Barnum
Morris Robert Werner
9781465506429
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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.
