Hall.” Buckingham’s Boston Courier had accepted paid advertisements for the exhibit, and as Barnum tells it, “the newspapers had heralded her anticipated arrival in such a multiplicity of styles, that the public curiosity was on tip-toe.” Not all of those styles were flattering, however. The editor of the conservative Boston Atlas complained, “We have been annoyed the last week by a score of puffs dropped in our communication box—in poetry and prose,” promoting Heth. The editor went on to say that a “more indecent mode of raising money than by the exhibition of an old woman—black or white—we can hardly imagine.” Regardless, the initial crowds were so large that the room in the Concert Hall proved inadequate, and a fellow exhibitor in the building’s ballroom had to be “induced” to vacate.14
That exhibitor was Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a Bavarian engineer and inventor who for nearly two decades had toured in Europe and then the United States with “the Turk,” a life-size, chess-playing automaton dressed in a white turban and baggy Turkish pants. The automaton would match wits with and generally beat challengers from the audience, and years of speculation about how the hoax was done ended when a young writer named Edgar Allan Poe saw the act several times in Richmond, Virginia, and wrote a piece correctly speculating that a man hidden in a box onstage directed the automaton’s moves.15
Barnum wrote about Maelzel in his autobiography, “I looked upon him as the great father of caterers for public amusement,” and because of this he often spoke with the older man, who eventually invited Barnum to team up with him. Barnum declined but would soon draw inspiration from Maelzel’s contraption. The crowds were big at the Concert Hall for several weeks, thanks to a drumbeat of “novel advertisements and unique notices” in the papers, but then the numbers started to fall off. Here Barnum came close to admitting one of his notorious humbugs, implying that he himself had placed a notice in a Boston newspaper calling out Heth as a hoax. The article said that she was not a 161-year-old slave, and “not a human being” at all, but “simply a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together.” Heth was a machine, induced to speak, laugh, and sing hymns by the work of a ventriloquist—a particularly cruel line of publicity in an era when black Americans were already roundly dehumanized, though it’s unclear whether or not this ever crossed Barnum’s mind. In his autobiography, he wrote that the Turk “prepared the way for this announcement” and that the result was hundreds of new visitors, as well as old visitors who wanted to see whether they had been duped on their original visit. “Our audiences,” Barnum wrote, “again largely increased.”16
Barnum, Lyman, and Heth bounced around New England for the next month, then returned to Niblo’s Garden in late October at the same time a fair put on by the American Institute of the City of New York was under way there. Many of the upward of one hundred thousand visitors to the fair had come from out of town, and a healthy number of those, after examining the new products on display—ten thousand exhibits ranging from artificial flowers to threshing machines—crossed the garden to see Joice Heth as well. Barnum would accompany Heth on only one more trip, to Albany, and after that she was in Lyman’s charge, beginning with an exhibit in the Bowery aimed at a more working-class New York audience than the one at Niblo’s.
Around the time of his own departure, Barnum hired a woman to serve as Heth’s nurse and attendant on the road. After her New York showing, and a return to New England, Heth’s travels soon had to be suspended. She had not been able to get over a cold, and after an exhibition in New Haven in late January, Barnum had her moved, along with her nurse, to his half brother Philo’s house in Bethel to try to recuperate. There, Barnum wrote, “she was provided with warm apartments and the best medical and other assistance.” Nevertheless Heth’s sickness intensified, and she died in Bethel on February 19, 1836.17
Philo Barnum had Joice Heth’s body shipped to his brother in New York, and it arrived by horse-drawn sleigh at Barnum’s boardinghouse on February 21. If Heth really did have relatives other than the ones Lyman had invented, nobody knew where they were, and if John Bowling, off in Kentucky, still technically owned her, he apparently did not offer to pay for her burial or ask that her body be returned to him. Barnum could have tried to seek out relatives himself, or he could have immediately given her a respectable burial. Instead he chose an entirely different approach, which would increase both his profits and his infamy.
