If Barnum re-read his Old Testament in his retirement, he may have found a strange portent in Genesis. For in its pages, Pharaoh revealed to Joseph a dream: "There come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt, and there shall arise after them seven years of famine, and all the plenty shall be forgotten."
Barnum had known the years of plenty, ten or more of them, and now came the years of famine. In 1855, secluded in Iranistan, he had seemed unassailable, mighty, utterly indestructible. Before the year was out, his life was a shambles. All that he had so laboriously built through the American Museum, the Tom Thumb tour, the Jenny Lind enterprise—reputation, wealth, haven—was brought tumbling down in a decade of disaster. Some of it he might attribute to an unkind fate or accident, but much of it he invited upon himself.
The disintegration began in a small way, and was of his own making. It began with the writing of a book, his autobiography, a common act of vanity overlaid with a desire for immortality. Until this book reached the public, his reputation in America and Europe had been relatively unblemished. With the appearance of the book, he became, overnight, a rascal and blackguard. He had committed the incredible folly, out of some insensitivity or further need for sensation, of letting his vast public come backstage—where they might learn, for the first time, the extent and detail of his occasional trickery. By this act, the prophet of the new showmanship made his flock feel foolish—and there were many who would not forgive him.
During most of 1854, he scratched away at the autobiography —"being assured by publishers that such a work would have an extensive circulation, and by personal friends that it would be a readable book"—and at last, in 1855, the 404 pages were put before the public by J. S. Redfield, of New York, who also published Fitz-Greene Halleck and Edgar Allan Poe. It was entitled: The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself.
Barnum insisted that he had, indeed, written it by himself, though Charles Godfrey Leland, the editor of Barnum's defunct Illustrated News, thought that it was ghostwritten. Leland said that Barnum had asked him to write the book, and that he had refused. "This would have been amusing work and profitable," Leland admitted, "but I shrunk from the idea of being identified with it." It was Leland's opinion that Barnum had then turned to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, another editor on the periodical.
Griswold was the most unsavory character in Barnum's circle. A onetime Baptist minister, he had worked as editor on twenty magazines and produced forty books. On several occasions he had been dismissed for dishonesty. A psychopathic liar and plagiarist, he maligned Catholics and Thomas Jefferson. Appointed Edgar Allan Poe's literary executor, he viciously slandered Poe in print the moment that he was dead. Of Poe, he wrote: "Irascible, envious—bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold, repellant cynicism, his passions vented themselves in sneers. There seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and, what was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of the true point of honor. He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition. . . ." Griswold was a capable hack, and it is possible that he did secretly write Barnum's autobiography. But the style of the published book is so perfectly the showman's own that either Griswold was a remarkable literary ape or Barnum actually wrote the book.
Barnum's bulky confession, advertised as the success story of a self-made man and a guidebook to riches, was startlingly frank. "It will be seen that I have not covered up my so-called 'humbugs,'" Barnum wrote, "but have given a full account even of such schemes as 'Joice Heth,' the 'Feejee Mermaid,' and the 'Woolly Horse.' . . . Though a portion of my 'confessions' may by some be considered injudicious, I prefer frankly to 'acknowledge the corn' wherever I have had a hand in plucking it."
It was sold, as were most serious books at that time, by subscription. Door-to-door salesmen trudged about the nation extolling its virtues and quoting its contents. Too, it was for sale at the American Museum. Soon enough, it was competing as a best-seller with Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Henry Thoreau's Walden, and T. S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Barroom.
The critics fell on it and belabored Barnum sorely. In the United States, the New York Times led the pack. "The great fact which Mr. Barnum sets forth in this biography of himself, is that his success has been achieved—his wealth acquired—his reputation and consideration established, by the systematic, adroit and persevering plan of obtaining money under false pretences from the public at large. . . . Nothing in this book is more remarkable than the obvious insensibility of Mr. Barnum to the real character of its disclosures. He takes an evident pride in the boldness and enormity of the impositions by which he has amassed his fortune. He does not confess them, he boasts of them. . . . The book will be very widely read, and will do infinite mischief. It will encourage the tendency, always too strong in the young men of this country, to seek fortune by other means than industry. . ." To this, Severn T. Wallis added an amen. "Lie and swindle as much as you please—says the voice from Iranistan—but be sure you read your Bible and drink no brandy!"
