Struggles and Triumphs · Chapter 39 (3/3)

All the New York journals, and many more in other cities, editorially expressed their sympathy with my misfortune, and their sense of the loss the community had sustained in the destruction of the American Museum. The following editorial is from the New York Tribune, of July 14, 1865:

The destruction of no building in this city could have caused so much excitement and so much regret as that of Barnum’s Museum. The collection of curiosities was very large, and though many of them may not have had much intrinsic or memorial value, a considerable portion was certainly of great worth for any Museum. But aside from this, pleasant memories clustered about the place, which for so many years has been the chief resort for amusement to the common people who cannot often afford to treat themselves to a night at the more expensive theatres, while to the children of the city, Barnum’s has been a fountain of delight, ever offering new attractions as captivating and as implicitly believed in as the Arabian Nights Entertainments; Theater, Menagerie and Museum, it amused, instructed, and astonished. If its thousands and tens of thousands of annual visitors were bewildered sometimes with a Woolly Horse, a What is It? or a Mermaid, they found repose and certainty in a Giraffe, a Whale or a Rhinoceros. If wax effigies of pirates and murderers made them shudder lest those dreadful figures should start out of their glass cases and repeat their horrid deeds, they were reassured by the presence of the mildest and most amiable of giants, and the fattest of mortal women, whose dead weight alone could crush all the wax figures into their original cakes. It was a source of unfailing interest to all country visitors, and New York to many of them was only the place that held Barnum’s Museum. It was the first thing⁠—often the only thing⁠—they visited when they came among us, and nothing that could have been contrived, out of our present resources, could have offered so many attractions unless some more ingenious showman had undertaken to add to Barnum’s collection of waxen criminals by putting in a cage the live Boards of the Common Council. We mourn its loss, but not as without consolation. Barnum’s Museum is gone, but Barnum himself, happily, did not share the fate of his rattlesnakes and his, at least, most un⁠—“happy Family.” There are fishes in the seas and beasts in the forest; birds still fly in the air and strange creatures still roam in the deserts; giants and pygmies still wander up and down the earth; the oldest man, the fattest woman, and the smallest baby are still living, and Barnum will find them.

Or even if none of these things or creatures existed, we could trust to Barnum to make them out of hand. The Museum, then, is only a temporary loss, and much as we sympathize with the proprietor, the public may trust to his well-known ability and energy to soon renew a place of amusement which was a source of so much innocent pleasure, and had in it so many elements of solid excellence.

As already stated, my insurance was but $40,000, while the collection, at the lowest estimate, was worth $400,000, and as my premium was five percent I had paid the insurance companies more than they returned to me. When the fire occurred, my summer pantomime season had just begun and the Museum was doing an immensely profitable business. My first impulse, after reckoning up my losses, was to retire from active life and from all business occupation beyond what my large real estate interests in Bridgeport, and my property in New York would compel. I felt that I had still a competence and that after a most active and busy life, at fifty-five years, I was entitled to retirement, to comparative rest for the remainder of my days. I called on my old friend, the editor of the Tribune, for advice on the subject.

“Accept this fire as a notice to quit, and go a-fishing,” said Mr. Greeley.

“A-fishing!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, a-fishing; I have been wanting to go a-fishing for thirty years, and have not yet found time to do so,” replied Mr. Greeley.

I really felt that his advice was good and wise, and had I consulted only my own ease and interest I should have acted upon it. But, two considerations moved me to pause: First, one hundred and fifty employees, many of whom depended upon their exertions for their daily bread, were thrown out of work at a season when it would be difficult for them to get engagements elsewhere. Second: I felt that a large city like New York needed a good Museum, and that my experience of a quarter of a century in that direction, afforded extraordinary facilities for founding another establishment of the kind, and so I took a few days for reflection.

Meanwhile, the Museum employees were tendered a benefit at the Academy of Music, at which most of the dramatic artists in the city volunteered their services. I was called out, and made some offhand remarks in which I stated that nothing which I could utter in behalf of the recipients of that benefit, could plead for them half so eloquently as the smoking ruins of the building where they had so long earned their support by their efforts to gratify the public. At the same time I announced that, moved by the considerations I have mentioned, I had concluded to establish another Museum, and that in order to give present occupation to my employees, I had engaged the Winter Garden Theater for a few weeks, and I hoped to open a new establishment of my own in the ensuing fall.

The New York Sun commented upon the few remarks which I was suddenly and quite unexpectedly called upon to make, in the following flattering manner:

One of the happiest impromptu oratorial efforts that we have heard for some time, was that made by Barnum at the benefit performance given for his employees on Friday afternoon. If a stranger wanted to satisfy himself how the great showman had managed so to monopolize the ear and eye of the public during his long career, he could not have had a better opportunity of doing so than by listening to this address. Every word, though delivered with apparent carelessness, struck a key note in the hearts of his listeners. Simple, forcible and touching, it showed how thoroughly this extraordinary man comprehends the character of his countrymen, and how easily he can play upon their feelings.

Those who look upon Barnum as a mere charlatan, have really no knowledge of him. It would be easy to demonstrate that the qualities that have placed him in his present position of notoriety and affluence would, in another pursuit, have raised him to far greater eminence. In his breadth of views, his profound knowledge of mankind, his courage under reverses, his indomitable perseverance, his ready eloquence and his admirable business tact, we recognize the elements that are conducive to success in most other pursuits. More than almost any other living man, Barnum may be said to be a representative type of the American mind.

I very soon secured by lease the premises, numbers 535, 537 and 539 Broadway, seventy-five feet front and rear, by two hundred feet deep, and known as the Chinese Museum buildings. In less than four months, I succeeded in converting this building into a commodious Museum and lecture room, and meanwhile I sent agents through America and Europe to purchase curiosities. Besides hundreds of small collections, I bought up several entire museums, and with many living curiosities and my old company of actors and actresses, I opened to the public, November 13, 1865, “Barnum’s New American Museum,” thus beginning a new chapter in my career as a manager and showman.