Authors: Matthew Goodman
While Barnum bantered with Locke at the
Sun,
the showman’s assistant Levi Lyman was paying a call on another prominent newspaper editor.
James Gordon Bennett had not yet addressed the
Sun’
s autopsy report, but he certainly meant to; the Joice Heth affair was the most fascinating story in the city, the one everyone was talking about, and he would not concede the field to his rival. At the
Evening Star,
Mordecai Noah was preparing an item asserting that Joice Heth was as old as advertised, since no autopsy of a person over seventy could indicate true age. That idea might suffice if nothing better presented itself, but wherever possible Bennett looked for the more sensational approach, especially when it came to hoaxes. He was still seething about
Great Astronomical Discoveries,
furious that the
Sun
had won so many readers on the basis of a public deception, and eager to expose its proprietors as the swindlers he knew them to be. So he leaped at the opportunity that was unexpectedly provided by Levi Lyman—who, after arriving at the
Herald’
s basement offices on Broadway, confessed to Bennett the marvelous humbug about Joice Heth that he and Barnum had put over on Dr. David L. Rogers.
P. T. Barnum never revealed why he and Lyman decided to play this trick on James Gordon Bennett. (In his autobiography he placed the responsibility on Lyman alone, but there can be no doubting his involvement.)
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Maybe, with Joice Heth’s great age now exposed as a hoax, they were looking for another career-advancing bit of self-promotion; maybe they were still bitter that back in August Bennett had been the only newspaperman in town who did not accept their money in exchange for writing a puff piece about Joice Heth. Or maybe they were simply in the mood for a practical joke and Bennett—so arrogant, so pompous, so maddeningly sure of himself—provided an especially inviting target.
Whatever its motivation, their tale appeared in the next morning’s
Herald.
The
Sun’
s report of the autopsy, Bennett triumphantly announced, “is nothing more or less than a complete hoax from beginning to end.
Joice
Heth is not dead.
”
That had not been Joice Heth on the examining table at all, Bennett declared: Joice Heth was alive and well and living in Hebron, Connecticut.
The woman on whom Dr. Rogers had performed the autopsy was actually
“a respectable old negress called AUNT NELLY,” who had lived the past many years up in Harlem. At the time of her recent death she was eighty years of age, just as Dr. Rogers had determined. Someone in New York (Bennett believed it was a physician who had been “hoaxed by the Lunar Discoveries”) had heard of Aunt Nelly’s death and arranged to have her body shipped into the city and passed off as the venerable Joice Heth. The ruse had worked perfectly: the autopsy was conducted, the
Sun
wrote the story, and the public—once again—“swallowed the pill.”
“Such is the true version of the hoax,” Bennett pronounced with great satisfaction. The information had been given to him on the best authority, and “for the verity of which we have names and certificates in our possession.” There was, however, still one more matter to address. Before he concluded, he wanted to “put a few plain questions” to Dr. David Rogers, who had played such a large role in the Joice Heth hoax and—Bennett now astonishingly charged—in the other great one of the age as well: Are you not, Sir, the real author of the Lunar Hoax? Did you not furnish Richard A. Locke with the most of that humbug? Did he not, at your request, undertake to pass for the author of the work? Is it not known to you that he is incapable of writing the scientific portion of that hoax?
Bennett declared that he would await Dr. Rogers’s explicit denial of the charges, written and signed by him. Once it was received, “we shall then
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stir our stumps” (a colloquialism of the time, meaning to get oneself moving) “and see if we can’t produce certificates of their truth.” To put it another way: he had not yet obtained any evidence for his new moon story accusations, not even “certificates” as authentic as the ones he claimed to have for the truth of the Aunt Nelly story. David Rogers never deigned to reply to James Gordon Bennett, which may have been fortunate for Bennett; numerous libel suits had been filed against newspapers of the day for less cause. Nor did Richard Adams Locke respond to Bennett’s allegations about the authorship of the moon series, although about the “Aunt Nelly” story he did compose a single, extraordinary item.
The exhibitors of Joice Heth, Locke noted in the
Sun,
were apparently not content with making ten thousand dollars from “their humbug representation of her age when alive,” nor with charging fifty cents a head to exhibit her body after death; now they had been “amusing themselves with hoaxing some stupid editors with the story that the body dissected the other day at the City Saloon, was not that of Joice Heth.”
One of these editors, if the despicable and unprincipled scribbler to whom we allude can be so termed, believed this story of the non-identity of the body, and proclaimed it in his loathsome little sheet, not knowing that the persons who had deceived him came directly from his office to ours and boasted of their new exploit!
This was a highly unusual display of personal invective from Richard Adams Locke, who seems to have been inflamed by Bennett’s defamation of his friend David Rogers. It is worth noting that Locke referred here to the “persons” who had perpetrated the Aunt Nelly humbug—that is, Barnum as well as Lyman—and it was to both of them that he addressed the final sentence of the item, about as close to a direct threat as he ever produced in the pages of the
Sun:
“With the agents in this infamous imposture, we have hitherto dealt very mercifully, but if they proceed further, we will make this city rather uncomfortable for them.”
In the
Sun
Joice Heth was dead at eighty years old; in the
Evening Star
she was dead at twice that age, while in the
Herald
she had not died at all.
All over the city New Yorkers argued vigorously for each of these mutually exclusive propositions, just as a few months earlier they had debated whether intelligent life had been discovered on the moon. In New York in
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the 1830s, such arguments were precisely what it meant to participate in civic life. As New Yorkers increasingly claimed the right to vote, so too were they claiming their democratic right to judgment—the right to hold and express their own opinions. “That’s just the question,” Barnum once replied to someone who asked if an exhibit at his museum was “real.”
