P. T. Barnum around 1860: a heavy-set man with a high forehead and a halo of dark curls, seated in a carved chair in a dark frock coat, patterned waistcoat and watch chain, looking straight at the camera.

P. T. Barnum

Impresario of Humbug

He paid $1,000 to exhibit an enslaved old woman, rented a stitched-up mermaid, billed a Bridgeport four-year-old as an English general and called the method humbug.

Printer’s Ink
Buys so many notices and stunts that the press advertises him for free, even when it calls him a fraud.
Honest Humbug
Rents a monkey-and-fish “mermaid” to sell the whole museum, then swears the 25 cents was well spent.
Living Exhibit
Pays $1,000 to tour Joice Heth as Washington’s 161-year-old nurse; sells 50-cent seats at her autopsy.
18101891
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P. T. Barnum

Showman, Museum Proprietor, Author & Politician

Start hereThe Humbugs of the World — the opening chaptersA short way in. Barnum defines humbug as “putting on glittering appearances — outside show — novel expedients” to catch the public eye, then insists that the honest humbug still gives full value. Judge that claim against the rest of this page.Read the definition

P. T. Barnum sold curiosity by the ticket. He started by exhibiting an elderly enslaved woman as George Washington’s nurse and sold seats at her autopsy. He hired a fake mermaid to advertise a real museum, made a Bridgeport child a celebrity under a false age and nationality, and turned a Swedish soprano into a national craze. Then he wrote and rewrote his own life, lectured on money while bankrupt, spoke in the Connecticut legislature for Black suffrage and lent his name and money to a circus that other men built. He called his method humbug: arresting the eye with outside show, then giving people their money’s worth. This page follows that method through the people and animals it used. Start with his own definition, and test it against the record.

1810–1834

Lotteries, a store and sixty days in jail

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born on 5 July 1810 in Bethel, Connecticut, a Congregationalist farming town near Danbury. His father, Philo, farmed, kept a tavern and ran a store; he died on 7 September 1825, when Phineas was fifteen. The boy clerked in country stores. Asked to clear out a wagon-load of green glass bottles and shop-worn tinware, he invented a lottery for them, with a top prize of twenty-five dollars in goods and hundreds of small prizes paid mostly in the same glass and tin. “The tickets sold like wildfire,” he wrote later.

At eighteen he became a lottery agent, buying tickets from the Connecticut lottery managers and selling them on commission, with sub-agents as far as New York. He opened his own store in Bethel and married Charity Hallett, a tailoress, in New York on 8 November 1829. His later accounts are frank about the trade’s tricks: he advertised goods “25 per cent cheaper” than his neighbours and called it “a trick of trade”. The store failed on bad debts, and Connecticut banned lotteries in 1834.

In October 1831, when the Danbury paper refused his letters against what he called sectarian interference in politics, he bought a press and started his own weekly, the Herald of Freedom. He was sued for libel three times in three years. The third case, a criminal prosecution for writing that a Bethel churchman had been “guilty of taking usury of an orphan boy”, brought a hundred-dollar fine and sixty days in Danbury jail. He edited the paper from a papered, carpeted cell. On his release supporters held a celebration in the courtroom that had convicted him and escorted him home behind a band and a coach and six. The account of the parade that he reprinted came from his own newspaper.

The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself artwork
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1835–1836

Joice Heth, exhibited and dissected

In the summer of 1835 Barnum, now running a grocery in New York, went to Philadelphia to see an exhibition. Joice Heth was an elderly, blind, partly paralysed Black woman, held as a slave, whom her Kentucky exhibitor R. W. Lindsay advertised as 161 years old and the former nurse of George Washington. A bill of sale dated 1727 supposedly proved it. Barnum paid $1,000 for the exhibition, half of it borrowed, and sold his share of the grocery to raise it. Lindsay issued a new bill of sale, which Barnum reprinted in 1855; in 1872 he still wrote that he had been “anxious to become proprietor of this novel exhibition”.

