Authors: Matthew Goodman
“Yes, sir.”
“And sanded the sugar?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And dusted the pepper?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And chicoried the coffee?”
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“Yes, sir.”
“Then come up to prayers.”
Philo died in September 1826, just a few months after his son turned sixteen. Before long Barnum left the store in Bethel and went to work at another country store in the nearby town of Grassy Plain. There he met a seamstress from Bethel named Charity Hallett (known to all as “Chairy”) who had come to Grassy Plain to buy a bonnet. Barnum was immediately struck by the girl’s rosy cheeks, pale complexion, and beautiful white teeth (enough of a rarity in a country village of the time that he recalled the detail decades later), which provoked in him, as he charmingly described it, “a state of feeling quite new to me.” Their relationship proceeded slowly, due in part to resistance from Barnum’s mother and other relatives, who felt that the promising young man should set his sights higher than a local seamstress. The two did not marry until three years later, in a ceremony in New York to which none of Barnum’s side of the family had been invited.
By that point Barnum had left the store in Grassy Plain to become a clerk in a grocery store run by a former Bethel neighbor, Oliver Taylor, in Brooklyn. In 1826 Brooklyn consisted of a few neighborhoods near the docks, surrounded by a collection of independent villages with names such as Flatbush and Gravesend. Thanks to the newly established Fulton Ferry service to New York, Barnum could easily cross the East River to Manhattan, where he happily partook of the night life available there, often squiring visiting Connecticut friends to the theater, of which he had come to fancy himself a discerning critic. As a boy Barnum had once accompanied his grandfather on a business trip to New York, but the excitement of that brief stay could hardly have compared to that felt by a young man living in the city for the first time, with his own money in his pocket. It is not hard to imagine Barnum strolling up Broadway of an evening, peering into the windows of the exquisite little shops offering the latest fashions from Paris and London (differing in every way from the country stores he knew), admiring the great stone spires of Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel (the Bethel church had not even had a steeple), letting himself drift along with the crowds that surged all the way up the avenue to Niblo’s at Prince Street, the most celebrated eating house in the city, where those with enough money could feast on shad and grouse and venison, and in the warmer months stroll in the landscaped gardens under
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showers of fireworks. Surely he stopped at Scudder’s American Museum in the park behind City Hall to see the tens of thousands of items on display there, including remarkably preserved animal specimens—petrels and hummingbirds and toucans and grebes, snakes and alligators, an ostrich, a five-legged sheep, a dog-faced monkey, even an Indian elephant—as well as genuine antiquities and curiosities, from a piece of the damask bed cur-tains under which Mary, Queen of Scots, had slept to a chunk of Plymouth Rock: gazing at it all in what must have been a kind of rapture, beholding, for an admission price of just twenty-five cents, the miraculous nature of the world. Just fourteen years later he would become the new owner of the museum, renaming it Barnum’s American Museum, where, at the top of that grand marble structure on the corner of Ann Street, he would bring the first limelight to Broadway, its dazzling blue-white light soaring into the night sky and visible for miles in every direction, his prospects by then having become just as bright, and seemingly as limitless.
After working for a year at Oliver Taylor’s grocery, Barnum left to open his own porterhouse (he was then seventeen years old), which a few months later he sold at a sizable profit. For a while after that he worked at a local tavern, but he found himself becoming homesick, feeling more acutely than ever his distance from Charity. When he received a letter from his beloved grandfather Phineas, offering him free use of half of a Bethel carriage house, he went back home to open a fruit and confec-tionery store that also did a brisk trade in oysters and ale. Still, even this was not enough to fully engage his attention, and before long he had taken up a more stimulating sideline: managing lotteries.
“Advertising is like learning,” Barnum once counseled a would-be showman, “a little is a dangerous thing.” Having become a lottery manager, he immediately blanketed the state with huge placards and brightly colored handbills and took out large newspaper advertisements awash in exclamation points, all of them proclaiming the unrivaled good fortune of his lottery office (he had bestowed on it the name “Temple of Fortune”), which he said was overseen by the trustworthy-sounding— though imaginary—proprietor “Dr. Peter Strickland.”
