The Jenny Lind venture had occupied ten intense months of Barnum's life. With its success, he had reached the highest peak of celebrity in his career as showman. Now he was tired. "After so many months of anxiety, labor, and excitement, in the Jenny Lind enterprise," he said, "it will readily be believed that I desired tranquility."
For almost four years Barnum devoted more of his time to home and family in Connecticut than to his Museum. He would visit New York only once or twice a week. Finally, even his interest in the Museum, which had dominated his life for thirteen years, began to flag.
At last, in the summer of 1855, Barnum decided to retire completely. He sold the Museum collection of curiosities to John Greenwood, Jr., his assistant manager, and Henry D. Butler, for $24,000. And the long-term lease on the building, which he had signed over to his wife, he sublet to Greenwood and Butler for an annual rental of $29,000.
In 1855, unencumbered, wealthy, renowned, and only forty-five, Phineas T. Barnum sat back to enjoy the fruits of his imagination and labor. For the first time since he had become a vertical man, he had stopped running. He was left with himself and his private life. But of this aspect of his existence, Barnum, publicist and advertiser, spoke little.
Few persons knew in his own time, and few have found out in the century since, just what were Barnum's personal interests outside show business, his habits, his prejudices, his beliefs, his character, his relationship with his wife and three daughters. It would be difficult to find another public figure in modem times who has had so little known or written of his private self. Constance M. Rourke, in Trumpets of Jubilee, remarked with wonder upon it. "Almost nothing substantial about him emerges from the nick of contemporary evidence; scarcely another figure of equal proportions had left so little behind him by way of personal print. Necessarily he becomes legend—an outcome he would have relished."
Yet, behind the elaborate façade of showman was a man stripped of show. What manner of man?
Perhaps he had a bond, a strange affinity, with Coleridge. Perhaps he read: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, / A stately pleasuredome decree. . . ." Prosaic Bridgeport was no Xanadu. But Barnum's stately palace in this New England city would have seemed properly familiar and exotic to Coleridge and Kubla Khan. The showman's palace was Iranistan. Behind its Oriental walls the real Phineas T. Barnum lived.
As long before as 1846, Barnum and Charity had selected Bridgeport as their place of residence. It was near enough to New York by rail and water to enable Barnum to commute to his business, but far enough removed to give him the feeling of country living. Too, the city gave promise of growth and expansion, which made any real estate investment seem sensible. Accordingly, Barnum purchased seventeen acres less than a mile west of the city. The site was choice. It overlooked Long Island Sound. The surroundings were sylvan. And, important consideration, the railroad ran nearby: "I thought that a pile of buildings of a novel order might indirectly serve as an advertisement of my Museum," Barnum said.
Not until he had visited England with Tom Thumb did Barnum decide what architecture his "buildings of a novel order" would reproduce. In Brighton, he was enchanted by the Oriental Pavilion that had been built by George IV in 1787. He had seen nothing like it before in either Great Britain or America, and he instinctively knew that it was what might be expected of him.
Forthwith he employed a London architect to draw up a blueprint of the actual Pavilion, so that he might duplicate it on his seventeen acres outside Bridgeport.
Barnum's showy mansion—Iranistan, he named it, which meant "Oriental villa" or "Eastern country place"—was two years in the building, and cost $150,000. Part Byzantine, part Moorish, part Turkish, the three-story main building was capped by a center dome rising ninety feet above the ground. Flanking this were lesser minarets and piazzas. The house was one hundred and twenty-four feet wide at its entrance. It faced a park containing a huge fountain and tame elk, all enclosed within an iron fence.
The interior dazzled and bewildered the unprepared visitor. A great staircase rose to the second story, and along it were niches filled with marble statues imported from Italy. The furniture in each room was of a different period. The drawing room, its ceiling white and gold, its paneling covered with murals of the four seasons, its folding doors mirrored, featured rosewood furniture.
The library was Chinese, though the tortoise-shell table was often graced by china and silver purchased from a Russian prince.
Barnum's private study was hung in orange satin with "furniture of corresponding elegance." Adjacent to it was that wonder of the period, a bathroom with a shower that ran hot and cold water. The dome above the structure, sixty feet in circumference, was outfitted as an astronomical observatory.
The landscape around the house, once barren, soon contained an orchard planted full-grown, a stable for horses, several barns filled with livestock, and a complete private waterworks. On November 14, 1848, these grounds, and the house itself, were crowded with one thousand guests, including Tom Thumb and his parents—"the poor and the rich," Barnum said proudly—invited to attend the formal housewarming. It was a long way from the boardinghouse and the billiard parlor next to the Museum. Iranistan was destined to remain Barnum's refuge for almost a decade.
The housewarming party set the note of hospitality. Barnum liked people, especially listeners. Joel Benton, a frequent visitor, regarded Barnum as the perfect host. "As a host he could not be surpassed. He knew the sources of comfort—what to omit doing, as well as what to do, for a guest. He had the supreme art of making you really free, as if you were in your own house." Among the guests who shared Barnum's table, at Iranistan and at later homes, were Colonel George A. Custer, Matthew Arnold, Horace Greeley, and Mark Twain. Barnum constantly tried to encourage Mark Twain to write about him and his enterprises, but without success.
When no house guests were present, Barnum followed a rigid, unvarying routine. He rose at seven o'clock in the morning. He devoted the entire morning to his littered desk in the orange study where, quill in hand, he answered letters or conducted business affairs. Commercial callers were usually received briefly during these morning hours, but after these appointments were out of the way, Barnum would permit no further interruption from friends or family. Shortly after the noon hour, he would emerge to take a ride in his carriage. Returning to Iranistan, he had a large midday meal, sometimes with members of the family. This was followed by a five-minute nap, after which, he said, "I am as much refreshed as if I had slept for hours." Another outing in the carriage followed before nightfall.
Evenings at Iranistan were short. Except when he went to the theater, Barnum liked to read for an hour or listen to piano or string music. Best of all, he enjoyed having a few neighbors in for several games of whist, cribbage, or chess. By nine-thirty, visitors were expected to leave. If they forgot, Barnum bluntly reminded them that he intended to be in bed by ten o'clock sharp. Once, asked to what habits he owed his vigorous health, Barnum replied: 'Primarily, regularity; secondarily, abstinence from things that tend to shorten life."
