P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race Author(s): Benjamin Reiss Source: American Quarterly, Vol.

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P. T. Barnum,Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race

BENJAMIN REISS University Tulane

ON 25 FEBRUARY 1836, P. T. BARNUM ORCHESTRATED AN EVENT THAT

would launchhis careerin show business and providethe nascentmass media one of its first great spectacles.1 Joice Heth, an aged African Americanwoman whom Barnumhad exhibited across the Northeastas the 161-year-oldformernurse of GeorgeWashington,now lay dead on an operating table in New York's City Saloon. 1,500 spectators, includingmany of the most important editorsin the city, paid fifty cents apiece to watch as Dr. David L. Rogers carvedinto her corpse. Rogers' "finding" that Heth was a fraud touched off an intense journalistic debate, in which the penny press-the first entirely commercial newspapers in the country-took the lead. Through this debate, a surprisingnumberof improvisationson the themes of identity,authenticity, and essence were seemingly wrung from Heth's corpse. Alternately, she was still alive, dead but a fraud,the real thing and dead, an everlastingmystery,a waste of time, and about to embarkon a tour of Europeas a phial of ashes; and the scientific inquiryinto her deathwas authoritative, invasive, irrelevant,and fraudulent. the Heth exhibit-in particular, Reconstructing its grisly aftermaththroughits coverage in the media provides a microscopicview of some of the unsettling transformations that were shaping nineteenth-century culture.Providinga backdropfor and sometimes intrudingdirectlyinto reportingof the affairwere the issues of modernization thatprofoundly affected the lives of many who saw Heth: the new prestige of science, social atomization,the emergenceof a commercialmass culture,rapid urbanization and the expansion of social roles, and a felt loss of
Benjamin Reiss is an assistantprofessor of English at Tulane University.
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communal,familial, and class-basedtraditions.Many of these transformations produced anxieties about status, authenticity, and identity: what was the basis of trustin a social interchangeinvolving strangers? how could one be sure that an economic transactionwas not fraudulent? How could one truly "know"another?2In several of its aspects, Heth's autopsy appearsas a moment in which science-mediated by popularjournalismand other mass media-faced some of the crises of legibility, authenticity,and recognition brought on by the process of modernization. A related context for the exhibit was the changing meanings of "race"in the antebellumNorth. In early nineteenth-century America, racial distinctionwas a relativelyloose set of discourses,practices,and ideas that separatedand elevated one group from others, drawing on law, religion, and science with little internalconsistency.The essential linkage between race and property rights, for example, would not become explicitly codified until the 1850s throughlegal decisions like Dred Scott and legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act; and notions of the biological determinismof race were only fully developed in later decades throughthe increased energies of anatomistsand other scientists. Heth's itinerantexhibit reflects some of this loose structure,in thatit was a free-floating,improvisedracialistdisplay,an open text that was given a wide range of readings in local media. These readings illuminateher various publics' notions of race, which were inevitably filtered throughtheir differences of region, class, and ideology. But in death, the question of what she meant to her viewers and to readers became displaced by the more imperiousquestion of who she was-or rather,who was behind her.The intensifiedfocus on fixing her identity (which had always been a threadin reactionsto her live exhibit ), rather thaninterpreting her story,takes on an implicitly deterministicovertone when viewed within the context of scientific attemptsto essentialize race in the antebellumperiod. The Heth autopsy-like other spectacular displays of race createdby the emerging mass media-dramatized some of the new meanings of racial identity and providedan opportunity for whites to debate them (in a displaced register) as they gazed upon or read about her corpse. The episode thus offers the opportunity to constructan ethnographicminiatureof white antebellumNortherners as they struggledto make sense of the interlockingissues of racial identificationand modernization,and looked for symbolic resolutionto those struggles in popularculture and the emerging mass media.

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Freak Show, History Lesson, or Disgrace: Heth on Tour The small scale and itinerancyof Heth's tourwith Barnummarkit as an "earlymodem" entertainment-more consistentwith the wandering performers,orators,and curiosities of the late eighteenthcenturythan Her first exhibitor the urbanspectacles of the mid- to late-nineteenth.3 was actually not Barnumbut R. W. Lindsay, a hapless showman from Kentucky,who had exhibited her in towns and cities across the South, Ohio, and the mid-Atlanticstates. Little is known aboutthis early tour, but when Lindsay couldn't turn a profit, he sold his interest in the exhibit to Barnum,who was at the time workingin a dry goods store in New York.4Barnumthus became Heth's virtual owner and-with the assistance of a young lawyer named Levi Lyman-displayed her in taverns, inns, museums, railway houses, and concert halls across the Northeastfor a periodof seven months,until her death.Startingwith an extended stay in New York, Heth, Barnum, and Lyman moved on to Providence, Boston, Hingham, Lowell, Worcester,Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Newark, Patterson,Albany and many towns in between, stoppingback in New Yorkseveraltimes. Wherever they went, newspapersreportedHeth's comings and goings avidly, and crowds flocked to hearher tell abouthow she had witnessedthe birthof "dearlittle George"and been the first to clothe him and even to breastfeed him, to hearher sing hymns she had supposedlytaughthim, and to ask questions about the upbringingof the fatherof the nation. Others came to judge for themselvesthe authenticityof her claims, which were supported by an impressive array of documents such as her birth certificateand bill of sale, as well as by the bodily signs of her old age; and to ponderthe causes and implicationsof her extraordinary longevity. Her debility was a draw,too, for many came to gaze on-even to touch-her marvelously decrepit body. Joice Heth was advertisedas weighing only forty-six pounds; she was blind and toothless and had deeply wrinkledskin; she was paralyzedin one arm and both legs; and her nails were said to curl out like talons. Visitors regularly shook hands with her, scrutinizedher, and sometimes even took her pulse. "Indeed,"wrote one observer, "she is a mere skeleton covered with skin, and her whole appearancevery much resembles a mummy of the days of the Pharaohs, taken entire from the catacombs of Egypt."5 Doctors and naturalistswere fascinated.Well before she died-in fact,

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while some were predicting that she would never die-her autopsy was a greatly anticipated event.6 Throughout her travels with Barnum and Lyman, a curious multivalence marked the exhibit of Joice Heth. Did her decrepitude mark her as a human oddity, to be marketed like the Chinese woman with "disgustingly deformed" bound feet, the Virginia dwarves, and the Siamese twins whose paths she often crossed on the touring circuit?7 Was it her scientific value as an embodiment of the different aging processes of the different races that merited her display? Was she an attraction because of her patriotic value as a living repository of memories of a glorious past? Because she was a storehouse of ancient religious practices? Or simply because she was a good performer? An advertisement for her exhibit at Niblo's Gardens in New York plays on all of these possibilities:
GREAT ATTRACTION AT NIBLO'S-UNPARALLELED LONGEV-

ITY. . . . Joice Heth is unquestionablythe most astonishing and interesting curiosity in the world! She was the slave of Augustine Washington (the
father of Gen. Washington) and was the first person who put cloths [sic] on

the unconscious infant who was destined to lead our heroic fathers on to glory, to victory, and to freedom.To use her own languagewhen speakingof her young master, George Washington, "SHE RAISED HIM!" Joice Heth
was born in the island of Madagascar, on the coast of Africa, in the year of 1674, and has consequently now arrived at the astonishing age of ONE

HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE YEARS!!! She weighs but FORTY-SIX POUNDS, and yet is very cheerful and interesting.She retains her faculties in an unparalleleddegree, converses freely, sings numeroushymns, relates
many interesting anecdotes of the boy Washington, the red coats, &c., and often laughs heartily at her own remarks, or those of the spectators. Her health is perfectly good, and her appearance very neat... The appearance of

this marvellousrelic of antiquitystrikes the beholder with amazement,and convinces him that his eyes are resting on the oldest specimen of mortality they ever before beheld. . 8

The tension in this advertisement between claims of Heth's historical importance ("SHE RAISED HIM!") and of her status as a monstrous wonder of nature ("she weighs but FORTY-SIX POUNDS") points to a tension between identification and objectification, exaltation and denigration, nostalgia and disgust that marked her visitors' responses. These vacillations take on cultural significance when we consider the cultural politics behind differing representations of her body and her narrative.

