Authors: Matthew Goodman
William Niblo—Billy, as his friends called him, and everyone wanted to be his friend—was an Irish immigrant who had worked his way up to become the owner of the most fashionable entertainment spot in the city. In 1823 he had purchased the site of a former stud farm, occupying a full city block, and set about creating the greatest pleasure garden that New York had ever seen. Over the next few years he turned what was already a beautiful setting into a kind of enchanted landscape, planting exotic flowers and trees (in which he hung small cages full of singing birds) and designing serpentine walks lined with statuary, above which glowed parti-colored glass lanterns. In 1827 Niblo added a theater, the Sans Souci; in 1829 he converted the theater into a handsome saloon (a term that then referred not to a barroom but to a large entertainment hall), built a hotel, and named the property after himself: Niblo’s Suburban Pleasure Garden, he called it, though it was known by all simply as “Niblo’s Garden.” For fifty cents patrons could stroll through Niblo’s immaculate grounds, where in the evenings there were fireworks displays; or, if they preferred, take a table in one of the ivy-covered, latticed boxes that surrounded the gardens, where they might order a lemonade and a frosted cake, a port-
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wine negus, or any of the other refreshments served by Niblo’s legion of black waiters, each of whom wore a white apron and a blue sash with a numbered badge, so that any patron, if displeased with the service, could report the offending waiter to Mrs. Niblo. An extra twenty-five cents gained admission to the saloon, which nightly featured gymnasts, polka dancers, contortionists, pantomimists, opera singers, and other purveyors of light entertainment. Off the saloon were separate viewing areas, usually occupied by painstakingly crafted dioramas that gave viewers the impression of being present at the Great Fire of London, the exodus of the Is-raelites from Egypt, and other memorable historical events. They were halls of grand deception, and in one of them Joice Heth performed her engagement at Niblo’s Garden.
On August 10, Joice Heth—plainly exhausted by the trip up from Philadelphia—was carried in a sedan chair to her new accommodations next to the saloon; there she could rest until Barnum had completed the arrangements for the exhibition. Immediately he commissioned a woodcut portrait of her, to be featured on advertising posters. The portrait shows Joice Heth in a three-quarter profile that highlights her great spray of wrinkles, rendered in stark white against the severe darkness of her face and arms; her arms are crossed in front of her, her good right hand resting on the paralyzed left one, positioned so as to emphasize the extraordinary length of her nails; she is wearing a lacy bonnet and a checked dress, looking just as prim and respectable as any other regular church-goer. Next Barnum hired an assistant, a former courthouse clerk from upstate named Levi Lyman, and together the two men blanketed the city with the posters, which announced the arrival at Niblo’s of “the greatest curiosity in the world, and the most interesting.”
With his public advertising campaign under way, Barnum now turned to the city’s newspaper editors. Part of P. T. Barnum’s brilliance as a promoter lay in his early recognition of the power of what he liked to refer to as “printer’s ink.” With Joice Heth’s engagement at Niblo’s Garden, he first put into practice the expert manipulation of the press that would mark his career for decades, lavishing newspapers with paid advertisements in exchange for a constant stream of free publicity, cultivating friendships with editors to such a degree that one of his address books contained a separate category with the heading “Newspapers friendly.”
(Just a few days before his death in 1891, Barnum sent a letter to his business partner, James A. Bailey. “I am indebted to the press of the United
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States,” he wrote, “for almost every dollar which I possess and for every success as an amusement manager which I have ever achieved.”) Before Joice Heth’s engagement at Niblo’s began, Barnum decided to invite the city’s leading newspaper editors to private meetings with the star attraction. He was counting on the intense rivalry among the editors to help create his publicity, for he knew that each one would want to be the first to bring his readers an account of “Lady Washington”—as Joice Heth had begun to call herself—and none would want to be seen as having been excluded from the great curiosity just arrived in town. As he had anticipated, the editors of nearly all the daily papers hurried over to Niblo’s (it is not known if Richard Adams Locke was among them, though a subsequent item in the
Sun
describing Joice Heth’s appearance suggests that he was); there each man was met by Billy Niblo, exuding his usual charm and hospitality, who led him to the viewing room where Barnum had arrayed Joice Heth, in the phrase of the day, in her best bib and tucker. He had bought a new dress for her and carefully reviewed her best stories, mostly about the young George Washington, one of them a retelling of what was already, by the 1830s, a mythic American tale, although in Joice Heth’s version the cherry tree was replaced by a peach tree. She also had tales of her conversion to Christianity and her baptism in the Potomac River, as well as some stories she had not recalled during her tour with R. W. Lindsay, the best of them involving her childhood on the isle of Madagascar—where, as it turned out, she had been a princess.