When he still had his Museum collection, he devoted the greater part of his mornings to corresponding with paid oddity-hunters scattered throughout the world. Freed of the Museum, he was able to give more time to his other mail. Every post brought him hundreds of letters. Some of these were fan letters, but the greater number were money-making schemes. Correspondents offered him partnerships in new inventions, in land investments, in issues of mining stocks. For the most, said Barnum, the schemes were "as wild and unfeasible as a railroad to the moon, while perhaps once in a thousand times something reasonable is suggested."
For business callers who had a speculation to suggest, one that might make him a fortune, Barnum had a set reply. Before the visitor could disclose his idea, Barnum would abruptly state: "You are much mistaken in supposing that I am so ready or anxious to make money. On the contrary, there is but one thing in the world I desire—that is, tranquility. I am quite certain your project will not give me that, for you probably would not have called upon me if you did not wish to draw upon my brains or purse—very likely on both. Now, of the first, I have none to spare. Of the second, what I have is invested, and I have no desire to disturb it." When his visitor protested that what he had to offer was special, Barnum usually interrupted in a firm tone: "If you should propose to get up a stock company for converting paving stones into diamonds, with a prospect of my making a million a year, I would not join you. If your speculation therefore is not something better than that, you need not divulge it, for I certainly should not engage it."
This frontal attack usually kept Barnum's appointments brief. Rarely were the schemes heard of again, though one of the wildest speculations ever offered Barnum was actually carried out later. A man had approached Barnum with the suggestion that camels be imported to carry passengers overland to California. Barnum dismissed the visionary with a sarcastic remark: "I told him that I thought asses were better than camels, but I should not be one of them."
Nevertheless, in 1853, a group of New York businessmen organized "The American Camel Company." Shortly after, at the instigation of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, Congress appropriated $30,000 for the "importation of camels and dromedaries to be employed for military purposes." In 1856, the American vessel Supply left Smyrna with thirty-three camels, and after three months landed at Indianola, Texas. Lieutenant Edward Beale, a friend of Kit Carson, was assigned the task of leading the camels across the and Southwest, from Texas to California, to establish a new military transport route. Using Turkish drivers, Beale guided his strange caravan—further purchases had swelled the number of beasts to seventy-five—through Indian country to Los Angeles, and back again, four thousand sweltering miles in a year, to prove its worth. But the outbreak of the Civil War finally buried the scheme, and Barnum was satisfied not to have been part of this colorful but costly diversion in American history.
On the several occasions when Barnum did speculate on projects outside show business, he failed to make profits. He owned seventeen percent of the North America, a steamship controlled by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had a hundred other steamers servicing the East Coast, and who would one day accumulate one hundred million dollars. The first time Barnum and Vanderbilt met, the crusty Commodore roared: "Is it possible you are Barnum? Why, I expected to see a monster, part lion, part elephant, and a mixture of rhinoceros and tiger!" Almost coincidental with the North America's sinking in the Pacific, Barnum sold his share in the vessel to another millionaire, Daniel Drew, and thus emerged unscathed.
At about the same time, Barnum became interested in an English invention, the Philipps' Fire Annihilator, which was supposed to be more effective than water in dousing a blaze. Barnum put $10,000 into this scheme, but in its first test against a burning building, the Annihilator failed to annihilate and the showman's investment went up in flames.
Again, speculating in a field with which he was more familiar, Barnum exchanged $20,000 for a one-third ownership of a new pictorial weekly to be called Illustrated News. His partners were two brothers named Beech. For his editor, Barnum hired the untrustworthy Rufus Wilmot Griswold, maligner of Poe, and Griswold selected, for an assistant, Charles Godfrey Leland, a lawyer turned journalist who had been educated at Princeton, Heidelberg, Munich, and the Sorbonne.
Of the pair, Barnum admired Leland more because Leland was a man much like himself. According to Van Wyck Brooks, Leland was "famous for two generations as a lover of the marvelous, the forbidden, the droll and the wild. . . . He was drawn naturally to sorcerers and fakirs, wizards, tinkers, tramps and those who dwell in tents and caravans." Leland loved Barnum for his essential innocence, his practical jokes, and his infectious smile. For a short time, the two conducted a humor column in the weekly. Leland recalled later that Barnum "would come smiling in with some curiosity of literature such as the 'reverse' [a sentence that reads the same forward and backward] —'Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel'—or a fresh conundrum or joke, with all his heart and soul full of it, and he would be as delighted over the proof as if to see himself in print was a startling novelty. We two had 'beautiful times' over that column, for there was a great deal of 'boy' still left in Barnum. . . . On that humorous column Barnum always deferred to me, even as a small schoolboy defers to an elder on the question of a game of marbles or hopscotch. There was no affectation or play in it; we were both quite in earnest. I think I see him now, coming smiling in like a harvest moon, big with some new joke, and then we sat down at the desk and 'edited.'"
Within a month of its publication, the Illustrated News climbed to a circulation of 70,000, and soon after it reached 150,000. Griswold, entangled in a domestic crisis, quit his job, and Leland was left in full charge. Though Leland fretted over his small salary, objected to the single cramped office "half-portioned off from the engine room," protested his lack of help, and deplored the "wretched scrimping" of the entire operation, he stayed on loyally because he liked Barnum. But, much as he liked his employer, Leland steadfastly refused to publicize him. "I never would in any way whatever write up, aid, or advertise the great show or museum, or cry up the elephant," Leland said. "I was resolved to leave the paper first. . . . The entire American press expected, as a matter of course, that the Illustrated News would be simply an advertisement for the great showman, and as I represented to Mr. Barnum, this would ere long utterly ruin the publication. I do not now really know whether I was quite right in this but it is very much to Mr. Barnum's credit that he never insisted on it and that in his own paper he was conspicuous by his absence." Because Barnum and the Beech brothers were too busy to devote full time to the periodical, and too close-fisted to make it more than a repository for reprints, the Illustrated News soon languished from this lack of love and money. After a year, said Leland, it "came to grief," but Barnum and his partners managed to sell out to a Boston publishing firm without loss.
