his boundaries. Or he could also have been unconsciously or consciously acting out against the parents and mentor who trapped him in a life of work at such a young age. In later years, everyone, especially his wife, described him as the gentlest, most accommodating person, and it is surprising his strange upbringing did not lead him to continue on a path of bullying and callousness.
More troubling is a story the showman related in July 1844 about one of Tom Thumb’s early exhibitions in London, which a well-dressed black gentleman happened to attend. Only a year before, the first “blackface” performance had appeared in New York’s Bowery Amphitheater at the same time Charles was appearing at the American Museum. Blackface actors would apply a mask of burnt cork and act as racial stereotypes to humor the all-white audiences. Building on earlier blackface comedians and singers, as well as “whiteface” clowns, Dan Emmet’s Virginia Minstrels caricatured African-American behavior and speech with malapropisms and rhetorical absurdity, gave mock sermons and political orations, sang plantation songs, and lampooned both black and white cultures. In the decades before the Civil War, this “blackface minstrelsy” became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America.34 During the mid-1840s Barnum incorporated some of these “minstrel” songs into Charles’s act, and related that in this performance:
I made General Tom Thumb sing all the “nigger songs” that he could think of and dance Lucy Long and several “Wirginny breakdowns.” I then asked the General what the negroes called him when he travelled south. “They called me little massa,” replied the General, “and they always took their hats off, too.” The amalgamating darkey did not like this allusion to his “black bredren ob de South,” nor did he relish the General’s songs about Dandy Jim, who was “de finest nigger in de county, O” and who strapped his pantaloons down so fine when “to see Miss Dinah he did go.” The General enjoyed the joke and frequently pointed his finger at the negro, much to the discomfiture of “de colored gemman.”35
The fact that a prominent New York paper felt comfortable publishing this article shows that derogatory views were not unusual, or even controversial, amongst Americans, including urban northerners, at the time. As any child does, Charles picked up the prejudices of the adults around him, and this disturbing incident is a sad commentary on learned behavior. That the mocking wit Charles included in his act should be pointed at the black man in the audience is not surprising, though certainly disappointing and distasteful. Barnum would perhaps redeem himself for incidents like this later in life, when he became a passionate abolitionist and joined the Connecticut legislature specifically to vote for the rights of African Americans. Charles himself acted in an abolitionist play as a teenager, and seems to have dropped the “nigger songs” like Old Dan Tucker and Dandy Jim from his act shortly after.36 Though other comedians continued to use blackface minstrelsy as a way to poke fun at African Americans throughout the Civil War and after, Charles seems to have used racially charged humor less often than his contemporaries, despite this offensive incident.
By the end of their first year together, Barnum probably began to understand how much of his success was wrapped up in Charles’s performances and that while he was making this “dwarf” a fortune, the dwarf was doing the same for him. Success builds on success, and before “Tom Thumb” he had only had minor victories and major failures, with somewhat profitable fakes like the Fejee Mermaid and Joice Heth, and forgettable hoaxes like the wooly horse and a cherry-colored cat. His much-anticipated buffalo hunt across the river in Hoboken was a hilarious failure, although he managed to make a small profit from it.37 As a Pennsylvania newspaper said twenty years later, Charles was “perfectly formed, graceful in every movement, with a shrewdness and wit worthy of his country … the public found in Tom Thumb a reality—nothing of the wooly horse or the Fejee Mermaid school about him; no wonder the General should attain such popularity.”38 Barnum was discovering already that there was little need for exaggeration with “The General.” People expected a humbug, a baby dressed in adult clothes or a mirror illusion, but when they saw him their disbelief evaporated, and suddenly the world was full of wonders again. Unlike the many other “curiosities” that Barnum had championed, Charles Stratton was real.
The next step was to conquer Europe, where an entirely different audience awaited. After a year showing in New York and northeastern America, the departure date was set for a few days after his sixth birthday, in January 1844. The Tribune praised Charles’s appearances before he left for England, and the Evening Post urged, “A few hours more remain for General Tom Thumb to be seen at the American Museum, as the packet in which he has engaged passage to England does not sail to-day in consequence of the easterly winds now prevailing.”39 On one day alone, fifteen thousand people swarmed through the doors of the Museum to see Charles before he sailed, and continued to buy tickets even on the auspicious morning of his actual sailing, January 19.
At noon he was escorted by the City Brass Band and thousands of other New Yorkers to the docks, where he boarded the steamer Yorkshire with his parents, Barnum, and possibly his tutor Professor Guilladeau, a French naturalist.40 On the passport application he is listed as twenty-two inches high, fifteen pounds, and as Charles S. Stratton, alias General Tom Thumb. A few days later in the same passport register it says “Genl. Charles S. Stratton,” a blend of identities that presaged troubles to come for the boy entertainer.41 But perhaps his role-playing was not as much a problem for him as we might imagine. We often give too little credit to children, who slip between the personalities of make-believe without effort, and whose imaginations are usually more fertile than adults. He remained “Charles” to the people of Bridgeport, to his friends and family, and later to his wife. But to everyone else he was now General Tom Thumb, for forty years one of the most recognizable names in the world.
In England, Charles’s comedy developed further, becoming part of a new tradition of “Yankee” characters. Although this Yankee personality would enter literature in the novels of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the following decades, it seems to have first been popularized by comedians on the stage. The term was already used by foreigners to describe all Americans, perhaps because northeastern traders were the most frequently encountered. Comedies in early America had featured characters based on these New Englanders, with Royall Tyler’s The Contrast of 1787 the earliest extant play to incorporate “the Yankee” as an important character. But it was not until the 1820s that the type began appearing with regularity. Ironically the first comedian to succeed with this persona was an Englishman, Charles Mathews, an outstanding mimic who created characters that mocked the Irish, French, German, Dutch, and his fellow Englishmen. He used anecdotes, imitations, and songs in dialect to keep the audience amused, and writers like Washington Irving and Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised his talents. In 1824 his three-and-a-half-hour satirical travelogue, Trip to America, set the perceptions of the English public for decades, although the American comedians who followed him would take a slightly less partisan approach to the material.1
From 1826 to 1836 New Yorker James Hackett took this Yankee character to the London stage. He described the character as “enterprising and hardy—cunning in bargains—back out without regard to honour—superstitious and bigoted—simple in dress and manners—mean to degree in expenditures—free of decp.—familiar and inquisitive, very fond of telling long stories without any point.” George Hill of Boston had given an authentic New England flavor to the role in the late 1830s, touring the British Isles between 1838 and 1839 as the best and most famous American comedian known there before the arrival of Charles Stratton. Called “Yankee Hill,” he performed in solo “stand-up” acts and acted in melodramas like Samuel Woodworth’s pastoral comedy The Forest Rose, which sparked an entire genre of Yankee plays to accompany the stand-up comedy routines.2 Barnum himself had already adopted, or perhaps actually embodied,