But these reviews were as caresses compared with the reception awaiting Barnum in England. Blackwood's Magazine, which had once tried to destroy that "Cockney," John Keats, now had its knives out for Barnum. "We find but few instances of rogues openly congratulating themselves upon the success of their roguery, and confidently demanding from the public applause and congratulation. . . . Mr. Phineas Taylor Barnum is, we are thankful to say, not a native of this country. . . . We have not read, for a long time, a more trashy or offensive book than this. . . . If we could enter, with anything like a feeling of zest, into the relations of this excessively shameless book, we should be inclined to treat its publication as the most daring hoax which the author has yet perpetrated upon the public. But it has inspired us with nothing but sensations of disgust for the frauds which it narrates, amazement at its audacity, loathing for its hypocrisy, abhorrence for the moral obliquity which it betrays and sincere pity for the wretched man who compiled it. He has left nothing for his worst enemy to do; for he had fairly gibbeted himself. No unclean bird of prey, nailed ignominiously to the door of a barn, can present a more humiliating spectacle than Phineas Taylor Barnum, as he appears in his autobiography."
Tait's Edinburgh Magazine characterized Barnum as a swindler and villain whose career was "a living libel upon all that is manly in humanity." The periodical railed at him for his "wretched conceit," and then went on: "How much of Mr. Barnum's revelations is to be believed, and how much of them is sheer lies and moonshine? That is the question. Who shall say that when this autobiographical spec. has served its purpose, and brought the anticipated addition of dollars to the showman's coffers, another volume may not be forthcoming in which the writer shall renounce all claim to the nauseous depravity in which he has thought fit to clothe himself in this book, and stand forth in a new light. Positively, we have our suspicions whether this candid confession be not after all as much an imposture and humbug as Old Mother Heth, the mermaid, and Tom Thumb. Sure we are that it has been muckraked together for the same special purpose—to wit, to subserve the greedy, money-getting propensities of the author."
The Edinburgh critic was right in one respect: another volume was forthcoming, one in which the author did try to soften some of "the nauseous depravity" evident in his first book. Fourteen years later, after buying back the plates of his first book and destroying them, Barnum produced a new version of his autobiography with a new title. In 1869, J. B. Burr and Company of Hartford published Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. This version, almost twice the length of the first and three pounds in weight, was over 700 pages long and sold for three dollars and fifty cents.
Certain sections of Struggles and Triumphs were understandably expurgated or condensed. The years had mellowed Barnum. He wanted respectability. And he did not wish to be burned by a new generation of reviewers. As a consequence, many episodes that might show him in a bad light were played down. Certain details of the Feejee Mermaid trickery were omitted, as was his falsification of Tom Thumb's age and birthplace. Added were the stories of his most recent successes and an indignant account of his eventual downfall.
Again, the autobiography sold well, though it was still disdained by critics. After a few years, Barnum bought the plates and copyright back from Burr and decided to publish it himself. Using some of the old plates and joining with them new plates of smaller type, Barnum had a condensed edition of 300 pages printed in Buffalo. Each volume cost him nine cents and sold for one dollar. Until 1888, he continued to fiddle with the book, regularly adding accounts of his latest activities as if it was a personal yearbook or almanac, and periodically turning these new editions loose on the public. Nine versions of the autobiography are known, though possibly as many as twenty were published.
By 1884, desiring publicity more than profit, Barnum put the book in the public domain, offering its contents royalty free to any publishers who wished to reprint it. One Chicago publisher obliged at once, retitling it How I Made Millions. In 1883, Barnum claimed that half a million copies had been sold; six years later, he claimed over one million copies. It was hawked at the Museum, and then at the circus. Wherever Barnum went, the book went with him.
He considered his autobiography the best gift any human being could receive. In 1920, George Conklin, one of Barnum's lion tamers, disclosed that Barnum had kept a large packing box, nailed tight, in the Bridgeport office of his circus's winter quarters. On the box was painted the warning: "Not to be Opened Until After the Death of P. T. Barnum." An English elephant keeper who had once been keeper of Jumbo, a senile soul named Matthew Scott, took it into his head that this mysterious box contained his cash inheritance from Barnum. "When after Mr. Barnum's death the box was opened it was found to be full of copies of his life written by himself and each of the old men round the show was given a copy." Scott went to pieces from sheer disappointment. He could not understand that, in giving this book, Barnum was offering him the greatest treasure that he possessed.
Barnum's autobiography continued to be issued after his death, well into the twentieth century. As recently as 1927, both The Viking Press and Alfred A. Knopf brought out editions of the book, in each case combining the best of Barnum's many revisions. George S. Bryan, who edited the two-volume Knopf publication, regarded the book as "a full, leisurely narrative, done with vast relish. The style is, as one might expect, facile, in a high spirited and careless way. The story, bulk considered, well maintains its interest. . . . Whoso touches this book, touches a human being —touches a career of a peculiarly rich, varied, and entertaining pattern."
