After Lincoln’s reelection on November 8, 1864, as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s incendiary march through Georgia to the sea was under way, the Confederate government in Richmond, working with operatives in Canada, hatched a plot to send dozens of agents into New York to set the city ablaze in retribution. Richmond had appropriated $20,000 to support this quixotic effort. The hope was that the many Copperheads in the city (where the vote had gone two to one against Lincoln) would rise up from the ashes in general rebellion and unite New York with the Confederate cause.
The agents, who were equipped with black leather valises containing turpentine and bottles of phosphorus, checked into at least thirteen of the city’s most prominent hotels with the intention of dousing their rooms in the turpentine and uncorking the combustible phosphorus. They also set fires, or tried to, on docks along the Hudson, and in lumberyards and other places of business, including Niblo’s Garden, the Winter Garden, and Barnum’s American Museum. The fires, set on November 24 and 25, mostly failed to catch, and those that did caused only minor damage rather than the general conflagration the Rebels hoped for. The fire at Barnum’s was started at 9 p.m. on November 25 on the main building’s fifth floor, while a performance was under way in the Lecture Hall below. The flames were soon put out, but not before a cry of “Fire!” led to the chaotic emptying of the theater, with some people sliding down iron pillars supporting the balconies. Thanks to the quick and calm response of museum employees, however, no injuries and only a few torn dresses resulted. Barnum’s response was to create and display a wax figure of the captured Rebel arsonist Robert Cobb Kennedy, who would be executed the following spring for his role in the citywide attack.1
The fire, the panic, and the calm response of Barnum’s staff presaged a much more catastrophic event at the museum eight months later, and Barnum’s eagerness to put the museum’s waxworks in action again might have been a contributing factor. The spring of 1865 was among the most momentous seasons in the history of the nation, with General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, and the capture of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, in Georgia on May 10. Northern newspapers and many cartoons reported falsely that Davis had been caught wearing his wife’s petticoats. Barnum capitalized on the patriotic zeal of the press by creating a wax figure he called “The Belle of Richmond,” depicting Davis in a bonnet and a plaid dress. Barnum was soon running newspaper advertisements announcing that “JEFF.DAVIS IN PETTICOATS” was at the museum. But the Belle’s run would not be a long one. Less than two months later, soon after noon on July 13, fire broke out somewhere in the bowels of the museum, and within half an hour “forked tongues of flames were darting through every window, wreathing the painted medallions outside with chaplets of fire, and sweeping away at a single touch the veracious canvas representations of the whales, giantesses and alligators within.”2
As Barnum’s employees tried to save some of the museum’s purported million objects, and as visitors made off with them as keepsakes, a large crowd gathered on Broadway and the other streets around the museum, so densely packed that when the first of what would be thirty fire companies arrived at the scene, it caused “some severe accidents.” The police tried to push the crowd back, but when one of the steam-powered fire engines let off a blast that sounded like an elephant’s trumpet, panic flared among those still thronging the streets and people were trampled. Despite the chaos, nobody was killed.
The dusty museum itself, so crowded with objects, was a vast tinderbox, and soon the flames were leaping high into the sky. Every person inside escaped, some by making heroic leaps onto balconies and from there to the ground; one facetious report suggested that the giantess Anna Swan had to be hoisted down from a third-story window that was enlarged on the spot to get her through. The trained seal named Ned made its way out of the museum and through the crowd before it was safely captured. One bear supposedly climbed down a ladder to the ground, and some of Barnum’s rare birds were set free to fly away. But most of the animals in the large menagerie were not saved. Two recently arrived whales from Labrador, which were being exhibited on the second floor in a tank twenty-five feet in diameter, were sacrificed when firemen broke the tank’s glass walls so that the tons of Croton Reservoir water within might douse the fire below. The crowd outside could hear the pitiable sounds the whales made as they burned to death; monkeys, tigers, alligators, a kangaroo, and numberless other exotic animals perished in their cages, and some of the huge snakes that escaped their glass box were said to be seen slithering down stairways before they died.
Newspapers reported that the crowds in the streets were more amused than horrified by the whole scene, eager to get free glimpses of Barnum’s albinos and other human curiosities as they escaped through the crowd. Spectators hollered out what passed for witticisms about the many animals, as well as objects of real value, that were being lost in front of them. Before the smoke and fire grew too dangerous, some objects were tossed from the windows to the streets below. Although most of Barnum’s many wax figures simply melted into fuel for the fire, the figure of Jefferson Davis did sail out a window, its petticoats exposed to the crowd, where it (or perhaps just its head, as one report had it), was hanged from a lamppost on Fulton Street, beside St. Paul’s Church. The crowd made merry reference to a line in the famous Union marching song “John Brown’s Body,” which spoke of hanging “Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.”
