On an early August morning in 1835 a literate majority of New York City's 270,000 citizens awakened to learn of a new phenomenon in their midst. A new age was upon them—the age of showmanship.
In the weeks and months before that fateful morning, all classes of New Yorkers—the old-fashioned Knickerbockers, the nouveaux riches or Shoddyites, the professional people and artists—had prided themselves on the fact that they possessed and patronized more churches than places of amusement. Laws were blue, and life was gray. Theaters and exhibitions were regarded by most as outposts of the Devil. Sport was confined to intoxication, assault and battery, and discreet fornication.
Newspapers, as yet inhibited, were devoted to chaste reportage: the Democratic Party had nominated bantam cock Martin Van Buren for President; Oberlin College, to dramatize its attitude toward slavery, was accepting Negro students; a British chemist named James Smithson had willed £100,000 to establish an American institute "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men"; the National Trades' Union deplored child labor in the cotton and wool industries; the frigate Constitution had recently returned from Europe, bearing as its most distinguished passenger Edward Livingston, United States minister to France; General Sam Houston had been made the commander of the Texan army; the season's best-seller was Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Rienzi, and The Letters and Papers of Washington, edited by Jared Sparks, had just been published.
But of curiosity and wonder and sensation there was little until that early August morning when New Yorkers awakened to read in press advertisements, on street posters, in pamphlets hawked at six cents a copy, that a colored woman 161 years of age, who had been President George Washington's nurse and nanny was being placed on public exhibit in Niblo's Garden. The ancient's name was Joice Heth, the name of her sponsor Phineas T. Barnum.
The advertisements read: "The Greatest Natural & National Curiosity in The World. Joice Heth, nurse to General George Washington, (the Father of our Country). . . . Joice Heth is unquestionably the most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the World! She was the slave of Augustine Washington (the father of General Washington), and was the first person who put clothes on the unconscious infant, who, in after days, led our heroic fathers on to glory, to victory, and freedom. To use her own language when speaking of the illustrious Father of His Country, 'she raised him.' Joice Heth was born in the year 1674, and has, consequently, now arrived at the astonishing Age of 161 Years. She weighs but Forty-Six Pounds, and yet is very cheerful and interesting. She retains her faculties in an unparalleled degree, converses freely, sings numerous hymns, relates many interesting anecdotes of the boy Washington, and often laughs heartily at her own remarks, or those of the spectators. Her health is perfectly good, and her appearance very neat. She is a Baptist and takes great pleasure in conversing with ministers and religious persons. The appearance of this marvelous relic of antiquity strikes the beholder with amazement, and convinces him that his eyes are resting on the oldest specimen of mortality they ever before beheld. Original, authentic, and indisputable documents accompanying her prove, however astonishing the fact may appear, that Joice Heth is in every respect the person she is represented."
The announcement was oddly electrifying. It was something different in the drab monotony of everyday routine. Here was a living link to the first President, already in his grave thirty-six years and an austere deity to a new generation. Here was a hoary human whose croaking voice had cooed to the infant Washington and whose wrinkled hands had caressed him. To view this relic excavated from the dim past would be strange fun and even patriotic. And because the advertisements promised that she was a True Believer who chanted "hymns" and took pleasure in "conversing with ministers," a visit to this historic freak would certainly not offend the clergy or break its edicts against frivolity and hedonism.
Even as thousands of New Yorkers, titillated, prepared to invade Niblo's Garden for a day's diversion, thousands more considered the attraction and wondered if it was authentic. After all, who was this P. T. Barnum anyway? Was he reputable enough to stand behind his fantastic find?
Renown and repute P. T. Barnum had not in that late summer of 1835. He was, indeed, a nonentity—almost for the very last time in what was to be a most notorious and spectacular life. Later, of course, he would amass a fortune of four million dollars, and in so doing become a household name in America and throughout the world. He would become the personal friend of Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln, of William Ewart Gladstone and Mark Twain, of William Makepeace Thackeray and Horace Greeley. He would introduce to America the modem public museum, the popular concert, and the three-ring circus, all forerunners of vaudeville, motion pictures, and television. He would invent modern advertising and showmanship. And he would make himself an international legend. Once, meeting General Ulysses S. Grant, he would say: "General, since your journey around the world you are the best-known man on the globe," and Grant would honestly reply: "No, sir, your name is familiar to multitudes who never heard of me. Wherever I went, among the most distant nations, the fact that I was an American led to constant inquiries whether I knew Barnum."
But this was 1835, and P. T. Barnum was as yet unsuccessful and unknown. At the time when he promoted Joice Heth, he was only twenty-five, a Connecticut Yankee six foot two inches in height, a bundle of massive energy, with curly, receding hair above wide ingenuous blue eyes, a bulbous nose, a full, amused mouth, a cleft chin, and a high-pitched voice. Until this moment, he had been Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. He had served as a clerk in several retail shops, had conducted legal lotteries, had been proprietor of his own fruit store, had edited a liberal weekly, had sold hats and caps on commission, and, finally, had opened a small grocery store in New York with one John Moody as his partner, supplementing this income by running a boardinghouse with his wife. Not until his discovery of Joice Heth had he found himself. But in his flamboyant exhibition of this wizened and repulsive nursemaid, he would later admit: "I had at last found my true vocation." Equally important, his eager, waiting public had at last found a way of having fun without the fear of fire and brimstone.