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Many newspapersacross the NorthreadHeth's exhibitprimarilyas a freak show. Displays of humancuriosities, or lusus naturae-freaks of nature-were among the most populartravelingentertainments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but by the 1830s, the display of grotesquelyembodiedhumanforms was for some a populist, carnivalesque entertainment,and for others an offense to genteel sensibilities.9 The contested meanings of Heth's extraordinary body reveal much aboutregionaland class-basednotions of race and cultural propriety,andpoint towarda largerstrugglefor culturalpower in 1830s America. In New York, she was a favorite of the lively Jacksonian press, including the Evening Star, and the first three penny papers (the Sun, the Transcript, and the Herald.) These periodicals, the first entirely commercial serial publicationsin America, were perhapsthe most compelling voices of Jacksonian individualism. Their brash displays of hostility for the culturemavensof the upperclasses (and for each other), their sympathies for the urban working and upwardly mobile classes, their freedom from political patronage,and their fierce egalitarianism for whites mixed with overt anti-blackracismall marked For their distinctivenessfrom the more genteel "six-penny"papers.10 the most part, the Jacksonianpress peddled images of Heth's debility, her great appetiteand fondness for tobacco, and her grotesqueappearance. One articlein the Evening Star mentionedthat "hernails are near an inch long, and the great toes horny and thick like bone and incurvated, andthe Transcript's looking like the claws of a birdof prey," reporterwas fascinatedto find that her eyes "areentirely run out and closed."" The popularNew York"knowledgemagazine"Family went .. so far as to reportthatalthough"foodis administered to her regularly. occurbut once in a fortnight."'2 evacuations Together, these New York papers and magazines were on the vanguardof mass culture,using new techniquesin printingtechnology and distribution to publishmore cheaply and to garnera wider audience than had previously existed for print ephemera.The frankogling they encouraged-and performed-was a more risky business in New England, where the media were still dominatedby the genteel classes, and where stage shows of any kind, let alone displays of human Although some papers had only recentlybeen tolerated.13 "curiosities," Heth continued the kind of coverage had received in New York, reports. Barnumand Lymanhad to respondto a numberof opprobrious In Boston, the WhiggishAtlas complainedof the onslaughtof advertis-

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ing for Heth. Begging her exhibitors to refrain from sullying their communicationbox with "puffs"for the show, the editors wrote that "a more indecent mode of raising money than by the exhibition of an old woman-black or white-we can hardly imagine."4 The same city's Courierwas more graphicin its disgust. Its protestexpressed fear that viewers' morals would be corrupted by the display,but it also appealed to readers'sympathyfor Heth herself:
Those who imagine they can contemplatewith delight a breathingskeleton, subjected to the same sort of discipline that is sometimes exercised in a menagerie to induce the inferior animals to play unnaturalpranks for the amusementof barrenspectators,will find food to their taste by visiting Joice Heth. But Humanitysickens at the exhibition.9

"Those"who so delighted in the display, one might infer, included the very editors who were challenging the genteel press' power in the culturalrealm. In response to these attacks, Barnumand Lyman wisely advertised Heth's cleanliness and her religiosity, ratherthan her freakishness,on the rest of her New Englandtour.According to a puff piece plantedin the Hartford Times, "There is nothing in her appearancewhich can Apparpossibly be unpleasantto the minds of the most fastidious."l6 preempt a further ently to criticisms, they even printed pamphlet biography of Heth, which stressed, in addition to her propriety,the roughness of her treatmentin slavery and the humane qualities of her currentexhibitors:
Some of the time since [herpossession by the Washingtonfamily]... she has been very much neglected, laying for years in an outer building, upon the naked floor. In speaking of her past condition, she expresses great thankfulness, thatProvidenceshould so kindly providethe comfortsof life, and make infinitely better her condition as she approachestowards the close of it.17

Behind the differing representationsof Joice Heth lay a radical disagreementabout the role of the human body in public display, the stakes of which were connected to a wider argument about who controlled culture.'8 Editors of the "penny-a-liners"typically saw themselves as culturalpopulists,providingwhat their upwardlymobile readershipwanted for the cheapest price possible. As James Gordon Bennett opined in the Herald in 1835, "Formerlyno man could read unless he had $10 to spare for a paper. Now with a cent in his left pocket, and a quid of tobacco in his cheek, he can purchase more

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intelligence, truth,and wit, than is containedin such papersas the dull or the stupidTimes for threemonths."19 Courier& Enquirer, Consumption was thus figured as a kind of empowerment;Bennett encouraged a struggling his readersto imagine that buying the paperstransformed workerinto a culturalsuperior.The genteel editors, on the other hand, viewed theirrole as guardiansof an exalted realm,to be protectedfrom the exploitations of "pennyrascals" and other mercenaryassaults on propriety.In protestingthe Heth exhibit, the six-penny press' editors viewed its solicitation of voyeuristicinterestas a kind of nakedpublic aggression that threatenedtheir moral guardianshipof culture. When the Courier defended Heth's body from "the amusement of barren spectators,"it posed as an embattled defender of an exalted cultural sphere, newly under siege from below. The final sentence of the piece expresses the enormity of the felt threat:"humanity"-not just those The distaste with money,taste, andmorals-"sickens at the exhibition." of the Whiggish press for Heth's grotesquebody can thus be read as a synecdochic rejection of all the rabble that were crowding into the public sphere, and fashioning, from the ground up, a mass public for the new mass culture.20 The class-based culturalskirmishesover Heth's body fed as well on competingviews of racialdifference.AlexanderSaxtonhas writtenthat for the Whig coalition, as for the six-penny papers that were their centralorgans,maintainingclass hierarchieswas the primaryideological agenda.Accordingto the genteel world-view,within the "spectrum of differences,"racial difference was "simply one among many."In contrast,an emphasison racialdifferencebolsteredthe groupsolidarity of the mechanics who comprised the bulk of the northernJacksonian Democrats-and the bulk of the penny press' readers.21 Although this group perceived itself as united by class interests,it is tricky to define by the currentlexicon of class terminology,for it included apprentices and journeymen laborers as well as established "master"craftsmen (blacksmiths,hatters, comb-makers,etc.) and capitalist entrepreneurs If their interests were sometimes in who had risen from their ranks.22 conflict, the language of racial solidarity provided an imaginative category to reunite them, and images of a debased "other"reinforced the commonalty of whites.23 Freak shows, perhaps more than any other popular antebellum practice, helped disseminate the lessons of racial solidarity because they acted as a hinge between scientific inquiries into racial essence

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and the popular desire for images of white domination. Exhibits typically highlightedthe physical anomaly,grotesquefeatures,extreme disability,or exotic racial or culturaldifferenceof the displayedhuman object, and often more than one such quality at a time. For example, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Henry Moss, a black man afflicted with a disease that gave him spottedskin, exhibitedhimself in Philadelphiaand became the subjectof greatpopularattention,including that of Benjamin Rush, who concluded that Moss was undergoing a spontaneous"cure"of his blackness. This popularscientific interest was institutionalizedin the next centuryby Barnum,who exhibitedin his AmericanMuseum African Americanswith vitiligo, albinism, and microcephaly, claiming that they were the "missing links" in an evolutionarychain extending from black to white and from monkey to man. The difference between the earlier and later exhibits is telling. Moss' control of his own exhibit in a major urbancenter would have been unthinkablein the following decades, as racial attitudeshardened in the North and as culturalentrepreneurs like Barnum,circus managers, and proprietorsof dime museums began to comer the marketon human curiosities.24This increasing control of the freak's body was accompanied by the incorporation of freakishness into developing notions of racial science. Whereas Rush found that Moss blurredthe distinctionsbetween white and black, the laterdisplays tendedto refine and enforce those distinctions: the "missing links" demonstratedthe racialistimplications of the new Darwiniantheories.25Finally, Rush's interestin Moss was simply one voice among many aboutthe natureof "humancuriosities,"who were still often viewed in terms of religious wonder or the rituals of carnival that extended back to medieval Europe. By Barnum'stime-starting with the Heth autopsy-science the freak's body.26 became the dominantdiscourse for interpreting Not surprisingly,then, the papers that emphasized Heth's freakishness also debated her scientific value.27Centralto these discussions was the "fact"of her extraordinary old age, the significance of which was probedin the Jacksonianpress when she grew ill towardthe end of 1835. "Joice Heth goes South in about two or three weeks," the New YorkHerald announced."She says she cannot spend the winter in the North, where the cold is so severe and the nights so long. The South is The Herald was here echoing a notion popular her native element."28 scientists that, as one physician put it, among early nineteenth-century "theAfrican races are very susceptible of cold, and are as incapableof