In the years to come, Leland led a varied life. Emancipated by the inheritance of his father's estate, he became an expatriate. In Heidelberg he spent long hours with the older cousin of Shelley, Thomas Medwin, who had studied Arabic with the poet at Pisa and had ridden with Lord Byron. In Munich, Leland fell in love with the uninhibited Lola Montez, but later refused to elope with her. He tramped the Old World to study gypsy life in Brussels, Moscow, and Cairo. An amazing linguist, he acquired knowledge of Icelandic, Romany, Provençal, pidgin English, Illyrian. He was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature for his discovery of Shelta, a forgotten Welsh-Irish dialect. He published twenty-three books on such diverse subjects as gypsies, Abraham Lincoln, industrial education, slang, and Virgil, and he was never out of touch with his admirable "Uncle Barnum."
The periodical had been fun, but of all Barnum's outside investments, real estate alone gave him huge profits. Acquisition of more wealth was not his primary motive. He speculated in land because he could not stand idleness. More important, he wanted to build a city where none had been before.
He had been in Iranistan three years when he determined to establish an industrial community a half-mile across the river from Bridgeport. In 1851, in partnership with William H. Noble, a wealthy neighbor, Barnum acquired two hundred and twenty-four acres of beautiful level land. This was the beginning of what was to be called East Bridgeport.
On this property, Barnum and Noble laid out the outlines of a city, complete with streets, trees, and a seven-acre park. Then they began to sell every second lot as a home residence or a business. In order to encourage growth, they financed some of the dwellings themselves, demanding only small monthly payments. The total cost of a single house and lot ranged from $1,500 to $3,000. Barnum insisted upon certain restrictions. All houses had to be built a specified distance from the streets, all had to have their architecture approved by Barnum himself, all had to be fenced in and kept clean and neat. And every owner, in return for the right to build in East Bridgeport and receive financing from Barnum, had to sign a contract that promised he would no longer drink whiskey or smoke. Despite these restrictions—from a man who had long jousted against all blue laws—families began to construct homes. A carriage factory was the first of many businesses to appear.
In ten years Barnum had his city flourishing. East Bridgeport displayed three churches, a horse railway, and a Barnum School District. Sewing machine factories and other industries employed thousands of workmen. And the workmen, with their large families, lived in neat little houses, each with porch and green shutters, each free of the curse of liquor and nicotine, on streets named Barnum, and Hallett, and Caroline, and Helen, and Pauline.
But Barnum had more than a city. He had a sinecure and a profit. For years he and Noble had retained every second lot in the tract for themselves. "We looked for our profits," said Barnum, "solely to the rise in the value of the reserved lots, which we were confident must ensue." Rise in value they certainly did. Barnum had paid an average of $200 for each acre of East Bridgeport; a decade later, each acre was worth $4,000.
Barnum's personal idiosyncrasies were frequently reflected in his business dealings. The stern edict against stimulants and tobacco on his tract was merely a reaction against his old habits. There is no evidence that Barnum was ever an alcoholic, but there is every evidence that until middle age he drank heavily.
When he built Iranistan, he was prouder of the well-stocked wine cellar than of any other room in the mansion. He did not care for Scotch or bourbon, but daily at lunch he consumed an entire bottle of champagne. Sometimes, instead of the champagne, he drank a bottle of port or its equivalent in ale. He was usually drunk by early afternoon—which probably accounted for his habit of concentrating all work in the morning—and eager to have fresh air and a nap. When Mrs. Hannah Hallett, his mother-in-law, who lived beneath his roof, would accuse him of being "heady," he would lose his temper. He would blame overeating and not champagne for his sluggishness. If mother-in-law or wife lectured him, he would threaten to replace his wine diet with hard whiskey to show them what drunkenness really was like.
One autumn day, attending the State Fair at Saratoga Springs, New York, Barnum was shocked to see several prominent millionaires and intellectuals staggering about drunk. It worried him. Might he, too, become an alcoholic? He vowed never to touch whiskey, but to confine himself to the less harmful wine bottle. As he did not care for whiskey anyway, the sacrifice was not great. Still, his intoxication bothered him. He decided to inform himself more on the habit. He invited his friend the Reverend E. H. Chapin, a temperance crusader, to lecture at the Baptist Church in Bridgeport.
The Reverend Mr. Chapin appeared, and for his subject, significantly, he chose "The Moderate Drinker." Apparently, the Reverend was a persuasive evangelist, for his audience listened spellbound. The real problem, said the speaker, was "not the drunkard in the ditch" but the "moderate drinker" whom young people looked to as an example. The moderate drinker gave the whole habit a dangerous air of respectability, and his influence was the most evil of all.
The Reverend Mr. Chapin repeated the words with which he always privately addressed all those who pleaded that they only consumed wine. "Sir, you either do or you do not consider it a privation and a sacrifice to give up drinking. Which is it? If you say that you can drink or let it alone, that you can quit it forever without considering it a self-denial, then I appeal to you as a man, to do it for the sake of your suffering fellow beings."
All the long night that followed, Barnum did not sleep. He rose red-eyed at dawn with a new resolve. After dressing, he summoned his coachman. Together they descended into the beloved wine cellar where over seventy bottles of champagne lay on the shelves. Barnum and his servant carried the bottles outside, knocked the neck off each, and poured the sparkling contents on the lawn. Then Barnum sent the port wine to neighboring families who might use the bottles medicinally, and returned the whiskey to the grog shops.
When the cellar was bare, Barnum hastened off to find the Reverend Mr. Chapin. He begged for the teetotal pledge. The Reverend did not hide his surprise. He had assumed that the showman had sent for him because he was already an abstainer. Quickly, he produced the pledge, and Barnum signed it.
Returning to Iranistan, Barnum revealed his act of prohibition to his wife. She wept with joy. Confused, he wanted to know why his pledge provoked tears. She told him, he said, "that she had passed many a weeping night, fearing that my wine-bibbing was leading me to a drunkard's path. I reproached her for not telling me her fears, but she replied that she knew I was self-deluded, and that any such hint from her would have been received in anger."
At lunch, the happy champagne bottle was missing, and wife and mother-in-law beamed on the reformed inebriate with contentment. After eating, Barnum felt sufficiently self-satisfied and sober to pass the revelation on to others. That day he talked twenty friends into signing teetotal pledges. For the remainder of his life, he was a useful—or possibly insufferable—temperance man.