Soon the roof collapsed, and the inside of the building was likened to the crater of an active volcano. Then, according to a report the next day in the New-York Times:
At 1:30 came a crash resounding like the explosion of a powder magazine. The whole wall on the Ann-street side had fallen. A cloud of dust and smoke filled the air, making it dark as twilight, and rendering it impossible to descry objects at short distance.
At 1:45 o’clock the Broadway front of the Museum fell in three different sections, one after the other. . . .
Another section was left in the shape of an elongated triangle, and not unlike the steeple of a church. In a few moments this sunk slowly down, the point still remaining upright and in position until the whole section disappeared.3
Barnum had not been in the city at the time of the fire and had heard about it through Samuel Hurd, his daughter Helen’s husband, who was now the assistant manager of the museum and who had been at his office on the second floor as it began. When the fire reached a point of no return, Hurd pulled several thousand dollars from his desk and, along with account books, added them to the “many thousand dollars” in Barnum’s safe, which was recovered after the fire, its contents spared. Upon escaping the building, Hurd telegrammed Barnum, who was giving a speech to the Connecticut legislature in Hartford, apprising him that the museum was engulfed and likely to be a total loss. Barnum wrote in his 1869 autobiography what newspaper reports at the time also said, that he read the telegram calmly, folded it up on his desk, and finished his speech—“in the coolest manner possible,” as even the Barnum-despising Herald put it. That night he returned to Bridgeport, spent the evening with his family, and waited until the next morning to go to New York. He checked in at the Astor House, which, unlike a number of other buildings in the neighborhood of the museum, had not been damaged by the fire.4
Barnum held court in the hotel that morning, visited by sympathetic friends while offering a brave face to members of the press. In this gathering, the Herald wrote, “Mr. Barnum was the most buoyant of all. Instead of alluding to or mourning over his loss, he spoke of nothing but the prospectus for his new museum. This, he asserts, will surpass anything of the sort ever attempted.” Barnum vowed to move farther uptown and to construct a building that “will astonish the world.” His new menagerie would be triple the size of the one whose bones and ashes smoldered just across the street, and he would build a collection of curiosities unlike any “on this continent or any other.” Later that day he set up in the office of his other son-in-law, David Thompson, at 35 Chambers Street, where he issued a notice to the public promising to have a new museum in six months and to find a theater within a few days so that at least some of his performers and exhibitors could get back to work. Many of his anxious employees visited him that day; Barnum said the fire made 150 people temporarily jobless, and the Herald ran an item listing some sixty of them by name and job, including his longest-serving employee, the naturalist Emile Guillaudeu, who had been working for the museum and its predecessors since 1810. A theatrical benefit would soon be arranged for them at the Academy of Music—possibly Barnum’s idea, since the Herald printed this suggestion the next day in the midst of its reporting about the showman.5
Barnum demonstrated admirable energy, optimism, and concern for his workers, and his surefooted handling of the public-relations aspect of the disaster is astonishing if unnervingly cool-headed. He knew to act immediately, taking control of the situation, thanking his many customers and promoting the new museum he would create, while also skillfully taking advantage of the eager interest of the press in covering a disaster and its aftermath and availing himself of the natural sympathy that would flow his way after so great a calamity.
Neither the cause of the fire nor where it started has ever been definitively proven. Barnum placed its origins in a boiler room; the New-York Times put it in an adjacent building’s basement furnace; Samuel Hurd said it was under a staircase; the museum treasurer, H. O. Tiffany, said it originated in three different places at once, suggesting deliberate sabotage. Was the cause mechanical or arson? Southern arsonists had already attacked the museum once, and rumors that it might be attacked again would only have been fueled by the prominence of the exhibit of Jefferson Davis in petticoats. If that wax figure was the cause, it was the most expensive exhibit Barnum ever mounted.6
AS THE END OF THE war drew near, Barnum’s growing political consciousness and ever-present industriousness took him in an unlikely direction. He decided to run for political office. His distaste for his Copperhead neighbors in New York and Connecticut had grown as the war proceeded, and his now strong belief in abolition led him to agree to run as a Republican or Union candidate from the town of Fairfield for the Connecticut legislature. “I did this,” he wrote in his autobiography, “because I felt that it would be an honor to be permitted to vote for the then proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States to abolish slavery forever from the land.” He was successfully elected in April 1865, and he immediately got to work.
