Even before he went out on the road with Jenny Lind, and while he was dedicating himself to family life, Barnum had been working at a dizzying number of ventures, some of which had now come to pass. When those projects relied on his instincts and experience as a showman, they tended to be successful. But when he was tempted by schemes in areas where he was less familiar, the results were uneven. Eventually, as his attention turned in so many directions and he bankrolled so many initiatives, his long run of good luck, stretching back to his purchase of his museum a decade earlier, would come to an end. But for several years he was able to overcome small setbacks, to sample his opportunities, and to learn from his mistakes. A series of ventures in the early 1850s reveals the breadth of Barnum’s interests and the range of risk he was comfortable with—as well as how capable he was at adapting once he’d pushed too far, eventually turning failure into future success.
As Barnum had been renovating and expanding the American Museum in 1850, he was also working on a plan he had hatched the previous year to start a new circulating show, “a great travelling museum and menagerie.” His partners included Tom Thumb’s father, Sherwood Stratton, and a circus man named Seth B. Howes, whom Barnum put in complete charge of the new venture, not having “time nor inclination to manage such a concern” himself. Barnum could hardly have chosen a better man for the job than Howes, who is sometimes called the father of the American circus. He was born five years after Barnum on a farm less than fifteen miles from Bethel, in Brewster, New York. His much older brother Nathan had started a small traveling circus when Seth was eleven, and Seth performed in it on horseback and helped with the management. He would be connected with one circus after another for most of the next quarter century, up until his association with Barnum. In 1848 he and his brothers started the Great United States Circus, considered then to be the biggest of its kind ever assembled in this country. After Howes worked with Barnum, he would import a hippodrome from Paris and establish it on Broadway, and then he managed a circus in England for seven years, returning home to help start what would be called the Great European Circus. Like Barnum, he also managed individual performers, working with Tom Thumb and also with Eng and Chang, the Siamese Twins, whom he took on a year-long tour in 1853. After he left circus life, Howes made a princely fortune in real estate in Chicago, at one point owning the land that is now Hyde Park, and retired to Brewster, where he built on his family’s property a lavish, turreted, stone castle of a house that he called Morningthorpe.1
What would be called P. T. Barnum’s Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie was still being put together when in 1850 the three partners sent a ship to Ceylon with the goal of capturing or buying a “herd” of a dozen elephants and “such other wild animals as they could secure.” The Regatta sailed out through the Narrows in May, carrying five hundred tons of hay to be stored on St. Helena, halfway between New York and Ceylon, to be used as feed on the journey home. After a year, the Regatta returned to New York with ten of the thirteen elephants it had set off with from Ceylon. One of the elephants was captured with a calf, which with its dam survived the passage to America, where it became the steed of Tom Thumb in the caravan. Barnum’s agents had also acquired a huge Burmese bull in Ceylon, and brought back a native elephant handler, now transformed as a promotional matter into the chief of a “wild and wandering tribe” from the island. Six lions would also be on parade in the traveling show, along with other beasts “selected at immense cost,” and a cortege of 110 horses and ninety riders. A large selection of curiosities from the American Museum would accompany this menagerie from town to town, and a tented pavilion large enough to accommodate fifteen thousand people would be erected at the end point of the procession, which would pass through the streets accompanied by a brass band and a military band. Admission to the exhibition would be Barnum’s usual charge of twenty-five cents.2
Barnum did not seem to regret the death of the three elephants in shipment from Ceylon, perhaps because so many others had perished during their procurement. “Large numbers” had been killed, Barnum reported, dwelling not on the loss of life but on the “most exciting adventures” and “numerous encounters of the most terrific description” that proved necessary in the capture of those thirteen. It seems that his agents had not been able to buy elephants, so they had hired dozens and dozens of local people to help them drive the animals into places where they could be captured. To capture as many as he requested, however, required being willing to kill or maim many more.
This is one of those places in Barnum’s story where a modern sensibility must struggle to understand him. Our own sense of moral responsibility toward elephants and other large mammals led directly to the closure of the circus that bore Barnum’s name for 125 years after his death. For most of those years most people did not see the harm in parading elephants and other wild animals and doing what was necessary to train them to be performers. In his day, procuring wild beasts and shipping them long distances involved harsh realities that Barnum accepted without apparent regret, and keeping them alive after they came under his care was also a challenge. The financial incentive existed to make the whole process of exhibiting wild beasts more humane and efficient, and Barnum would hire people with the expertise to make this happen. But he also resigned himself to the frequent deaths of the beasts in his care, more readily than we would expect today. Still, while he never hesitated to mention the expense and trouble this aspect of his business created, he was circumspect about sharing with his audience how many elephants were killed in the process of capturing his troupe. His early advertising for the Asiatic Caravan said only that the elephants captured in the Ceylon jungle had been subdued and made no mention of those killed in the process.