Yet, in 1855, there had been the savagery of the critics. They did not understand Barnum's intent, Joel Benton argued in The Century Magazine in 1902. The book "was not meant to be taken as literal truth; but it was so taken, and the criticism of it was very bitter. The soberer matter-of-fact public of that day did not see the Pickwickian sense and the orientalism of statement that pervaded it. The cold type could not carry with it the twinkling of the author's eye." What stabbed Barnum deepest was that everywhere he was accused of having built his career on trickery instead of on industry and by the use of his intelligence.
Before he could recover from this blow, another of far more drastic consequences occurred. This time, it was not his pride that was damaged, but his pocketbook. Late in 1855, because he was overly ambitious for East Bridgeport and gullible in most matters outside show business, he found himself thrown into bankruptcy.
The man so recently branded swindler by the reviewers was, in his own words, "cruelly swindled and deliberately defrauded." It was incredible to all. Barnum later tried to explain his vulnerability to an audience: "Many people have wondered that a man considered so acute as myself should have been deluded into embarrassments like mine, and not a few have declared, in short metre, that 'Barnum was a fool.' I can only reply that I never made pretensions to the sharpness of a pawnbroker, and I hope I shall never so entirely lose confidence in human nature as to consider every man a scamp by instinct, or a rogue by necessity. 'It is better to be deceived sometimes, than to distrust always,' says Lord Bacon, and I agree with him." Apart from the fact that Lord Bacon had not originated that statement, the sentiment was appropriate. Barnum, ever impressed by wealth and position, did not consider Chauncey Jerome or his son, respectively president and secretary of the Jerome Clock Company, a scamp or rogue—and he suffered for it.
According to Barnum, Chauncey Jerome visited him in September 1855 at Iranistan. Later, in his own autobiography, Jerome denied this. "I wish to have it understood that I never saw P. T. Barnum, while he was connected with the company of which I was a member." Jerome declared that he was retired at the time, and that it may have been his son who called upon Barnum. No matter which, a Jerome came calling. A proposition was suggested to Barnum. The Jerome Clock Company would gladly move from New Haven to the showman's beloved East Bridgeport if, in return, Barnum made the firm a loan. The company was worth $587,000—there were ledgers to prove it—but this had been a poor season. Unless the company could raise another $110,000 immediately, it would have to lay off a large number of workmen.
Barnum was interested. In exchange for a temporary loan to an established and reputable firm, he would have its factories permanently in East Bridgeport. At once he investigated Chauncey Jerome. He learned that Jerome had made his fortune by inventing brass clockworks eighteen years before. Through mass production of standardized brass parts from steel dies, Jerome was able to sell an all-metal timepiece for four dollars, thereby undermining the market for wooden clocks selling at twelve dollars. Jerome's clocks were used as far away as China, where the innards were removed so that the cases could be used as temples for the Gods —"proving that faith was possible without 'works,'" Barnum added while he could still be merry. Jerome had given a $40,000 church to New Haven and a large clock to a church in Bridgeport. Barnum was satisfied. "So wealthy and so widely known a company would surely be a grand acquisition to my city," he decided.
And so Barnum made his ill-fated deal with the Jerome Clock Company. He signed a series of notes vouching for the loans the Jeromes needed. On some notes he left the date of payment blank, allowing the firm to use them as required, but they were never to total in excess of $110,000. A whole series of complex financial transactions followed, in which Barnum's old canceled notes were returned to him for new ones. Assured by Jerome's son that the prospering company would soon be able to "snap its fingers at the banks," Barnum relaxed, and in so doing, made his final mistake. He continued to cosign new notes, without bothering to see if all of the old ones had been canceled.
At the end of three months he learned the truth—"the frightful fact that I had endorsed for the clock company to the extent of more than half a million dollars, and most of the notes had been exchanged for old Jerome Company notes due to the banks and other creditors. My agent who made these startling discoveries came back to me with the refreshing intelligence that I was a ruined man!" Not only was the Jerome Company bankrupt, but so was Barnum himself.
He was incredulous. He could scarcely believe it. He had been on the summit, safe against all emergencies, secure, and now suddenly he was poor.
"What a dupe had I been!" he cried in anger. "Here was a great company pretending to be worth $587,000, asking temporary assistance to the amount of $110,000, coming down with a crash, so soon as my helping hand was removed, and sweeping me down with it. It failed; and even after absorbing my fortune, it paid but from twelve to fifteen per cent of its obligations, while to cap the climax, it never removed to East Bridgeport at all, notwithstanding this was the only condition which ever prompted me to advance one dollar to the rotten concern!"
The distraught Barnum briefly contemplated suicide. But, after much soul-searching, he concluded "that the blow was wisely intended for my ultimate benefit" and that a higher authority wished to teach him the lesson "that there is something infinitely better than money or position or worldly prosperity. . . ."