Connecticut’s General Assembly quickly and unanimously voted to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, making Barnum’s wish come true two days after he took office on May 2. But an amendment to the state’s own constitution proposing to drop the word white from the qualifications to vote “was violently opposed by the Democratic members,” Barnum wrote. On May 26, 1865, the freshman legislator from Fairfield rose in favor of the amendment. He spoke passionately, not holding back his partisan potshots, and ruminated on how a party calling itself Democratic could be so opposed to democracy. He was proud of the speech, devoting thirteen pages of his autobiography to quoting what even at that length was only a summary of it, because, as he explained in a letter three days later, “the opposition interrupted me and put me on my mettle, & I gave them an hour and a half without tiring anybody.”7
In the speech, which was widely quoted and praised in the newspapers, Barnum energetically moved to fulfill the obligations for which so many Union troops had died. He attempted to rise above the racism of his time, asserting that in his travels through the South he had observed “that the slaves, as a body, are more intelligent than the poor whites.” He left little doubt in the minds of his listeners that his commitment to enfranchise black people living in Connecticut was unflinching and unwavering. More meaningfully, the speech served its purpose in the legislature, and the amendment passed. Nonetheless, when it was put before a state referendum in the fall, it failed by about five thousand votes. Black citizens in Connecticut would get the vote only with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870, and the word white would not be removed from the state constitution until 1876.8
In the General Assembly, Barnum chaired both the agriculture and the state house committees, and he led a fight against railroad interests in the state government. He worried that the New York and New Haven Railroad, which served his part of the state, would use its monopoly status and political clout to hike prices for Connecticut commuters, as had been done with other commuter lines into New York. The railroad lobby, however, was already so deeply lodged in the legislature that Barnum and his allies fought them day in and day out on many fronts. Despite his lasting reputation as a cynic, his anger over the way the railroad could buy legislators was undoubtedly genuine, as was his interest in protecting voters and extending the right to vote in the state.
Indeed, the speech he was giving when he received the terrible telegram about the museum fire was in favor of a measure regulating how the railroads could increase commuter fares; that bill “was carried almost with a ‘hurrah’ ” by the state house. Barnum later noted with satisfaction that the measure “annually adds many dollars to the assessment roll of Connecticut,” since a large number of new citizens bought land along the railroad as a result. Barnum ran for the legislature again the next spring, mainly, he asserted, because a director of the New York and New Haven Railroad had vowed that he would not be elected again. Yet he prevailed, and served a second term as a representative for Fairfield. It was less eventful than the first, but Barnum acknowledged that it “was very agreeable” to him.9
In 1867, for the third spring in a row, his party asked him to run for office, this time for the U.S. Congress in a district including Fairfield and Litchfield counties. His Democratic opponent turned out to be a rich industrialist and a distant cousin, William H. Barnum, who would go on to have a long career in Democratic politics, even serving as a U.S. senator from Connecticut.10
The battle of the Barnums was hard fought and not particularly clean. P.T. made use of his contacts in the Bridgeport and New York press to publicize an anonymous letter from a potential constituent in Litchfield alleging that William H. was planning to spend $50,000 to buy votes in the election and challenging P.T. to “fight fire with fire.” Despite the letter’s anonymity, and therefore the possibility that P.T. or a supporter had written it, papers published both it and P.T.’s high-minded reply, to which he primly appended the Connecticut statute forbidding the bribery of voters.