Once the Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie was out on the road in the spring of 1851, Barnum was willing to use his wealth for ventures beyond showmanship, trying his hand as an investor. By summer’s end, he had a visitor in Bridgeport representing a new British invention called a fire annihilator, which would put out fires without using water, by suffocating them with steam and chemical vapors. The overstatement in its name should have been a warning to Barnum, the master of overstatement, but its British and American pedigrees soon persuaded him to invest. After visiting Washington, where he met with former congressman Elisha Whittlesey, who had become the first comptroller of the U.S. Treasury and was angling to hold the American patent for the Phillips Fire Annihilator, Barnum agreed not only to invest but to become an officer in the company that was set up to sell it to Americans. He also became its “general agent,” meaning he was involved in sales but also in creating franchises across the country and in opening a New York office for the business. According to Barnum, he collected only a small percentage of the $180,000 that was soon pledged to the enterprise but personally guaranteed that amount and urged investors to hold the bulk of their money until a grand demonstration of the annihilator should take place.3
W. H. Phillips, the British inventor of the contraption, would be present with Barnum for the public display of its annihilating powers. After a successful demonstration before about thirty people on December 17, 1851, on Hamilton Square, in the remote precincts of Manhattan at Sixty-Ninth Street and Third Avenue, the big trial was set for the same place on the following day. Barnum’s advertisements and fliers brought a crowd of some three thousand spectators on a bitterly cold afternoon to watch as fires were set to the shell of a house constructed for the demonstration and then to marvel as the annihilators did their work. Phillips’s plan, as he would write to the papers the next day, had been to start two separate fires, one small and one large. But after a fairly unimpressive first fire was quickly snuffed out by four annihilators, rowdies in the crowd swarmed into the house, tossed a number of pre-positioned annihilators out the windows (seriously injuring one small boy), and then themselves set the house ablaze. Phillips, who was knocked down twice trying to get the intruders out of the house, refused to intervene as it now burned down. Members of the crowd called out the familiar refrain “Where’s Barnum?” as a chorus of “Humbug” also rose above the ashes. A small group carried one of the annihilators to a nearby pub, where they chalked the name Barnum on it and hung it above the door to much laughter. A piece in the Tribune the next day was headlined, with a jaunty disregard for spelling, “Annihilition of the Fire Annihilator.” Despite Phillips’s call for another demonstration, Barnum returned the money he had already collected and eventually sold his share in the company. Although Phillips would succeed in getting an American patent for the machine, on October 31, 1852, the factory in Battersea where the Fire Annihilator Company built and stored its product itself caught fire, and neither the annihilators nor an old-fashioned bucket brigade could save the building. Passengers of steamboats passing by on the Thames were reported to have been “greatly inconvenienced” by the showers of steam the burning annihilators emitted. The factory fire would be the fire annihilator’s fatal blow.4
The number of business schemes presented to him during this period, Barnum wrote, had “neither limit nor end,” and most were “as wild and unfeasible as a railroad to the moon.” Many of these speculators assumed that Barnum’s greed was bottomless and that he would have no compunction about lending his name to any sort of swindle. But he often responded to these proposals, he wrote, by saying that what he wished for, far more than money, was tranquility. Still, he was amused by the variety and persistence of the offers that came his way. In his 1869 autobiography he described a few of them, sharing his own witty responses. The last came from a fellow who wanted to use camels to carry people overland to California: “I told him that I thought asses were better than camels, but I should not be one of them.”5