Except for Charity's possession of the Museum lease, which profited her $19,000 a year, all was lost. Iranistan and all personal property fell into the hands of his creditors. Barnum rented a furnished house in New York City, removed his family there, and tried to restore method to the madness. But swarms of creditors, impatient to recover some part of their depressed notes, kept him in court to face a series of separate judgments until he was exhausted and in despair.
In one of these many trials, a stunted, waspish attorney, representing a creditor who had bought a thousand dollar note for $700, baited Barnum until the showman had all that he could endure.
"What is your business?" the attorney demanded.
"Attending bar," said Barnum quietly.
"Attending bar? Attending bar! Why, don't you profess to be a temperance man—a teetotaler?"
"I do."
"And yet, sir, do you have the audacity to assert that you peddle rum all day, and drink none yourself?"
"I doubt whether that is a relevant question," said Barnum softly.
"I will appeal to his honor the judge, if you don't answer it instantly."
Barnum considered, then replied. "I attend bar, and yet never drink intoxicating liquors."
"Where do you attend bar, and for whom?" the attorney snapped.
"I attend the bar of this court, nearly every day, for the benefit of two-penny, would-be lawyers and their greedy clients," Barnum replied.
The trials were fewer after that.
No longer high and mighty, he was the target of every kind of attack from press, clergy, and fair-weather friends. The press gloated over the debacle of "Barnum and the Jerome Clock Bubble." To Barnum, the sadistic slanders were unbelievable. For years, the press had been his friend, his collaborator, his very life blood. Now, it was his rack. "I was taken to pieces," he said, "analyzed, put together again, kicked, 'pitched into,' tumbled about, preached to, preached about, and made to serve every purpose to which a sensation-loving world could put me."
It was an age-old lesson, and he would never forget it. "There were those who had fawned upon me in my prosperity, who now jeered at my adversity; people whom I had specially favored, made special efforts to show their ingratitude; papers which, when I had the means to make it an object for them to be on good terms with me, overloaded me with adulation, now attempted to overwhelm me with abuse. . . ." Worst of all, as with the book, were the preachers and moralists who announced that Barnum was getting just retribution for his "ill-gotten gains." This, when he had labored day and night for what was achieved and deserved.
His enemies, of course, had a field day. James Gordon Bennett, who strongly disliked him, was in the vanguard of the calumniators. On March 17, 1856, the New York Herald piously editorialized:
"THE FALL OF BARNUM—The author of that book glorifying himself as a millionaire from the arts and appliances of obtaining money upon false pretenses is, according to his own statements in court, completely crushed out. All the profits of all his Feejee Mermaids, all his woolly horses, Greenland whales, Joice Heths, negroes turning white, Tom Thumbs and monsters and impostures of all kinds, including the reported $70,000 received by the copyright of that book, are all swept away, Hindoo palace, elephants and all, by the late invincible showman's remorseless assignees. It is a case eminently adapted to 'point a moral or adorn a tale."'
Bennett did not bother him. It was the defection of so many friends that really hurt. More than a year later, they were still treating him as a leper. "Oftentimes in passing up and down Broadway," he recalled, "I saw old and prosperous friends coming, but before I came anywhere near them, if they espied me they would dodge into a store, or across the street, or opportunely meet someone with whom they had pressing business, or they would be very much interested in something that was going on over the way or on top of the City Hall."
Bitterness turned finally to secret and sardonic amusement. He vowed to himself that once he had escaped the "bewilderment of broken clock-wheels," he would remember his "butterfly friends."
Then, on the late night of December 17, 1857, came another crushing blow.
Iranistan had been vacant for two years while realtors attempted to sell it on behalf of Barnum's creditors. But its weird design and ungainly size deterred all prospective buyers. At last, the creditors agreed that Barnum could move himself and his family back into it until a purchaser was found or an auction held.
At once, with what funds he had, Barnum sent painters and carpenters into the mansion to refresh and mend it. He gave strict orders that workmen should not smoke inside the building. Nevertheless, when the painters and carpenters climbed to the observatory dome to sprawl on the circular seat during lunch hour, they usually smoked as they conversed after their meal. On one such noon, it was surmised afterwards, a laborer absently left his glowing pipe on the cushion of the curved divan. The pipe rolled to its side, dumping burning tobacco on the tow with which the cushion was stuffed. How many hours or days the tow smoldered could not be determined. But an hour before midnight, in the week before Christmas, all Iranistan was aflame.
The exertions of the bucket brigades were futile as the flames from the wooden pyre lit the frozen grounds and the dark sky. In two hours Barnum's Oriental palace was a grotesque heap of smoking embers. Nothing but its memory and scattered pieces of charred furniture survived the fire.