Over the course of Barnum’s promotion of Heth, he had courted demand for an autopsy upon her death to answer the question of her age (and humanity) once and for all. Upon the coffin’s arrival in New York, he went to visit a well-regarded surgeon and anatomist he knew, who had looked Heth over during one of her showings at Niblo’s and at the time expressed an interest in autopsying her should she die. Barnum and the physician, David L. Rogers, agreed that the procedure would take place on February 25, and Rogers, who had undertaken some high-profile jobs of this sort in the past, had no objection to Barnum’s selling tickets to those who would like to watch him at work.18
Ads with such sober headlines as “ANATOMICAL EXAMINATION” invited the public to join those with a somewhat legitimate medical interest in viewing the dissection, for which Barnum rented an amphitheater in the City Saloon on Broadway. It was a large enough space to accommodate the fifteen hundred people who paid Barnum fifty cents apiece to watch the procedure. Among those he invited were representatives of the clergy. Richard Adams Locke, a descendant of John Locke and the editor of the penny paper the New York Sun, was a pal of Dr. Rogers and thus was given an exclusive in covering the event.19
Rogers, who had been skeptical of the age claims for Heth when he first saw her, now found that she had not died from the effects of a cold or the cold weather but from tuberculosis, and that she had been, as Locke reported, no “more than seventy-five or, at the utmost, eighty years of age!” The relatively good condition of all her major organs other than her lungs had led Rogers to this confident determination. Locke’s story, which appeared in the next day’s Sun, ran under the headline “Precious Humbug Exposed” and did not spare the grisly details of the old woman’s dissection. Locke let Barnum off the hook publicly, concluding that he had been duped alongside everyone else. This was the case that Barnum had made to Rogers and Locke immediately after the autopsy, and he would stick to this story in his autobiography.
The next morning, Barnum showed up at the offices of the Sun and told Locke that he was now persuaded that Heth had not been as old as claimed, and thus had had no direct connection to George Washington in his youth. In an article in the paper about Barnum’s office visit, Locke wrote that the showman “took our exposure of the humbug with perfect good humor.” While Barnum cozied up to the influential editor, his compatriot Levi Lyman was approaching a pricklier newspaperman, James Gordon Bennett, the Scottish-born editor of the New York Herald. In the most brazen twist to the whole story, Lyman persuaded Bennett that the autopsy itself had been a hoax, that Heth was still alive and even currently on display in Connecticut. The dead woman that Rogers had dissected was thus not Heth but a woman identified only as “Aunt Nelly” from Harlem. Barnum wrote that Bennett “proceeded to jot down the details as they were invented by Lyman’s fertile brain.” In the next day’s Herald, Bennett, his good sense overwhelmed by his competitive fury, reprinted the story from the Sun and headlined it “Another Hoax!” He called the Sun story “rigmarole” and exclaimed—in italics yet—“Joice Heth is not dead.” Locke and the Sun naturally defended their story, calling Bennett a “despicable and unprincipled scribbler” editing a “loathsome little sheet.” Bennett was slow to realize that Lyman, probably with Barnum’s encouragement, had made a fool of him, even proposing a large bet with Locke over whether Heth was still alive. Sales of both newspapers undoubtedly benefited from the dispute, as the public continued to wonder where the truth rested.20
But even this was not the end of the Heth affair. The following September, Barnum wrote, Bennett ran into Lyman on the street and “proceeded to ‘blow him sky high’ ” for lying to him. Lyman laughed it off as a “harmless joke” and offered to make it up to the editor by telling him, once and for all, the whole story of the Heth affair from beginning to end—“the veritable history of the rise, progress, and termination of the Joice Heth humbug.” In Barnum’s account, Bennett not only forgave Lyman on the spot but led him back to the office and once again began taking notes for a series of four front-page stories (ending without explanation before the chronological narrative was finished) that amounted to “a ten times greater humbug” than Lyman’s first offering. Bennett’s long, successful newspaper career and his famously irascible nature would suggest that his forgiveness and this new failure of skepticism could not have come easily. But the prospect of having the last word with a newspaper-buying public still obsessed with Joice Heth must have proven irresistible.