Among the projects Barnum did take on at about this time was one that reached back to his roots in the newspaper business. He and the brothers Alfred and Henry Beach, who had given up joint editorship of the Sun, each invested $20,000 to found a weekly illustrated newspaper, modeled on the Illustrated London News. Barnum was a worthy third to these two members of a newspaper family, having established the Herald of Freedom two decades before and in his career since having been intimately involved with the newspapers of his and other cities, as advertiser, writer, source, and friend or enemy of prominent editors. The first issue of the Illustrated News appeared on the first day of 1853, and although the circulation grew to exceed 150,000 (and by Barnum’s estimation its number of readers reached half a million), it closed after forty-eight issues. The paper ambitiously aspired to cover “Intelligence, Literature, Art, and Society.” Its chief engraver was Frank Leslie, whose own subsequent illustrated weekly paper would become an American mainstay and an important chronicler of the Civil War. The first editor of the Illustrated News was an excitable literary man named Dr. Rufus Griswold, and his assistant was Charles Godfrey Leland, a young journalist who later became a prominent folklorist. It was generally believed by “the entire American press” that Barnum’s interest in the paper was to create a frictionless vehicle for promoting his own interests, and Leland himself claimed in his memoirs to have been sufficiently concerned about it to explain to the showman that “this would ere long utterly ruin the publication.” Leland credited Barnum for avoiding that path, so much so “that in his own paper he was conspicuous by his absence.” Barnum assisted his editors by soliciting articles from the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, who was in America at the time, and his old friend Edward Everett, who as U.S. minister to Great Britain had set up the first meeting between Tom Thumb and Queen Victoria and was, at the time Barnum wrote to him, U.S. secretary of state.6
According to Leland, Barnum also liked to stop by the office to share his latest joke or puzzle and to help him fill a regular humor column. “There was a great deal of ‘boy’ still left in Barnum,” Leland recalled, adding that Barnum would delight in sitting down to hear the best bits from the next column. Leland was unstinting in his admiration for Barnum, even though his tenure as editor of the Illustrated News (where he soon replaced Griswold) was brief and in his memoirs he emphasized how hard he was worked and how little he was paid. When he once complained to Barnum about his salary, Barnum doubled it, which still left Leland lagging behind what others in the newspaper business were being paid. But given that Barnum had put out the Herald of Freedom by himself, and given the older man’s general indefatigableness, Barnum was probably not the person to feel great sympathy for how hard Leland was working.7
The Illustrated News ran its last issue on November 26, 1853, and Barnum had again lost money. But he soon allowed himself to be drawn into another investment in Manhattan, one that at least depended in part on his skills as a showman. The famous Crystal Palace exhibition in London’s Hyde Park in 1851 had inspired a group of New York businessmen to erect their own Crystal Palace in what was then called Reservoir Square and is now Bryant Park, located behind the main New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Barnum wrote that he was approached by the initial group of investors but declined to participate, because he thought it was too soon for New York to try to emulate the successful world’s fair in London. Besides, he thought the site, “four miles distant from the City Hall, was enough of itself to kill the enterprise,” being too far from the population center of the city. But the investors were undeterred by Barnum’s doubts and went ahead without him. The American Crystal Palace had a footprint following the Greek-cross plan of a central square with four equal wings, topped by a dome a hundred feet in diameter, the whole built of iron and glass, with enough wood to make it as flammable as the British original would turn out to be. The exhibition opened on July 14, 1853, with President Franklin Pierce as the featured speaker, but by the following winter the novelty had worn off sufficiently for its owners to approach Barnum again in the belief that he and his old friend John Genin, the now quite-rich hatter, could revive it. Barnum again “utterly declined,” but in almost no time he somehow found himself the president of the enterprise and a big investor in it. He immediately planned a “re-inauguration” ceremony, a Fourth of July celebration, and other Barnumesque events. But after three months of his focused attention, he realized that the enterprise was doomed, so he resigned.8
He made at least one cursory attempt to fob the structure off on his friend Moses Kimball, proposing that the building be disassembled and rebuilt on the Boston Common, but he was honest enough to begin his letter floating this scheme with the admission “I was an ass for having anything to do with the Crystal Palace.” Still, he went on to make a spirited defense of the idea, even asserting, “New Yorkers who now think the palace too far off to visit would positively go to Boston to see it.” Kimball declined his friend’s offer.