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the climate, as a white populationare of supporting enduringa northern torrid sun of Africa."29 This idea-most lucidly formulatedby the English anatomist Robert Knox-took on the characterof a racist ideologeme in the United States, as advocatesof slaveryarguedthatthe South, with its semi-tropicalclimate, was as much a "natural" environment for blacks as Africa was.30The Evening Star used Heth's old age to support this idea. Far from an anomaly, the paper argued, Heth's longevity was common among slaves in the South but almost unheard illness testifiedto the fact that "the of in the North.Her suddennorthern calumniatedclimate of the South, which has been so decried for its marshes, stagnantstreams,and pine barrens,is. . . admirablyadapted for the African race."31 Amidst the swirling possibilities and anxieties attendingmodernizationand urbanlife that these papers so brilliantly chronicled, race stood as an island of fixity: in this case, the laws of nature decreed that each race should remain in its proper place, and those laws could be read on or throughthe body. If freaks were the image of denigration and difference, George Washington had become, by the early nineteenth century, the most exalted of national icons. Seen as a freak show, the Heth exhibit of blacks: theirgrotesquematerialexaggeratedstereotypicalattributes ity, their biological difference from white observers. But seen as a living relic of the age of Washington,Heth was sometimes an object of identification,even idolization. Audiences melted on hearing her sing the hymns she had taughthim and tell stories of his youth;as a reporter for the ProvidenceRepublicanHerald gushed,
when we heard her converse on subject or circumstance.. . connected with the birth,the infancy, and childhood of the immortalWashington--the mind was carried away by an intensity of interest, which no other object of curiosity has ever createdin our breast.32

"Somebodyis raising money to build a monumentto the memory of Washington,"ran an item in the New YorkHerald on 25 November 1835.
What profanation!A monumenthas long since been built to the memory of Washington. Where is its foundation? In the breasts of free men in both Europeand America.Whereis its highest pinnacle?Farbeyond the brightest starin the heaven itself-in the bosom of Him who liveth for ever and ever.33

As this articlemakes clear,Washingtonhad passed beyond politics and into the realm of myth. Fromhis deathin 1799 until the outbreakof the

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Civil War,the mythic Washingtonwas by far the most veneratedfigure in Americanhistory,andproductionof Washingtoniana one of the most profitable of patriotic industries. Artists by the dozen painted his portrait;monumentsto his memory sprangup across the country (the Herald's cries of profanationnotwithstanding),and his face invested countless trinkets, walls, and mantelpieces with a touch of nobility. Between 1800 and 1860, over four hundredbooks, essays, and articles on the life of Washingtonappearedin print,most of them outrageously flattering. (The most famous of these was-and continues to beMason Weems's 1809 The Life of Washington,whose famous cherry tree scene Heth claimed to have witnessed.34)A clearly jealous John Adams wrote of the "idolatrousworship" accorded his colleague; he was deified "by all classes and nearly all parties of our citizens,"who referredto him as "'ourSavior,''our Redeemer,''our cloud by day and ourpillarof fire by night,' 'our starin the east,' 'to us a Son is born,'and 'our guide on earth, our advocate in heaven.'"35 Such venerationserved as a stabilizing force duringa time of social upheaval.As the nation underwentits most rapid period of urbanization, widespread anxieties about loss of traditionsurfaced in society and politics. In this context, legends of the "founding Fathers"presented the heroes of the glorious Revolutionarypast as paternalrole models on a national level. As George Forgie has written:
Society began to concern itself with child nurtureas a political matterand to
summon models from history at the same time that for essentially economic

reasons actual fathers ceased to provide. . . automaticmodels of roles their

sons would grow up to play. . . . At a time when expanding economic

opportunitymeantthatboys were beginningto need a wider range of models than their surroundingswere likely to provide, history stepped in to supply them in the form of the founding heroes.

And just as actual families were losing their cohesiveness, disunion on a broaderscale was threateningthe national "family":it began to look as thoughthe North and the Southcould not live togetheras one nation. Amidst these anxieties, GeorgeWashington,as the fatherof all Fathers, stood as a figure of authorityamong squabblingsons. As such, he was subjectnot only to idolatry,but to the occasional "ritualisticacting out of patricidalfantasies."36 Heth's exhibit was only one of many antebellumculturalproductions thatmingled nostalgiafor the Revolutionaryage with degradingimages blacks: stage plays, popular literature,and even minstrel shows often

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voiced longing for the glorious past most strongly throughthe mouths of simplistic African American characters. George Stevens's 1834 dramaThe Patriot, for instance, presentsthe characterof Sambo, who claims he is descendedfrom the servantsof GeorgeWashington. When his masterasks Samboto take out the bust of Washingtonand dust it for the Fourth of July celebration, Sambo replies: "Yes Massa-de big Washington, me lub him massa! were he 'live, me would hug him massa, as him Sambo do-dis!", and then broke into the "Jim Crow" dance routine.37 WilliamAndrewshas arguedthatthis antebellumtrope of the ridiculous black patriottook shape in part because blacks were presumedincapableof progress (unless aided by whites) and therefore stood outside of history. In the words of Hegel, "Africais a land of perpetualchildhood"whose natives are "capableof no developmentor culture.... As we see them at this day, such have they always been."38 Stuck in the past, oblivious to the changes aroundthem (one version of the Heth story has her blissfully ignorant of the identity of Andrew Jackson),Heth and Sambo were portrayedas developmentallystunted, but they were also inuredfrom the present.These northernstagings of nostalgia--coming shortly after the final emancipation of slaves in northernstates-thus expressed a conservativelonging for a place and time in which blacks were perfectly in their place. Both the remembrance of Washingtonand its voicing in black (or blackface) dialect stood as a counterbalanceto the changes wrought by modernization and those advocatedby abolitionists. Still, the past was not called forth without some "filial resentment." Heth's exhibit was an opportunityto pay respects to the memory of Washington, but the image of this freakish black woman having suckled "dear little George" (an image that caught on in popular discussion of the exhibit, though Heth herself usually claimed to have been a dry nurse)pointed to a monstrousperturbation in a culture-wide idols tainted by the to idealization, a desire see one's nostalgic grotesque. At times, the exhibit served to displace resentmenttoward Washington's impossibly grand historical example by directing it downwardtowardblacks. Heth was jeered in severalpapersfor putting (The Providence on airs and assuming the role of "lady Washington." Daily Journal, for example, reportedthat she refused to eat chicken because "I'd tank you to understanddat I am Lady Washington,and Sometimes, too, the racial and want as good victuals as anyone."39)

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patriotic meanings found in her exhibit clashed. If Joice Heth were truly who she claimed to be, then her exalted statuswas almost enough to erase the social fact of her blackness. This perspectiveoccasionally made her marketingappearobscene, even in the world of the otherwise in New York enthusiasticpenny papers.Duringher initialperformances duringAugust 1835, an indignantletterwriternamedHenryCole asked in a letter to the Sun,
why SHE who nursedthe "fatherof our country,"the man to whom we owe our presenthappyand prosperouscondition,should at the close of her life be enough in the exhibitedas "ourrarermonstersare."Is therenot philanthropy Americanpeople to take care of her, althoughher skin be black?4"

This raredisplay of sympathyfor Heth andher sufferingbody stretched but did not breakthe bounds of racist thinking:Cole saw the indignity takingplace despite her being black. And even though Cole believed in her unique claim to historical importance, he was still comfortable viewing her as a piece of property, if not quite a commodity. He concluded by remindingthe Sun's readersthat Joice Heth
is the common propertyof our country-she is identified with the history of the foundation, rise and progress of our government-she is the sole remainingtie of mortalitywhich connects us to him who was "firstin war, first in peace, first in the heartsof his countrymen"-and as such, we should protect and honor her, and not suffer her to be kept for a show, like a wild beast, to fill the coffers of mercenarymen.

In contrast to Cole, the penny press's editors either scrutinizedJoice Heth's freakish body for scientific significance or celebrated it in grotesquerevelry, while the six-penny press sneered at it as a sign of filth bubbling up on the culturallandscape. However, Cole saw in the display not so much Heth's freakishness as the mythic history that passed through her body like breath.And yet this history seemed to have little to do with Heth herself, as its main function was to "connect us to him"-that is, white viewers to their symbolic father.(Could "us" include non-whites?) Cole sympathizedwith Heth by looking past her body rather than at it; beyond her body, he saw his own race's mythological kinship to Washington,and it was this that he wanted to protect from mercenaries.The mercenaries-Barnum as well as the penny press's editors-ultimately had their way.