The newspaper editors listened to Joice Heth’s stories, they asked her questions, they inspected her certificate of baptism and the bill of sale from the Washington family. They were, to a man, impressed with what they had seen—but Barnum, just to be absolutely certain (or so claimed his assistant Levi Lyman in a story he gave the
Herald
the following year), took each editor aside and promised him money in exchange for a positive newspaper review. It is not exactly clear if this money constituted outright bribery, or if it was simply a promise of paid advertisements for his paper—Barnum did, in fact, place scores of ads in New York’s newspapers throughout Joice Heth’s engagement at Niblo’s—but in either case, as Lyman recounted to James Gordon Bennett, “the expense of making these sudden conversions” was “considerable.” The amount Barnum was said to have given the newspapers reads almost like a bar graph of their relative importance at the time. According to Lyman’s account, Webb’s
Courier and Enquirer
would end up receiving the most money of all,
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$49.50. Noah’s
Evening Star
received, precisely enough, $31.46. William Leete Stone’s
Commercial Advertiser
got an even $30, and three other mercantile papers a good deal less. The
Sun,
as further evidence of its growing prominence in the city, received $42, while its penny-paper rival the
Transcript
received $21.75. (The
Herald,
which published the information, is conspicuously missing from the list.) Immediately the publicity items (or “puffs,” as they were known) began to appear. The
Daily Advertiser
told its readers, “We venture to state, that since the flood, a like circumstance has not been witnessed equal to the one which is about to happen this week. Ancient or modern times furnish no parallel to the great age of this woman.” “This old creature is said to be 161 years of age,” observed the
Courier and Enquirer,
“and we see no reason to doubt it. Nobody indeed would doubt it if she claimed to be five centuries.” “We can have no doubt that she is 160 years of age,” agreed the
Evening Star,
citing the bill of sale from George Washington’s father as proof. The
Commercial Advertiser,
while allowing for some possibility of exaggeration, was scarcely less enthusiastic in its pronouncement: “She is evidently very old, and although we are not prepared to say that all doubt is removed touching the amazing protraction of existence assigned to her, we have no difficulty in believing that she has actually lived considerably more than a century.”
Barnum and Lyman had done their work well. Just a few days before, no one had heard of Joice Heth; now, it seemed, all of New York was talking about her. “The arrival, at Niblo’s Garden, of this renowned relic of the olden time has created quite a sensation among the lovers of the curious and the marvellous,” Richard Adams Locke wrote in the
Sun
(going on to add that “a greater object of marvel and curiosity has never presented itself for their gratification”). Barnum was pleased enough with his work to allow himself a bit of hyperbole: “Victoria herself would hardly have made a greater sensation.”
By the second week of August, New Yorkers were arriving at Niblo’s Garden less to see the Grand Military Band play patriotic music to the accompaniment of fireworks and the release of colored pigeons, or Dr.
Valentine present his “amusing eccentricities,” or Signor Il Diavolo Antonio and His Three Sons (direct from Drury Lane in London) perform on the “flying rope,” than to see for themselves the ancient woman the posters and newspapers had so loudly heralded. Originally Barnum had intended for Joice Heth to be on view fourteen hours a day, from eight in
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the morning until ten at night, but it quickly became apparent that any woman as old as she (even one, as Barnum’s advertisements claimed, whose “health is perfectly good”) could not bear up under such a demanding schedule, and before long he had reduced her visiting hours to six per day, six days a week, allowing her a day of rest on the Sabbath.
