The following year, Barnum finally found his vocation—or perhaps it found him. An acquaintance told him about a travelling act that was up for sale. It featured a woman, Joice Heth, who was advertised to be a hundred and sixty-one years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. Barnum rushed to Philadelphia, where the show with Heth was playing. She was blind, toothless, and practically paralyzed. Still, as Barnum put it, she “was very garrulous when speaking of her protégé, ‘dear little George.’ ” He resolved to buy the act, which effectively meant buying Heth, who’d been a slave in Kentucky but whose legal status in Pennsylvania was murky.
In New York, Barnum engaged Levi Lyman, who later posed as Dr. Griffin, to serve as Heth’s director-cum-chaperon. The two men flooded the city with ads and, it seems, bribes; Lyman paid off editors to gin up interest. Whether or not New Yorkers were convinced by the claims made about Heth, they flocked to see her, and soon Barnum had made back the thousand dollars he’d paid for her. When the crowds in New York began to thin, he sent Heth and Lyman on to Providence, Boston, and Hartford. The abolitionist movement was strong in New England, so the flexible Lyman concocted a new story: the proceeds from the act were going to purchase the freedom of Heth’s great-grandchildren, back in Kentucky. Even by the standards of the time, Barnum’s use of Heth was shameful, a point made by at least one un-bought-off editor. A “more indecent mode of raising money than by the exhibition of an old woman—black or white—we can hardly imagine,” the Boston Atlas declared.
Barnum’s imagination, though, was not so limited. After Heth died, in 1836, he arranged for her to give one last show. Ostensibly to determine how old she had been, he staged a public autopsy. Fifteen hundred people bought tickets to the event, at an amphitheatre on Broadway. Based on the condition of her organs, the presiding physician concluded that Heth had been at most eighty. The New York Sun reported this finding the next day, under the headline “precious humbug exposed.” To a rival paper, Lyman, presumably with Barnum’s blessing, peddled the fiction that the body on the table had not been Heth’s at all; she was in Connecticut, “alive and well.” Several other papers weighed in on the ghoulish dispute, providing Barnum with just the sort of attention he thrived on. “Newspaper and social controversy on the subject (and seldom have vastly more important matters been so largely discussed) served my purpose as ‘a showman’ by keeping my name before the public,” he crowed.