Now that he was operating on a larger stage than in his previous campaigns, he ran into objections based on his long career as a purveyor of humbugs. The Nation, not a Democratic organ, published a long rant in the middle of the campaign bemoaning what it saw as a postwar failure to count character as the most important trait of political leaders, and used Barnum as the current example. Although the magazine’s writer praised him for his antislavery and pro-Union positions as well as his defense of “sobriety and good order”—allowing “that he has public spirit and is a good neighbor” (faint praise, that)—he wrote that none of this atoned for Barnum’s “having been for twenty or thirty years a depraving and demoralizing influence.” It was the old argument about Barnum, that he was a humbug and that he not only felt unashamed of his behavior, but even reveled in it and the riches it brought him. The heart of their charge against him, finally, had to do with his “vulgarity.”11
A less somber and self-satisfied attack came on March 5 from Mark Twain, then thirty-one and recently returned from the West, imagining in the pages of a New York newspaper “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress,” which Twain was able to obtain, the conceit went, by “Spiritual Telegraph.” The introduction to the speech predicted that Barnum “will find the House of Representatives a most excellent advertising medium” and suggested that “he can dove-tail business and patriotism together to the mutual benefit of himself and the Great Republic.” In the imaginary speech itself, Representative Barnum managed to go on at length about all the attractions of his museum, not failing to mention (twice) that peanuts were for sale throughout the building, and calling for the impeachment of “the dread boss monkey”—that would be President Andrew Johnson—and the restoration of “the Happy Family of the Union.” Twain’s effort in an evening paper in New York probably had no impact on voters in Connecticut, but the eventual outcome of the race did call into question the efficacy of the Spiritual Telegraph.12
On April 1, Connecticut voters went for Democratic candidates across the state, reacting in part against issues such as the one Barnum had backed in the legislature proposing black suffrage. The state’s Republican governor, Joseph Roswell Hawley, who had risen to the rank of brigadier general during the Civil War, was himself defeated that day. Hawley blamed the nomination of Phineas T. Barnum as the Connecticut Republican Party’s “great blunder,” but he still defended Barnum as “a better man than many out of the state suppose. He is one of those fellows who have double characters, one professional & scoundrelly, the other private, church-going, decorous, and utterly abstinent from pocket-picking. . . . But he was a burden.”13
Barnum lost handily to his distant cousin, but worse than the loss, as he wrote, was the contest itself: “The filth and scandal, the slanders and vindictiveness, the plottings and fawnings, the fidelity, treachery, meanness, and manliness, which by turns exhibited themselves in the exciting scenes preceding the election, were novel to me.” He did not have what it took to “make a lithe and oily politician” and had not chosen in the campaign “to shake hands with those whom I despised, and to kiss the dirty babies of those whose votes were courted.” Still, this would not be his last foray into elective politics.14
MARK TWAIN WAS ABLE TO imagine Barnum puffing his museum in Congress because, as he promised the public, Barnum had opened a second museum within weeks after the first one burned. Nine days after the fire, two shows benefiting his employees played at the Academy of Music, where everyone involved, from the performers and musicians to the carpenters and machinists, donated their time to the cause. Barnum spoke at both showings, announcing that some of his artists would be appearing very soon at the Winter Garden on Broadway at Bond Street and that he was refurbishing the site of the old Chinese Museum, up Broadway between Spring and Prince Streets, to open a new but temporary museum. As the Herald reported about his appearances at the Academy, “Barnum was greeted with much applause during the delivery of his remarks, which he interlarded with characteristic anecdotes and the development of a philosophy strictly of the Barnum school.” For example, he told the packed houses that he believed the fire had been sent by Providence to rid his name and that of his museum of the stench of humbug.15
One week later, on July 28, 1865, his Winter Garden show opened, featuring an orchestra, the presentation by his mimes of a theatrical called “The Green Monster,” and a family of trapeze artists performing “Astounding Aerial Flights”—all twice daily. By September 5 the new museum was ready for a preview for the press and important friends. As Barnum and Samuel Hurd took their guests through the newly arranged space, the visitors saw that it was bigger than the old museum, divided into “five roomy saloons and a theatre or a lecture room” on four floors taking up the entire block. Besides featuring a few wax figures saved from the fire, and Ned the Learned Seal (“which by the way has grown considerably since his rescue,” the Sun observed), Barnum’s New Museum offered a new and larger “Happy Family,” an aquarium, model steam engines, a glass-blowing shop, a shooting gallery, new cosmorama pictures and stereoscopes, and a reported 100,000 new curiosities, stuffed fauna, and minerals. Barnum also returned with a wide array of “human curiosities,” touting a Cherokee Indian with no arms, Anna Swan and other giants, a woman weighing 660 pounds, and the Circassian beauties. Most remarkable, perhaps, was that Barnum had in so short a time constructed a new Lecture Room, with a stage fifty feet wide, red velvet seats and benches to accommodate 2,500 customers, and a huge drop curtain featuring painted images of Barnum and Jenny Lind flanking a representation of the old museum and the words, “It still lives, and rises Phoenix like from the ashes.” Although Barnum’s architect-builder admitted that there was still much to do, the museum opened for business the next morning.16