Another mammoth
prize—huzzah Dr. Strickland,
trumpeted one advertisement.
A fortune for
a dollar—apply to Fortune’s favorite, Dr. Strickland.
Before long Barnum had hired agents throughout the state, and they were selling as much as two thousand dollars of lottery tickets per day. His own profits were, he later wrote, “immense.”
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Despite Connecticut’s Puritan heritage, lotteries had long been highly popular there, raising money for a variety of public institutions, including churches. (As a writer of the time noted, “People would gamble in lotteries for the benefit of a church in which to preach
against
gambling.”) Still, resistance to lotteries was beginning to build. By the beginning of the 1830s a newly energized revivalism was sweeping across the state, and a ban on lotteries seemed the least of the measures looming on the horizon. There was even talk of forming a Christian political party, with the goal of reestablishing the old alliance between church and state. (In Connecticut the Congregational Church was not disestablished until 1818; before that time church membership was a requirement to hold public office, churches ran the public schools, and the church itself was supported by public taxation.) Barnum bitterly opposed all such ideas. He had long ago freed himself from the hellfire of those childhood camp meetings, and by political inclination he was a Jacksonian Democrat; like many of his fellow dissenters and Democrats, he was alarmed at the prospect of a religious coalition controlling the state’s political life. Never one to shy away from expressing his opinion, Barnum sent several strongly worded letters to the Danbury newspaper, the
Recorder,
setting forth his concerns about the threats to freedom posed by undue religious excitement, and reciting the evils committed throughout history whenever religion had been joined with political power. To his great indignation, the letters were not published. Barnum was convinced that the editor of the
Recorder
—perhaps even the press generally—was being muz-zled by the forces of religious orthodoxy. Liberty itself seemed now at stake, and he felt a duty to alert the public to the growing danger. So he purchased a printing press and a set of types, and took on a new occupation: P. T. Barnum became a newspaper editor.
The name of the paper that Barnum founded in October 1831 was the
Herald of Freedom.
Published weekly, the
Herald
was, in contemporary fashion, four pages long, most of it taken up by advertisements from local merchants and tradesmen offering butchering and blacksmithing, soap-stone furnaces, peddlers’ wagons, coffins (“made at the shortest notice”), and farms for sale. The news pages contained political speeches as well as reports on the doings of the Connecticut legislature, many of them written by Barnum himself—no mean feat for a twenty-one-year-old storekeeper with limited education—and like New York’s mercantile press, they carried clippings from foreign newspapers. The real energy of the
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Herald of Freedom,
however (and the primary reason it found subscribers throughout Connecticut and in fifteen other states), came in Barnum’s vigorous and untiring excoriation (much like that of another crusading young editor, Richard Adams Locke of the
Bridgwater and Somersetshire
Herald
) of conservative politicians and orthodox clergymen.
On the front page beneath the masthead, the
Herald
carried a quote from Thomas Jefferson, “For I have sworn upon the Altar of God, eternal hostil-ity against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” and inside Barnum promised that the
Herald
would oppose “all combinations against the liberties of our country.” This meant not only standing against any effort to reestablish the old church-state alliance in Connecticut (in one item, for instance, he denounced a proposal that would have allowed the state legislature to hire chaplains with public funds) but also ridiculing what he saw as the superstition and fanaticism of the revivalist movement. The
Herald of
Freedom
regularly included stories of suicides and murders, of people gone mad—all of these tragedies, Barnum claimed, brought on by the sermons of fear-mongering evangelists. In one especially horrific case, a girl in New Haven, convinced that she carried an intractable evil inside her, attempted to cut out her own heart with a razor. That, raged Barnum, was the hateful consequence of these “
hireling Priests,
” these “relentless savages who would reduce every peaceable dwelling to an insane house, and make every father a
murderer
of his own innocent and helpless offspring, rather than fail in establishing their heart-rending, barbarous and unfeeling creed.”