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Death, Dissection, and CulturalCommodification A year before Joice Heth died, the body of George Washingtonwas the focus of an interestingdebate in Congress. The Senate and House had established a joint committee to plan a commemorationfor the one-hundredthanniversaryof George Washington'sbirth, and a proposal emerged to have his remains removed from Mount Vernonand placed in a tomb below the centerof the U.S. CapitolRotunda.Edward Everett, a senator from Massachusetts,spoke mainly for Northerners when he proclaimed that the procession of pallbearerswould be a
spectacle "unexampled in the history of the world. . . The sacred

remains are. .. a treasurebeyond all price, but it is a treasureof which every part of this blood-cemented Union has a right to claim its share."41Blood-cemented partners or no, Southerners resisted this Northerner'sappeal to the "right"to move the body North; the plan faltered as southerncongressmen lined up to keep the body in Mount Vernon,where it would emphasize Washington'ssouthernroots. Cutting against the lofty symbolism of unity and spirituality that the idealized image of Washingtoninvoked, his actual corpse exerted a downwarddrag, defacing his memory with the petty political interests of the disputantsand, finally, with its own materiality. If Washington'scorpse was supposed to be free from the material interests of antebellumAmericans, the corpse of his supposed nurse, who passed away on 21 February1836, never had such a clear status. Instead of the spiritual and mythic values ascribed to Washington's corpse, Heth's remainswere invested with overlappingand sometimes conflicting historical, scientific, commercial, and racial values. The first of these values made it a sanctified object, worthy of respect and protection;the others made it fit for rougherusage by anatomistsand editors. The clash of these meanings, and the hay that the penny press made of them, reveal some unspoken but deeply felt beliefs and fantasies aboutwhat it meantto be white and to be black, what it meant to own oneself and to be owned. In order to probe the riddles of her identity, the penny papers immediately began clamoring for an autopsy. The Sun provided the lone half-heartednote of dissent:
thata public dissection of this kind shouldhave We were somewhatsurprised been proposed, and were half inclined to question the propriety of the scientific curiosity which promptedit. We felt as though the person of poor

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old Joice Heth, should have been sacredfrom exposureand mutilation,not so much on account of her extreme old age, and the public curiosity which she had alreadygratifiedfor the gain of others, as for the high honor with which she was endowed in being the nurse of the immortalWashington.42

Consistentwith HenryCole's objectionto Heth's exhibit in life, the Sun professed to view her autopsy not as an indignity for Heth herself, but as a mercenaryassault on the memory of Washington.But this protest was disingenuous,for two days earlier,the same paperhad encouraged the autopsy on the grounds that "the anatomy of very aged persons, affords one of the most curious and instructivestudies in the science," and after the autopsy took place, the Sun never saw fit to impugn its propriety.43 As opposed to the historicalvalue that was presumedto be embedded in Heth's body when she was alive, the Sun saw that her but potentially anatomicalstatuswas not only "curiousandinstructive," profitableas well, inasmuchas it touchedon issues of race.As planned, Heth's autopsy was an early instance of the imperious gaze of anatomists,which made the racializedbody a crossroadsof science and popularculture.A precedentwas set in 1815 with the death of Sartje Baartman(the "HottentotVenus"), a native South African woman of the San tribewhose steatopygia-an excess of fatty tissue thatgave her abnormallyprominent buttocks-had made her an object of intense popularand scientific interestas she had been exhibitedacross Europe. When she died, the prominent French zoologist Georges Cuivier dissected her and presentedto the scientific communitya writtenreport and her actual, excised genitals in a jar that still remains on a shelf in the Musde de l'Homme in Paris.44The scrutinyof racial "types"that began with human curiosities like Baartmanand Heth would become more thoroughgoing in the researches of the American School of anatomy, which dominated the field in the 1850s. Led by Samuel George Morton and Louis Agassiz, the American School sought to prove the African race's physiological uniqueness and mental inferiority through such means as measuring the cranial capacity and other As physical features of large numbers of racially typed specimens.45 with the story of SartjeBaartmanin Europe,popularcultureand racial science in the U.S. existed in a state of symbiosis. The popularpress commented extensively on the "findings"of these scientists; popular exhibitors (led by Barnum) often called on scientists to authenticate theirexhibits; and the exhibits themselves often led to furtherscientific research.

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The Sun's rationale for dissecting Heth was thus justified by scientific inquiries into racial difference (as was the autopsy of Baartman).It was also of a piece with wider culturalattitudestoward anatomists'work and towardthe dead body. Ann Douglas has written that the corpse was imagined in the antebellumperiod as a spiritual object, a body thathad foundheavenlyrepose aftera life of competition But it is necessary to restrictthis meaning to respectand ambition.46 corpses, for those of blacks, the poor, and criminalsusually able white met a differentfate. Extendingthe stigmathese bodies bore in life, they continued to be subjected to indignities in death-among them the anatomist'sknife. Autopsies were a crucial forum for medical research,but they were also a socially contested enterprise, charged with the conflicting meanings of science, religion, race, propriety,and commodification. Obvious as it sounds, white people's legal advantagesover other races technically ended at death. The bodies of living white people in the which could not be antebellumperiod were a kind of quasi-property, sold or even given as a bequest. But at the moment of death, white bodies became in the eyes of the law-as HenryCole wrote aboutJoice
Heth-"the common property of our country."47Body-snatching was in

most states a misdemeanoroffense, but the possession of stolen corpses was no crime at all-anatomists, surgeons, and medical students depended on the often-illicit traffic in corpses for their livelihood and the furtheranceof knowledge. In a purely legal sense, death erased social difference by converting all bodies into raw materials for the potential researches of the scientific community. This stripping of privilege markednot only a limit to the advantagesof whiteness, but it was in oppositionto the exaltationof the corpse in the famously deathobsessed antebellumculture.As a result, sentimentagainst anatomists (grave-robbingfor profit) ran high, and acts of and acts of "burking" vigilantejustice againstmedical schools thattraffickedin corpses were frequentthroughoutthe first half of the nineteenthcentury.The racial politics of this "mob rule" were consistent with those of the great doctors'riot of New Yorkin 1788. One laterwriterdescribedthe events that led to the disturbances:
Usually the [medical] studentshad contented themselves with ripping open the graves of strangersand negroes, about whom there was little feeling; but this winter they dug up respectable people, even young women, of whom they made an indecent exposure."48

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The ensuing riots and others like them in the early national period helped antebellum doctors and anatomists understand that their reputations and even security depended on producing an illusion of social distinctions between corpses that reproduced those between living bodies. Paupers, criminals, and blacks were most prone to be cut open, and, as Todd Savitt has shown, slaves provided the best material for morbid anatomy. Not only were their surviving kin powerless to raise trouble about the commodification of their corpses, but their bodies had been commodities to begin with.49 The protection of white corpses from desecration and commodification inscribed one of the dominant social meanings of race onto the dead. As Priscilla Wald and Cheryl Harris have shown, the maintenance of racial distinction hinged on conceptions of property rights: whites were the only group that had an inalienable right to own property, including most importantly a Lockean property in the self. Blacks were at the other extreme, since they not only possessed no such right, but could be bought and sold as commodities.50 Within the racial hierarchy of antebellum possessive individualism, white corpses had an uncanny status. They were clearly the same objects as the once-living bodies that had occupied a position of privilege and had been exempt from commodification, but they were now stripped of this legal protection. The popular outcry against the abuse of white corpses reveals a collective fantasy about the metaphysics of racial demarcation: that whites would own themselves in perpetuity, even after death. As Barnum and the penny press' editors saw, the cluster of social meanings adhering to Heth's corpse made it an object of considerable value. Its connection to Washington made it a curiosity in its own right; and it was prized material for scientists because of its rarity (the remains of medical curiosities usually generated top dollar in the market for corpses51) and because of its significance in the loaded debates about race, biology, and region. In addition, Heth's blackness exempted those responsible for her autopsy from the clamor against human dissection and turned them into actors in a scene of white domination. Finally, popular interest in racial science translated her scientific value into commercial value. Soon after Heth died, Barnum contacted Dr. David L. Rogers, a respected New York surgeon who had expressed a desire to perform an autopsy on her when she expired. Barnum took Rogers up on his offer, rented the City Saloon in New York, converted its exhibition room into