He lectured everywhere on the evils of alcohol. He spoke throughout New England an entire winter and spring at his own expense. He went into New York City, in a year when twenty-one thousand men and eleven thousand women had been arrested for intoxication, and tried to get its citizenry to boycott the seven thousand liquor shops and saloons. He harangued the moderate drinker in Toledo, St. Louis, and Montreal. He invaded Wisconsin in an election year to support the prohibitionists, and he addressed a female audience in the ladies' lounge of the steamer Lexington. In New Orleans, he filled the Lyceum Hall, and when a heckler interrupted his tirade on the destructive force of alcohol with the question, "How does it affect us, externally or internally?" Barnum shouted back, "E-ternally."
Tobacco was more difficult to give up. Barnum smoked ten cigars a day. Several times, for the sake of economy, he tried to give up cigars. On those tortured days, he chewed chamomile flowers instead, but confessed that "they almost killed me" and went back to tobacco. Not until he was fifty did he quit. One day he arrived at the Museum with a fit of choking and palpitations of the heart. Certain that he was having a heart attack at death's door, he made his way to his doctor. He was told that his heart was fine. "Nicotine is all that is the matter with you," the doctor said. "Stop smoking." Barnum stopped. Henceforth, cigars and cigarettes were coffin nails. He chewed bits of calamus, the root of sweet flag, to make him forget.
His chief hobby was farming. Although he hated physical labor, he occasionally enjoyed planting potatoes or flower beds. His green thumb was awkward. Once, observing his gardener cut away useless shoots and limbs from his maples, he tried to emulate him and instead destroyed all the grafts. In 1848, and for three years after, he was President of the Fairfield County Agricultural Society and liked to buttonhole all who would listen to talk on the values of manure. During his tenure of office, he sponsored six county fairs, handling them like the showman that he was. One he enlivened with a plowing competition. Thousands of spectators came to watch plowmen and their teams lay hasty furrows over staked-out plots thirty-six-rods square. At another fair, just when receipts were falling off, the sheriff caught an English pickpocket in the act of pilfering a purse. Barnum convinced the sheriff that the thief should be put on display at the fair for the purposes of further identification. When the sheriff consented, Barnum quickly distributed handbills promising one and all that they could view "a live Pickpocket." Hundreds came from great distances to cluck over the handcuffed culprit.
Barnum was a sedentary person. He had no interest in athletics or games beyond an occasional billiard match with Henry Ward Beecher at Irving Hall. Except for two horse races that he had seen in England, even spectator sports bored him. As he told the editor of the New York Standard at the very time when Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourne was winning twenty-six successive games for Providence with his underhand pitch and when Paddy Ryan was winning the heavyweight title in eighty-seven rounds: "I never witnessed the 'great and glorious' national game of baseball, and I never expect to. I never saw a boxing or sparring match, a boat race, or a cock fight."
Indoor sports appealed to him more. He had a gift for mimicry, and liked to imitate many celebrities he knew. He enjoyed practicing ventriloquism, at which he was poor, and performing parlor tricks of magic, at which he excelled. He enjoyed reading as much as playing cards, and, wearing those spectacles rarely seen by outsiders, he read widely. Among his favorite authors were Emerson, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Shelley, Smollett, and Thomas Moore. Among his most treasured books were an anthology entitled Library of Choice Reading, a reference volume entitled Positive Facts, the Encyclopedia of English Literature, and a set of the Pictorial History of England. Also, he frequently consulted bound sets of the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Illustrated London News.
In later life, Barnum was partial to religious and inspirational works. He claimed to read the family Bible regularly, and next to it, he enjoyed a slender anthology of prose and verse by "wise and holy men of many times" entitled Daily Strength for Daily Needs. He said that he read a page of the latter volume every morning, and on the flyleaf of one of his two copies, he wrote: "This book I believe teaches the philosophy of Life and death. . . . I wish every person would daily read it." Another book that Barnum read every morning was Manna—Daily Worship by J. W. Hanson, D.D., a collection of prayers published by the Universalists. "Its Bible lesson and prayers afford great consolation to those who desire to love God and practice the Gospel teaching thru Living conscientious, honest, and as far as possible unselfish lives," wrote Barnum in this book.
He was an inveterate collector of oil paintings. The pursuit of art gave him pleasure, though it pained his friends. Barnum's taste was abominable. He had frequently visited London and Paris when the works of Turner, Rossetti, Whistler, Constable, Ingres, Corot, Delacroix, and Courbet were available, many of them for a song—yet the oils that graced his favorite walls were an Adirondacks scene, a portrait of Columbus, and two views of Niagara Falls, all by artists who did not survive their time. Also, in Iranistan, he hung commissioned portraits of Charity, his three daughters, and himself, and in later residences an oil of his grandson Clinton H. Seeley as a child.
But even more than art and reading, the practical joke still gave him his greatest pleasure. When one of his daughters left Bridgeport to spend her wedding night in Boston, Barnum sat casually waiting in Boston the next morning to embarrass bride and groom at breakfast. Sometimes his jokes were more elaborate. During the Jenny Lind tour, his daughter Caroline traveled with him and kept a diary, and for April 1, 1851, she noted: "Well this is All Fool's Day and I think we have all had our share of jokes. Father has perpetrated one of the best jokes today that I ever heard of. He procured some blank telegraph papers and envelopes and wrote some of the most astounding news by telegraph to all our company. I received one saying that Mother would meet us at Louisville on Monday and I believing it true was very happy. Soon I received another saying that Minerva [Philo Barnum's daughter] was coming with her which made me quite wild with joy. Also stating that Mrs. Lyman's father [Mrs. Lyman, a Bridgeport widow, was Caroline's companion on the tour] had sold his house and purchased one in Trumbull, she was very unhappy about it. Soon Mr. Wells [the Bridgeport hotel proprietor] came in with a telegraph that the old Franklin Hotel, Sterling Hotel, etc., were burned, that the wind was high and that the new Presbyterian Church was then burning. Imagine our consternation. Mr. Wells and Mrs. Lyman looked as though they had lost all the friends they ever had. After Mr. Wells went away, however, we thought it over and Mrs. Lyman came to the conclusion that it was April Fool. . . ."
Although Barnum imported thousands of animals for the masses and countless pseudoscientific gimcracks for the curious, he had no fondness for household pets and no interest in scientific experiments or discussions.