Barnum ran the show as a seven-month tour of Northeastern cities, in taverns, hotels, museums and concert rooms. Each show recounted her story and read the bill of sale; then Heth answered questions, talked about religion, sang hymns and spoke of “dear little George”. A handbill priced admission at 25 cents and called her “the Greatest Natural & National Curiosity in the World”. In New England, according to Connecticut historian Gregg Mangan, Barnum claimed the proceeds would buy her great-grandchildren out of slavery. When Boston crowds thinned, a newspaper note signed “A Visitor” said she was not a woman at all but an automaton of whalebone and springs, and the halls filled again. Barnum reprinted the note in 1855 without saying who wrote it; Connecticut History’s account says he sent it himself.

Heth died in February 1836. On 25 February the surgeon David L. Rogers dissected her body in New York’s City Saloon before about 1,500 spectators, who paid fifty cents each. Rogers judged her to be no more than about eighty, not 161. Barnum and his associate Levi Lyman then told James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald that the body was someone else’s and that Heth was alive; Lyman later spun out a further “hoax” story in the Herald. In 1872 Barnum called this “the least deserving of all my efforts in the show line”, a scheme he said he had believed genuine. Benjamin Reiss’s The Showman and the Slave reconstructs how the penny press, the minstrel stage, medical curiosity and Northern racism all fed on her. On the Southern tour that followed, Barnum blacked his own face to sing “Zip Coon” when his minstrel singer quit.

The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America artwork
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  1. Joice Heth handbillc. 1835

    A handbill printed by J. Booth & Son in New York for the December showing at Barnum’s Hotel, Bridgeport, about 1835. It calls Heth “the slave of Augustine Washington”, gives her birth as 1674, says she weighs “but forty-six pounds” and charges 25 cents, children half price. The handwritten additions extend the run to Monday the 14th.

    Source & credits

    J. Booth & Son, printers; Somers Historical Society, Somers, New York; full frame retained

    Public domain licence

    Wikimedia Commons file record
A printed handbill headed “The Greatest Natural & National Curiosity in the World”, with a woodcut of an old Black woman in a bonnet between the words “Joice Heth”, and “Age of 161 Years” in large type.

Joice Heth handbillc. 1835

A handbill printed by J. Booth & Son in New York for the December showing at Barnum’s Hotel, Bridgeport, about 1835. It calls Heth “the slave of Augustine Washington”, gives her birth as 1674, says she weighs “but forty-six pounds” and charges 25 cents, children half price. The handwritten additions extend the run to Monday the 14th.

Source & credits

J. Booth & Son, printers; Somers Historical Society, Somers, New York; full frame retained

Public domain licence

Wikimedia Commons file record
1841–1847

A museum, a mermaid and a boy general

In late 1841 Barnum took over Scudder’s American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street, a losing collection of natural history and curiosities. Asked what he would buy it with, he said “Brass, for silver and gold have I none”: the building’s owner, Francis Olmsted, bought the collection in his own name and let Barnum pay for it in instalments. He covered the building in painted animal medallions, flags and lights, and charged “all for twenty-five cents, children half price”. Inside were stuffed animals, waxworks, a model of Niagara with real water, living giants and dwarfs, performers and a Lecture Room that became a theatre for “moral” plays. On the Fourth of July 1842 the crowd grew so thick that he had carpenters cut a temporary rear stair into Ann Street to let people out. They had brought their dinners and would not leave.

The “Fejee Mermaid” was a dried monkey’s upper body joined to a fish. Barnum did not make it. He hired it in the summer of 1842 from Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum, after his own naturalist said he did not believe in mermaids. Barnum then planted paragraphs in the press and toured it as “From Barnum’s Great American Museum, New York”. He later wrote that he had used it “mainly to advertise the regular business of the Museum” and called it “a special show of which, I confess, I am not proud”. James Gordon Bennett called it the “Fudg-ee Mermaid”. The fame was the point.

