To preempt this, the showman, whether Barnum or a surrogate, would usually bring it up during the performance, giving “general statements and remarks on the little General’s health,” along with assuring the audience that no “signs” or “omens” accompanied his birth. He would stress the happiness and appetite of the child, citing his “uncommon power of enduring fatigue,” despite being “task’d with constant performance through the whole day, almost, without rest.”28 Along with reassuring both the prejudiced and genuinely concerned, Charles and his managers needed to carefully turn whatever pity or sympathy the audience might have into wonder and amusement. No one wanted the audience to go away distressed or unhappy.
While the success of “Tom Thumb” was bringing in huge sums of money for Barnum, the showman continued his media assault, combining exaggeration with truth. Many of his early stories about Charles might be somewhat embellished. One suspicious anecdote took place during his dinner with Colonel James Watson Webb in New York. Charles stood on the table while the turkey was being carved, and knocked over a tumbler of water. This event seems quite reasonable, but his quick response, that he was afraid he might fall in, sounds invented, as does when he promptly drank the health of all present in a glass of Hungarian wine.29 However, like most of Barnum’s stories, there was a grain of truth in it, and the rehearsed dinner table joke was certainly repeated at other houses over the years.
Charles was clearly the biggest draw for visitors at the American Museum, and sending him away meant a risk. Barnum knew, however, that money could be made elsewhere. Throughout the first year, the boy traveled to different places around New York and New England accompanied by Barnum or his business manager, Fordyce Hitchcock. From May to June 1843, Charles spent six weeks doing his “statues” at the Kimball Museum in Boston, accompanied by Hitchcock and his father. Apparently during all that time Sherwood did nothing but sit in his hotel room, even when Senator Daniel Webster and President John Tyler came to Boston on June 17 to speak at the anniversary of Bunker Hill, amidst a huge celebration.30 This strange incident foreshadowed Sherwood’s increasingly erratic behavior as the years passed. Luckily, during the tours of theaters and halls in the Atlantic cities that year, Sherwood began acting as ticket-seller, and this job seemed to please him, especially handling the money.
Detailed accounts of these exhibitions are rare, but James White Nichols gives a thorough description of one of these “levees” in Danbury, Connecticut a few years later. Though by that time Charles had advanced in skill and was putting on plays and more complicated performances, apparently he occasionally fell back on the basic formula, only changing the impersonations or characters to suit the occasion. On a Monday in autumn, Nichols found handbills scattered around town advertising a show the following week, and by the day of the exhibition had composed a hilarious poem about the incredible buzz around town, “the streets were unpeopled, all business was dumb, absorb’d in the interest of Gen’ral Tom Thumb.” On the day of the performance the main room at the city hall swelled to capacity, with between four hundred and five hundred people standing wall to wall. A stage had been built over the judge’s seat, with another gold-railing platform raised three feet above.
Mr. Webster, the “conductor” carried the “The Little General” into the room high over his head and set him on the stage. Charles scrambled up a miniature flight of steps to the platform “with the agility of a little squirrel” and bowed to the audience, saying “Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen!” A selection of costume changes followed, with Charles becoming a professor at Oxford, a Spanish dandy, a sailor, and a Bowery b’hoy from New York. Most of the effect was gained by a simple change of hats: narrow brim for the Spaniard, battered white hat for the b’hoy, and a mortarboard for the Oxonian. Mr. Webster would ask him about the Oxford cap, for example, and Charles would answer with a joke: “One of the hats we read of!”
He sang songs as each of the characters, “swaggering and staggering around the platform amid rapturous shouts of applause.” Dressed as a sailor he danced a hornpipe before taking his first “break” only to emerge as Napoleon, with “indescribable style” walking in a “meditative and abstracted ramble” and taking snuff in the manner of the French general. Then he impersonated Frederick the Great of Prussia as an old man, with “stooping form,” “tottering gait,” “shaking hand,” and “unsteady head.” He changed clothes again, appearing in a tight white bodysuit and imitating Cupid with bow and arrow, a frightened slave, Ajax, Sampson, Cincinnatus, Cain slaying Abel, Hercules, the Gladiator, and more. Nichols writes wonderingly, “In all these his position was so true to the originals—his firmness of nerve so conspicuous—that for the time being the eye was ready to acknowledge him the true creation of the sculptor chiseled out of the real stone.”
He finally appeared in the elaborate costume of a Scottish Highlander, which looked “perfect in every particular,” including a bonnet and plume, royal Stuart plaid “united by a most gorgeous clasp” and a coat of arms, a dirk and claymore, powder horn, pistols, and “skene d’hu” or deer knife. This was a lot to carry for such a “little body,” and “yet he moved about perfectly easy and untrammel’d by the uniform.” Of course in this outfit he danced a highland fling and sang a Scottish song, “all which was done in his usual sweet and inimitable style of acting.” Throughout all these costume changes, Mr. Webster fed him innocent questions, as a straight man setting up Charles to deliver his jokes.
“What do you call that, General?” “A claymore!” “What do you do with it?” This was answered by assuming an attitude of defiance and flourishing it in a warlike manner toward him. Again: “What is that General?” “That is my skene d’hu!” “What do you do with it?” “Skin deers!” “When do you skin them?” “When I catch ’em!” with a quickness of expression which brought out a laugh from every corner of the house.
Nichols echoes almost every other contemporary account when he insists: “Of all the innumerable host who attended these levees, I saw or heard no one who grudged their money or wished it back in their pocket, and the great curiosity still a stranger to their eyes. All united in the declaration that he was the most extraordinary sight they had ever beheld, and a more remarkable specimen of humanity, probably, than it would ever be their happiness again to look on.”31 Nichols went home to tell his wife what he had seen, and she promptly dragged him back with her to the evening show.
Charles’s physical and verbal comedy skills and his ability to memorize and adapt were on constant display to an appreciative public. Nichols expresses amazement at the boy’s comic timing, his muscular control, and his singing skills. All this was a tribute to the tiny but fertile brain that was being cultivated to its full capacity. It was startling even to Barnum that such a young boy could learn so much, and so quickly. “He was an apt pupil with a great deal of native talent, and a keen sense of the ludicrous. He made rapid progress in preparing himself for such performances as I wished him to undertake and he became very much attached to his teacher.” Barnum also claimed that “he was in no sense a spoiled child but retained throughout that natural simplicity of character and demeanor.”32 Other accounts support Barnum’s analysis. That may be the most remarkable fact of his career: no one ever reported that Charles developed an ego to match his fame.
Charles’s early career as a child star hinged on his posed portrayal of various characters, from Cain to “Our Mary Ann.” Photo by Paul Mutino. Collection of The Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, Connecticut.
But not everything Charles learned from his experience with Barnum was positive. When asked by the showman what he wanted as a present after making him so much money, Charles only asked for a ball of twine. With it, he created a primitive trap by tying it to chair legs and whatever else was available. Barnum or the other adults would walk into the room and pretend to trip over it, a result that would cause Charles to “laugh and scream with such delight as to cause him absolutely to roll upon the floor and shed tears of joy.”33 His gleeful