With heavy heart, Barnum's half-brother, Philo, wired him the news in New York. When Barnum awakened in his room at Astor House the next morning, the telegram was waiting. "My beautiful Iranistan was gone!" he wrote. "This was not only a serious loss to my estate, for it had probably cost at least $150,000, but it was generally regarded as a public calamity. It was the only building in its peculiar style of architecture, of any pretension, in America, and many persons visited Bridgeport every year expressly to see Iranistan."
Financially the loss was cataclysmic. Barnum, in his difficulty, had allowed the property insurance to lapse from $62,000 to $28,000. This relatively meager sum was swallowed by the creditors. Now the seventeen acres, unencumbered by the eccentric dwelling, was easily disposed of by these same creditors. The land was purchased by a close friend of Barnum's, Elias Howe, Jr., whose invention of the sewing machine twelve years before had eventually made him wealthy enough to pay personally the salaries of a company of his comrades in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. Once, in fact, he even chartered a special train to bring these men home on furlough. Howe paid $50,000 for the estate, intending to construct another mansion on it, but his long litigation with Isaac Merrit Singer and others over the sewing-machine patent, as well as his enlistment in the war as a private, delayed his plans, and he died without developing the property.
Much of the period of Barnum's greatest travail coincided with the agonizing fratricide by which his country was gripped from 1861 to 1865. At the outbreak of hostilities, Barnum was fifty-one years of age and too old to enlist. Instead, as was the custom, he paid for four substitute soldiers to represent him at the front. Because he opposed slavery, he contributed generously to the Union cause.
All too soon he became personally involved in a home-front struggle to prevent sabotage and treason. Connecticut was well populated with advocates of peace at any cost and Southern sympathizers. After the Federal defeat at Bull Run, many of these peace groups began to propagandize openly. When Barnum heard that one such group was going to hold a rally at Stepney, ten miles north of Bridgeport, he joined Elias Howe, Jr., in attending the meeting to investigate disloyalty.
Arriving at the rally, Barnum and Howe were accompanied by two omnibuses filled with curious Union soldiers home on leave. When a white peace flag was run up to replace the stars and stripes, and the leading orator, a preacher, began to speak of Northern aggression, the soldiers present charged the platform. In the ensuing melee, the speaker fled to a cornfield, while his confederates drew revolvers and brandished muskets. One pacifist fired a shot before being chased out of town. The others were quickly disarmed. The soldiers carried Barnum on their shoulders to the platform, where "he made a speech full of patriotism, spiced with the humor of the occasion." A Union officer made another speech, then "The Star-Spangled Banner" was lustily sung, and finally Elias Howe, Jr., mounted the platform to shout: "If they fire a gun, boys, burn the whole town, and I'll pay for it!"
Returning to Bridgeport, the soldiers muttered of burning the offices of the Farmer, a local newspaper with secessionist sympathies. Barnum warned them to remain law-abiding citizens and refrain from violence. But the moment Barnum went to telegraph the story to New York newspapers, the soldiers rushed the newspaper office, smashed the presses, and scattered the type in the street. Distressed, Barnum offered to raise money for the editor, but the editor was not interested and ran off to Georgia.
In 1863, Barnum was a prominent member of the "Prudential Committee," one of the home-front vigilante organizations. His life was often threatened, and he was provided with rockets to shoot in case his home was ever besieged. Several times he was given Federal troopers to guard his premises.
One of the less well-known sidelights of the Civil War was the Confederate plot to burn and take over New York in retaliation for General William T. Sherman's savage march of attrition to the sea. Barnum was, as it turned out, one of the minor victims of the plot, for the American Museum, now in his hands again, turned out to be a prime target.
Greenwood and Butler, lacking the master's showmanship, had done poorly with the Museum, and five years after the Jerome Clock disaster, Barnum offered to buy the collection back. Greenwood and Butler were only too glad to oblige. Barnum had been in possession of the Museum, which again was flourishing, for four years when the Confederate raiders almost turned it into cinders. It was, in a way, a forewarning of the Museum's eventual fate.
The great Confederate arson plot was masterminded by Jefferson Davis to boost sagging morale in the South and to terrorize the North into ending the war. Davis wired Jacob Thompson, in Mississippi, to execute the plan. Thompson, wealthy lawyer, Congressman, and Secretary of the Interior under President Buchanan, left at once to establish headquarters in Toronto, Canada. His private war chest contained one million dollars in Federal currency.
Results were immediate. Two steamships on the Great Lakes were captured and sunk. Several boats were burned at St. Louis.
St. Albans, Vermont, was successfully raided, and three banks there were emptied of $200,000. But the big plan was, in Thompson's words, "a corps to burn New York City." The mustached, twenty-six-year-old Colonel Robert Maxwell Martin, a Kentuckian who had slashed through Ohio as commander of Morgan's guerrilla cavalry, was selected to lead the task force of eight. Three of his more prominent aides were the hard-drinking Robert C. Kennedy, of Louisiana, Lieutenant John W. Headley, of Kentucky, and Lieutenant John T. Ashbrook.