He liked to talk, or rather to propound. He had a carefully nursed reputation for wit, but he was neither witty nor clever. Sometimes when inspired, he would get off a bright retort. When the Bishop of London bade him farewell and assured him that they would meet again in Heaven, Barnum replied: "If your Lordship is there." On another occasion, he remarked: "Every crowd has a silver lining." Invited by friends to dine in a restaurant, he was sated two thirds through the feast. When heaping platters continued to appear, he held up his hand. "No, thank you," he said. "I will take the rest in money, if you please."
His conversation was colorful rather than quick. The best-known comment attributed to him was: "There's a sucker born every minute." He was said to have uttered this cynicism in a speech, yet no record has ever been found of the speech or of any evidence that Barnum spoke the words. In fact, Robert Edmund Sherwood, who worked for Barnum twenty years, denied that the remark was made at all. "The great impresario never expressed himself in this manner," Sherwood wrote. "Primarily, the word 'sucker' as a slang slogan was not in use during Barnum's lifetime. His favorite expression was 'the American people like to be humbugged.'" Rather proudly, Barnum had named himself the "Prince of Humbugs."
In his book The Humbugs of the World, published in 1865, Barnum discoursed on the sin of cynicism. "The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes—or pretends to believe—that everything and everybody are humbugs. We sometimes meet a person who professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as likely to be false as true and that the only way to decide which, is to consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that particular case. Religion he thinks one of the smartest business dodges extant, a first rate investment, and by all odds the most respectable disguise that a lying or swindling business man can wear. Honor he thinks is a sham. Honesty he considers a plausible word to flourish in the eyes of the greener portion of our race. . . . Poor fellow! He has exposed his own nakedness. Instead of showing that others are rotten inside, he has proved that he is."
Like Polonius, Barnum was given to banal profundities. In the year he retired to Iranistan, he was asked his advice on how to get ahead in business. Whereupon he issued the following ukase in the form of maxims: "Select the kind of business that suits your natural inclinations and temperament. . . . Let your pledge word ever be sacred. . . . Whatever you do, do with all your might. . . . Sobriety. Use no description of intoxicating drinks. . . . Let hope predominate, but be not too visionary. . . . Do not scatter your powers. . . . Engage proper employees. . . . Advertise your business. Do not hide your light under a bushel. . . . Avoid extravagance; and always live considerably within your income, if you can do so without absolute starvation! . . . Do not depend upon others."
Barnum meant every word of this. He sincerely believed what he publicly preached. In the privacy of his memorandum notebook, under the date of April 15, 1889, he summarized his credo of The Compleat Man: "The noblest art is that of making others happy, honesty, sobriety, industry, economy, education, good habits, perseverance, cheerfulness, love to God & good will toward men. These are the preeminent requisites for securing Health, Independence, or a Happy Life, the respect of Mankind and the special favor of our Father in Heaven."
Although Barnum was always satisfied with, even proud of, his profession as showman, he often fancied that his forensic talents might have served him better in another capacity. Once when he was crossing the Atlantic, a mock trial was staged on shipboard for the amusement of the passengers. Barnum acquitted himself well as prosecutor. Flushed with the success of his performance, he later told Joel Benton: "I have the vanity to think that if my good fortune had directed me to that profession, I should have made a very fair lawyer."
Beyond his boundless egotism, his passion for the pronoun I, and his continuing love affair with himself, beyond this and his self-advertised generosity, little else was known of Barnum's character traits in his lifetime. But careful consultation with friends, enemies, and employees, who left obscure memoirs of him, reveals something more.
He was good-natured, as well as thoughtful and kind in most of his personal relationships. Lyman Abbott, who knew him, wrote: "If I am right in defining a good-natured man as a man who desires to make other people happy, then the word good-natured would adequately describe him." Joel Benton remembered an incident when a poor boy had fallen ill just before Barnum's circus parade was to appear, and was inconsolable because he must miss it. In childish scrawl, the boy wrote Barnum asking "if he would not change the route of the parade to a certain direction that he named, so that it would pass his house, as he could then be taken to the window to see it go by." Despite all inconvenience, Barnum changed the direction of the parade and did not publicize his thoughtfulness.
Benton always felt that the showman's ego was more a matter of hardheaded business than vanity. "When he found his celebrity was a tremendous factor in his success, he did everything that he could think of to extend the exploitation of his name. This was not to nourish vain imaginings or because he felt exalted; it was to promote business."
The great majority of those who worked for Barnum were unrestrained in their admiration of him as human being and careerist, even when they were not in his employ. In 1893 Charles Godfrey Leland recalled: "Of all the men whom I met in those days in the way of business, Mr. Barnum, the great American humbug, was by far the honestest and freest from guile or deceit or 'ways that were dark, or tricks that were vain.' He was very kind-hearted and benevolent and gifted with a sense of fun which was even stronger than his desire for dollars. . . . He was a genius like Rabelais, but one who employed business and humanity for material instead of literature, just as Abraham Lincoln, who was a brother of the same band, employed patriotism and politics. All three of them expressed vast problems, financial, intellectual or natural by the brief arithmetic of a joke." As late as 1926, Robert Edmund Sherwood was nominating Barnum as the foremost showman in history. "I consider him the greatest genius that ever conducted an amusement enterprise in this country, a man of superlative imagination, indomitable pluck and artistic temperament."
Some persons, of course, found less attractive traits in Barnum. He was a poor loser at whist, and often embarrassed guests with his lack of sportsmanship. Although he could invest a fortune in a Jenny Lind or a Commodore Nutt, or volunteer large sums to charities, he was niggardly about the most minor household expenses. The Siamese Twins had considered him parsimonious, and they were not alone in this.
Major James Burton Pond, the Civil War veteran who made lecturing a big business with his management of Mark Twain, Henry Ward Beecher, and Henry M. Stanley, always remembered Barnum with mixed emotions. "A more plausible, pleasant-speaking man was never heard," wrote Pond. "It was as good as the show itself to listen to him in conversation." Yet, Pond added, "I think I never knew a more heartless man or one who knew the value and possibilities of a dollar more than P. T. Barnum."