How had the age of showmanship come about?
On an ordinary working day in the latter part of July 1835, young Phineas T. Barnum was morosely tending his grocery store and consulting advertisements of the penny New York Sun in the hope of finding some golden opportunity, when an old neighbor and customer named Coley Bartram, of Reading, Connecticut, came calling.
As Bartram made his purchases, he related some of his recent activities, and then, remembering the proprietor's unceasing interest in speculative investments, he told Barnum of the latest project that he had discarded. Bartram explained that recently he and one R. W. Lindsay had purchased a curiosity as a business investment, a slave woman thought to be 161 years old and formerly the nurse of President Washington. They had been exhibiting her at the Masonic Hall in Philadelphia. But Bartram had soon wearied of the project, and had sold his interest in the woman to Lindsay. And now Lindsay, homesick for his native Kentucky and feeling that he had little ability as a showman, wanted to get rid of the woman and was casting about for a buyer. Was this something that might interest Barnum?
At once Barnum was attentive. He vaguely recalled having read several paragraphs about the exhibit in the New York press. Could Bartram refresh his memory? Bartram could, indeed. He handed Barnum a clipping from The Pennsylvania Inquirer, dated July 1, 1835:
"CURIOSITY.—The citizens of Philadelphia and its vicinity have an opportunity of witnessing at the Masonic Hall, one of the greatest natural curiosities ever witnessed, viz., JOICE HETH, a negress aged 161 years, who formerly belonged to the father of General Washington. She has been a member of the Baptist church one hundred and sixteen years, and can rehearse many hymns, and sing them according to former custom. She was born near the old Potomac River in Virginia, and has for ninety or one hundred years lived in Paris, Kentucky, with the Bowling family.
"All who have seen this extraordinary woman are satisfied of the truth of the account of her age. The evidence of the Bowling family, which is respectable, is strong, but the original bill of sale of Augustine Washington, in his own handwriting, and other evidence which the proprietor has in his possession, will satisfy even the most incredulous.
"A lady will attend at the hall during the afternoon and evening for the accommodation of those ladies who may call."
Something stirred inside Barnum. He must see this oddity for himself. At the earliest opportunity, he made off for Philadelphia by stagecoach, sought out Lindsay at the Masonic Hall, confirmed the fact that Joice Heth was for sale, and then asked to meet her.
He was solemnly ushered into the presence of the extraordinary ancient. "She was lying upon a high lounge in the middle of the room," he later reported in his autobiography. "Her lower extremities were drawn up, with her knees elevated some two feet above the top of the lounge. She was apparently in good health and spirits, but former disease or old age, or perhaps both combined, had rendered her unable to change her position; in fact, although she could move one of her arms at will, her lower limbs were fixed in their position, and could not be straightened. 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. The fingers of her left hand were drawn so as nearly to close it and remained fixed and immovable. The nails upon that hand were about four inches in length, and extended above her wrist. The nails upon her large toes had also grown to the thickness of nearly a quarter of an inch."
Gazing at her, Barnum reflected that she could as easily be "a thousand years old as any other age." He began to converse with her. He found her at first "sociable" and finally "garrulous"—especially when she reminisced about her servitude under George Washington's father and her duties in raising "dear little George" to maturity. Eventually she discussed the Baptist Church, and she sang a hymn.
Barnum was enchanted. He took Lindsay aside. Only one point remained to be discussed: proof of her age. Lindsay said that he had this proof. He explained that before George Washington's birth Augustine Washington had sold Joice Heth to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Atwood, who also lived in Bridges Creek, Virginia. When George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, his father borrowed Joice Heth back from his sister-in-law and retained her to raise the future President. The proof itself was encased in a glass frame. It was a yellowing document, greatly creased and worn, a bill of sale from Augustine Washington to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Atwood, for "one negro woman, named Joice Heth, aged fifty-four years, for and in consideration of the sum of thirty-three pounds lawful money of Virginia." The document was dated February 5, 1727, and it had been witnessed by William Washington and Richard Buckner.
Barnum was satisfied. Only one more question disturbed him. Why had the existence "of such an extraordinary old woman" not come to light years before? Lindsay had the answer. He replied "that she had been lying in an out-house of John S. Bowling of Kentucky for many years, that no one knew or seemed to care how old she was, that she had been brought thither from Virginia a long time ago, and that the fact of her extreme age had been but recently brought to light by the discovery of this old bill of sale in the Record Office in Virginia by the son of Mr. Bowling, who, while looking over the ancient papers in that office, happened to notice the paper endorsed Joice Heth."
Lindsay, a neighbor of the respectable Mr. Bowling, had heard of the living antique and purchased her, and now he was prepared to dispose of her to Barnum for $3,000. Barnum, always at his best in a horse trade, reacted unfavorably to the price. The two men haggled, and when they were done Lindsay had agreed to accept $1,000 for his exhibit.