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a makeshift operating theater, and opened the doors to the public. spectators Despite the steep fifty-cent admissionprice, fifteen-hundred showed up, netting a large profit for Barnum. The spectacle also provided a windfall for the commercial press. The Sun was first on board,reportingthe spectacle of her dismemberment in clinical detail:
On dissecting the heart [Dr. Rogers] found the cardinary[coronary]artery not at all ossified, nor were the valves in general;and it was only at the arch of the aorta. .. that even the slightest degree of ossification was present. On examining the lungs he found very extensive adhesionsto the left side. . . and also many tuberclesin the lobe, which he presumedto have been the cause of death. On opening the head he found the brain healthy, and the suturesof the skull not only quite distinct,but easily separablewith the hand: phenomena,never before observed in very old subjects.52

On the strengthof these findings, Rogers pronouncedthat Heth could have been no more thaneighty years old and thatthe whole exhibit had thereforebeen a hoax. But was the corpse even hers? The uncanny aspects of corpses that made them such curious objects in antebellumculturewere multiplied in Joice Heth's case by a kind of extendedculturalandcommercialplay that set in afterthe autopsy.Two days afterthe dissection, Barnumand Lymanpaid a visit to JamesGordonBennett,the notoriouseditorof the New York Herald (the Sun's main competitoramong the penny dailies), and convinced him that Heth was still alive and well and living in Connecticut.The body on the table, they explained, was actually that "of a respectable old negress called AUNT NELLY, who has lived many years in a small house by herself, in Harlaem."53 The Aunt Nelly theory,publishedin the Herald the next day, ignited a journalisticfreefor-all, with the Sun, the Herald, and severalfledgling penny papersall claiming to have the true story.Though Bennett bought the claim that Heth was still alive, he persistedin calling her a humbug;the Sun clung to its original story based on the autopsy; the Transcriptran a long Rogers' piece by anothersurgeonwho had been present,which rebutted findings on scientific grounds (the absence of signs of aging in Heth was taken as evidence that the aging process developed differentlyin her than in other subjects);and the SundayMorningNews thoughtthat nothing was yet certain.Hoping to have the last word, the Sun reported that Barnum and Lyman confessed to their imposture and were preparingto take Heth's ashes with them on a tour or Europe, where, accompaniedby "an old male negro who is to rejoice in the name of

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Joice's husband, and to swear he is 180 years old," they would begin their humbug over again. Predictably,the other papers denounced this story as yet another of Barnum and Lyman's hoaxes, with the Sun's editor as the dupe; each paper charged the others with fraud, idiocy, perversity,and charlatanism.54 The multiplicityof responses to the autopsy obscures the fact that a was taking place. fundamentalreductionin the scope of interpretation Earliernewspaperaccountshad addressedHeth's spirituality, her place in history, and the propriety of her display, but here the focus was exclusively on her authenticity,which was reducedto a set of material facts: whetherthe body on the table was even her; if it was, whetherit possessed the scientific or historical value ascribedto it, and how one could know. Amidst the smoke screens and deceptions thrown up by Barnumand the editors, the task had become to divine Heth's essence rather than to interpret her narrative or place her within a larger narrativeof history. This task of divination was not explicitly about race, but the structureof the event was conditionedby wider scientific and popular inquiries into racial essence. Michael O'Malley has chartedthe rise of racial essentialism in the nineteenthcenturyagainst the backdropof rapid urbanizationand free-marketliberalism.As the economy dilated and as social roles for whites grew more varied and unstable, essentialized notions of race served as ballast for anxieties about the shifting grounds of identity, status, and authenticity.55 In attemptingto fix Heth's identity,the new mass media appealedto white readers who looked both to racial science and to popular culture for signs of their own masteryin a time of social and economic instability. Exposure and Mastery In attemptingto "expose"the Heth fraud,the editors found a way to push productwhile playfully addressingtheir readers' anxieties about the deceptions latent in capitalist culture-a theme the commercial press was in a unique position to address.As KarenHalttunenhas put it, "theproliferationof moveablewealth, especially negotiablepaper,in the early nineteenthcentury,and the growing confusion and anonymity of urbanliving, had made possible for the first time a wide variety of swindles, frauds, forgeries, counterfeiting activities, and other confidence games."56 The series of exposs-and exposes of exposes-that followed Heth's autopsy offered numerousvariationson this theme of

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counterfeiture,providing an array of deceptions for readers to work through, always promising a final resolution, but always holding out. The epistemological process of reading the unfolding story-peeling off the layers of hoax to arrive at "the truth"-provided symbolic compensationfor the strugglesof many of the pennypapers'readers.In contrastto the increasingillegibility of the social world, in the genre of the expose (which was a favoriteof the penny papersand which was to become perhaps the most popular genre of literature in the midnineteenth century), the darkest secrets could always be penetrated, mastered,and possessed, if only in the culturalrealm.57 Seven monthsafterBarnumand LymandupedBennettwith the Aunt Nelly theory, Lyman granted the Herald an exclusive interview, in which he promised finally to deliver the real story behind Heth's exhibit. What followed was "the Joice Heth Hoax," a month-long serialized accountof the entire episode. This expose to end all exposes was itself an example of the thing it purportedto expose, for in it Lyman-who seven months earlier had convinced Bennett that Heth was still alive-duped Bennett once again. The reportingof the hoax served as a half-jokingversion of the Herald's many serializedexpos6s From the first of notorious frauds, swindlers, and "stock-jobbers." installment,it cast the self-making northernconfidence man or swindler as an emblem of Yankee ingenuity, rather than of threatening inauthenticity. An unnamed"gentlemanfrom New England"(presumably Barnum) visits a Kentucky plantation and is struck by the old-looking slave woman. Thinking appearanceof an extraordinarily "hardand steady,"the New Englanderformulates a plan to turn this decaying matterinto profitby exhibitingher as a curiosity;he offers the Kentuckianowner "aninterestin the speculation," which the Kentuckian accepts. The story goes on to detail the New Englander'ssuccessive money-makingschemes with his new bogus commodity,who calls him "massa."First he dreamsup the George Washingtonstory and drills it into his subject;then, when she begins to object to performingfor him, he contrivesto addicther to whiskey, so thathe can have some leverage in compelling her to act; he also pulls out all her teeth in orderto make her look older (using liberal doses of whiskey to drownher curses and protests). In this way, the northern master becomes an even more shrewdexploiter of the slave's body thanhis southerncounterpart-he is the true exemplarof the masterrace, for he can compel black bodies to work to the point of death, and beyond. This is because he

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understandsthat labor is not the only basis of value, that the northern and entertainment economies of "speculation" provide novel opportunities to invest in the raw materials,even the waste, of the South. Joice Heth becomes, in his hands, not just a commodity,but an example of capitalist alchemy: value produced out of nothing-an ingenious counterfeitbill. The serialized "Joice Heth Hoax" cuts off abruptly after seven installments-well before the spectacularautopsy is narrated-when Bennett apparentlyrealized that Lyman was pulling his leg again. (Barnumhad of course not "discovered"Heth on a Kentuckyplantation, nor had he invented her story; as he later admitted, she was exhibitedfirst by R. W. Lindsay.)But in casting the Barnum-figure as a culturalhero for the same sorts of manipulationsof value and confidence that the penny press elsewhere denounced so thoroughly,the Herald voiced its ambivalentrelation to capitalist culture.As the first purelycommercialjournalisticenterprise,the penny press was itself an partof the capitalistexpansionwhose excesses it exposed. In important keeping with this ambivalence,the penny press portrayedBarnumas that liminal figure who was symbolic of both the dangersand possibilities of capitalist culture: the confidence man. The essence of social mobility,the confidence man was in early mass cultureeithervilified as an impostor or lionized as an emblem of self-making. Neither role, however, was to be afforded African Americans: in the overlapping realms of science, law, and popular culture, their nature and identity were generally seen to be "fixed"-their supposedly inferior status renderedthem incapableof the self-makingthatwhites both fearedand aspired to. As Saidiya Hartmanhas argued, one of the purposes of both in the exhibitionsof AfricanAmericansin popularentertainments South and the North was to demonstrate "the possession of the captive's body by the owner's intentions.""58 In the same story that cast Barnum as the ultimate confidence man, Heth herself was made to seem a blank slate whom the white man animatedwith his schemes. Her role in the deception was displaced entirely onto the will of this strangenorthern"master." This displacementbecame more severe but also more anxious in a series of mock-confessional texts writtenby Barnumhimself over the following decades. As Bluford Adams has related the story, shortly after Barnum's triumphwith Heth came the financial panic of 1837, and Barnumfound himself "at the bottom round of fortune's ladder."

