to thin, he sent Heth and Lyman on to
Providence, Boston, and Hartford. The
abolitionist movement was strong in
New England, so the flexible Lyman
concocted a new story: the proceeds
from the act were going to purchase the
freedom of Heth’s great-grandchildren,
back in Kentucky. Even by the standards
of the time, Barnum’s use of Heth was
shameful, a point made by at least one
un-bought-off editor. A “more indecent
mode of raising money than by the ex-
hibition of an old woman—black or
white—we can hardly imagine,” the Bos-
ton Atlas declared.
Barnum’s imagination, though, was
not so limited. After Heth died, in 1836,
he arranged for her to give one last show.
Ostensibly to determine how old she had
been, he staged a public autopsy. Fif-
teen hundred people bought tickets to
the event, at an amphitheatre on Broad-
way. Based on the condition of her or-
gans, the presiding physician concluded
that Heth had been at most eighty. The
New York Sun reported this finding the
next day, under the headline “Precious
Humbug Exposed.” To a rival paper,
Lyman, presumably with Barnum’s bless-
ing, peddled the fiction that the body
on the table had not been Heth’s at all;
she was in Connecticut, “alive and well.”
Several other papers weighed in on the
ghoulish dispute, providing Barnum with
just the sort of attention he thrived on.
“Newspaper and social controversy on
the subject (and seldom have vastly more
important matters been so largely dis-
cussed) served my purpose as ‘a show-
man’ by keeping my name before the
public,” he crowed.
A
few years after Heth’s demise, Bar-
num found his way to an even big-
ger hit, in the form of a very small per-
son named Charles Stratton. Stratton
had stopped growing when he was a
baby, but in every other way had con-
tinued to develop normally. At the time
Barnum encountered him, he was four
years old and just two feet tall. Barnum
entered into an agreement with Strat-
ton’s parents, bumped his age up to
eleven, and rechristened him General
Tom Thumb.
As luck would have it, Stratton proved
to be a theatrical prodigy. In almost no
time, Barnum had taught him how to
sing, dance, swing a cane, and do im-
personations. (By all accounts, he could
pull off a wicked Napoleon.) Wearing
an overcoat, Barnum would sometimes
show up at the American Museum right
as a performance was scheduled to begin.
Patrons would crowd around him, de-
manding to know where Tom Thumb
was. After a few minutes, Stratton would
emerge from an extra-deep pocket in
Barnum’s coat: “Here I am, sir!”
Barnum sent Stratton on a tour up
and down the East Coast, during which,
it was claimed, the boy was seen “by
nearly half a million persons.” Next, he
took him to England, where, after con-
siderable conniving, he managed to get
him an audience with Queen Victoria.
She was amused. This coup turned Tom
Thumb into a sensation. “I felt the
golden shower was beginning to fall,”
Barnum later recalled. The two went on
to Paris, where Tom Thumb appeared
on the Champs-Élysées in a tiny car-
riage pulled by two Shetland ponies. In
France, the boy performed his Napo-
leon imitation only once, at the request
of King Louis-Philippe, during a pri-
vate show at the royal country palace.
Barnum remained with Tom Thumb
in Europe for nearly three years. Exactly
how much money he made from the
trip is unknown; probably it was the
equivalent of tens of millions of dollars
in today’s money. Returning to the
United States in 1847, Barnum used his
newfound wealth to expand his opera-tions in all directions. He booked the
Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind on a
U.S. tour. He renovated and enlarged
the American Museum, adding a the-
atre to the complex. For his family—he
now had a wife and three daughters—he
built an enormous mansion in Bridge-
port. (The place, called Iranistan, looked
like a mashup of the Taj Mahal and the
British Parliament.) He created a circus,
P. T. Barnum’s Great Asiatic Caravan,
Museum, and Menagerie; invested in an
early version of a fire extinguisher, the
Phillips Fire Annihilator; and launched
another newspaper, the Illustrated News.
He bought up a large chunk of Bridge-
port, divided it into lots, and began lend-
ing money to the purchasers of those
lots. Then he went broke.
According to Barnum’s version of
events, he was ruined by a perfidious
business partner, who tricked him into
endorsing half a million dollars’ worth
of promissory notes. But Barnum never
convincingly explained how the decep-
tion worked, and there is some ques-
tion about whether it ever took place.
The business partner maintained that
he was the one who’d been duped. And
even though Barnum insisted that he’d
had no inkling of the impending disas-
ter, he had transferred a number of his
assets to associates and to his wife, Char-
ity, months before he declared bank-
ruptcy. “Without Charity, I’m nothing,”
he would joke. (Iranistan, which had“They’re all native to the region.”