Barnum had only $500 to his name. He took a ten-day option on Joice Heth, and then returned to New York to raise the rest of the money. It was not easy. Barnum convinced his wife that though, true enough, there was the definite risk that Joice Heth might die and they would lose their full investment, the venture held enough promise to warrant gambling their entire savings. Then, dazzling a friend with the marvel of his freak, he borrowed the remaining $500. And finally, because he needed cash for living and incidental business expenses, he sold his half interest in the grocery store to his partner, Moody. Then he rushed back to Philadelphia, paid off Lindsay, and overnight became showman and slaveholder.
The site chosen for the exhibition was all-important. Barnum selected Niblo's Garden. This attractive open-air saloon or refreshment center, profuse with flowers and trees, featured a musical floor show. Once Barnum had applied to William Niblo, the proprietor, for a job as bartender, and now, presenting himself again, he was grateful that Niblo did not remember that occasion.
While Niblo had no desire to display Joice Heth in his saloon, he was agreeable to leasing Barnum a large apartment in the building next door. In return for renting this room, paying for all printing and advertising, and furnishing a ticket-seller, Niblo was promised one half of the gross box-office receipts. Barnum next proceeded to hire an assistant, someone who would help him in promotion and serve as master of ceremonies. The assistant was Levi Lyman, a onetime attorney who had practiced in Penn Yan, New York. "He was a shrewd, sociable and somewhat indolent Yankee," Barnum said, "possessed a good knowledge of human nature, was polite, agreeable, could converse on most subjects." The stage was set for "Aunt Joice," as Barnum liked to call his investment.
Barnum filled the newspapers with advertisements and flooded the metropolis with provocative posters. Levi Lyman wrote a learned pamphlet on Washington's nurse, and this, too, was added to the barrage of publicity. In a single week, New York was made Heth-conscious. Then the building adjacent to Niblo's Garden was thrown open to the public, and the public responded.
Most often, as the customers reverently crowded about the high lounge upon which the ancient one reclined—"an animated mummy," the Sun called her; "a loathsome old wench," a later critic decided—Barnum and Lyman jointly conducted the show. According to Barnum: "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 ever particular. Individuals among the audience 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 facts."
Joice Heth frequently sang or chatted with members of the audience. Once, an elderly Baptist minister joined her in singing a hymn. When he went on to sing several little-known ones, she continued the duet with him, filling in lyrics when he forgot them. On another occasion, Grant Thorbum, a reporter for the Evening Star, caught her placidly puffing at a pipe and asked how long she had been a pipe-smoker. "One hundred and twenty years!" she replied spiritedly.
The press, enjoying her, publicized her lavishly. "Methuselah was 969 years old when he died," stated the Daily Advertiser, "but nothing is said of the age of his wife. . . . It is not unlikely that the sex in the olden time were like the daughters at the present day—unwilling to tell their age. Joice Heth is an exception; she comes out boldly, and says she is rising 160." And the Spirit of the Times remarked: "The dear old lady, after carrying on a desperate flirtation with Death, has finally jilted him." One optimistic physician was heard to admit that Joice Heth might quite possibly prove to be immortal.
For several months, observed the Sun, Joice Heth "created quite a sensation among the lovers of the curious and the marvelous." And for each week of these months, Barnum divided a gross of $1,500 with Niblo. It was more money than he had ever known before, and when business in Manhattan slackened, Barnum determined to take his exhibit on the road.
He presented Joice briefly to the people of Providence, and then, on the heels of a saturation campaign of posters and newspaper notices, moved into staid Boston. He unveiled Joice on her high lounge in the middle of the small ballroom at Concert Hall, and the original sensation was repeated. The proper Bostonians appeared in droves.
Competing with Barnum and Joice in Concert Hall was the even more renowned Johann Nepomuk Maelzel with his Terrible Turk, an automaton chess player. Maelzel and his thinking-machine occupied the larger ballroom of the Hall, and they had been a popular attraction before the arrival of Barnum.
Immediately, perhaps apprehensively, Barnum attended his rival's show. Maelzel was a short, sixty-three-year-old inventor, mechanic, and musician who addressed his audience in a thick Teutonic accent. His robot, to which he had devoted the greater part of thirty-one years, was more impressive. Barnum has left no description of what next occurred, but Edgar Allan Poe, who saw the exhibit the same year, did. "At the hour appointed for exhibition, a curtain is withdrawn . . . and the machine rolled to within about twelve feet of the nearest of the spectators, between whom and it [the machine] a rope is stretched."
The automaton proved to be a larger-than-life-size Turkish gentleman, carved of wood, attired in plumed turban and flowing Oriental robe. He was seated on a backless chair behind a maple desk or chest three and a half feet wide, two feet four inches deep, and two and a half feet high. A chess board was built into the top of the desk.
Barnum watched closely as Maelzel unlocked the front of the chest and revealed a mass of wheels, levers, cylinders and other complicated machinery. Then, rolling the robot around, Maelzel opened the rear door, held a burning candle inside, and disclosed that this too was filled with machinery.
Next, Maelzel set the chess pieces on the board and invited a spectator to play against the machine. Then, as Maelzel turned a key in the hole at the left of the chest, the machinery noisily began to clank, grind, and whir. Slowly the Turk raised his left arm, moved it toward the chess piece he intended to play, grasped it with stiff fingers, placed it in the proper square, withdrew his arm, and rested it on a cushion. His perplexed human competitor made the next move, as the wooden Turk watched impassively. Then, amid much metallic noise, the automaton resumed. In half an hour the machine had conquered and the match was over.