In November 1842 Barnum met Charles Sherwood Stratton in Bridgeport. He was four, weeks short of his fifth birthday, under two feet tall and weighed under sixteen pounds. Barnum hired him for four weeks at three dollars a week. The museum bills called him “General Tom Thumb”, advertised him as eleven and “just arrived from England”, and Barnum admitted that “some liberty might be taken with the facts”. Stratton was a quick mimic, singer and comic, and his pay rose to seven dollars, then twenty-five, then fifty a week. In January 1844 they sailed for England. Queen Victoria received them three times at Buckingham Palace. The first time, Barnum hung a placard on the door of their London hall, the Egyptian Hall: “Closed this evening, General Tom Thumb being at Buckingham Palace by command of Her Majesty.” Tours of France and Spain followed. On 1 January 1845 Stratton, through his father, became Barnum’s equal partner, and the family came home rich.

Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum artwork
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  1. View of the American Museum, Broadway, New Yorkc. 1853

    The American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street, drawn by Chapin and engraved by Avery for Gleason’s Pictorial (1853). The painted medallions, rooftop flags and balcony band were all advertising. Next door is Genin the hatter, whose sign offers “Jenny Lind” riding hats.

    Source & credits

    Chapin, draughtsman; Avery, engraver; New York Public Library, Wallach Division Print Collection; cropped to the printed sheet (colour bar removed), resized

    Public domain licence

    Wikimedia Commons file record
An engraving of a five-storey corner building covered in oval animal paintings and the words “Barnum’s American Museum”, with flags along the roof, balconies full of people and omnibuses and carriages in the street. Genin’s hat shop stands next door.

View of the American Museum, Broadway, New Yorkc. 1853

The American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street, drawn by Chapin and engraved by Avery for Gleason’s Pictorial (1853). The painted medallions, rooftop flags and balcony band were all advertising. Next door is Genin the hatter, whose sign offers “Jenny Lind” riding hats.

Source & credits

Chapin, draughtsman; Avery, engraver; New York Public Library, Wallach Division Print Collection; cropped to the printed sheet (colour bar removed), resized

Public domain licence

Wikimedia Commons file record

  1. P. T. Barnum and General Tom Thumbc. 1850

    Barnum and Charles Stratton, about 1850, when Stratton was about twelve and had already toured Europe as “General Tom Thumb”. Half-plate daguerreotype by Samuel Root or Marcus Aurelius Root.

    Source & credits

    Samuel Root or Marcus Aurelius Root; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (NPG.93.154); plate cropped from its case, resized

    Public domain licence

    Wikimedia Commons file record
A daguerreotype of Barnum, seated, with a hand on his hip, and Charles Stratton standing on a draped table beside him in a cap, tailcoat, striped waistcoat and white trousers, one hand on Barnum’s shoulder.

P. T. Barnum and General Tom Thumbc. 1850

Barnum and Charles Stratton, about 1850, when Stratton was about twelve and had already toured Europe as “General Tom Thumb”. Half-plate daguerreotype by Samuel Root or Marcus Aurelius Root.

Source & credits

Samuel Root or Marcus Aurelius Root; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (NPG.93.154); plate cropped from its case, resized

Public domain licence

Wikimedia Commons file record
1849–1851

Jenny Lind at a thousand dollars a night

In October 1849 Barnum decided to bring the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to America. He had never heard her sing; she reached London just after he left. He sent an agent, John Hall Wilton, to Europe with terms, and on 9 January 1850 Lind signed in Lübeck. The contract promised her $1,000, or £200, for each of up to 150 concerts. Barnum would pay all the travel, hotels, servants, a secretary and a carriage in every city, and he hired her musical director Julius Benedict and the baritone Giovanni Belletti. Security for the whole engagement had to be lodged with Baring Brothers in London before she sailed. A clause gave her a fifth of the profits after seventy-five concerts if he had cleared £15,000.