The scheme relied heavily on the cooperation of those peace groups in the metropolis which were allied with the very groups Barnum was combating in Connecticut. Thompson and Colonel Martin had been assured that the Sons of Liberty, a secret society that supported the right of secession by any state at any time, had a membership of 300,000, of which 8,000 were in Illinois, 50,000 in Indiana, and 20,000 in New York City itself. At the given signal—the firing of New York hotels and places of amusement—the Copperheads would rise up and panic the citizenry, thus blocking off troop movements. With muskets and bombs, the Sons of Liberty would take over City Hall and the Superintendent of Police's offices and blow up Fort Lafayette in New York harbor.
Colonel Martin, Captain Kennedy, and six others, slipped into New York on the eve of the 1864 Presidential election in which Abraham Lincoln was to defeat General George B. McClellan by 400,000 votes. Election day, when various peace groups from New Jersey and Connecticut were convening with their fellow subversives in New York, was to be the day of the firing and revolt. The entire city was absorbed in the impending vote. The campaign had been bitter. The cocky, thirty-eight-year-old McClellan had even called Lincoln "the original gorilla . . . a well-meaning baboon."
The eight rebel invaders met with three representatives of the Sons of Liberty in a piano store owned by one of them. The New York contacts were Henry W. McDonald, proprietor of the piano store, James A. McMasters, publisher of the Freeman's Journal, and Captain E. Longuemare, who had drawn up the list of hotels to be burned and had arranged for the production of a large number of incendiary bombs filled with the chemical known as Greek fire. But the following morning, before the rebels could act, pudgy General Benjamin Butler marched into New York with 10,000 troops. This was the same Butler who, when administrator of New Orleans, was despised by all Southern womanhood. When the belles turned their backs to him, he remarked admiringly: "These women know which end of them looks best." Butler, obviously, was a man who brooked no nonsense. He promptly let it be known that he was aware some plot was afoot, and that he was out to arrest the conspirators. Much later, the rebels learned that they had been betrayed by a man named Godfrey Hyams, who knew of their plans made in Canada, and who sold his knowledge to the Union for $70,000.
The arrival of Union troops made the eight raiders delay their sabotage. Then, suddenly thinking it all too romantic and unfeasible, the publisher and piano dealer withdrew their support. Discouraged, Captain Longuemare also gave up. Now, divested of aid from the Sons of Liberty, the rebels might have returned to Canada except for reading the news that Sherman had burned Atlanta. Stirred by Colonel Martin's demands for retaliation, six of the eight agreed to remain and reduce New York to ashes. Lieutenant Headley visited an elderly chemist in Washington Square and picked up a valise, two by four feet in size, containing 144 four-ounce bottles of incendiary Greek fire. Sixty of the bottles were divided, and the six men separated to register under false names in nineteen hotels.
On the evening of Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1864, the plot to burn New York went into motion. "I went to my room in the Astor House at twenty minutes after seven," Lieutenant Headley said. "I hung the bedclothes over the footboard, piled chairs, drawers, and other material on the bed, stuffed newspapers into the heap and poured a bottle of turpentine over the whole mass. I then opened a bottle of 'Greek fire' and quickly spilled it on top. It blazed instantly. I locked the door and went downstairs. Leaving the key at the office, as usual, I passed out. I did likewise at the City Hotel, Everett House and United States Hotel."
Simultaneously, Colonel Martin was igniting the Hoffman House and Fifth Avenue Hotel. By nine o'clock, all nineteen hotels had been set aflame. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Ashbrook, assigned to the giddier avenues of holiday New York, heaved a bottle of Greek fire into the audience at Niblo's Garden and another into the Winter Garden where three thousand persons were enrapt by John Wilkes Booth's performance as Marc Anthony in Julius Caesar. Headley, taking the sea air at the North River wharves, deposited several incendiary bombs among the moored shipping and sank one hay barge and damaged two other vessels.
The metropolitan fire department, alerted at once, caught most of the sputtering combustions in their earliest stage. Mobs of people in confusion and fear began to fill Broadway. Captain Kennedy, having committed arson at three hotels and reinforced his waning courage with a drink, found himself caught in the milling crowd before Barnum's brightly illuminated American Museum.
Hugging his half-filled valise, fearing recognition and consequent lynching, Kennedy hastily paid twenty-five cents and ducked into the safety of the Museum. Once inside, he mingled with the customers, examining several exhibits. Suddenly, moved again by a memory of the wicked Sherman, he realized that he was in the perfect place for a spectacular act of demolition. Eliminating the world famous Barnum's Museum would be an immense demoralizing factor. Descending the main staircase, he halted, opened his valise, extracted a glass bomb, and hurled it at the steps. There was a sudden sheet of flame, and the Museum was afire.