In his youth, Pond represented Barnum during a temperance speaking tour of New England. Barnum, who was to receive $2,000 and all expenses for twenty talks, was met at the Boston depot by Pond. The showman refused a carriage because of the cost, and insisted on walking to his hotel. "He was the most prudently economical man that I have ever known," Pond said.
Barnum hired the cheapest rather than the best musicians for his orchestras. His colored posters were prepared so that they could be used again year after year. For his sideshow double acts, he preferred married couples because he refused to provide more than one sleeping berth to a pair on the road. According to Pond, the showman, who knew that his ticket-seller often shortchanged customers and did not mind, freely admitted that his ticket-seller had paid him $5,000 to obtain the job.
Pond saw Barnum as a cold, emotionless promoter in his relations with employees. Human beings were forever subordinate to the success of the show. Once, during a circus performance, a giantess was run over by a chariot and instantly killed. Barnum watched without visible reaction. Pond turned to him in horror. "That is dreadful, isn't it?" Barnum shrugged. "Oh, there is another waiting for her place. It is rather a benefit than a loss."
Barnum believed in God and the Universalist creed, and he attended church regularly with his wife, but he did not become a member of the church until late in life. He suffered few superstitious beliefs except in the ominous number thirteen, which he felt plagued him in every way during his life and caused him bad luck.
Even less known than his private personality was his private life as husband, father, and lover. Although he was constantly in the headlines, he was able to suppress most domestic news and gossip, even from the prying scandal sheets that infested New York.
In 1855, his wife of more than a quarter of a century, Charity, was forty-eight years of age. She was prematurely old. Her face bore the ravages of the trying and lonely years spent as mate of a public man. She wore her hair in ringlets. Her high forehead, narrow eyes, long straight nose, tight thin lips, and receding chin line made her countenance a startling contrast to her husband's big, merry, expansive face. Little is known of the elusive Charity Barnum, of her personality or her relationship with the showman, because little was ever recorded. Even in his voluminous autobiography, Barnum gave her entire life less lineage than the Feejee Mermaid, and no more than he gave to a single dance and frolic with Jenny Lind.
Charity had been raised in poverty, and even after she married Barnum she knew how to economize. When he had undertaken the Museum, and was determined that the household be managed on six hundred dollars a year, Charity had come forth with a proposed budget of four hundred dollars. She had borne Barnum three daughters before they had means and one when he was becoming wealthy, and she had suffered to see the third of the four girls, Frances, die at the age of two in 1844.
After the children had appeared, Charity became increasingly ill and weakened. Barnum built a greenhouse for her, and there she puttered among her "rare and beautiful flowers." One of her few outside interests was a membership in the exclusive Bridgeport Charitable Society. She was almost never consulted by Barnum about personal affairs. In March 1851, while in St. Louis with Jenny Lind, Barnum abruptly told his daughter Caroline that he was selling Iranistan and moving the family to an estate near Philadelphia. Caroline burst into tears. "Father has not written yet to Mother about it," she complained in her diary. "I expect she will be perfectly miserable for she is as much attached to Bridgeport as I am, and after having so much trouble with our house and grounds I think it is abominable to have to leave them. . . ." Later, it was Caroline and not Barnum who revealed the news to Charity. In the end, however, Barnum decided against the move.
Except for two visits to London with her daughters in 1844 and 1857, there is no evidence that Charity ever traveled abroad or in the United States with her husband. When Barnum was staging his Jenny Lind concerts in Havana, he invited Charity to make a sea voyage to Cuba. At the last moment she declined, explaining that "she had not the courage" to face seasickness. For the most part, her role was that of mother, hostess, and homebody. Barnum rarely wrote of her or spoke of her in public, though once, at the Museum, he told an audience, "Without Charity I am nothing"—but this may have been merely a pun, since he was then recovering from a period of hardship, and all his money was in his wife's name. When she died, his grief was great, he said, yet it was of brief duration.
Being in show business, Barnum was regularly exposed to the charms of other women, and all of them were not freaks. He consorted with a wide variety of attractive actresses and ladies of society and title, not only in America but also in England. The proximity of these women, their awe and flattery, and the showman's long absences from home, gave rise to rumors of infidelity.
If Barnum had love affairs, they did not find their way into the newspapers in his lifetime. But tongues wagged, nevertheless, at least enough so that his friend Sherwood was still trying to silence them in another century. In Here We Are Again Sherwood wrote: "Another untruth . . . is the declaration that he was a libertine, and consequently lived unhappily with his family. These scurrilous and scandalous assertions are made for sensational reasons only and embrace not a trace of truth. There never lived a man more lovable in his family than Mr. Barnum."
On January 17, 1897, six years after Barnum's death, the New York World published a sensational exposure of the showman's extramarital sex life, as revealed by the newspaper's "Special Correspondent" in Bridgeport. "Besides the three daughters Barnum had a son," the World reported. "That circumstance is not generally known, but it is none the less a fact. He does not bear the name of Barnum because he is not entitled by law to do so. His mother was a French actress who was one of the attractions at the old Barnum Museum, when that notable landmark was at the corner of Ann Street and Broadway, New York, where the new Havemeyer skyscraper now towers. The paternity of this son Barnum never denied. He cared for him in childhood and educated him as a physician, and at the present day, under a name that affords only an indirect hint of his ancestry, he is holding an honored place among the medical practitioners of an important city of the Union. . . .
"Not long after Barnum married his last wife [Nancy Fish, Barnum's second wife], this illegitimate son made a sudden and by no means welcome descent upon Bridgeport. There was a more or less remote possibility of a male heir to the Barnum millions—something the old showman very much desired—and the real but unrecognized son came to demand that his father settle some property upon him. Barnum drew up a cast-iron contract by which the son received $60,000 on condition that he never attempt after Barnum's death to annoy the heirs or claim anything from the will. The son has kept the contract faithfully."
In 1904 Julian H. Sterling, a Barnum relative, corroborated the exposure by writing that, sometime between 1851 and 1855, the showman had "brought over to Franklin house . . . a circus woman who shortly gave birth to a boy. Barnum educated the boy and late in life gave him a fortune. He turned out well and now lives in Richmond."
Old Bridgeport families still remember that a Mrs. Candee, whose husband edited the Bridgeport Daily Standard, used to speak of "a dashing young man named Phineas Taylor, who was said to be P. T. Barnum's illegitimate son." His mother was thought by some to have been Ernestine de Faiber, an actress and dancer at the Museum.
