What was p.t. barnum

His running mate, he suggested, should come from a state like Indiana. Phineas Taylor Barnum—Tale to his family and friends—came from a long line of humbugs, Wilson relates. He was born in Bethel, Connecticut, in , and named for his maternal grandfather. Uncle Phin, as the older man was known, had fought in the American Revolution and then managed to buy much of the property around Bethel. Growing up, Barnum was told that Uncle Phin had purchased a prime piece of farmland for him, a gift that made him the wealthiest child in town.

If he was wounded by the hoax, he also seems to have profited from it. Still a teen-ager, Barnum was sent to clerk at a general store outside Bethel, where he staged his earliest recorded swindle. Not surprisingly, the place soon closed. Barnum tried opening his own store. He also founded a newspaper, the Herald of Freedom , and created an agency to sell lottery tickets. This was long before government-sponsored gambling, and the contests were private ventures.

The store lost money. The Herald prompted several libel suits, including one that landed Barnum in jail. The agency, for its part, did quite nicely, until lotteries were banned by the Connecticut state legislature, in The following year, Barnum finally found his vocation—or perhaps it found him.

An acquaintance told him about a travelling act that was up for sale. It featured a woman, Joice Heth, who was advertised to be a hundred and sixty-one years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. Barnum rushed to Philadelphia, where the show with Heth was playing. She was blind, toothless, and practically paralyzed.

The two men flooded the city with ads and, it seems, bribes; Lyman paid off editors to gin up interest. After Heth died, in , he arranged for her to give one last show. Ostensibly to determine how old she had been, he staged a public autopsy. Fifteen hundred people bought tickets to the event, at an amphitheatre on Broadway.

Based on the condition of her organs, the presiding physician concluded that Heth had been at most eighty. Stratton had stopped growing when he was a baby, but in every other way had continued to develop normally. At the time Barnum encountered him, he was four years old and just two feet tall. 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 impersonations. 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, demanding to know where Tom Thumb was. Barnum: An Entertaining Life Facebook. Barnum , Fairfield , Popular Culture. By Gregg Mangan P. Fitzsimons, Raymund. Barnum in London. New York, NY: St. Saxon, A. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. New York: Columbia University Press, Wallace, Irving. New York: Knopf, Barnum, P. The Life of P. Barnum, Written by Himself.

New York: Redfield, Noah Webster and the Dream of a Common Language. Other CT Humanities Programs. He later tried to run for the U. Congress—ironically, against a distant relative also named Barnum—but lost in a heated campaign.

Following a stint as mayor of his adopted hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Barnum later returned to the Connecticut Legislator in the late s and became a leading advocate for pro-temperance reforms and the abolition of the death penalty.

He spent years writing and updating his autobiography. New editions and appendices appeared on a near-annual basis, and Barnum helped increase sales by putting the book in the public domain and allowing anyone to publish it. He even instructed his widow to write a new chapter that chronicled the events of his death.

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