Then he did what he did best. Biographies, “foreign correspondence” about her charity and, in his phrase, “printer’s ink” in every possible form kept her before the public. Tickets for the first concert, at Castle Garden on 11 September 1850, were auctioned, and the hatter John N. Genin paid $225 for the first one. Barnum thought it made Genin’s fortune, because the papers printed the hatter’s name across the country. Soon after she landed, Barnum rewrote the contract in her favour: she would keep her $1,000 a night and, once $5,500 had come off each concert for expenses and his fee, split the rest with him equally. Auctions spread from city to city; the record bids were $625 in Boston and $650 in Providence. Ordinary seats cost $3 to $7.

The tour ran through the East, Havana, New Orleans and up the Mississippi. By the spring of 1851 advisers around Lind were telling her that she could manage the tour better herself. She paid the $25,000 forfeit for stopping at the hundredth concert, then a further $7,000 to stop sooner, and the partnership ended after the ninety-third concert, in Philadelphia, on 9 June 1851. Barnum’s published accounts give $712,161 from ninety-five concerts, counting two charity concerts outside the contract. They record $176,675 net to Lind and $535,486 to Barnum before his costs.

Struggles and Triumphs artwork
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  1. The Second Deluge1850

    The Second Deluge: First Appearance of Jenny Lind in America, published by William Schaus in 1850. Castle Garden becomes Noah’s ark and Lind’s audience a herd of animals in evening dress: a contemporary joke about the craze Barnum manufactured.

    Source & credits

    Published by William Schaus, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward W. C. Arnold Collection (54.90.661); resized

    CC0 licence

    Wikimedia Commons file record
A satirical lithograph of a crowd with the heads of donkeys, geese, sheep and other animals filing into a round building labelled “Modern Ark of Noah”, while a monkey with a man’s face watches from a tree.

The Second Deluge1850

The Second Deluge: First Appearance of Jenny Lind in America, published by William Schaus in 1850. Castle Garden becomes Noah’s ark and Lind’s audience a herd of animals in evening dress: a contemporary joke about the craze Barnum manufactured.

Source & credits

Published by William Schaus, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward W. C. Arnold Collection (54.90.661); resized

CC0 licence

Wikimedia Commons file record
1854–1860

A confession, a clock bubble and a lecture on money

In 1855 Barnum published The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, dedicated “to the Universal Yankee Nation”. It boasted of the lotteries, the Heth tour, the mermaid and the tricks of trade, and the backlash was severe. The New York Times accused him of “the systematic, adroit, and persevering plan of obtaining money under false pretenses from the public at large”. He spent the rest of his life revising. Struggles and Triumphs (1869) recast the Heth tour as a scheme he had believed genuine and skipped most of it, and new editions kept extending the story to the latest season.

He was also trying to build a manufacturing town, East Bridgeport, on land he owned. In 1855 the Jerome Clock Company of New Haven offered to move its factory there if he would guarantee its paper up to $110,000. He signed notes, some with the payment dates left blank. The company renewed and multiplied them, and Barnum found he had endorsed more than half a million dollars. The company failed, paid creditors twelve to fifteen cents on the dollar and never moved to East Bridgeport. By the spring of 1856 Barnum had failed, and the newspapers relished it. Iranistan, his Moorish-style mansion in Bridgeport, burned down on the night of 17–18 December 1857.

Stratton wrote from Philadelphia in May 1856 offering to perform at any benefit for the family: “just take your pencil in hand and you will see I can draw a tremendous load.” Barnum declined, then took him back to Britain in 1857 and 1858 and sent the profits home to buy back his estate and the clock notes. In London, friends suggested a lecture. Barnum joked that he was better qualified to speak on “The Art of Money Losing”. On 29 December 1858 he gave The Art of Money Getting at St James’s Hall to about three thousand people, and in 1859 he delivered it nearly a hundred times. In March 1860 he bought back the American Museum’s collection and announced “Barnum on his feet again”.