Barnum's three daughters were his greatest domestic pleasure and possibly his greatest trial. In 1855, Caroline was twenty-two years old, the next, Helen, fifteen, and the youngest, Pauline, nine. "They had been brought up," Barnum said a little regretfully, "in luxury; accustomed to call on servants to attend to every want; and almost unlimited in the expenditure of money." In short, they were spoiled.
Caroline, a tall, slender, dark-eyed brunette, was Barnum's favorite daughter. She was said to have a first-rate business sense, considerable linguistic ability, and a talent for conversation. On October 19, 1852, a thousand guests arrived for her wedding to David W. Thompson, a twenty-one-year-old Episcopalian who shared a prosperous Bridgeport saddlery business with his father. Most of the guests were driven outdoors when a portion of Iranistan caught fire. The groom was deeply upset, but Barnum assured him: "Never mind! We can't help these things; the house will probably be burned; but if no one is killed or injured, you shall be married tonight, if we are obliged to perform the ceremony in the coach-house." Fortunately, a bucket brigade quenched the flames and the wedding took place as scheduled.
Caroline bore Thompson a daughter and son, but the boy died in his infancy. The girl, Frances Leigh, who died in 1939, was Barnum's last surviving granddaughter. In Thompson's later years, he went into the coal business, became vice-president of a Bridgeport bank, and accepted a government job with the customhouse in New York City. During the Civil War he incurred Barnum's wrath for his secessionist sympathies, and when he ran for the state senate in 1865 as a Copperhead, and was soundly beaten, Barnum was delighted. Thompson died in 1915; Caroline had died four years earlier, when she was seventy-eight, as the result of a fall and a brain concussion. At her death, she was worth one and a half million dollars.
Helen, a shapely brunette, grew up to marry Samuel H. Hurd in 1857, when she was but seventeen. Not Iranistan but Caroline's home was the scene of the wedding. Hurd, whom Barnum loved as he might his own son, was shareholder in a company that sold goods brought east from California. He also conducted a leather business. After his marriage to Helen, he accepted employment as Barnum's treasurer. The union between Helen and Hurd produced three daughters. Of all his brood, Barnum considered Helen the most extravagant. "She was a warm-hearted, generous girl, but knew literally nothing of the value of money and the difficulty of acquiring it." Shortly before her marriage, when she was still attending an exclusive French boarding school in Washington, D.C., Helen learned that her father was in desperate financial straits. She offered to return home and give piano lessons to help him. Barnum was deeply moved and thought her concern "worth ten thousand dollars."
Pauline, Barnum's youngest daughter, was a large, buxom girl of considerable beauty. She developed a first-rate singing voice, and it is said that several times her father sponsored her in vaudeville shows on the road. Finally, in 1866, she gave up her career to marry Nathan Seeley, a stockbroker. Five hundred guests, including three Congressmen and John N. Genin, of hat fame, attended the formal wedding in Bridgeport. A New York Times correspondent praised Barnum's management of the affair. "It was the wedding of his last daughter and his last child, and its celebration was conducted nobly. I may properly refer to the fact that no stimulants were present, and I have no doubt that to this excellent feature is due the complete success of the affair."
Pauline's marriage to Seeley resulted in two sons and a daughter. Her early death, in 1877 when she was thirty-one, was blamed on "diphtheria and measles," and her passing struck Barnum cruelly. "This blow would have been unsupportable to me," he said, "did I not receive it as coming from our good Father in Heaven, who does all things right." Seeley remarried later, and died in 1917.
Not all of Barnum's daughters, according to the New York World exposé, led exemplary lives. Apparently, ardent Helen was unfaithful to Hurd, and finally left him for another. "The career of a certain one of Barnum's daughters was about as sensational as anything in the Barnum family history," said the World. "This daughter married and she and her husband lived in the handsomest house in Fairfield Avenue, this city, which was called Lindenhurst, a house which Barnum had built for himself after Iranistan was burned. There were gay times at Lindenhurst while the Hurds lived there. A good-looking tailor's clerk was one of the favored guests, so much favored that his wife left him. The clerk died soon after so there was an end to that scandal.
"But the daughter soon developed another and even more sensational one. She ran away from her husband with a doctor, and the two lived openly together in Chicago. Poor old Barnum, whose chickens were coming home to roost with a vengeance, tried hard to suppress this scandal, but a New York newspaper printed it and gave a diagram of the apartment in Chicago.
"The much-abused husband started in to get a divorce, but Barnum induced him to abandon it on account of his two other daughters. Some years later the eloping daughter quietly got a divorce out West and married the doctor. She, too, like the irregular son, made a descent upon Bridgeport soon after Barnum married his last wife, and there was a terrible scene at 'Waldemere,' as Barnum called his home in Seaside Park. Barnum was just about to take his great show to London and had made his will. The daughter was entirely cut off, her name not even being mentioned in it. After much bitter wrangling Barnum agreed to give her a tract of land, but insisted on leaving her name out of his will."
Certain elements of this lurid account are confirmed by what is known of Helen's activity and Barnum's will. To the best recollection of the oldest Bridgeport families, Helen did indeed run off with a physician, and live openly with him as his mistress. Helen did divorce Hurd, who retained custody of their children and remained in Bridgeport to work for Barnum. According to a living relative, "Barnum was furious about the divorce—he was so very fond of Hurd." Helen did take a doctor for her second husband. On March 22, 1871, at South Bend, Indiana, she married Dr. William Harmon Buchtel, an Ohioan who had served in the Civil War and was a practicing physician. Shortly after the ceremony, Helen and Dr. Buchtel moved to Denver, Colorado, where he became Professor of Obstetrics at Gross Medical College, and later its president, before the school was incorporated with Denver University. By her second husband, Helen had two daughters, the elder dying before the age of three. In Barnum's will, while Helen was mentioned by name several times, she was finally left no cash, but rather "a tract of land" near Denver.
