February 9, 1863, The New York Herald
The American press and public have been exceedingly lenient with Barnum. They have allowed him to make money by humbugging innocent people, and more money by selling a book telling how well his humbugs have succeeded. Recently, however, he has taken altogether too bold an advantage of this leniency. Having secured a dwarf woman, he has been exhibiting her at his Museum for some time past as the betrothed of another dwarf called General Tom Thumb. How this match was arranged we do not care to know; but we are informed that it is to be consummated at Grace church tomorrow with all the display of a fashionable wedding. Of course we have no objections to the marriage, and no desire to forbid the banns. Miss Warren is a woman and Tom Thumb is a man, no matter how small they may be, and they have as good a right to be wedded as any other man and woman. This will be by no means the first time that dwarfs have been married and lived happily ever after. We do object, however, to Barnum’s share in the transaction, and particularly to his attempt to make money by the public exhibition of the intended bride and all the paraphernalia of the affair.
We are aware that Barnum has no very great respect for the public. He considers it a goose which lays golden eggs, and is not very particular where he tickles it, so that the eggs drop into his treasury. A long while ago he produced an old colored woman whom he called Joyce Heth, and advertised her as the nurse of General Washington. Crowds came to see this imposture, and after the poor woman’s death Barnum had her dissected, and would undoubtedly have hung up her skeleton in his Museum had not the surgeons exposed the humbug by pronouncing her only about sixty or seventy years old. Then some ingenious fellow tinkered together the head and body of a monkey and the tail of a fish, and this abortion Barnum heralded as the great Fejee mermaid, and displayed beautiful pictures of handsome women with fishy extremities in order to allure silly folk to pay a quarter and see the curiosity. And then came the woolly horse which had been captured on the Rocky Mountains, and which had two of its legs miraculously shortened, so that it might run around its native hills safely and expeditiously, but which, upon inspection, turned out to be a combination of a little wool and as poor a specimen of horseflesh as had ever been rejected by the knackers as unfit even for the glue factory. These and a hundred other such successful swindles, more curious than those of poor Greeley, have earned Barnum his proud title of the Prince of Humbugs, and a reputation which, if not enviable, is at least world wide.
It is an old saw that humanity loves to be cheated, and Barnum’s experience is not contradiction to the saying. The people seem to have a sort of affection for him, and he is always shrewd enough to take advantage of this affection to get at the people’s pockets. When he came to grief by turning clock peddler on a large scale, and lost almost all the money he had so easily acquired, the public sympathized with him most cordially and laughed heartily over the book in which he boasted of his exploits in making money by false pretences. No sooner had he secured dollars enough to conduct the Museum in his own name again than he came over from England and repaid us for our sympathy by exhibiting a poor, little, deformed and idiotic negro boy as “What Is It? A connecting link between man and the brute creation, captured on the coast of Africa, and so on ad nauseum. Everybody had become so accustomed to Barnum by this time that no one could be induced to expose this deception. Indeed, it would be a task worthy of Hercules himself to clean Barnum’s Museum of all its humbugs, from the moral room, where ministers, deacons and members of country churches, who would not go to a theatre for the world, sit and gaze entranced upon theatrical performances, down to the sewing machine exhibited as a curiosity but paid for as an advertisement. But there is so much really valuable and interesting in the Museum that such an expose would be unkind. Just as Barnum did the public a real service by introducing Jenny Lind, so his Museum collection is not all humbug and deception. Why is he not satisfied to get rich a little less quickly and eschew false pretences altogether?
By his connection with this miniature marriage, Barnum has injured himself sadly in the estimation of virtuous people. There is such a thing as going a little too far even with patrons so indulgent as the Americans. The marriage vows ought not to be trifled with for the interest of a showman. The exhibition of Miss Warren at the Museum, the display of Miss Warren’s wedding dress, Tom Thumb’s wedding shirt, Miss Warren’s wedding shoes and Tom Thumb’s wedding stockings in store windows on Broadway, and all the other details of Barnum’s management of this matter, are offensive to delicacy, decorum, modesty and good taste. Why should men and women be so much more eager to see Miss Warren after she was engaged to Tom Thumb than before? What class of ideas did Barnum appeal to when he advertised her engagement so extensively? One had only to listen to the conversation of silly countrymen and countrywomen as they stood gaping at the Queen of Beauty, or to open his ears to the numerous jokes in circulation upon the subject, in order to receive a sufficient answer to these questions. What Barnum will do when the wedding is over nobody can tell. Doubtless he intends to exhibit the couple after the marriage ceremony. There will be a crowd to see the little people married, and certainly there would be a greater crowd to see them encouched, as the princes and princesses of France were exhibited during old monarchical times. We advise Barnum not to attempt this, however. He has already overstepped all ordinary barriers, and must be satisfied. Those persons who have encouraged him by their wish to see Miss Warren and her dry goods have our sincere compassion. We hope that the wedding will pass of pleasantly tomorrow, and that no speculating Barnum will henceforward overshadow the happy pair.