Undoubtedly Barnum was awed, and perhaps he feared that Washington's nurse would not prove to be as great an attraction as this mysterious thinking-machine. He need not have worried on that score. For an automaton, even one that had defeated Napoleon, Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, and Benjamin Franklin, could not compete with a creature alive 161 years. Every day thereafter Barnum's smaller ballroom was mobbed to the point of suffocation while Maelzel's larger ballroom was almost empty. At last, Barnum, who had by then become acquainted with his competitor, begged Maelzel to close down his exhibit temporarily (for a sum of money, no doubt) and turn the larger ballroom over to Joice Heth. Maelzel, surprisingly, agreed.
Maelzel, who had been Royal Mechanician to the Imperial Court at Schönbrunn for seven years, had a long record of successful entertainment promotions. Although erroneously credited with inventing the metronome, he had done some work on improving the instrument. In 1812 he had fascinated Beethoven with his musical automata and had actually talked the composer into creating a mediocre but popular symphony, Wellington's Victory, for the mechanical wind band that he advertised as the Panharmonicon. For all his accomplishments and experience, Maelzel was still enormously impressed by young Barnum's ability to obtain free publicity. "I see that you understand the press," he told Barnum, "and that is the great thing. Nothing helps the showmans [sic] like the types and the ink. When your old woman dies, you come to me, and I will make your fortune. I will let you have my carousal, my automaton trumpet-player and many curious things which will make plenty of money."
Barnum was grateful for the offer. He regarded Maelzel with respect and considered him "the great father of caterers for public amusement." During many afternoons while Levi Lyman held forth with Joice Heth in the large ballroom, Barnum sat at the master's feet and had "long conversations." He had read something of the incredible automaton chess-player's history and had seen Maelzel work with it, but now he wanted to know every colorful detail. Maelzel obliged. From Maelzel's story, Barnum would learn one great lesson, a lesson that would help him to make his fortune. He would learn the importance of using royalty and the upper classes to build up and exploit an exhibit for the masses. He would also learn from Maelzel the means by which he could make Joice Heth an even bigger success in Boston.
Maelzel confessed that he had not invented the automaton chess player. This had been done by Baron Wolfgang von Kernpelen, a hydraulic engineer who had been a counselor of the Royal Chamber of Hungary. The Baron had built his Turk in Vienna in 1769 for the amusement of the Empress Maria Theresa. He traveled widely with the machine. Once, in Berlin, the Turk received a challenge from Napoleon Bonaparte. Though Napoleon was a notoriously poor chess player, he faced the Turk with confidence. According to the Illustrated London News of the period: "After some half-dozen moves, he [Napoleon] purposely made a false move, the figure inclined his head, replaced the piece, and made a sign for Napoleon to play again. Presently, he again played falsely; this time the Automaton removed the offending piece from the board, and played his own move. Napoleon was delighted, and to put the patience of his taciturn opponent to a severer test, he once more played incorrectly, upon which the Automaton raised his arm, and, sweeping the pieces from the board, declined to continue the game."
The Baron died in 1804, and the automaton was sold to one Anthon, who in turn sold it to Maelzel. In 1826, Maelzel brought the Turk to the United States. He was an immediate hit in New York. He was taken on tour as far west as Cincinnati. And in Baltimore, challenged by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, then eighty-nine and the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, the automaton graciously saw fit to lose the match.
Invariably spectators, Barnum among them, would ask Maelzel: "Is the Automaton a pure machine or not?" And invariably, Maelzel would reply: "I will say nothing about it." Certainly Barnum was unable to learn the secret. There were rumors that Maelzel worked the machine with his feet, others that magnets were somehow employed, but not until two years after Barnum saw Maelzel was something closer to the truth revealed.
In 1837 a drunken chess expert in Paris, M. Mouret, sold a cheap French magazine an exposé of the Turk, and the exposé was reprinted in the Washington Gazette. Mouret said that the machinery was a camouflage, and that the Turk was secretly operated by a small man hidden inside the chest. He said that he himself had been one of those hired by Maelzel for this work. The man thus concealed "sat on a lower species of stool, moving on casters, and had every facility afforded him for changing and shifting his position like an eel. While one part of the machine was shown to the public, he took refuge in another. . .
In 1859, Robert Houdin, the celebrated magician, elaborated the exposé in his autobiography. During a rebellion in Riga in 1796, an officer named Worousky had tried to escape the Russians and "had both thighs shattered by a cannonball." A sympathetic doctor saved him by amputating his legs and then hiding him. During Worousky's convalescence, Baron von Kempelen paid a visit to the doctor. Fascinated by Worousky's genius at chess, the Baron conceived a means of smuggling the cripple to safety. Within three months, he had built the automaton and secreted the stunted Worousky inside it, thereafter employing him as the Turk's alter ego.
When Maelzel bought the machine and took it to America, Worousky remained behind. Edgar Allan Poe thought that Maelzel employed an Alsatian chess expert named William Schlumberger to the same purpose. "There is a man, Schlumberger, who attends him [Maelzel] wherever he goes, but who has no ostensible occupation other than that of assisting in packing and unpacking of the automaton. This man is about the medium size, and has a remarkable stoop in the shoulders. . . . Some years ago Maelzel visited Richmond with his automata. . . Schlumberger was suddenly taken ill, and during his illness there was no exhibition of the Chess Player."