His agreement with William Niblo had been for a two-week engagement; however, business proved so brisk that Niblo extended Joice Heth’s stay to near the end of August, beyond which she could not continue, as Barnum had already booked other engagements for her. Exactly how many people came to see Joice Heth at Niblo’s is not known, but the demand was clearly overwhelming: with an admission price of twenty-five cents per person (twelve and a half cents for children), Barnum estimated that each week he and Niblo divided gross receipts of fifteen hundred dollars.
If there were New Yorkers who disbelieved Joice Heth’s purported age, they kept silent; not until later in the year, after Barnum took Joice Heth to New England, would doubts be raised about the authenticity of her story. In New York in 1835, it was accepted wisdom—at least among the city’s white residents—that black people were constitutionally different from whites. Such a belief was necessary to tolerate what would otherwise have been intolerable: the manifest horrors of slavery.
The differences between the races were thought to encompass a broad range of attributes, physical and emotional, including the diminished capacity among black people for basic human emotions; many whites allowed themselves to believe, for instance, that a slave would not feel anguish at being separated from a spouse or child when sold to another owner—the possibility that George Wisner had once entreated his readers to consider. Given the notion of such overwhelming difference, it was not difficult for whites to imagine that some blacks, like Joice Heth, might attain an astonishing longevity. The racial stereotypes of the age, which had fostered so much delusion throughout the society, did so inside Niblo’s as well, creating a powerful (and, for her exhibitors, extremely lucrative) gullibility that would not have been possible if Joice Heth had been white.
Day after day, the people kept coming to see Joice Heth. The room in which she lay was dimly lit, and nearly bare except for her couch and the documents of her enslavement displayed on the walls. Visitors arrived frequently, singly or in pairs, sometimes in small groups, and though they might have entered laughing or talking, on seeing the still, sightless
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woman on the couch most grew momentarily silent, hushed by the presence of one who had somehow escaped mortality’s grasp. But either Barnum or Lyman was always there to relate the story of how her remarkable age had been discovered, and Joice Heth’s own open, friendly manner soon prompted visitors to begin asking questions about her life, all of which she answered gladly and without hesitation. Some visitors just gazed in wonder as she went about her daily activities: praying, eating, smoking her pipe. (She claimed to have been a pipe smoker for 120 years; “if tobacco smoke is a poison,” noted a correspondent to the
Evening
Star,
“then it is a
very slow poison
.”) Some of a more religious inclination sang or prayed with her, the low, thrilling chant of the hymns echoing through rooms more accustomed to polkas and patriotic airs. A good many knelt beside her to stroke her rough, leathery hands; ordinarily they would not have cared to touch the hands of a slave, but these hands were different; they were the hands that had once held George Washington, and in touching Joice Heth the visitors felt the past draw suddenly near, almost as if they were touching the great man himself (he whose portrait hung in almost every house), and kneeling beside her they felt something approaching veneration, as though this slave were a kind of reliquary, preserving the remains of a departed saint.
On August 8, two days before Joice Heth arrived in New York, the
Sun,
having outgrown its tiny office on William Street, moved to a three-story building at the corner of Nassau and Spruce streets. Just four days later, in the early-morning hours of Wednesday, August 12, one of the most destructive fires ever seen in the city swept through the printing district of Lower Manhattan. AWFUL CONFLAGRATION, screamed the
Sun’
s headline of the following day. IMMENSE DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY, AND LOSS OF LIFE.
The fire had begun on the second floor of a six-story building at 115
Fulton Street and quickly spread to the surrounding buildings on Ann, Nassau, and William streets. Nearly all of the buildings contained businesses associated with the printing trades—booksellers, binderies, newspapers, print shops—and, feeding on the seemingly limitless supply of paper, the fire grew with terrifying speed, consuming whole blocks of new five-and six-story brick buildings. Five people perished in the flames, including two printers living on the fifth floor of 115 Fulton, one of whom, Daniel Wyatt, was attempting to carry the other, an elderly man named
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