Barnum was nowhere specific about how much money he invested in the enterprise. But when he mentioned to Kimball a new project he had begun immediately after resigning his presidency, he added, “I hope [it] will make up my losses by Crystal Palace.” After a series of questionable ventures, he turned to one that put his best qualities forward. It would rely on his instincts as a showman, his impressive verbal skills, and his dedication to hard work.9
For this new endeavor, he anchored himself at home, spending what was left of the summer and much of the fall in the elegant second-floor study he had built for himself at Iranistan. Over the next four months, he would write his autobiography. Given its length, its coherence, its wit, its polish, and its depth of self-reflection, his speed in writing the four-hundred-page book is remarkable. The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, was published in a first edition of fifty thousand copies in mid-December 1854, only a few weeks after its completion. Considering Barnum’s latter-day reputation, it’s worth noting that the book is not dramatically more, or less, mendacious than the usual autobiography by a famous person, and rivals Rousseau’s Confessions in its eagerness to reveal his own foibles, misdeeds, and missteps.10
Yet it is not as though when Barnum sat down at his desk, cocooned in the orange silk damask that covered the walls and ceiling of his study, he was starting from scratch as a novice writer. He had been inventing his persona ever since he had gone to work in his father’s store, and he had polished and polished again his anecdotes about himself in his years as a public speaker and a person in whom the press and the public took an eager interest. He had his hundred letters to the New York Atlas from 1844 to 1846 to draw on for his time in England and Europe; he had journals he had kept in the 1830s that formed the basis of his mock autobiography of Barnaby Diddledum, which had also been published in the Atlas, in 1841; and he had his daughter Caroline’s journals from trips she had made with him in 1848 and 1850–51. He wrote Kimball as he was getting started, “Pray tell me if the story of the old sailor getting [the Fejee Mermaid] in China was really true, and also give me all the particulars of its origins that you can.” In the same letter he asked Kimball if he had a copy of a pamphlet Barnum had written about mermaids. He wrote such letters to other friends to help him jog his memory or recover things he had already written about himself or his undertakings, since he had always been a writer of real productivity, dashing off advertisements, articles, squibs, pamphlets, letters, and on and on. Nothing he wrote ever feels labored: his prose seems to flow easily from the same stream that made him such a good talker. Even the many letters in which he apologizes for the haste with which they were composed exude his high spirits and unwillingness to do things perfunctorily, although the haste sometimes means things tumble out in a stream of consciousness.11
As he was writing his book, Barnum was also busily preparing for its reception. In October 1854 he announced to newspaper and journal editors hither and yon that “fifty-seven publishers have applied for the chance of publishing” the book and also sent out two letters to journalists claiming that “Boston, New York, and Philadelphia publishers are all after the book in a swarm.” In the first letter, he undercuts the claim about the fifty-seven publishers by adding, “Such is the fact—and if it wasn’t, why still it ain’t a bad announcement.” He makes his appeal to publishers in the second letter “as a whilom brother of the Order Editorial.” The jaunty tone of both announcements makes clear that he knew his news would find friendly editors eager to publicize it, especially when he leaked parts of the book to them. Only four days after the second letter, he purchased a notice in New York newspapers, addressed “To Publishers,” asserting “Circumstances having occurred by which the publication of my ‘Autobiography’ is again thrown open to the trade” and encouraging publishers to submit bids for the almost-finished book. Appended to the notice was the book’s preface, consisting of seven short paragraphs, in which he offered his subsequently well-known self-analysis: “On the whole my life has been a merry one. I have looked chiefly on the bright side of things.” He promised that the book would not cover up his humbugs and admitted that some people might find his “confessions . . . injudicious,” a selling point if ever there was one and an observation that presaged the book’s strongest condemnations.12
Barnum’s efforts to publicize the eager competition among publishers to acquire his book came after he had already written to a friend in late August that his publisher would be the firm of Julius Starr Redfield. He never said whether there had been a subsequent falling out with Julius Redfield—a fellow Universalist who attended the same New York City church as Barnum—or whether the idea of a competition was only a ruse to get publicity. But his notices about the competition were reprinted widely, along with the preface, and certainly added to the general interest in what Barnum would produce. The Sun reported that twenty-one bids from publishers came in response to his invitation, and the highest bidder was Julius Redfield! Reporting also had it that Barnum would receive $.56 for each $1.25 copy of the book that was sold, but in fact he signed a contract with Redfield calling for him to get 30 percent, or $.375 per copy. This is the precise deal that Barnum had described in another letter to a friend nearly two months earlier.13
By the middle of March, three months after Redfield unleashed it on the world, The Life of P. T. Barnum had received more than a thousand positive reviews in the United States alone (many seeming so due to selective quotation), and not a few negative ones, and within a year it had sold an astounding 160,000 copies, for which Barnum’s share would have been $60,000. It was published at the same time in England, where pirated editions soon appeared, and was also translated into French, German, Swedish, and Dutch.14