Three years after meeting Barnum, Maelzel took Schlumberger to Havana on a vacation. There Schlumberger died of yellow fever. Returning by boat to the States, Maelzel tried to drown his grief in wine, and himself died in his cabin. The Turk wound up in Philadelphia's Chinese Museum, where it was destroyed in the fire of 1854.
The considerable time that Barnum spent with Maelzel in Boston proved to have been more than mere diversion: he was able to turn it to profit. After several weeks, Joice Heth had begun to lose her appeal, and the crowds had started to thin. Listening to Maelzel, and contemplating his Turk, Barnum was struck with an idea. Why not announce that Joice Heth was also an automaton and start the excitement all over again?
Soon, there appeared in the Boston press an open letter signed "A Visitor." It said in part: "Joice Heth is not a human being. What purports to be a remarkably old woman is simply a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together, and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the operator. The exhibitor is a ventriloquist, and all the conversations apparently held with the ancient lady are purely imaginary, so far as she is concerned. . ."
Curiosity was again piqued. At once those who had already seen Joice Heth were determined to have another look, and those who had not seen her were excited to view a contrivance more unusual than the Turk. Barnum's business boomed, and there was no Niblo to share the gross this time.
After Boston, Barnum and Lyman, with Joice Heth in tow, toured New England from Hingham to Hartford, then returned to Niblo's Garden for a second engagement, then went on to New Haven, Newark, and Albany. Joice was shown at the Museum in Albany, where other exhibits were appearing simultaneously. One of these, an Italian immigrant who spun plates, walked on stilts, and balanced bayoneted rifles on his nose, caught Barnum's attention. The Italian billed himself as Signor Antonio. Barnum sought him out, learned that he was available and unbooked, and promptly signed him to a year's contract, guaranteeing him twelve dollars a week, board, and travel fare.
Returning to New York, Barnum bullied the Italian into taking his first bath in a year, then changed his name to Signor Vivalla, and prepared to sell him. Barnum cornered William Dinneford, manager of the Franklin Theater, and expounded in detail on Vivalla's feats. Dinneford was not interested. Barnum persisted. "You have no doubt seen strange things in your life, but, my dear sir, I should never have imported Signor Vivalla from Italy, unless I had authentic evidence that he was the only artist of the kind who ever left the country. . . . You shall have him one night for nothing." Dinneford succumbed.
For three days Barnum publicized his unique foreign find, and on the opening night the Franklin Theater was packed. Barnum appeared on the stage as Vivalla's assistant, arranging his plates, handing him his muskets, and catching his stilts. The act was greeted with smashing applause. Vivalla was engaged for two weeks and Barnum collected fifty dollars a night.
In January 1836, encouraged by the success of his second venture, Barnum left Joice Heth to the management of Levi Lyman, and himself proceeded to snowbound Washington, D.C., with his juggler. Renting an obscure theater at fifty dollars a night, Barnum was dismayed to learn that his first night's gross was no more than thirty dollars. While Signor Vivalla continued to regale empty seats, Barnum wracked his brain for another attraction. And suddenly he remembered one near at hand. He went to call on Anne Royall, one of the most notorious women in all America.
Anne Royall, born in Maryland in 1769, had been raised in the wilderness of the Pennsylvania frontier. After her father fell under an Indian's tomahawk and her stepfather died, she accompanied her mother to the Virginia estate of wealthy Captain William Royall, there to work with her mother as a common domestic. After twelve years, the eccentric Captain Royall married Anne, tutored her, and bequeathed her his fortune. In a legal battle with relatives over the estate, Anne could not prove the validity of her marriage, and was left destitute. She journeyed to Washington to claim Royall's Revolutionary War pension. She began to write travel books. She did publicity for the Masons. She indicted the seamier side of American life and berated politicians in The Black Book, a three-volume commentary on the national scene. Embroiled in a feud with Evangelicals, she was arrested as "a common scold," found guilty, sentenced to the ducking stool, and then let off with a fine. At sixty-three, five years before Barnum saw her, she had initiated a weekly scandal sheet called Paul Pry, and had managed to corner President John Quincy Adams for an interview while he was swimming in the nude in the Potomac River.
Barnum found her, wrinkled, toothy, dumpy, at her decrepit Ramage printing press. Before he could discuss business, Anne Royall asked him for whom he intended to vote in the impending Presidential election.
"Well, I believe I shall go for Matty," Barnum replied, referring to Martin Van Buren.
Barnum would never forget what happened next. "I have seen some fearful things in my day," he recorded, "some awful explosions of tempestuous passion; but never have I witnessed such another terrible tempest of fury as burst from Mrs. Anne Royall, in reply to my response. . . . 'My God! My God! Is it possible? Will you support such a monkey, such a scoundrel, such a villain, such a knave, such an enemy to his country, as Martin Van Buren! Barnum, you are a scoundrel, a traitor, a rascal, a hypocrite! You are a spy, an electioneering fool, and I hope the next vessel you put foot on will sink with you."