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He workedfor severalyears with small circuses and varietyacts touring the U.S. and Canada,then found himself selling blacking, waterproof paste, cologne, and bear's grease back in the Bowery of New York. Finally, he got a job writing articles for a new commercial paper, the Atlas, and used the opportunity to reclaim the spotlight. It is not surprising,as Adams notes, that he used the opportunityto resuscitate his greathumbugof five years earlier.59 In a serializednovella or mockautobiographycalled Adventuresof an Adventurer Being Some Passages in the Life of Barnaby Diddleum, Barnum trumpetedhis own (lightly fictionalized) rise in an aggressive, vernacularvoice that was the hallmark of the JacksonianYankee, a shrewd aspiring merchant who uses his wiles to achieve upwardmobility.60 In this text he retold the expose of "The Joice Heth Hoax" from a particularly egomaniacal to my memoryperspective: me with fame-erect a monument "Crown decree me a roman triumph-I deserve all-I stand alone-I have no equal, no rival-I am the king of Humbugs-the king among princes," begins the first chapter on his involvement with Heth.61Here the discovery of Heth in Kentuckyis given a menacing new spin. Barnaby Diddleum (for "diddle 'um") has heard of the "remarkably old negro woman"who "was swindling my friendby her disgustingpertinacityto cling to life at his expense,"and he goes to visit master and slave:
"You want to get rid of aunt Joice?" said I.
"I do."

"I'll do it. What will you give me?" "Oh!"he said laughingly, "she must die a naturaldeath. "To be sure,"said I, "andbe as well or bettertaken care of than now. I have a crochet in my head by which I may probablymake somethingout of her. At all events, I'll take her off your hands if you give me something handsome."62

The Kentuckianreadily assents, agreeingto pay Diddleumhalf of what Aunt Joice would cost him if she were to languish anotheryear on his plantation. This jovial linking of Diddleum's plan for profit to the murderof Joice Heth reveals an aggression and a will for power over the text. "Adventures" his touringcompanionthatcontinuesthroughout repeats scenes from the "Joice Heth Hoax" in which the new master dreamsup the Washingtonstory,yanks out her teeth, and uses whiskey as a means of control-all now told from the first person.
I soon got Joyce [sic] into training, and from a devil of a termagant, convertedinto a most docile creature,as willing to do my biddingas the slave

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of the lamp was to obey Aladdin. I discovered her weak point. ... WHISKEY. Her old master, of course, would indulge an old bed-ridden creaturein no such luxury, and for a drop of it, I found I could mould her to anything.

Writtentwo decades after the final abolition of slaves in the North, the story's emphasis on Diddleum's absolute possession of his performer's will reads like a Yankee wish-fulfillment-Diddleum and reworkingmaterials achieves his northernglory by appropriating (both human property and narrative)from southern slavery. But the story also betrays a hint of unease about the tractabilityof slaves; Diddleum's insistence on the absolute emptiness of Heth is in tension with her continued backstage swearing and her occasional complicity in the scheme (at one point, Diddleum refers to her as "a very good actor").In a text similarto "Adventures of an Adventurer" called "The Autobiography of Petite Bunkum,"published in pamphlet form in 1855, the whiskey that cements her dependence comes back to haunt the master.63 "In fact," Barnum (or "Bunkum")writes, "the old lady occasionally used to get drunk;and in one instance she bestowed upon me the compliment of a black eye, by a blow of her crutch,because I refusedto 'come down' with anotherhalf pint."The story of Joice Heth (referredto as "JudyHeath")drunkenlybraining "Bunkum"with her crutchserves as a mock uprising,one thataccordswith the dynamicsof the story as a whole. Earlier in the same text, Bunkum overhears a conversationbetween Heathand her owner,leading up to theirarrangement for this human propertyto tour with the would-be showman:
"How are you today, aunty?"inquiredMr. Shelby, kindly. "Bless de Lord, massa," mumbled the old woman-"I is alive. When is massa goin' to let de poor ole nigger go to de free States, so dat she may die and go to glory a free woman?" "Well, well; we'll see aboutit soon," answeredMr. Shelby, carelessly;and then, turningto me, he continued, in a low tone"Thepoor creaturehas taken a strangefancy to die in the free States. She appearsto believe that if she dies a slave, she can not go to heaven. I would instantly set her free and send her North, were it not on account of the certaintyof her coming to suffering and want."64

Playing to the kindly affections of this "good master,"Bunkum, a Yankee, offers to take the slave woman off his hands and fulfill her dreams of dying in a free state. in the story that follows, though, her dreamis endlessly deferred;their life on the road becomes a battle of

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wills, in which the northernmaster always has the upper hand and always pockets the money. When she dies, writes Bunkum, "I shed tears upon her humble grave not of sorrow for her decease-but of regreton accountof my having lost a valuableand profitableproperty." Exposing Heth's sham story of connection to Washingtonhad been for the penny papers an exercise in unraveling Barnum's mind, but Heth's own role in the imposturewas left unexamined.So, too, these later texts made her a blank slate, but not without some trouble:she is shown struggling,resisting, even lashing out in violence, and she must be broken, taught to voice her master's will. Negating the urgency of this comic resistanceis the fact that she is impelled not by an ongoing secret desire for freedom, but by her enslavementto a strongermaster than Bunkum-whiskey. The troubling notion of a slave's resistance to white control that these texts laughed off was a recurrentpreoccupationfor the penny papersand in much antebellumpopularculturein the North.Duringthe 1830s, in the wake of the Nat Turnerrebellion, newspapersacross the North were fascinated with slave uprisings and conspiracies. Penny press readers'insatiableappetitefor even rumorsof such distantevents reflects the ambiguousmixture of envy and anxiety that, accordingto Eric Lott, also characterizedthe appeal of blackface minstrelsy.Lott shows that for working-class whites, the black insubordinationon display on the minstrelstage could be readmetaphorically-the idea of slave's transgressionwas often made to articulatethe resentmentsof "class difference,intentionallyor not, by calling on the insurrectionary resonances of black culture."65 Mirroring the relation of minstrel audience to performers,the scene of white workersconsuming images of black rebels during the volatile labor situation of the 1830s and 1840s in New York has more than a whiff of "insurrectionary resonance."And just as the comforting filter of grease and cork allowed minstrelsy's audiences to dismiss the transgressivebehavior of the minstrel-blacksas an evening's antic fun, the editorsof the penny press exposed slave uprisings, the supreme evidence of slaves' calculated fury,only to revealthem as hollow. The Herald-and to a lesser degree, the Sun-pulled off an extraordinary trick by reportingslave uprisings in a manner that completely undercut the motive and intelligence behind them, and they displaced that intelligence and motive onto the figure of ingenious if dastardlywhite men. In the seven months'run of the Herald and the Sun during the time when Joice Heth's story was

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reported, therearefourreportsof uprisings.One of them,in Farmington, Tennessee, turned out to have been instigated by "some white man, who refused to tell [the rebel slaves] his name";the otherthree,readers would be relieved and intriguedto learn, were not uprisings at all, but were elaboratehoaxes. 66 One of these involved a southernspeculator who wanted to create panic in the marketsso that he could profit from the ruins.67In these reports, the papers performed the disciplinary functionof exposing the fraud-and even more comfortingly,revealing that the transgressionwas not instigatedby those who had the highest stake in upsettingthe social order.As Michael Rogin has written,"the wish for basic trust that obliteratesthe autonomy of the other brings with it anxiety over vengeance."68 If the penny press openly addressed (and profited from) readers' nervousness about the manipulationsof untrustworthy capitalistspeculatorsabove them, they assuredthem that blacks, at least, were not autonomouslycapableof plottingfrom below. The goal of the various exposures of the Heth hoax was not to discern how she had come to gull thousands of white viewers and readers,but who was behind her; and it was comfortingto find that it was a Yankee,one whose own story of upwardmobility white northern working-class readers could identify with. During Heth's exhibition, many of her visitors had delighted in her animation, her quick responses to questions, and her improvised responses as well as her well-rehearsedroutine; but in her mass-culturalafterlife, she was a drunken,swearingnegro who spoke nothingbut her master'swords on stage, and whose attempts at resistance were laughable. In recycled legends of the Heth story,Barnumwas both a capitalistconfidenceman and a breakerof slaves, a traderin bogus commodities and an emblem of white mastery. Conclusion and Postscript:The Dark Subject As the Joice Heth episode progressed from itinerantroad show to urbanspectacle, from wondrousdisplay of humancuriosity to medical specimen, from historical relic to fraudulentcommodity, it traversed many of the geographical and conceptual spaces of the modernizing antebellum North. Her living display had been given a range of readings contingent on the regional and ideological interests of her visitors. Her autopsy, in contrast, shows mass media and science converging on the black body in search of a fixed text in a fluxional