As Kennedy hastened into the street, the Museum became the scene of the night's most effective conflagration. In the Lecture Room, twenty-five hundred persons were being lulled by one of Barnum's morality plays. The assistant manager, Greenwood, burst in, shouting warnings of fire. At once, the auditorium was in chaos as playgoers scrambled and fought for means of egress. There were injuries, but no fatalities.
Now, the Museum's main entrance was thick with smoke. Thousands in the street fell back as firemen charged in to smother the blaze. A female customer trapped on the second floor was rescued by ladder. One of Barnum's freaks, a seven-foot giantess, possibly Anna Swan, stumbled to the entrance suffocating and hysterical. When Greenwood and three firemen tried to assist her, she sent the pygmies sprawling. She was subdued by six men, and soon was asleep under sedation.
Gradually the wild animals were ushered out of the Museum onto Broadway, where they were closely guarded. In a few hours, the fire was out. Barnum estimated the damage at $1,000. It had been a close call.
By daybreak, after nine valiant hours, the red-shirted fire fighters had quenched every rebel blaze. Except for a report from one hotel of a $10,000 loss, the damage had been light. What saved the city was not the efficiency of its fire department alone, but the ineffectiveness of the bottles of Greek fire. With the exception of the glass bottle used in the Museum, all the bombs had been weak and fizzling. As a result, the desperate foray had ended in utter futility. Informed of the result in Toronto, Thompson made the following notation: "Their reliance on the Greek fire had proved a misfortune. It cannot be depended on as an agent in such work. I have no faith whatever in it and no attempt shall hereafter be made under my general directions with any such materials."
Two days later, with a reward on their heads, the arsonists sneaked out of New York on a train for Albany, and finally reached Toronto safely. Sometime later, Kennedy, who had ignited Barnum's Museum, and Ashbrook boarded a train in Detroit with the object of returning to the South. Detected by Union secret service agents, Ashbrook escaped through a window. Kennedy was trapped and arrested by two officers. Charged with arson and espionage, he was returned, manacled, to New York. There, in March 1865, he was tried by a military court and found guilty. He was hanged at Fort Lafayette. Barnum had his precious Museum and giantess intact—but, as it turned out, not for long. Misfortune still had him by the coattails.
The last severe blow fell on July 13, 1865. What the Confederacy had started was now finished by the unkindest Fate. In the engine room of the American Museum, there was machinery that furnished steam to rotate the large fans cooling the building and to pump fresh water into the recently installed aquarium. This machinery sparked a fire. The flames took hold of the adjacent manager's office—usually occupied by Greenwood and his assistant, the unhappy Samuel H. Hurd, Barnum's son-in-law—and spread swiftly through the first floor and then to the floors above.
It was a major holocaust. Even as the fire brigades of the metropolis were hastily summoned, Hurd staggered to his burning desk and rescued several thousands of dollars in receipts. Fearing to expose the cash to the unruly crowds gathering outside, he placed the money in Barnum's metal safe.
From Maiden Lane to Chambers Street, Broadway was lined with forty thousand people watching a blaze worthy of Nero's art. Although the Museum rapidly became a torch, no human being died. Barnum was in Hartford, and Greenwood was also away. Hurd, having secreted the money, barely reached the safety of the street. The few visitors escaped easily, but the freaks had a harder time. Great billows of smoke invaded the upper stories, and many freaks were overcome. Fortunately, innumerable fire engines clanged up before the building just in time.
Among the heroic firemen was John Denham, of Hose Company Number Fifteen, who dashed inside time and again to rescue victims. He led the Albino woman to safety, and again, by some surprising reserve of strength, he carried out the fat lady, whose weight was advertised as four hundred pounds. From a room across the street, Nathan D. Urner, reporter for Greeley's New York Tribune, witnessed the rescue of Anna Swan, the seven-foot-eleven-inch giantess from Nova Scotia.
Miss Swan, who lost her entire savings of $1,200 in gold and her wardrobe to the fire, was found at the top of the third story staircase, nearly unconscious. "There was not a door through which her bulky frame could obtain a passage," reported Urner. "It was likewise feared that the stairs would break down, even if she should reach them. Her best friend, the living skeleton, stood by her as long as he dared, but then deserted her, while as the heat grew in intensity, the perspiration rolled from her face in little brooks and rivulets, which pattered musically upon the floor. At length, as a last resort, the employees of the place procured a lofty derrick which fortunately happened to be standing near, and erected it alongside the Museum. A portion of the wall was then broken off on each side of the window, and the strong tackle was got in readiness, the tall woman was made fast to one end and swung over the heads of the people in the street, with eighteen men grasping the other extremity of the line, and lowered down from the third story, amid enthusiastic applause. A carriage of extraordinary capacity was in readiness, and entering this, the young lady was driven away to a hotel."