“Persons who pay their money at the door have the right to form their own opinions after they have got up stairs.”
In this democratizing age the traditional practices of the older world were fast disappearing, like the venerable hillside estates leveled to make room for new avenues. The city’s mayors, who for more than a century had been appointed by the governor and for a decade chosen by the Common Council, had since 1834 been voted in by direct election. At the beginning of the 1830s, trade unions were still a rarity in New York; by 1836, the
Evening Post
was estimating that “two-thirds of the working men in the city” were union members. Cartmen now called their employers “Mister” rather than the old-fashioned “Sir,” and no longer felt inclined to doff a cap and bow deeply with averted eyes, the ritual of deference that went by the name “courtesy.” Shaking hands had become the preferred greeting between men, a gesture that bespoke social equality rather than superiority and subordination. In 1835 the English novelist Frederick Marryat noted that it was “invariably the custom to shake hands,” and complained that in America he was no longer able to size up a man’s breeding at a glance.
The act of reading was changing too, with a flood of books, journals, and especially newspapers streaming from the new generation of printing presses. Not five years earlier, a newspaper had been a luxury reserved for the elite; its content as well as its prohibitive price had made sure of that.
“Such a paper,” declared an early issue of the
Sun,
“is an insult to a civilized community.” There was power in information, Benjamin Day knew, and pleasure as well. So Day made sure that his paper, alongside its coverage of the issues of the day, included in its police court reports a healthy measure of sin, spectacle, tragedy, and amusement. A newspaper was a like a show hall that could be carried around in the pocket, available for viewing at any free moment of the day, and just a penny covered the price of admission.
Of course Benjamin Day was a newspaperman, not a showman, but in the 1830s the differences between the two were not as marked as might be imagined. “At the outset of my career,” P. T. Barnum wrote in
Struggles and
Triumphs,
a late edition of his autobiography, “I saw that everything de-
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pended on getting the people to think, and talk, and become curious and excited.” Were he the type of man to write his autobiography, Benjamin Day could not have better related the secret of his own success. Like his fellow Yankee Barnum (the two men had been born just three months and eighty miles apart), Day understood that the
Sun
would rise and fall on its ability to engage the attention of the public, and like Barnum he was willing to offer some attractions that might not be considered strictly legitimate; he had made this clear in the very first issue of the
Sun,
when he placed a story on the front page about a Vermont boy who whistled even as he slept.
The following year Day had published a story about a four-foot snake removed from a sailor’s stomach with the aid of a bowl of warm milk.
The
Evening Star
had denounced the snake story as a hoax, and maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t; the
Sun’
s readers hadn’t seemed to care. To them, the story was not simply a fabrication, as it would be described today, irresponsible and deserving of condemnation; it was instead—to use that proud nineteenth-century word—a
humbug.
As P. T. Barnum explained in his book on the subject, a humbug “consists in putting on glittering appearances—outside show—novel expedi-ents, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.” Superficially, at least, Barnum’s humbug is similar to Edgar Allan Poe’s diddle, as each is a form of hoax. The diddle, however, is carefully designed to preclude any awareness that it has taken place: the grocery store owner does not realize he has been tricked out of his whiskey, or the camp-meeting attendee out of his bridge toll. A humbug, on the other hand, noisily calls attention to itself; it also allows for the possibility of doubt, and requires consent from those who participate in it. The humbug might well turn out to be authentic (many of Barnum’s attractions were just what they were advertised as being), but whether it is true or false, the customers must depart believing they have gotten their money’s worth. A promoter who fails to provide his customers what Barnum called “a full equivalent for their money” will be denounced as a swindler and a fraud, while one who delivers a proper humbug will find his customers coming again and again—the first time because they believe the attraction is authentic, the second time because they are not sure, and the third time to figure out how the trick has been pulled off. The entertainment lies less in the nature of the attraction (although as Barnum pointed out, a certain amount of “glitter” is essential) than in the implicit competition between patron and promoter, each one seeking to outwit the
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other in a game of deception and exposure. It was a distinction on which P. T. Barnum would build a career, and it helps to explain the continuing success of the
Sun
in the aftermath of the moon series.
James Gordon Bennett had predicted that New Yorkers would turn away from the
Sun
after the moon series was revealed as a hoax, but the
Sun’
s circulation never went down. A year later, in August 1836, the
Sun
was reporting a daily circulation of 27,000—more than 5,000 copies greater than the
combined
circulation of the city’s eleven six-penny dailies.
Like the patrons of the Joice Heth exhibition, who passionately debated her age and even her humanity—and who would continue to give Barnum their business for decades to come—New Yorkers admired the skill and ingenuity with which the Moon Hoax had been perpetrated. In Barnum’s formulation, they had gotten their money’s worth. They had been thoroughly fooled, but in looking back they felt less resentment than wonder.
The general sentiment was captured by Horace Greeley in the
New-Yorker,
in an item he wrote not long after the
Journal of Commerce
had identified Richard Adams Locke as the true author of the moon series.
For our own part—frankly admitting that we were taken in to the full amount—we can feel no uncharitableness towards the perpetrator of the hoax. On the contrary, we advise all who have not read the whole story to buy a copy of his pamphlet, which costs but a shilling. . . . We shall not trumpet his name to the general ear—our acquaintance does not warrant even a passing nod—but we can say plumply that if the operator nets a few hundreds by his ingenuity, we shall find a gratification.
He felt confident that New Yorkers would, as he did, “relish a joke,”
and not harden their hearts against the
Sun
over “the whole magnificent hoax.” Even the skeptics (of which, he noted, there had been not one where twenty now claimed the honor) would have to admit the brilliance of the work, its “air of unquestionable plausibility and verisimilitude,”