Barnum

Firecrackers had just celebrated the thirty-fourth year of the Independence of the United States in the small town of Bethel, Connecticut, when the first son by his second wife was born to Philo F. Barnum. P. T. Barnum was born on July 5, 1810. He arrived late. It was a pity, for he would so much have enjoyed being born on the Fourth of July. He himself wrote that after peace and quiet were restored, and the audience had regained their seats, he made his début. Probably his tardiness was for the best: competition between P. T. Barnum and the national holiday would have been too much—for the national holiday.

Lincoln had just about cut his first tooth, and Poe was in his swaddling clothes, when Barnum appeared on the American scene. When, in 1891, he died, Free Silver was beginning to be discussed in the Senate, and William James’s Principles of Psychology was a new book. The span his life covered was as significant as any in American history, and he managed to make himself as much at home among his contemporaries as the Fourth of July. Barnum wrote to Matthew Arnold when Arnold was lecturing in this country, inviting him to visit at Bridgeport, Connecticut. The invitation read: “You and I, Mr. Arnold, ought to be acquainted. You are a celebrity, I am a notoriety.” This remained his self-appointed position among his fellowmen during his entire lifetime.

They named him Phineas Taylor Barnum, after his maternal grandfather, Phineas Taylor, from whom he inherited a tract of swampy, snake-infested land, known as “Ivy Island,” and a propensity for practical jokes which the boy never outgrew. Barnum wrote of his grandfather: “He would go farther, wait longer, work harder, and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven.” Barnum admitted the influence of Phineas Taylor’s propensity, and throughout his own life he exercised it with all the force which heredity gives to individual action. The paternal grandfather was Ephraim Barnum—Captain Ephraim Barnum, a captain of militia in the Revolutionary War. Captain Ephraim Barnum had fourteen children by two wives, and died at the age of eighty-four, when P. T. Barnum was seven years old. His grandson tells us that “he relished a joke better than the average of mankind.”

Philo F. Barnum, P. T. Barnum’s father, was sometime tailor, farmer, tavern-keeper, livery-stable proprietor, and country store merchant. He also operated a small express company, and his son wrote that “with greater opportunities and a larger field for his efforts and energies, he might have been a man of mark and means.” He never did a profitable business in any of these capacities.

Phineas began the little schooling he received when he was six years old. He later wrote that “a school-house in those days was a thing to be dreaded—a schoolmaster, a kind of being to make the children tremble.” The first three male teachers he sat under—a Mr. Camp, a Mr. Zerah Judson, and a Mr. Curtiss—“used the ferule prodigiously.” For one season he attended the private school of Laurens P. Hickok, later Professor Hickok, the educational philosopher and metaphysician. Hickok’s sweetheart, Eliza Taylor, was also a pupil. “One day he threw a ruler at my head,” Barnum wrote. “I dodged, and it struck Eliza in the face. He quietly apologized and said she might apply that to some other time when she might deserve it.” Young Phineas excelled all other scholars in Bethel in arithmetic, he admits, and his later career shows a constant development by the rules of arithmetical progression and sometimes even as fast as a geometrical progression. He recalled that his teacher and a neighbor got him out of bed late at night at the age of twelve to settle a wager. The teacher had bet that Phineas could figure up the correct number of feet in a load of wood in five minutes. Phineas marked down on the stovepipe in his father’s kitchen the given dimensions and in less than two minutes gave the correct result, much to the delight of his teacher, his mother, and himself, and the incredulous astonishment of the neighbor.

He was often kept out of school to help on his father’s farm, and he records as one of his earliest emotions an aversion to hand-work that earned him a reputation as the laziest boy in town. This impression of him by his neighbors, however, was false, Barnum said, “because I was always busy at head-work to evade the sentence of gaining bread by the sweat of my brow.” Throughout his life he hated manual labor and routine work, but the number of enterprises in which he sometimes engaged simultaneously would indicate that he never disliked work if he was allowed to choose its nature. What Barnum called “my organ of acquisitiveness” was large. At an early age he earned money by selling cherry-rum to soldiers, and when he was twelve years old he owned a sheep, a calf, and a sum of money in his own right. He would have been a wealthy boy for his environment, if his father had not insisted that he buy his own clothes.

When he was about twelve years old, Barnum paid his first visit to New York City, assisting a neighbor to deliver a drove of cattle there. To “go to York” from Connecticut in 1821 was not a trip, but a journey, which had some of the elements of a pilgrimage; it took Phineas four days to reach the big city with his cattle. During this period passengers traveled from Connecticut to New York via the New York-Boston stage coach or by boat via Long Island Sound. The stage coach was not allowed to take on passengers in any Connecticut town on Sunday, and any man who rode on horseback or in his carriage before sundown on the Lord’s Day was arrested by a deacon of the church. If the stage coach driver was found with passengers in his possession, he was arrested by meeting house sentinels, posted along the Connecticut route of the coach. In Barnum’s youth the Blue Laws were Connecticut’s contribution to American life. The voyage to New York by boat depended upon the state of the wind, sometimes requiring eight hours and sometimes several days. Barnum’s grandfather, Phineas Taylor, took this voyage upon an occasion which gave him an opportunity to enact what seemed to impress his grandson as Phineas Taylor’s most famous practical joke. On this particular voyage the fourteen jolly jokers from Bethel were becalmed for seven days, at the end of which all needed to shave. There was one razor on board, belonging to Phineas Taylor, who professed himself against the practice of shaving and refused the loan of his razor. Finally, the boat approached New York on Sunday afternoon. Barnum’s grandfather was persuaded to lend his razor since the barber shops would be closed when the party arrived in New York. Because time was short, he stipulated that each man must shave half his face and pass the razor on to the next. After all had finished, each could begin shaving the other half of his face. Half of each face was shaved, and Phineas Taylor began on the other half of his own face. When he had finished, Barnum’s grandfather stropped the razor, and, as if by accident, it flew from his hand into the water. All the other passengers created a sensation with their half-shaved faces when they arrived in New York on Sunday afternoon. Barnum himself never ceased to delight in this type of joke.