After a half-hour, Anne calmed down, and Barnum meekly joined her on the floor in wrapping papers to be mailed. Eventually he presented his proposition. "I tried to hire her to give a dozen or twenty public lectures upon Government, in the Atlantic cities; but she was not to be tempted by pecuniary reward, and I was obliged to give over that speculation, which, by the way, I am certain would have proved a profitable one."
Reluctantly, Barnum resumed with Signor Vivalla. The Washington stand proved a complete failure, and Barnum had to pawn watch and chain to reach Philadelphia. The receipts at the Walnut Street Theater were better, but still Barnum was dissatisfied. On the second night, studying the scattered attendance and absently watching Vivalla go through his repertoire on the boards,
Barnum received the saving inspiration. "It was evident that something must be done to stimulate the public. And now that instinct—I think it must be—which can arouse a community and make it patronize, provided the article offered is worthy of patronage—an instinct which served me strangely in later years, astonishing the public and surprising me, came to my relief, and the help, curiously enough, appeared in the shape of an emphatic hiss from the pit!"
Vivalla, who had never been hissed before, was incensed. Barnum searched for the heckler, found him, and tried to silence him. The heckler turned out to be a circus juggler named Roberts, who insisted loudly that Vivalla's act was of mediocre quality and that he could do anything the Italian could do, and perhaps do it better. An armistice was finally reached, and Vivalla completed his act, but Barnum's performance was just beginning. Excited, he made the rounds of Philadelphia's daily newspapers, inserting advertisements offering $1,000 to any person who could publicly match Signor Vivalla's feats.
As Barnum foresaw, Roberts came forward to accept the challenge. Barnum produced the $1,000, which he had borrowed from a friend, but first he insisted that Roberts sign an agreement—to be published—that he would forfeit the sum if he could not duplicate every single one of Vivalla's feats. Roberts balked. Now it appeared that he could perform most of Vivalla's tricks, and even some few unknown to Vivalla, but could not duplicate every one of them, being inexperienced with stilts and plate-balancing. Barnum insisted that it would have to be all or nothing. Angrily, Roberts insulted him. Barnum took it calmly, pocketed the $1,000, and offered a new proposition. He would give Roberts thirty dollars to pretend that he was challenging Vivalla to a juggling duel. It would be rehearsed and stage-managed by Barnum, though no one was to know this, and Vivalla would of course emerge the winner. Roberts readily agreed.
Barnum quickly secured the Walnut Street Theater at the cost of two thirds of the gross receipts. Then, feverishly, he wrote and distributed handbills and advertisements, announcing the juggling duel for the prize of $1,000. The night of the grudge contest the theater was jammed to the rafters. Vivalla had drawn receipts of seventy-five dollars the evening of the historic hiss; this night the receipts added up to $593.
"The contest was a very interesting one," Barnum remembered with relish. "Roberts of course was to be beaten, and it was agreed that Vivalla should at first perform his easiest feats, in order that the battle should be kept up as long as possible. Roberts successively performed the same feats that Vivalla did. Each party was continually cheered by his friends and hissed by his opponents. . . The contest lasted about forty minutes, when Roberts came forward and acknowledged himself defeated. He was obliged to give up on the feat of spinning two plates at once, one in each hand."
Thunderous applause and bravos ensued, and then Barnum had an idea to prolong the feud. He appeared before the curtain to reveal that Roberts, who had been handicapped by a sprained wrist, was challenging Vivalla again. The duel would resume the following week, same place, same prices.
After the return performance, once more won by Vivalla before a filled theater, the combatants were transported to New York by Barnum, where they continued their feud on the stage of the Franklin Theater, and then, for a month more, in neighboring villages.
By this time, Barnum had not two acts, but one: Joice Heth had fallen ill and had been retired to an alcove of his half-brother Philo's home in Bethel, Connecticut. Fully appreciative of the garrulous ancient who had given him a vocation, Barnum supported her and paid for a colored woman to look after her.
On February 21, 1836, Barnum received word from his half-brother that Joice Heth was no more. She had died two days earlier, and her remains were now outside, having been delivered by sleigh over snow-packed roads to the very door of Barnum's boardinghouse. While making preparations to bury her, Barnum remembered that he had once promised a famous surgeon, Dr. David L. Rogers, permission to perform a post-mortem examination of Joice. Barnum now kept his word.
The following day the corpse of Washington's nurse was transported to the medical hall on Barclay Street where Dr. Rogers and "a large number of physicians, students, and several clergymen and editors" waited. Among the editors was the well-known, British-born Richard Adams Locke, a Cambridge graduate, who had been assigned to the story by Benjamin H. Day, founder and publisher of the New York Sun. The thirty-six-year-old Locke, though uncommonly short of stature and possessing a face pitted by smallpox, was an impressive man. "There is an air of distinction about his whole person," Poe observed, "the air noble of genius." Along with Locke and the others, Barnum and Levi Lyman were on hand to watch as Dr. Rogers proceeded to dissect Joice's anatomy. When the surgery was completed, Dr. Rogers seemed surprised and disturbed. What surprised him was the absence of ossification of the arteries in the region of the heart.
After the spectators had been dismissed, Dr. Rogers, with his close friend Locke, remained behind to discuss the autopsy with Barnum and Lyman. The surgeon had something on his mind, and now he spoke openly of it to Barnum. He said that "there was surely some mistake in regard to the alleged age of Joice; that instead of being 161 years old, she was probably not over eighty."