The Art of Money GettingThe lecture a bankrupt delivered nearly a hundred times to pay his debts: plain rules on work, debt, advertising and sobriety, from a man still paying for an endorsement he never read closely.Read free text
1860–1868

What Is It?, the vote and two fires

In February 1860, three months after Darwin’s Origin of Species and in the middle of an election fought over slavery, the museum opened “What Is It?”. A Black performer in an animal costume was billed as a creature captured in Africa and, in Barnum’s promotional copy, “the connecting link between the wild native African, and the orang outang”. Visitors were invited to decide for themselves. Mathew Brady photographed the costumed performer, and an anti-Lincoln print by Currier & Ives used the figure to argue that enslaved people were unfit for citizenship. The Lost Museum archive says the original performer is unidentified; from 1877 the part was taken by William Henry Johnson, a Black man with an intellectual disability, who played it for more than fifty years.

In 1865 Barnum sat in the Connecticut legislature as a Republican for Fairfield. On 26 May he spoke for a state constitutional amendment to strike the word “white” from the qualifications of voters: “Knock off your manacles and let the man go free … Give him the responsibility of a man and the self-respect of a man, by granting him the right of suffrage.” The same speech assumed that Black men needed “proper training” before their “manhood” could develop. The legislature sent the amendment to the voters, who rejected it: 44.8 per cent voted yes. Black men in the state voted only after the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870. Barnum himself lost a run for Congress in 1867.

On 13 July 1865, while Barnum was speaking in Hartford, the American Museum burned down. The New York Times reported that snakes escaped into the halls and that two white whales, which had arrived a week earlier, “were, of course, burned alive” in their tank. A seal named Ned and a few other animals were saved. The newspaper blamed a defective furnace in a restaurant cellar; Barnum thought it began in the museum’s engine room. He opened a new museum at 539–541 Broadway. That one burned on 3 March 1868, on a night so cold that the water froze on the ruins, and most of its animals died in their cages. Barnum sold the site that June and went into partnership with the Van Amburgh menagerie in another museum.

The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum artwork
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  1. Burning of Barnum’s Museum, July 13th 1865print after C. P. Cranch, undated

    A later colour print of the 13 July 1865 fire, made after a painting by C. P. Cranch then owned by the German American Insurance Company. It is an artist’s reconstruction, not an eyewitness photograph.

    Source & credits

    After C. P. Cranch; colour print issued by the German American Insurance Co., New York; full frame retained

    Public domain licence

    Wikimedia Commons file record
A colour print of the five-storey American Museum in flames and black smoke, with red-shirted firemen working hand pumps and hoses in the street and a dense crowd watching beside the spire of St Paul’s Chapel.

Burning of Barnum’s Museum, July 13th 1865print after C. P. Cranch, undated

A later colour print of the 13 July 1865 fire, made after a painting by C. P. Cranch then owned by the German American Insurance Company. It is an artist’s reconstruction, not an eyewitness photograph.

Source & credits

After C. P. Cranch; colour print issued by the German American Insurance Co., New York; full frame retained

Public domain licence

Wikimedia Commons file record
1870–1891

The circus on rails, Jumbo and Bridgeport

The circus was not Barnum’s idea. William Cameron Coup and Dan Castello had been running a circus that toured the Great Lakes by boat, and Coup went to New York to interest Barnum, whose name, he knew, would sell a show. The new combination of museum, menagerie, caravan, hippodrome and circus opened under nearly three acres of tents in Brooklyn on 10 April 1871. In his 1888 autobiography Barnum tells the story as his own creation and mentions Coup only as his “too cautious manager”. Coup’s memoir tells it the other way round. Seeing that big towns earned two or three times as much as small ones, he moved the show by rail in 1872, on sixty-one cars, despite what he called “my partner’s opposition and his requests to abandon the scheme”.