Given the ferocity of his invective and the often personal nature of his attacks—various news items accused ministers, by name, of drunkenness, philandering, seducing their female servants, even robbery—it is not surprising that during his three years as editor of the
Herald of Freedom
Barnum was sued for libel three times, twice successfully. The first case resulted from his accusation that a local butcher was acting as a spy within the state Democratic caucus, for which he was ordered to pay a $215 fine. It was an even more serious matter when he pronounced Seth Seelye, one of Bethel’s leading citizens and soon to become deacon of the church, “guilty of taking usury of an orphan boy.”
The outcome of the case could hardly have been doubted: Seth Seelye was a highly respected merchant from a prominent family (two of his sons would go on to become presidents of Amherst and Smith colleges) and an outspoken member of the Congregational Church; Barnum, on the other hand, came from questionable stock, had enriched himself from lotteries,
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and was a believer in the heresies of Universalism. Barnum was found guilty of libel, and after a tongue-lashing by the judge he was fined $100
and sentenced to sixty days in the Danbury jail.
Where others might have been chastened, or at least demoralized, by the guilty verdict, Barnum emerged from the Seelye trial exultant; he reveled in the publicity it had brought him (not to mention the hundreds of new subscribers for the
Herald of Freedom
), and in his newfound status as a martyr for freedom of speech—a view of the case that Barnum himself took every opportunity to encourage. “The same spirit governs my enemies that imprisoned Sellick Osborn and burnt to death Michael Servetus by order of John Calvin,” he declared in a letter written to a supporter in Hartford. As a Democratic editor who had been imprisoned for libel in Connecticut two decades earlier, Sellick Osborn provided a fitting comparison, but Michael Servetus’s fiery death at the hands of inquisitors in Geneva bore scant resemblance indeed to the conditions that met Barnum in the Danbury jail, where the walls of his cell had been freshly papered, and a new carpet laid down. For the two months of his stay he received a steady stream of well-wishers, and continued to edit the
Herald of Freedom
all the while.
At sunrise on the day of his release, a group of Barnum’s friends gathered on the Danbury green to raise the flag and fire a salute in his honor.
For hours they braved the cold of the December morning, until shortly before noon, when a “Committee of Arrangements” marched across the green to the jail. There they met a delighted Barnum, requesting that he accompany them to the nearby courthouse. Passing through the cheering crowd that had gathered outside to meet him, they entered the same courtroom in which Barnum had received his sentence two months earlier.
The program began with the singing of a musical ode composed for the occasion, followed by the democratic anthem “Jefferson and Liberty” and a long oration on freedom of the press by the Universalist minister Theophilus Fisk, after which a choir sang “Strike the Cymbal” as the crowd, now numbering several hundred, filed out of the courthouse and proceeded to a banquet in a nearby hotel. For hours they feasted, sang, gave speeches, and raised toasts (Barnum, “the fearless advocate of truth and liberal principles”; Barnum, “a terror to bigots and tyrants”). Then, when the celebrations were ended, from outside the hotel came the roar of cannon fire and the lively strains of a brass band, and Barnum was es-corted, like the giant-slaying hero of a fairy tale, to a coach drawn by six horses. Forty riders on horseback preceded the coach, at the very front a
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marshal bearing the American flag, while behind followed sixty carriages filled with supporters. The hundreds who remained sent up three cheers as the procession started off, seeming less a political march than a circus parade, the horses high-stepping, the band playing patriotic tunes all along the three-mile route to Bethel, where at the village limits the band broke into a spirited rendition of “Home, Sweet Home.” All of this Barnum happily chronicled in the following week’s edition of the
Herald of Freedom,
in an item he headlined “The Triumph of the People.”