Becoming Tom Thumb. Eric D. Lehman
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the incredible buzz around town, “the streets were unpeopled, all business was dumb, absorb’d in the interest of Gen’ral Tom Thumb.” On the day of the performance the main room at the city hall swelled to capacity, with between four hundred and five hundred people standing wall to wall. A stage had been built over the judge’s seat, with another gold-railing platform raised three feet above.
Mr. Webster, the “conductor” carried the “The Little General” into the room high over his head and set him on the stage. Charles scrambled up a miniature flight of steps to the platform “with the agility of a little squirrel” and bowed to the audience, saying “Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen!” A selection of costume changes followed, with Charles becoming a professor at Oxford, a Spanish dandy, a sailor, and a Bowery b’hoy from New York. Most of the effect was gained by a simple change of hats: narrow brim for the Spaniard, battered white hat for the b’hoy, and a mortarboard for the Oxonian. Mr. Webster would ask him about the Oxford cap, for example, and Charles would answer with a joke: “One of the hats we read of!”
He sang songs as each of the characters, “swaggering and staggering around the platform amid rapturous shouts of applause.” Dressed as a sailor he danced a hornpipe before taking his first “break” only to emerge as Napoleon, with “indescribable style” walking in a “meditative and abstracted ramble” and taking snuff in the manner of the French general. Then he impersonated Frederick the Great of Prussia as an old man, with “stooping form,” “tottering gait,” “shaking hand,” and “unsteady head.” He changed clothes again, appearing in a tight white bodysuit and imitating Cupid with bow and arrow, a frightened slave, Ajax, Sampson, Cincinnatus, Cain slaying Abel, Hercules, the Gladiator, and more. Nichols writes wonderingly, “In all these his position was so true to the originals—his firmness of nerve so conspicuous—that for the time being the eye was ready to acknowledge him the true creation of the sculptor chiseled out of the real stone.”
He finally appeared in the elaborate costume of a Scottish Highlander, which looked “perfect in every particular,” including a bonnet and plume, royal Stuart plaid “united by a most gorgeous clasp” and a coat of arms, a dirk and claymore, powder horn, pistols, and “skene d’hu” or deer knife. This was a lot to carry for such a “little body,” and “yet he moved about perfectly easy and untrammel’d by the uniform.” Of course in this outfit he danced a highland fling and sang a Scottish song, “all which was done in his usual sweet and inimitable style of acting.” Throughout all these costume changes, Mr. Webster fed him innocent questions, as a straight man setting up Charles to deliver his jokes.
“What do you call that, General?” “A claymore!” “What do you do with it?” This was answered by assuming an attitude of defiance and flourishing it in a warlike manner toward him. Again: “What is that General?” “That is my skene d’hu!” “What do you do with it?” “Skin deers!” “When do you skin them?” “When I catch ’em!” with a quickness of expression which brought out a laugh from every corner of the house.
Nichols echoes almost every other contemporary account when he insists: “Of all the innumerable host who attended these levees, I saw or heard no one who grudged their money or wished it back in their pocket, and the great curiosity still a stranger to their eyes. All united in the declaration that he was the most extraordinary sight they had ever beheld, and a more remarkable specimen of humanity, probably, than it would ever be their happiness again to look on.”31 Nichols went home to tell his wife what he had seen, and she promptly dragged him back with her to the evening show.
Charles’s physical and verbal comedy skills and his ability to memorize and adapt were on constant display to an appreciative public. Nichols expresses amazement at the boy’s comic timing, his muscular control, and his singing skills. All this was a tribute to the tiny but fertile brain that was being cultivated to its full capacity. It was startling even to Barnum that such a young boy could learn so much, and so quickly. “He was an apt pupil with a great deal of native talent, and a keen sense of the ludicrous. He made rapid progress in preparing himself for such performances as I wished him to undertake and he became very much attached to his teacher.” Barnum also claimed that “he was in no sense a spoiled child but retained throughout that natural simplicity of character and demeanor.”32 Other accounts support Barnum’s analysis. That may be the most remarkable fact of his career: no one ever reported that Charles developed an ego to match his fame.
Charles’s early career as a child star hinged on his posed portrayal of various characters, from Cain to “Our Mary Ann.” Photo by Paul Mutino. Collection of The Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, Connecticut.
But not everything Charles learned from his experience with Barnum was positive. When asked by the showman what he wanted as a present after making him so much money, Charles only asked for a ball of twine. With it, he created a primitive trap by tying it to chair legs and whatever else was available. Barnum or the other adults would walk into the room and pretend to trip over it, a result that would cause Charles to “laugh and scream with such delight as to cause him absolutely to roll upon the floor and shed tears of joy.”33 His gleeful reaction to the apparent harm caused by this sort of devious trick is perhaps easily explained as the act of a young boy playfully pushing his boundaries. Or he could also have been unconsciously or consciously acting out against the parents and mentor who trapped him in a life of work at such a young age. In later years, everyone, especially his wife, described him as the gentlest, most accommodating person, and it is surprising his strange upbringing did not lead him to continue on a path of bullying and callousness.
More troubling is a story the showman related in July 1844 about one of Tom Thumb’s early exhibitions in London, which a well-dressed black gentleman happened to attend. Only a year before, the first “blackface” performance had appeared in New York’s Bowery Amphitheater at the same time Charles was appearing at the American Museum. Blackface actors would apply a mask of burnt cork and act as racial stereotypes to humor the all-white audiences. Building on earlier blackface comedians and singers, as well as “whiteface” clowns, Dan Emmet’s Virginia Minstrels caricatured African-American behavior and speech with malapropisms and rhetorical absurdity, gave mock sermons and political orations, sang plantation songs, and lampooned both black and white cultures. In the decades before the Civil War, this “blackface minstrelsy” became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America.34 During the mid-1840s Barnum incorporated some of these “minstrel” songs into Charles’s act, and related that in this performance:
I made General Tom Thumb sing all the “nigger songs” that he could think of and dance Lucy Long and several “Wirginny breakdowns.” I then asked the General what the negroes called him when he travelled south. “They called me little massa,” replied the General, “and they always took their hats off, too.” The amalgamating darkey did not like this allusion to his “black bredren ob de South,” nor did he relish the General’s songs about Dandy Jim, who was “de finest nigger in de county, O” and who strapped his pantaloons down so fine when “to see Miss Dinah he did go.” The General enjoyed the joke and frequently pointed his finger at the negro, much to the discomfiture of “de colored gemman.”35
The fact that a prominent New York paper felt comfortable publishing this article shows that derogatory views were not unusual, or even controversial, amongst Americans, including urban northerners, at the time. As any child does, Charles picked up the prejudices of the adults around him, and this disturbing incident is a sad commentary on learned behavior. That the mocking wit Charles included in his act should be pointed at the black man in the audience is not surprising, though certainly disappointing and distasteful. Barnum would perhaps redeem himself for incidents like this later in life, when he became a passionate abolitionist and joined the Connecticut legislature specifically to vote for the rights of African Americans. Charles himself acted in an abolitionist play as a teenager, and seems to have dropped the “nigger songs” like Old Dan Tucker and Dandy Jim from his act shortly after.36 Though other comedians continued to use blackface minstrelsy as a way to poke fun at African Americans throughout the Civil War and after, Charles seems