The Life of P.T. Barnum. P.T. Barnum
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the choice, and handed to my mother a gift-deed, in my behalf, of five acres of land, be the same more or less, situated in that part of the parish of Bethel, town of Danbury, county of Fairfield, State of Connecticut, known as “Plum Trees;” said tract of land being designated “IVY ISLAND.”
The village and parish of Bethel, honored by embracing within its limits that valuable inheritance of mine, (of which I shall hereafter have something to say,) has been repeatedly mentioned to me, by persons who ought to know, as my birth-place, and I have always acknowledged and reverenced it accordingly.
As however my grandfather happened to be born before me, and as it is said by all who knew him and have knowledge of me, that I am “a chip of the old block,” I must record some facts regarding him.
I think I can remember when I was not more than two years old, and the first person I recollect having seen, was my grandfather. As I was his pet, and spent probably the larger half of my waking hours in his arms, during the first six years of my life, my good mother estimates that the amount of lump sugar which I swallowed from his hands, during that period, could not have been less than two barrels.
My grandfather was decidedly a wag. He was a practical joker. He would go farther, wait longer, work harder and contrive deeper, to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven. In this one particular, as well as in many others, I am almost sorry to say I am his counterpart; for although nothing that I can conceive of delights me so much as playing off one of those dangerous things, and although I have enjoyed more hearty laughs in planning and executing them, than from any one source in the world, and have generally tried to avoid giving offence, yet I have many times done so, and as often have I regretted this propensity, which was born in me, and will doubtless continue until “dust returns to dust.”
My grandfather had four children: IRENA, my mother; LAURA, now the widow of Aaron Nichols; EDWARD, late Judge of the County Court. These three at present reside in Bethel, in which village ALANSON, the youngest of the four, died June 5, 1846, aged nearly 45.
The two sons exhibited a small degree of their father’s propensity for a joke. My aunt Laura is considerably given that way – my mother somewhat less so; but what is lacking in all the children, is fully made up with compound interest in the eldest grandson.
My paternal grandfather was Captain Ephraim Barnum, of Bethelfn1 – a captain in the militia in the Revolutionary War. His son Philo was my father.fn2 He too was of a lively turn of mind, and relished a joke better than the average of mankind. These historical facts I state as some palliation for my own inclination that way. “What is bred in the bone,” etc.
BORN – MARRIED – DIED. Most of my ancestors have passed the third state. I hope, through the grace of God, to meet them all in a better world, where “they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” and where “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
First Appearance – School Experience – John Haight – Breaking the Ice – A Debt Discharged – Living Statues – Dive, you Vagabond! – Speculation in Horns – The Biter Bit – The Horse and his Rider – The Crisis – John goes to Sea – A Naval Officer – Pennies and Sixpennies – Fish out of Water – First Visit to New York – Adventures in the City – Speculation in Oranges – Guns and Torpedoes – Funds running low – My first Swop – Vast Supplies – Corporation Morals – End of the Bargain.
MY first appearance upon this stage was on the 5th day of July, Anno Domini 1810. Independence Day had gone by, the cannons had ceased to thunder forth their remembrances of our National Anniversary, the smoke had all cleared away, the drums had finished their rattle, and when peace and quiet were restored, I made my début.
This propensity of keeping out of harm’s way has always stuck by me. I have often thought that were I forced to go to war, the first arms that I should examine would be my legs. I should scarcely fulfil the plan of the Yankee soldier who fired a few stray shots at the enemy on his own hook, and then departed, singing,
“He that fights and runs away,
May live to fight another day.”
I am decidedly a man of peace, and the first three words of the first line would never correctly apply to me if it was possible for me to appropriate the three words which follow them.
I am not aware that my advent created any peculiar commotion in the village, though my good mother declares that I made a great deal of noise the first hour I saw the light, and that she has never been able to discover any cessation since.
I must pass by the first seven years of my life – during which my grandfather crammed me with sugar and loaded me with pennies, to buy raisins and candies, which he always instructed me to solicit from the store-keeper at the “lowest cash price” – and proceed to talk of later events.
I commenced going to school at the age of about six years. The first date which I recollect inscribing upon my writing-book, was 1818. A schoolhouse in those days was a thing to be dreaded – a schoolmaster, a kind of being to make the children tremble. My first school-teacher was a Mr. Camp, the second Mr. Zerah Judson, the third a Mr. Curtiss from Newtown, the fourth Dr. Orris T. Taylor, and afterwards my uncle Alanson Taylor, etc. In the summers Miss Hannah Starr, an excellent teacher, of whom I was an especial favorite, and for whom I have ever entertained the highest respect, was our school-mistress. The first three male teachers used the ferule prodigiously, and a dark dungeon which was built in the house, was tenanted nearly all the time during school hours, by some unlucky juvenile frequently under eight years of age, who had incurred the displeasure of the “one-man power.”
I was generally accounted a pretty apt scholar, and as I increased in years, there were but two or three in school who were considered my superiors. In arithmetic I was unusually quick and I recollect, at the age of twelve years, being called out of bed one night by my teacher, who had laid a small wager with a neighbor that I could figure up and give the correct number of feet in a load of wood in five minutes. The neighbor stated the dimensions, and as I had no slate in the house I marked them on the stove pipe, and thereon also figured my calculations, and gave the result in less than two minutes, to the great delight of my teacher, my mother, and myself, and to the no small astonishment of our incredulous neighbor. My father was a tailor, a farmer, and sometimes a tavern-keeper; so I was often kept out of school, and never had any “advantages” except at the common district school, and one summer at the “Academy” in Danbury, a distance of three miles, which I marched and countermarched six times per week.
Like most farmers’ boys, I was obliged to drive and fetch the cows, carry in firewood, shell corn, weed beets and cabbages, and, as I grew larger, I rode horse for ploughing, turned and raked hay, and in due time handled “the shovel and the hoe,” as well as the plough; but I never really liked to work.
One of my playmates, who also had occasion to drive cows the same road with myself, and who was two years my senior, I will in these pages call John Haight. He was the son of Dr. Ansel Haight, one of our village physicians. John was a pretty hard customer. He was profane, bullying, fond of visiting other people’s peach and apple orchards, water-melon patches, etc. Many is the whipping that fell to my lot for disobeying my mother’s injunction “not to play with that John Haight.”
John was a regular raw-head and bloody-bones to all prudent mothers, and although he had a happy faculty of coaxing their sons into scrapes, he never helped them out. The boys generally both liked and feared him. They liked him for his impudent, daredevil sort of character, and they feared him because he was a terrible tyrant, ruling his mates with a rod of iron, and flogging all who presumed to disobey him.
On one occasion a dozen of the schoolboys – John among the rest – were skating upon a pond where the water was about twelve feet deep. John, prompted by his