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world: if Barnum's deceptions-like the text of modem life-were hardto read, Heth's body was not. In this sense the autopsyanticipates the work of racial anatomists,like one Dr. Caldwell, whose "personal examination of dissection of the entire negro anatomy,"led him to conclude that it is easier to "distinguishan African from a Circassian skeleton"than a that of a dog from a hyena, a tiger from a panther,or a horse from an ox.69 This type of work established racial difference as a zone of distinct legibility and fixed boundaries;this essential fixity, when reportedin the popularpress, was a dialectical counterweightto the popularfascinationwith hoaxes, confidence games, and conspiracy theories that grew out of modernanxieties of authenticity,status,trust, and recognition. The autopsy can also help us perceive the links between nascent racial essentialism and the grotesque popularessentialism of the freak show and minstrelsy, which were beginning to emerge as dominant mass cultural representationsof blacks in the modernizing, urbanizingNorth. Scientific ideas about the biological nature of racial difference provided a conceptual framework for popular images of degraded, deformed, and otherwise humiliated blacks on stage. As these links suggest, the shifting and sometimes conflicting meanings found in the Heth display, the autopsy, and the various exposures do not simply constitute a paratacticsequence of sometimes contradictory interpretations. Rather,they illustratethat her exhibit was a profoundly overdeterminedevent whose major themes continuedto fascinate scientists and purveyorsof mass culturethrough the mid-nineteenthcentury,and whose minorones appearnow as roads not taken. Barnum himself circled back in his writings to the Heth exhibit several more times throughouta long and varied career.In his 1855 he finally gave away the secret thathe had not dreamed autobiography, up the Heth act, but had seen Lindsay's exhibit of her in Philadelphia and decided to purchase her and continue the tour himself. "The question naturallyarises,"he wrote,
if Joice Heth was an impostor, who taught her these things? and how happenedit thatshe was so familiar,not only with ancientpsalmody,but also with the minutedetails of the Washingtonfamily? To all this, I unhesitatingly answer, I do not know. I taughther none of these things. She was perfectly familiarwith them all before I ever saw her, and she taughtme many facts in relationto the Washingtonfamily with which I was not before acquainted.70

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In what was to prove the penultimate "final" exposure of the Heth story, Barnum reversed course by suggesting that he was not Heth's absolute master-that he had in fact been gulled by Heth as much as any visitor had been. Despite this disarming admission, Barnum took pains to show that he had still been firmly in control of the exhibit, dreaming up ever more complex schemes of deception-such as passing her off as an automaton and averting abolitionist protests of the exhibit by claiming that proceeds of the exhibit went toward freeing slaves-that culminated in the autopsy itself. But in the next edition of his autobiography, in 1869, he retold the story with something like shame. Barnum had by this time remade himself from a Jacksonian Democrat into a Republican politician; in 1867, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress, and he went on to become Mayor of Bridgeport in 1875. Ever the opportunist, he enthusiastically endorsed the Republican platform, including the granting of franchise for the newly freed slaves, and he now cast himself as a defender of African American freedoms. In looking back on his own potentially embarrassing career as a northern slaveowner, he wrote that the Joice Heth exhibit was "the least deserving of my efforts in the show line... a scheme in no sense of my own devising." And as to the identity of Heth, he claimed to be as ignorant as anyone else. All he could say about the results of the autopsy, whose mystification he had spent months producing, was that "the doctors disagreed, and this 'dark subject' will probably always be shrouded in mystery." As for the dark subject's story, he wrote, "I honestly believed it to be genuine; something, too, which... I did not seek, but which by accident came in my way and seemed to compel my agency."71 This turnabout owes much to the rhetorical demands of the situation Barnum found himself in, but his denial exceeds those demands. Not only was his role in the exhibit an "accident," but "it"or Joice Heth herself-"seemed almost to compel my agency." Entrepreneurs of culture in the antebellum North had borrowed images from the slave-owning South to construct fantasies of northern white mastery, in which the slave's body was subjected to the modern disciplines of scientific and mass-cultural scrutiny. In the process, the slave's mind had been repressed; but now it returned, after the war, to haunt the northern master.

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NOTES
1. Chief sources for the Barnumand Heth story are P. T. Barnum,The Life of P. T. Barnum, Writtenby Himself (London, 1855), 81-103; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum, ed. Carl Bode (New York, 1981), 79-88; Neil Harris,Humbug:TheArt of P. T. Barnum(Chicago 1973), 20-26; A. H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York, 1989), 67-85; and Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture(Minneapolis,Minn., 1997), esp. 2-10. I thankthe authorof this last work for making proofs of his book available to me before publication, and for his helpful suggestions on this manuscript. 2. My framing of these questions has been influenced by Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women:A Study of Middle Class Culture in America (New Haven, Conn., 1982); and John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century America(New York:, 1990). A studythatplaces the penny press in this cultureof confidence is Andie Tucher,Froth and Scum (ChapelHill, N.C., 1994). For a discussion of Barnum's career in relation to issues of urbanization and technological advances, see Neil Harris' classic, "The Operational Aesthetic," in Humbug,59-90. 3. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modem England (1978 Hants, England, 1988); and Richardson Wright, Hawkers & Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Lawyers, Doctors, Players, and Others, from the Beginning to the Civil War(Philadelphia,1927). 4. On Lindsay, see Barnum,Life, 84-86. Evidence of Lindsay and Heth's Southern tour is in "Rathera Tough Story,"Alexandria Gazette, 17 Jan. 1835; and "161 Years Old," Boston Evening Transcript,6 July 1835. 5. "Longevity,"New YorkBaptist, repr.in Springfield(MA) Gazette, 16 Sept. 1835. 6. Barnum,Life, 100; "At Last!"New YorkEvening Star, 23 Feb. 1836. 7. For reportsof Afong Moy, the Chinese woman with boundfeet, see "TheChinese Lady,"New YorkTranscript, June 26, 1835; Boston Evening Transcript,31 July 1835; Republican Herald [Providence, RI], 2 Sept. 1835. On the Virginia dwarves, see "Amusements,"New YorkEvening Star, 29 Oct. 1835. On the Siamese twins, see Boston Morning Post, 18 Aug. 1835. 8. New YorkSun, 21 Aug. 1835. and 9. See RobertBogdan, Freak Show: PresentingHumanOdditiesfor Amusement Profit (Chicago, 1988). Bogdan, the pioneering historianof the freak show, uses the date of 1840 to markthe beginningof the "goldenage" of the freakshow because prior to that date freaks were not exhibited in such extravaganzasas circuses or carnivals; just as significantly, Barnumhad not yet opened his AmericanMuseum, in which the exhibit of freaks became a central component of an importantmass-culturalurban institution(p. 10). In this sense, the Heth tour was still very much a part of the early modern or pre-mass cultural traffic in human oddities, as she traveled from town to town as an isolated exhibit. 10. I am drawing primarilyon Alexander Saxton, "The JacksonianPress," in The Rise and Fall of the WhiteRepublic: Class Politics and Mass Culturein NineteenthCenturyAmerica (Londonand New York, 1990), 95-108. See also Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of AmericanNewspapers (New York, 1978); and Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth,Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murderin America's First Mass Medium(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994).