The show sold living people as well as animals. In 1872 Barnum advertised “four wild Fiji Cannibals, ransomed at great cost”. Coup built the Great Roman Hippodrome in New York in 1874, then left the partnership. In 1880 the rival Great London Circus of Cooper, Bailey & Hutchinson billed the elephant calf born in its Philadelphia quarters as the first born in captivity. Barnum offered $100,000 for mother and calf and was refused, so in 1881 he merged with James A. Bailey and James L. Hutchinson instead. By 1887 Barnum had given up management to Bailey in an equal partnership, and the show became Barnum & Bailey.

In 1882 Barnum paid $10,000, by a draft for £2,000, for Jumbo, the London Zoo’s huge African elephant. British newspapers thundered against the sale and children wrote begging him to let Jumbo stay. Barnum cabled that forty years of exhibiting the best that money could buy made “Jumbo’s presence here imperative”. On 15 September 1885, at St Thomas, Ontario, an unexpected special freight train struck and killed Jumbo as he was led across the tracks to his car. Barnum spread a story that Jumbo died saving the small elephant Tom Thumb; an eyewitness account cited in Tufts University’s history contradicts it. Jumbo’s hide was mounted and his skeleton articulated, and both went on tour. That July, after the elephant Albert killed his keeper James McCormick, the show had him chained to trees and shot by a militia firing squad at Keene, New Hampshire.

In Bridgeport, Barnum was a property developer, temperance man and booster. He had sworn off spirits in 1847 and, after hearing E. H. Chapin, smashed his champagne bottles and signed the teetotal pledge. Elected mayor on 5 April 1875, he enforced the liquor laws and went after the city’s brothels. He helped found Bridgeport Hospital in 1878 and gave Tufts College its natural history museum, where Jumbo’s hide stood until a fire in 1975. He died at his house, Marina, on 7 April 1891, and Bailey took over the circus. One thing he almost certainly never said is “There’s a sucker born every minute”. Quote Investigator finds the line circulating anonymously, attached to confidence men, before anyone pinned it on him around the time of his death.

P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man artwork
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  1. P. T. Barnum & Co’s Greatest Show on Earth: Great Jumbo’s Skeleton1880s

    A poster for “Great Jumbo’s Skeleton”, issued after the 1885 death, with the bones mounted by Henry A. Ward of Rochester and the stuffed hide behind. Even dead, Jumbo stayed on tour.

    Source & credits

    P. T. Barnum & Co.; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, cph.3b52419 (no known restrictions); full frame retained

    Public domain licence

    Wikimedia Commons file record
A colour circus poster headed “P. T. Barnum & Co’s Greatest Show on Earth & the Great London Circus Combined”, showing a huge mounted elephant skeleton on a plinth labelled “Jumbo” with the stuffed elephant behind it, a crowd of visitors and a portrait of Barnum.

P. T. Barnum & Co’s Greatest Show on Earth: Great Jumbo’s Skeleton1880s

A poster for “Great Jumbo’s Skeleton”, issued after the 1885 death, with the bones mounted by Henry A. Ward of Rochester and the stuffed hide behind. Even dead, Jumbo stayed on tour.

Source & credits

P. T. Barnum & Co.; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, cph.3b52419 (no known restrictions); full frame retained

Public domain licence

Wikimedia Commons file record

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Keep exploring

Charles DarwinBarnum’s “What Is It?” opened three months after On the Origin of Species and sold a racist parody of its argument as entertainment.David OgilvyTwo theories of advertising. Barnum bought attention with outside show; Ogilvy argued that the facts about the product sell it.Walt DisneyAnother American who built an entertainment empire from a persona, with collaborators who did much of the building.Cornelius VanderbiltRail and credit made fortunes in Barnum’s America; compare the clock-note collapse with the railroad battles of the same years.
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