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P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race Benjamin Reiss (bio) On 25 February 1836, P. T. Barnum orchestrated an event that would launch his career in show business and provide the nascent mass media one of its first great spectacles. 1 Joice Heth, an aged African American woman whom Barnum had exhibited across the Northeast as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington, now lay dead on an operating table in New York’s City Saloon. 1,500 spectators, including many of the most important editors in the city, paid fifty cents apiece to watch as Dr. David L. Rogers carved into her corpse. Rogers’ “finding” that Heth was a fraud touched off an intense journalistic debate, in which the penny press—the first entirely commercial newspapers in the country—took the lead. Through this debate, a surprising number of improvisations on the themes of identity, authenticity, and essence were seemingly wrung from Heth’s corpse. Alternately, she was still alive, dead but a fraud, the real thing and dead, an everlasting mystery, a waste of time, and about to embark on a tour of Europe as a phial of ashes; and the scientific inquiry into her death was authoritative, invasive, irrelevant, and fraudulent. Reconstructing the Heth exhibit—in particular, its grisly aftermath—through its coverage in the media provides a microscopic view of some of the unsettling transformations that were shaping nineteenth-century culture. Providing a backdrop for and sometimes intruding directly into reporting of the affair were the issues of modernization that profoundly affected the lives of many who saw Heth: the new prestige of science, social atomization, the emergence of a commercial mass culture, rapid urbanization and the expansion of social roles, and a felt loss of [End Page 78] communal, familial, and class-based traditions. Many of these transformations produced anxieties about status, authenticity, and identity: what was the basis of trust in a social interchange involving strangers? how could one be sure that an economic transaction was not fraudulent? How could one truly “know” another? 2 In several of its aspects, Heth’s autopsy appears as a moment in which science—mediated by popular journalism and other mass media—faced some of the crises of legibility, authenticity, and recognition brought on by the process of modernization. A related context for the exhibit was the changing meanings of “race” in the antebellum North. In early nineteenth-century America, racial distinction was a relatively loose set of discourses, practices, and ideas that separated and elevated one group from others, drawing on law, religion, and science with little internal consistency. The essential linkage between race and property rights, for example, would not become explicitly codified until the 1850s through legal decisions like Dred Scott and legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act; and notions of the biological determinism of race were only fully developed in later decades through the increased energies of anatomists and other scientists. Heth’s itinerant exhibit reflects some of this loose structure, in that it was a free-floating, improvised racialist display, an open text that was given a wide range of readings in local media. These readings illuminate her various publics’ notions of race, which were inevitably filtered through their differences of region, class, and ideology. But in death, the question of what she meant to her viewers and to readers became displaced by the more imperious question of who she was—or rather, who was behind her. The intensified focus on fixing her identity (which had always been a thread in reactions to her live exhibit ), rather than interpreting her story, takes on an implicitly deterministic overtone when viewed within the context of scientific attempts to essentialize race in the antebellum period. The Heth autopsy—like other spectacular displays of race created by the emerging mass media—dramatized some of the new meanings of racial identity and provided an opportunity for whites to debate them (in a displaced register) as they gazed upon or read about her corpse. The episode thus offers the opportunity to construct an ethnographic miniature of white antebellum Northerners as they struggled to make sense of the interlocking issues of racial identification and modernization...
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