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11. "Joice Heth,"New YorkEvening Star, 22 Aug. 1835; "EyeballsWearing Out," New YorkTranscript,24 Aug. 1835. 12. "Joice Heth, Aged 161," The Family Magazine, or, General Abstract of Useful Knowledge, vol. 3 (1835), 155-156. Entertainers 13. See Peter Benes, "Itinerant in New Englandand New York, 16871830," in Itinerancy in New England and New York: The Dublin Seminarfor New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 1984 (Boston, 1984), 112-130. 14. Boston Atlas, 16 Sept. 1835. 15. "Joice Heth,"Boston Courier, 8 Sept. 1835. 16. "Joice Heth,"Hartford Times, 17 Oct. 1835. 17. The Life of Joice Heth, TheNurse of George Washington(New York, 1835), 5. Copies of this rare text are held in the libraryof the New-York HistoricalSociety and the AmericanAntiquarianSociety. 18. My discussion of the grotesque body's role in debates about culturalpropriety has been influenced by Peter Stallybrassand Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression(Ithaca,NY, 1986). 19. New YorkHerald, 12 Aug. 1835. 20. See Michael Warner,"TheMass Public and the Mass Subject,"in Habermasand the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge,Mass., 1992), 382. 21. Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the WhiteRepublic, 70, 103. 22. Sean Wilentz, ChantsDemocratic: New YorkCity and the Rise of the American WorkingClass, 1780-1850 (New York, 1984), 29. 23. Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the WhiteRepublic, 105. 24. See Michael Mitchell, Monstersof the GildedAge: ThePhotographsof Charles Eisenmann(Toronto, 1979). 25. See James W. Cook, Jr., "Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum's 'What Is It?' Exhibition,"in Rosemarie Garland Thomson,Freakery:CulturalSpectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York, 1996), 139-157. From Wonder to Error,"in 26. See Rosemarie GarlandThomson, "Introduction: Freakery, 1-19; and Thomson, "The CulturalWork of AmericanFreakShows, 18351940," in ExtraordinaryBodies: Figuring Physical Disability in AmericanLiterature and Culture(New York, 1997), 55-80. 27. See Bogdan, Freak Show, and Todd L. Savitt, "Blacks as Medical Specimens," in Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana,Chicago, Ill., 1978), 281-307. 28. "Joice Heth,"New YorkHerald, 2 Dec. 1835. 29. Quoted in Savitt, Medicine and Slavery, 35-41. 30. On Knox, see Evelleen Richards,"The 'Moral Anatomy' of RobertKnox: The Interplaybetween Biological and Social Thoughtin Victorian Scientific Naturalism," Journal of the History of Biology 22 (1989): 273-436. 31. "Longevityin Americaamong the Negroes: Its Causes,"New YorkEveningStar, repr.Boston Transcript,22 Sept. 1835. 32. Providence RepublicanHerald, 30 Aug. 1835. 33. New YorkHerald, 25 Nov. 1835. 34. "Joice Heth-Washington Family, &c.," The Albion, or British, Colonial, and Foreign WeeklyGazette, 29 Aug. 1835. 35. BarrySchwartz,George Washington:TheMakingof an AmericanSymbol(New York, 1987), 194. 36. George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979), 29.

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37. Quoted in RichardMoody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticismin American Drama and Theatre,1750-1900 (Bloomington, Ind., 1955), 68. 38. William L. Andrews, "Inter(racial)textuality in Nineteenth-CenturySouthern Literature," in Influence and Intertextualityin LiteraryHistory, eds. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison,Wis., 1991), 304. 39. "A Good 'Un," Providence Daily Journal, 27 Aug. 1835. 40. Henry Cole, "To the Editorsof the SUN," New YorkSun, 20 Aug. 1835. 41. Quoted in Schwartz,George Washington,2. 42. "Dissectionof Joice Heth.-Precious HumbugExposed,"New YorkSun, 26 Feb. 1836. 43. "Deathof Joice Heth,"New YorkSun, 24 Feb. 1836. 44. Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 71, 76. 45. Quoted in StephenJ. Gould, TheMismeasureof Man (New York, 1981), 51-54. 46. Ann Douglas, The Feminizationof American Culture(1977; New York, 1988), 200-226. 47. The paradox is that because (white) human beings were valued more than animals, in death they were grantedfewer legal distinctions.Although grave-robbing was illegal, it was not a crime to keep a stolen humancorpse, because to classify such possession as crime would be to classify the dead humanbody as a type of propertythat could be exchanged by contractor mutualconsent: a potentialcommodity. Possession of a stolen dead cow or pig, on the other hand, was considereda serious crime in the Anglo-Americancommon law tradition.See Ruth Richardson,Death, Dissection and morbid the Destitute (London, 1987). For the Americancontext of nineteenth-century anatomy, see Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799 -1883 (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 73-85. 48. J. T. Headley, The GreatRiots of New York,1712 to 1873 (New York, 1873), 57. 49. Savitt, "Blacks as Medical Specimens,"281-282, 290-293. 50. Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property,"Harvard Law Review, 1106 (1993): 1709-1791; Priscilla Wald, "Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the New Nation," in Culturesof United States Imperialism,ed. Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan (Durham,NC, 1993), 59-84. Both Wald and Harrisfocus on the Dred Scott decision of 1854 as the moment in which this state of affairs was formalized; but clearly that decision, which held that no "personsof African descent" could become citizens because they held no inalienable right to self-possession, justified a preexisting racial stratificationas much as it stipulateda new arrangement. 51. In Death Dissection and the Destitute, Richardsontells the story of the case of "The Irish Giant,"a man well over seven feet tall who was exhibited in London and died in 1783. Despite his explicit arrangementsto be buried at sea, his body was obtainedby the body snatcherJohn Hunter,who bribedthe undertaker approximately 500 pounds to remove it from the coffin before the funeral (57-58). 52. "Dissection of Joice Heth-Precious HumbugExposed." 53. "AnotherHoax," New YorkHerald, 27 Feb. 1836. 54. "AnotherHoax,"New YorkHerald, Feb. 27, 1836; "JoiceHeth,"New YorkSun, Discovery,"New York EveningStar, 27 Feb. 1836; "Joice 27 Feb. 1836; "AnImportant Heth,"and "Dissectionof Joice Heth,"New YorkTranscript,27 and 28 Feb., 3 March 1836; "Joice Heth," Sunday Morning News, 28 Feb. 1836; "The Joice Heth Hoax," New YorkHerald, 29 Feb. 1836; "The Heth Humbug,"New YorkSun, 1 March 1836; Defended,"New "TheJoice Heth Hoax,"New YorkHerald, 2 March 1836; "Imposture YorkSun, 2 March 1836.

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55. Michael O'Malley, "Species and Specie: Race and the Money Question in Nineteenth-Century America,"AmericanHistorical Review,99 (Apr., 1994): 369-395. A Studyof Middle-Class 56. KarenHalttunen,ConfidenceMen and Painted Women: Culturein America (New Haven, Conn., 1982), 7. 57. For broaderstudies of the connections between Jacksonianpolitics and cultural forms emphasizingepistemology and authenticity,see Halttunen,ConfidenceMen and Painted Women, and John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in NineteenthCentury America (New York:, 1990). A studythatplaces the penny press in this culture of confidence is Tucher,Froth and Scum.For discussion of Barnumin relationto these issues, see Neil Harris's classic, "The OperationalAesthetic,"in Humbug:TheArt of P. T. Barnum(Boston, 1973), 59-90. 58. Saidiya V. Hartman,Scenes of Subjection:Terror,Slavery, and Self-Makingin Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997), 39. 59. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum,8-9. 60. On the Jacksonian vernacular, see Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 117-123. Adams also comments on the Jacksonianpolitics in E Pluribus Barnum,2-10. 61. "Adventuresof an Adventurer,Being Some Passages in the Life of Barnaby Diddleum,"New YorkAtlas, 11 April 1841. 25 April 1841. 62. "Adventures," 63. As Michael Denning has noted, pamphletstories were one of the cheapest and most widely distributedformats for antebellum literature. See Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-ClassCulturein America, (London, 1987), 11. 64. Autobiographyof Petite Bunkum,The YankeeShowman(New York, 1855), 23. The authorship of this strangepamphletis problematic.Though it has the braggadocio and maliciousness of "Adventuresan Adventurer"-which was clearly written by Barnum-it is also more hastily written,and could have been simply a parodyof the first edition of Barnum's autobiography,which was published a few months earlier. The "Editor'sNote" at the end states thatit is a piece of "gratuitous puff"for the "great Yankee showman,"and it could be thatBarnumallowed the publicationof Bunkum by G. F. Harristo compensatefor Redfield's having won the rights to his autobiography. My own sense is that Barnum and the editor collaborated, for its distortions of Barnum's autobiographyare too close to Barnum's earlier journalistic voice to be coincidental. Class 65. Eric Lott, Love and Theft:BlackfaceMinstrelsyand theAmericanWorking (New York, 1993), 84. 66. "AttemptedInsurrection," New YorkHerald, 2 Sept. 1835. 67. "Negro Insurrectionin Virginia," New YorkHerald, 25-26 Nov. 1835; "Rumored Negro Insurrectionat the South,"New YorkSun, 25 July 1835; "A Villainous Hoax," New YorkSun, 22 Feb. 1836. 68. Michael Rogin, "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision': D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation," in The New American Studies: Essays from Representations,ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 379. 69. Quoted in "On the Unity of the Human Race," SouthernQuarterlyReview, 10, (Oct., 1854): 299. 70. Barnum,Life, 89. 71. Barnum,Struggles and Triumphs,80.