Barnum was astounded, or so he always insisted. "I stated to him, in reply, what was strictly true, that I had hired Joice in perfect good faith, and relied upon her appearance and the documents as evidence of the truth of her story." He reminded Dr. Rogers that the doctor himself had been impressed by the first exhibition at Niblo's Garden. Dr. Rogers was adamant. Though her appearance had fooled everyone, himself included, his scalpel had revealed the truth. He told Barnum that "the documents must either have been forged, or else they applied to some other individual."
If Barnum hoped that the hoax would not be made public, his hopes were shattered the following day. Prominently displayed in the New York Sun was an editorial by Richard Adams Locke:
"DISSECTION OF JOICE HETH—PREVIOUS HUMBUG EXPOSED. The anatomical examination of the body of Joice Heth yesterday, resulted in the exposure of one of the most precious humbugs that ever was imposed upon a credulous community."
The editorial went on to disclose every detail of the postmortem, and soon all of New York was buzzing about the deceit. Even Philip Hone, the retired onetime Mayor of the city, saw fit to record in his diary the scandal of a "black woman named Joice Heth" upon whom "our inquisitive unbelieving doctors, who have had the impertinence all along to doubt the facts in this case of longevity" had performed an autopsy that "resulted in a conviction that she could not have been more than 75 or 80 years old."
Instead of allowing the scandal to die, Levi Lyman, who possessed a warped funny bone, decided to play a joke on James Gordon Bennett, the cross-eyed Scot who was publisher of the sensational New York Herald, as well as to strike back at Locke and the Sun. Lyman advised Bennett that he and Barnum had merely played a practical joke on Locke and Dr. Rogers, that Joice Heth was still alive in Connecticut, and that the corpse dissected was that of an obscure old Negress who had recently died in Harlem.
With great excitement, Bennett featured the revelation in the Herald of February 27, 1836, beneath the headline "ANOTHER HOAX!" Bennett assured his readers: "Joice Heth is not dead. On Wednesday last, as we learn from the best authority, she was living at Hebron, in Connecticut, where she then was. The subject on which Doctor Rogers and the Medical Faculty of Barclay Street have been exercising their knife and their ingenuity, is the remains of a respectable old Negress called Aunt Nelly. . ."
Locke defended his original story, and though Bennett fought back, he realized at last that he had been duped. When he met Lyman in the street, he castigated him. Lyman apologized for "a harmless joke" and, to make up for it, promised to reveal the true story of Joice Heth, which had never before been published. He accompanied Bennett to his office and dictated the "facts." He said that Barnum had found Joice in Kentucky, extracted all her teeth to make her look older, and taught her the entire Washington's-nurse fable. Once again, Bennett went to bold-faced type, announcing: "THE JOICE HETH HOAX!" He called Barnum's fraud "a stupendous hoax, illustrative of the accuracy of medical science, the skill of medical men, and the general good-nature and credulity of the public."
Barnum admitted the existence of a hoax, but argued that he had been fooled as much as the public, and vehemently denied Bennett's story. Nevertheless, the public appeared to accept it, and, forever after, it was thought that Barnum had purposely rigged the whole absurd exhibit. Almost a decade later the memory lingered on sufficiently so that Tait's Edinburgh Magazine would rank Barnum "among the swindlers, blacklegs, blackguards, pickpockets and thimble-riggers of his day" and add: "Compared to Barnum, Cagliostro himself was a blundering novice, or perhaps it would be more just to say that he had the misfortune to be endowed with a more tender conscience. More than any other impostor Barnum has humbugged the world. . ."
Barnum continued to deny any part in the Joice Heth fake for the rest of his life. It was, he said, "a scheme in no sense of my own devising; one which had been some time before the public and which had so many vouchers for its genuineness that at the time of taking possession of it I honestly believed it to be genuine. . ." Furthermore, Barnum asked himself, "if Joice Heth was an impostor, who taught her these things? and how happened it that she was so familiar, not only with ancient psalmody, but also with the minute details of the Washington family? To all this, I unhesitatingly answer, I do not know. I taught her none of these things. She was perfectly familiar with them all before I ever saw her. . ."
Privately, Barnum believed that R. W. Lindsay had swindled him in Philadelphia, but he never bore Lindsay any malice. In fact, when he learned that Lindsay had fallen ill and was impoverished, he forwarded a gift of one hundred dollars to the unfortunate man.
It is surprising that there was so much indignation at the time and later over the Joice Heth hoax. Elaborate frauds were nothing new to New York or America. In an age of blue laws the harmless hoax was a safety valve and a means of amusement for the public. Only eleven years before Joice Heth, New Yorkers (at least most of them) had been delighted (for it had cost them nothing) by an amateur hoax of gigantic proportions. In the summer of 1824, two retired businessmen, Lozier and John DeVoe, having nothing better to do, announced to friends that they had been hired to saw off Manhattan Island and turn it around.