In Barnum's original will, written on January 30, 1882, eight years after he had taken a second wife, Helen was promised "the gold watch worn by her mother, and the ivory Madonna, also the two old tapestry pictures in parlor, and one gilt vase bought with gold set in Paris." She was also bequeathed $1,500 a year for the remainder of her life. But seven years later, in 1889, Barnum wrote the first codicil to the will and amended his legacy to Helen: "By a mutual and friendly agreement entered into between my daughter, Helen M. Buchtel, and myself, on the second day of May, 1884, I conveyed valuable property to her, which property she has accepted in full satisfaction of any and all claims and demands upon my estate after my decease, and she has agreed to forever acknowledge the same as a just and liberal provision by me for her out of my estate, and of as much thereof as she ought to expect or desire as my daughter. Now, therefore, I hereby revoke and annul all the provisions, annuities, gifts, legacies, and devises contained in my will, or other testamentary documents, to, or for her benefit in any way, and declare each and all of the same to be void, excepting always the gilt vase given to her in this codicil. (This is already delivered to her. P. T. B.)"
Barnum privately considered the so-called "valuable property" he had conveyed to Helen as "worthless." He justified his deceit as proper punishment for the disgrace she had brought upon the family. But the last laugh was Helen's own. For, ironically, after Barnum's death the "worthless" property was discovered to be rich in mineral deposits, and it made Helen more prosperous than all the other Barnum heirs combined.
Between 1882, when he offered gifts and annuity, and 1884, when he revoked them for the real estate settlement, Barnum may have had that "terrible scene at 'Waldemere'" with Helen. Yet, the year before his death, Barnum accompanied by his second wife who had insisted upon the reconciliation, traveled west to call upon Helen and Dr. Buchtel.
Helen, said the World, always blamed her passions and misfortunes on Barnum's example. When he severely chastised her for her affair with the tailor's clerk before she took off with her doctor lover, she rebuked him with the words: "How could I help it? Am I not P. T. Barnum's daughter?"
Of his numerous grandchildren, Barnum favored the two boys, Pauline's offspring, Clinton H. Seeley and Herbert Seeley. Barnum left behind him a $4,100,000 estate. After liberally providing for his second wife, his friends, and his charities, he bequeathed one third to Clinton, Herbert, and their sister Jessie, one third to two of the daughters Helen had abandoned to Samuel H. Hurd—Helen B. Rennell and Julia H. Clarke—and one third to his eldest daughter Caroline. Clinton H. Seeley was also left three percent of the profits (not to exceed $i10,000 a year) of Barnum's show business enterprises, and an additional $25,000 if he would cooperate in keeping Barnum's name alive.
"Whereas I have no son," Barnum wrote in his will, "and therefore my name of Barnum will not otherwise be continued in my family, except by my wife, and as I would like to perpetuate my surname, and I have a deep love and respect for, and confidence in the strict integrity of my said grandson, Clinton H. Seeley, who I am sure will honor the name, therefore I give my grandson, Clinton H. Seeley, Twenty-five Thousand Dollars ($25,000), on this express condition, that he shall in a legal and proper way change his name, or cause his name to be changed to that of Clinton Barnum Seeley, and that he shall habitually use the name of Barnum, either as Clinton Barnum Seeley, or C. Barnum Seeley, or Barnum Seeley in his name, so that the name Barnum shall always be known as his name." Quickly enough, the eldest of the boys became C. Barnum Seeley.
However, Barnum's certainty that C. Barnum would "honor the name" might have been sorely shaken had he lived a short time longer. For in the last month of 1896, Barnum's two grandsons were involved in a scandal that rocked and amused New York. To celebrate C. Barnum Seeley's impending marriage to Florence Tuttle, the younger Herbert, who had recently departed from West Point after two unhappy years, threw a stag dinner for him in an upstairs suite of Sherry's restaurant. Twenty gentlemen of society participated in what the World later called "the pigsty revel at Sherry's" and the Reverend A. H. Lewis called a scene to be likened "to the most licentious periods of Pompeii."
The Seeley's entertainment featured a shapely young lass named Catherine Devine, more popularly known as Little Egypt —probably the very same who had, three years before, exhibited her unsheathed charms and wiggle at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, side by side with such attractions as John Philip Sousa, Sandow, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown's house, Swami Vivekanada, and the stuffed horse Comanche, only survivor of Custer's Last Stand. Little Egypt, it appeared, cavorted in the nude on a table top while the Seeleys and other guests, hot with wine, snatched at her bare legs.
Police Captain George Chapman and two detectives, performing on a tip, raided the bacchanalia, but the Seeleys had been forewarned and had secreted their dancer in time. Later they protested the invasion of privacy, and Captain Chapman was placed on trial. At the same time the Grand Jury indicted Herbert Seeley for "conspiring to induce the woman known as Little Egypt to commit the crime of indecent exposure." Eventually this indictment was dropped, as were the charges against Captain Chapman. Thereafter, Little Egypt advertised herself as the veteran of "the Awful Seeley Dinner" (until she died in 1908, leaving behind almost a quarter of a million dollars); Captain Chapman was congratulated by the Woman's Purity Association; and C. Barnum Seeley was happily married in New York's Trinity Chapel (the ceremony, reported the New York Tribune, being unhappily attended by a large number of "unbidden" and "unwelcome" guests who had heard of "an incident which happened at a dinner").
Although Barnum had wanted Clinton to carry his name, it was grandson Herbert who eventually most resembled the showman. "Herbert seems to have been the only Barnum descendant with a circus flair like P.T.," a member of the Barnum family said recently. "Herbert was a carefree bachelor, who served in the Spanish-American War, and did not marry until just before his death at forty-three. His older brother, Clinton Barnum Seeley, worked with the circus only a short time after P.T.'s death. In 1907, Clinton set up residence in Bridgeport, headed the Bridgeport Trust Company, and served as member and then President of the Park Board for thirty-one years. He devoted himself to the Union League Club, the New York Yacht Club, genealogy, and golf. He died in 1958. The rest of the Barnum descendants led quiet, humdrum lives, far from the bright lights, the tinsel, the sawdust, and all seemed rather ashamed of their circus money."
Thus Barnum, grandfather as well as human being and mere mortal. William Roscoe Thayer called him "the typical American" of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Many other writers concurred. But in 1923, Robert C. Benchley dissented. "To point to Barnum as a 'typical American' is like pointing to a cat as a typical mouse. The 'typical American' was Barnum's meat. . . . You can never call a genius 'typical' anything."