A piece in the New-York Times acknowledged the divide in critical opinion, calling The Life “a very amusing book, which every one will read, half the world will abuse, and nobody can help laughing at and with.” Underlining this divide in its own pages, the Times published a second review asserting that the book established Barnum as a shameless liar, unaware of his own faults, and concluding that it “will be very widely read and will do infinite mischief.” The Herald managed only two snide paragraphs and change for Barnum’s book, suggesting, “It would be hard to find a more disgusting mess of trash, and the book seems to have been published to show to what vile uses printers’ ink may be put.” Overstatement went in both directions, one review calling Barnum’s life “the most readable work ever published.” Barnum himself favored a review in the Springfield Republican of Massachusetts, which suggested that a reader should go beneath the book’s humorous surface to find a “lesson that mere humbugs and deceptions generally fail” to turn a profit and that the showman’s intention was always to employ humbuggery only to publicize his “real and substantial exhibitions, such as his Museum, Tom Thumb in England, and Jenny Lind.”15
Only two of the negative reviews seem to have gotten under Barnum’s skin. The principal one appeared in the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine in March 1855. Its reviewer was indignant that Barnum could associate himself with the Universalist faith and with some well-known Universalist preachers. The other was a devastatingly negative review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which published both a British and an American edition. It concluded that Barnum “has left nothing for his worst enemy to do; for he has fairly gibbeted himself.” Blackwood’s and other British publications took delight in attributing what they saw as Barnum’s worst characteristics to his being an American. “Mr. Phineas Taylor Barnum is, we are thankful to say,” the magazine chortled, “not a native of this country.” Punch declared him to be the “type and symbol of the glorious Republic” and saw fit, as the title for its review had it, to propose “Barnum for President,” an idea more absurd in 1855 than it seems today. Barnum undoubtedly encouraged such disparagements by dedicating the book to “The Universal Yankee Nation, of Which I Am Proud to Be One.” The section of the autobiography where he tells how he sold Tom Thumb to the British by setting himself up as a gentleman, renting a fine house and a liveried servant, could not have helped, nor could the sting of his overwhelming acceptance by the British aristocracy and the British people.16
Many of the negative reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were concerned, both overtly and by implication, with the coarsening of public life that Barnum’s book represented. His plain speech, his delight in practical jokes and silly anecdotes, his willingness to admit and forgive himself his faults—all of this punctured the gentlemanly façade of the literary establishment, even as his approach was playing into prejudices in intellectual circles, on both sides of the Atlantic, against Americans who rose in class status through mere commerce. The publication of an autobiography necessarily invites criticism not only of the book but also of the life it portrays, and although Barnum admitted, “There are some things in my Autobiography which may honestly be objected to,” he added plaintively, “I only ask the acknowledgment that there are some good streaks in me and in my book, for I do not admire the doctrine of total depravity.”17
The decision to tell his life’s story at the age of forty-four, just past what would turn out to be his life’s halfway mark, might seem brash in retrospect, but his father had died before turning fifty and life expectancy in general did not promise Barnum the decades that, as it turned out, remained to him. Besides, he had a story to tell and had every right to believe that he could tell it well. Some critics who despised the book saw it as just another of his humbugs—an attempt to fool the public into believing that he really could mean both to confess his sins and absolve himself of them—but clearly the autobiography was not intended as humbug. And if he really thought there was more profit in serious enterprises than in humbuggery, then its financial success proved his point. It has been estimated that his autobiography has sold more than a million copies down through the years, and it did well enough in the decade after its publication to encourage him to greatly expand it fifteen years later.
Barnum had been eager to enhance his public reputation as a serious person since before he began to pursue Jenny Lind. His emphasis on moral drama in his Lecture Room, the family-friendly educational aspects of the American Museum, and his energetic lecturing on temperance all show that he was sincerely putting shameless humbuggery behind him and turning to more substantial and respectable pursuits. His autobiography was meant to emphasize this change in him, admitting (if a little too robustly) his sins and touting his virtues. But the negative aspects of its reception were unexpected. That his efforts at transformation could be so easily ignored and adamantly rejected in so many quarters stung and even staggered him. It must have been especially hurtful to be treated so harshly in Britain, where he had first been accepted by many people at the top of society—a continuing source of pride. Barnum would indeed recommit himself to become a more serious and more worthwhile person in the years after The Life of P. T. Barnum appeared. And although he never admitted it, the dismissive things said about his book and about himself must have motivated this change to come as much as the difficulties that still lay ahead.