The preposterous project might have been laughed out of existence had not Lozier, speaking with the authority of considerable wealth, convinced laborers, contractors, and tradesmen that he had the support of Mayor Stephen Allen. According to Lozier, he and the Mayor had agreed that Manhattan Island was beginning to sag on the Battery or southern end, because of the weight of new business buildings. The situation was dangerous. They had decided to saw off the Island at the Kingsbridge, or northern end, then float it down past Ellis Island, turn it around, bring it back, and moor it in a more sensible position.
DeVoe appeared with an impressive ledger and began signing on workmen and awarding contracts. During the next eight weeks the pixy pair located a quantity of mammoth saws one hundred feet long with teeth three feet deep, hired three hundred laborers to do the sawing, then found two dozen oars two hundred and fifty feet long, and hired two thousand men to row the Island across the bay. Giant anchors were available to keep the Island firm in the event of a storm. When the carpentry was to begin on the appointed date, nearly a thousand persons, with tools, assembled at Bowery and Spring streets—almost everyone was present except Lozier and DeVoe, who had left town. It would be a long while before they would return or the laughter subside. Manhattan Island remained sagging but intact.
A more admirable and far-reaching hoax, much enjoyed by Barnum at the very time he was first exhibiting Joice Heth and proclaiming her authentic, was perpetrated by Richard Adams Locke, the very man who later would expose Joice in the New York Sun.
In August 1835, the Sun, then a stripling journal of four sheets, began an exclusive series of four articles headlined: "Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope." This series, written by Locke, excited New York and America for two months. It disclosed that Sir John Herschel had invented a seven-ton telescope, with a lens twenty-four feet in diameter, capable of magnifying an object forty-two thousand times, so greatly that flora and fauna on the moon seemed to be only five miles from the earth. Sir John, assisted by Sir David Brewster, secretly had transported the telescope to Africa, and, eight months earlier, had seen lunar life as no human had seen it before.
The pair minutely observed fourteen species of animal life on the moon. There were "herds of brown quadrupeds, having all the external characteristics of the bison," with hairy flaps over their eyes to protect them from extreme light; there were "gregarious" monsters, blue and swift, "the size of a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn"; there were pelicans, cranes, bears, and "a strange amphibious creature of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach." All of these cavorted over pyramid-shaped mountains of amethyst, among thirty-eight species of trees, or near a lake two hundred and sixty-six miles long.
But the biggest sensation was saved for the final article. Sir John Herschel had seen "four successive flocks of large winged creatures," and later observed them "walking erect toward a small wood." Adjusting his lens so that these creatures were brought but eighty yards from his eyes, he saw them clearly at last. "They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of the shoulders to the calves of the legs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh-color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orang-utan . . ."
These articles were so rich in detail and scientific terminology that the greater part of the public and press swallowed them whole. The New York Times thought the articles "probable and plausible," and felt they displayed "the most extensive and accurate knowledge of astronomy." The New Yorker regarded the discoveries as "of astounding interest, creating a new era in astronomy and science generally." The Daily Advertiser considered the series one of the most important in years. "Sir John has added a stock of knowledge to the present age that will immortalize his name and place it high on the page of science."
Locke was gratified. The daily circulation of the Sun, Day's penny newspaper, had been twenty-five hundred. With the report of winged men four feet tall on the moon, circulation climbed to nineteen thousand. And some of these readers, notably a club of women in Springfield, Massachusetts, were stimulated to raise funds for sending missionaries to the lunar planet. In pamphlet form the series of articles sold sixty thousand copies in a month, enriching Locke and Day by some $25,000.
There were a few skeptics. Philip Hone noted in his diary: "In sober truth, if this account is true, it is most enormously wonderful, and if it is a fable, the manner of its relation, with all of its scientific details . . . will give this ingenious history a place with Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Edgar Allan Poe, aware that no telescope could reveal such detail even at a visual distance of eighty yards, let alone five miles, branded the articles as fiction. He confessed that he found few listeners, "so really eager were all to be deceived, so magical were the charms of a style that served as the vehicle of an exceedingly clumsy invention. Not one person in ten discredited it."
When Locke at last confessed the fraud to a fellow newspaperman on the Journal of Commerce, which exposed him, and when Sir John Herschel, informed of Locke's stories, laughingly denied the discoveries, the truth was out, and the "Moon Hoax" was relegated to the history of entertainment rather than that of science. Locke's motive, it turned out, had been more aesthetic than commercial. Bored with the speculations and popularity of Dr. Thomas Dick of Scotland, an astronomer whose books (advocating communication with the moon through use of giant stone symbols arranged on earth) were the rage in American society, Locke had intended to ridicule Dick's pompous pronouncements. Apparently his satire had got out of hand.
Yet, only ten months after his own hoax, Locke had exposed Barnum's first venture in the field of amusement. Shortly after this, Locke left the Sun to start a periodical of his own, the New Era. Later he became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, and finally a customhouse official. But in the end, his disclosure of the bogusness of Joice Heth did not matter. Barnum gradually came to be more admired than resented, for the people desperately needed what he had to offer.
Other isolated purveyors of pleasure operated at the time as they had before, of course, but their talents were limited and minor and made little impression on their era or on the future. They were not movers, not shakers, not Arthur O'Shaughnessy's "dreamers of dreams." Barnum was. With him, indeed, the age of showmanship and fun had its beginning. More than that, with the Joice Heth fraud, the first great showman in history, perhaps the greatest, was born.