Barnum’s ability to sink so much money into the new museum after losing so much in the severely underinsured old one was owed partly to his longtime nemesis, James Gordon Bennett of the Herald. Bennett wanted to construct a new building for the newspaper on the old American Museum land and paid Barnum $200,000 for the eleven years left in his lease. Bennett then decided to buy the land itself, but somehow when his agents came up with an offer, they neglected to subtract the $200,000 for the lease, so when Bennett sealed the deal, he in effect leased the building at the same time he was buying it. Bennett tried to wriggle out of the purchase and had his lawyer send for Barnum to inform him that he wanted his lease money back. To which Barnum memorably replied, “Nonsense, I shall do nothing of the sort, I don’t make child’s bargains.” Bennett would eventually lose a suit by the owner of the land compelling him to pay the $500,000 he had agreed in writing to spend on the property. The day after Barnum’s meeting with Bennett’s lawyer, an ad for his Winter Garden show failed to run as scheduled in the Herald. Hustling over to the newspaper’s office to find out why, Barnum was told that the Herald would no longer accept his advertising. Even this, though, Barnum parried. He quickly called a meeting of an association of New York theater managers, with the result that they all agreed to stop advertising in the Herald and to stop using the newspaper’s facilities for printing playbills, a lucrative add-on that Bennett had insisted upon as a condition of running their ads. For the next two years, all the principal theaters in New York headed all their ads in the other New York papers with the words, “This Establishment does not Advertise in the New York ‘Herald.’ ” At the end of the two years, the theater managers felt they had made their point and began to advertise with Bennett again. All of them, that is, except Barnum.17
Soon after the new museum opened, Barnum went into business with a lion tamer, animal trainer, and menagerie owner named Isaac Van Amburgh, who had been established in the Broadway building that Barnum had rehabbed, exhibiting his menagerie there when not touring. Thus the seal Ned was joined by an African elephant, the country’s only giraffe, lions and tigers, and “every description of wild animal.” Under the new arrangement, the menagerie would continue to travel in the warm months and be on exhibit in the museum in the cold months. The Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum and Menagerie Company also bought thirty acres of land in Bridgeport, suitable for breeding and training animals for exhibition. Part of the deal in creating the new company was that Barnum would now be the museum’s general manager in name only and could spend more time at home or traveling, visiting the museum only once a week when he was nearby.
He soon signed on for a lecture tour in the Midwest (then called the West), giving a talk called “Success, or the Art of Money-Getting,” while also continuing his long habit of lecturing on temperance. During this time, he worked on an ambitious plan to start a free national museum and managed to enlist in the effort a number of prominent men, including the president himself. Andrew Johnson signed a proclamation urging “our Ministers, Consuls, and commercial agents” to assist Barnum in acquiring throughout the world exhibits for the new project. Following up in Washington, Barnum met with both the sitting president and a future one, Ulysses S. Grant, who gave him for exhibition a hat he had worn during the war.18
The summer following the congressional elections in April 1867, the Barnums sold Lindencroft, their large house in Fairfield, and moved for the season into a farmhouse on the shore of Long Island Sound, where the sea breezes were thought to be better for Charity’s health. All three of Barnum’s daughters now lived in New York City with their husbands, so that same summer he and Charity bought an impressive town house at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, “at the crowning point of Murray Hill,” to be close to his family for the seven colder months of the year. He and Charity moved into the house in November. In his 1869 autobiography, he sang the praises of city life for a man his age: “One loves to find the morning papers, fresh from the press, lying upon the breakfast-table; and the city is the centre of attractions in the way of operas, concerts, picture-galleries, libraries, the best music, the best preaching, the best of everything in aesthetical enjoyments.” In addition to these benefits, the Barnums were close enough to Central Park to “spend hours of every fine day in that great pleasure-ground.”19
Having a mansion in town also made it possible to express the generosity he so often showed his friends. Two of them, a Universalist minister named George Emerson, who spent two nights a week with the Barnums for several years, and Greeley, the eminent if somewhat scatterbrained newspaper editor, were given keys to the house and an open invitation, such as this one from Charity to Emerson: “Come now as often as you can and stay as long as you can; only, remember, you are not company.” Greeley sometimes did dwell with them for weeks on end, with Barnum often offering him such domestic comforts as slippers or a robe. Many other friends also enjoyed the hospitality of the household when they were in town. The Barnum dinner table might feature Tom Thumb and his troupe on one night and the latest fashionable author on another. Always, George Emerson reminisced about Barnum, “the incorrigible humorist at the head of the table, ready to gush at any time, seemed to have no power to keep the jokes back when knife and fork were at play.”20
The preacher also recalled one of Barnum’s many acts of charity, when he gave an organ to Emerson’s church. Barnum urged his friend not to publicize the fact so that others who needed something would not besiege him. But Emerson noted that Barnum was routinely besieged anyway, his meals often interrupted by a solicitation at the door, so Barnum must simply have preferred not to take credit for this unprofitable act of philanthropy.