Lyman’s narrative had it that Barnum had found Heth on a Kentucky plantation, pulled her teeth, taught her the George Washington stories, and increased her purported age as he moved her from city to city. Many members of the public embraced this version of the affair, false though it was, which would have repercussions for Barnum throughout his career and up to the present day. But in his autobiography Barnum was willing to make the same sort of calculation that Bennett had, pointing out, “Newspaper and social controversy on the subject (and seldom have vastly more important matters been so largely discussed) served my purpose as ‘a showman’ by keeping my name before the public.”21
IN THE TWO PRINCIPAL VERSIONS of Barnum’s autobiography, he told this story of Heth in detail, showing an eagerness to persuade the reader at every turn that he honestly believed her to be what he said she was. Those who paid to see her, he wrote, were not simply amused by her novelty but decided for themselves that she was genuine. We undoubtedly live in a more skeptical age than the America of two centuries ago, but even factoring in both a more general naïveté and the racism of the era, the notion of a 161-year-old woman seems so unbelievable that it is hard to take Barnum at his word about his own gullibility.
As Barnum grew as a showman, he developed a more refined and humane view of his relationship to both his performers and his audience. He settled into an approach where the fakery was not a scam or an attempt to fool his customers into believing that something false was true, but in which they were drawn into the humbug by sharing the knowledge of the hoax. The deal he would make with his audiences in the future was that they would be entertained and that they would get their money’s worth, either by enjoying the state of doubt in which one of his exhibits placed them or by sharing in the pleasure of distinguishing between what was false and what was true. Barnum’s insistence throughout his life that he was not duping his customers with Joice Heth is the best evidence that, indeed, he was—that he had not yet understood what his relationship to his audience should be.
The far more complicated question, however, has to do with Barnum’s connection to Heth herself. He is at best ambiguous about whether he bought the rights to exhibit Heth from Bowling or whether he actually purchased her. But is renting a slave really so different, morally, from owning one? At this time it was still legal to own a slave in the South, but not in New York or his native Connecticut, and it was not illegal to bring a slave to a free state for prescribed periods. Growing up in a modest Connecticut village and working in middle-class businesses in New York, the young Taylor had not in his first quarter-century had much exposure to slavery. At this time in his life, his attitudes toward race were typical of white Americans at the time, meaning deplorable, as his willingness to exploit the racially tinged curiosity of his audience suggests. But however racist most Americans both north and south were in the middle of the 1830s, a considerable number of them had long believed, especially after the American Revolution, that slavery was both immoral and intolerable. Barnum was not in this number, and if he was willing to look the other way about the claims he made for Heth, he was equally willing to avert his eyes from the human reality of “Aunt Joice,” as he often called her. (The term feels patronizing today but was often used in his time for older women of any race.)
As Barnum aged, his attitudes toward race would become more enlightened. He shows respect for Heth in his autobiography, and nothing suggests that he treated her less than well while she was in his possession. His hiring a nurse for her when she became frail evinces a concern for her, although his motive was without doubt to protect his investment, and he clearly hoped that she would recover and go back on the road. Barnum wrote that he bought a mahogany coffin and saw to it that Heth was “buried respectably” in Bethel, but it can’t be ignored that he shamelessly exploited her death before any such burial.22
From the perspective of our own time, its seems clear that Barnum crossed the line numerous times in his exhibition and promotion of Heth. Within his own lifetime, he seems to have realized this as well. If it was the most troubling venture Barnum ever undertook, it was also his first effort in the national spotlight, coming at a time in his life when his eagerness to establish himself seems to have overwhelmed any scruples he might otherwise have had. Barnum would grow in judgment, and even in virtue, throughout his career as a showman. But he was more than willing to court disapproval early on, and he would never be able to escape the cost to his reputation, despite later efforts to improve himself and his approach.