Firemen reached the upstairs cages of tropical birds, and a great number of cockatoos and parrots were set free to fly over the city. A condor, and several vultures and eagles (one of the latter locked in a death battle with a snake, which he vanquished) were also freed.
But two frenzied lions who burst the bars of their confinement were soon overcome by smoke. A massive bear tried to escape through a second story window, but failed and was lost to the flames. A thirty-foot python writhing with pain on the roasting floor was compassionately put out of his misery by volunteer fireman George Collyer.
Some animals got into the streets and created small panics. Several serpents made their way up Broadway, forcing spectators to scatter. A Bengal tiger leaped from the second story to the thoroughfare below. Police emptied their pistols at the cat without effect until fireman Denham killed the tiger with a single blow of his ax. A sociable orangutan made his way to the near-by office of James Gordon Bennett and tried to effect an interview. "The poor creature," wrote Urner, "but recently released from captivity, and doubtless thinking that he might fill some vacancy in the editorial corps of the paper in question, had descended by the waterpipe and instinctively taken refuge in the inner sanctum of the establishment." It took the muscles of Bennett and his entire staff to suppress the potential journalist.
By nightfall the American Museum was a mound of charred ruins. During the progress of the fire, realizing that all was lost, Hurd sent a telegram to Barnum, who was then serving as an elected representative in the state legislature at Hartford. At the very moment the telegram arrived, Barnum was speaking against railroad monopoly. He paused in his address to glance at the wire, and then, without the slightest hesitancy or change of expression, went on to finish his speech.
When he was done, Barnum showed the telegram to his colleagues. His leading rival in the railroad fight took his hand in sympathy. "Mr. Barnum," he said, "I am really very sorry to hear of your great misfortune." With not unexpected bravado, Barnum retorted: "Sorry? Why, my dear sir, I shall not have time to be sorry in a week! It will take me at least that length of time before I can get over laughing at having whipped you all so nicely in this attempted railroad bill."
But Barnum was deeply distressed. The following morning, standing before the still-smoldering debris of what had once been the mainstay of his career, he felt an infinite sadness. "Here were destroyed," he wrote, "almost in a breath, the accumulated results of many years of incessant toil, my own and my predecessor's, in gathering from every quarter of the globe myriads of curious productions of nature and art—an assemblage of rarities which a half million of dollars could not restore, and a quarter of a century could not collect."
Not even a thousand dollars of personal property had been saved. Of course, the metal safe with the cash receipts was intact. A trained seal, a bear, the journalistic orangutan, some monkeys, snakes, and birds had been spared. And a portion of the waxworks, including statues of President Buchanan, Tom Thumb, and Barnum himself, all somewhat melted, had been rescued, whereas priceless Revolutionary War relics had been left to bum. And finally, of course, Anna Swan and the freaks were alive. But out of 600,000 exhibits, Barnum was left with pitifully few. His total loss was at least $400,000. His insurance was worth only $40,000.
His first instinct was to quit. The clock scandal, the destruction of his home, and this final accident weighed heavily upon him. He was no longer wealthy, but he had enough potential income from the Museum real estate and the East Bridgeport investment to retire.
He consulted his close friend Horace Greeley and asked his advice. What should he do?
"Accept this fire as a notice to quit," said Greeley, "and go a-fishing."
"A-fishing?"
"Yes, a-fishing. I have been wanting to go a-fishing for thirty years, and have not yet found time to do so."
Barnum considered. He knew that Greeley's advice was "good and wise," but felt that the editor did not really mean it or expect it. He remembered Greeley's editorial in the New York Tribune the day after the fire. The editor had publicly deplored the death of a showplace that had been "a fountain of delight," a wonder "as implicitly believed in as the Arabian Night's Entertainment," a site that "amused, instructed, and astonished."
The editorial had concluded: "We mourn its loss, but not as without consolation. Barnum's Museum is gone, but Barnum himself, happily, did not share the fate of his rattlesnakes. . . . There are fishes in the seas and beasts in the forests; birds still fly in the air and strange creatures still roam in the deserts; giants and pigmies still wander up and down the earth; the oldest man, the fattest woman, and the smallest baby are still living, and Barnum will find them."
Barnum's course was clear and his decision made. Fishing would have to wait. Somewhere, "the oldest man, the fattest woman, and the smallest baby" were waiting, and he would find them, he would show them, and he would rise from defeat at last.