Other friends included the Reverends Edwin H. Chapin and Abel C. Thomas and a literary set he would see at the Sunday evening salon of the poets Alice and Phoebe Cary. There, on Twentieth Street, Barnum and Greeley might mingle with the latter’s Tribune protégé Whitelaw Reid, the violinist Ole Bull, or the feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier also attended the soirees, but he and Barnum apparently never crossed paths. Phoebe Cary especially attracted Barnum for her spontaneous wit, and the two would sometimes go for carriage rides together in Central Park.
This life of urban leisure did not last untroubled for long. On the bitter cold, snowy morning of March 3, 1868, Barnum was enjoying those fresh-pressed newspapers at his breakfast table with Charity and Louise Thomas, the wife of Reverend Thomas, when he came upon an item on a late-closing page of the Tribune headlined, “Barnum’s Museum Burned: The Building and Menagerie Totally Destroyed.” He claims to have calmly read these words aloud to the two women, his tone so matter-of-fact that both took it as a joke. Only as he continued reading them the report, which said the fire had started at 12:30 that very morning, did Mrs. Thomas look over his shoulder to see that it was indeed true.21
If it seems odd that the newspaper should have reached him before anyone from his company did, consider that the fire had started in the throes of a huge snowstorm, the winds of which had pushed up large drifts in the streets, making public transportation problematic. The same drifts had allowed the fire to grow beyond containment. After the first alarm, it had taken the firemen half an hour to reach the museum, because they were fighting a blaze in a toy store on Spring Street. Although they sprayed the flames in the museum and then its ruins for hours, creating a picturesque “palace of ice” in the bitter cold, the fire could not be managed until it had done its worst. Barnum related that it started with “a defective flue in a restaurant in the basement of the building,” Charles Swift’s oyster saloon. The Circassian beauty Zalumma Agra, who, along with several others, slept in the building, had wakened from a restless sleep and looked out her window on Broadway to see flames pouring from a window on a floor below. Her cry of “Fire!” roused Anna Swan, who was already awake, listening to the stirrings from the menagerie, where the lions and a gray wolf had been exchanging growls and then howls. The reality of the second blaze then clicked into place, and all of the humans were able to escape the conflagration.22
Ned the Learned Seal was not so lucky. Although he died in the fire, more animals were saved than in the first blaze, including “one young elephant,” a giraffe, three kangaroos, a leopard, two camels, three llamas, and a variety of smaller animals and birds. Once again many other animals were lost, including a number of monkeys and a tiger that managed to escape the building, frightening the many spectators watching even in the middle of the night, until “an intrepid policeman with revolver . . . fired shot after shot,” killing it. In describing this fire, Barnum paused in his autobiography to express regret for the fate of the animals. “The loss was a large one, and the complete frustration of our plans for the future was a serious consideration. But worse than all were the sufferings of the poor wild animals which were burned to death in their cages.”23
Barnum’s immediate public response was noticeably different from that after the first fire. A brief notice sent to the Tribune reported that his company would not rebuild the museum on the spot of its ruins and took the opportunity to announce that “the six lots on which the Museum stood are for sale”—seventy-five feet of street front on both Broadway and Mercer, the depth of the block being two hundred feet. He sold the lots in June for $432,000, which made a nice dent in his losses. Still, he estimated that both museum fires and the one at Iranistan had cost him more than a million dollars, and he decided now that his long museum-keeping career was at an end. George Emerson reported that the liveliest evening he ever spent at Barnum’s table happened the day after the showman’s second Broadway museum burned to the ground. Greeley had suggested to his friend after the first museum burned that he should “take this fire as a notice to quit, and go a-fishing.” Now Barnum was ready to abide by that advice.24