The Humbugs of the World, P. T. Barnum [suggested reading .txt] 📗

began to call himself Matthias, and claimed to be a Jew. Then he went on a long journey to the Western and Southern States, preaching his doctrines, getting into jail, and sometimes fairly cursing his way out; and, returning to New York city, preached up and down the streets in his crazy, bawling fashion, sometimes on foot and sometimes on an old bony horse.

His New York city dupes, Elijah Pierson and Benjamin H. Folger and their families, together with a Mr. Mills and a few more, figured prominently in the chief chapter of Matthews’ career, during two years and a half, from May, 1832, to the fall of 1834.

Pierson and Folger were the leaders in the folly. These men, merchants of wealth and successful in business, were of that sensitive and impressible religious nature which is peculiarly credulous and liable to enthusiasms and delusions. They had been, with a number of other persons, eagerly engaged in some extravagant religious performances, including excessive fasts and asceticisms, and a plan, formed by one of their lady friends, to convert all New York by a system of female visitations and preachings⁠—a plan not so very foolish, I may just remark, if the she apostles are only pretty enough!

Pierson, the craziest of the crew, besides other wretched delusions, had already fancied himself Elijah the Tishbite; and when his wife fell ill and died a little while before this time, had first tried to cure her, and then to raise her from the dead, by anointing with oil and by the prayer of faith, as mentioned in the Epistle of Saint James.

Curiously enough, a sort of lair or nest, very soft and comfortable, was thus made ready for our religious humbug, just as he wanted it worst; for in these days he was but seedy. He heard something of Pierson, I don’t know how; and on the 5th of May, 1832, he called on him. Very quickly the poor fellow recognized the long-bearded prophetical humbug as all that he claimed to be⁠—a possessor and teacher of all truth, and as God himself.

Mills and Folger easily fell into the same pitiable foolery, on Pierson’s introduction. And the lucky humbug was very soon living in clover in Mills’ house, which he chose first; had admitted the happy fools, Pierson and Folger, as the first two members of his true church; Pierson, believing that from Elijah the Tishbite he had become John the Baptist, devoted himself as a kind of servant to his new Messiah; and the deluded men began to supply all the temporal wants of the impostor, believing their estates set apart as the beginning of the material Kingdom of God!

After three months, some of Mills’ friends, on charges of lunacy, caused Mills to be sent to Bloomingdale Asylum, and Matthias to be thrust into the insane poor’s ward at Bellevue, where his beard was forcibly cut off, to his extreme disgust. His brother, however, got him out by a habeas corpus, and he went to live with Folger. Mills now disappears from the story.

Matthias remained in the full enjoyment of his luxurious establishment, until September, 1834, it is true, with a few uncomfortable interruptions. He was always both insolent and cowardly, and thus often irritated some strong-minded auditor, and got himself into some pickle where he had to sneak out, which he did with much ease. In his seedy days the landlord of a hotel in whose barroom he used to preach and curse, put him down when he grew too abusive, by coolly and sternly telling him to go to bed. Mr. Folger himself had one or two brief intervals of sense, in one of which, angered at some insolence of Matthias, he seized him by the throat, shook him well, and flung him down upon a sofa. The humbug knowing that his living was in danger, took this very mildly, and readily accepted the renewed assurances of belief which poor Folger soon gave him. In the village of Sing Sing where Folger had a country-seat which he called Mount Zion, Matthias was exceedingly obnoxious. His daughter had married a Mr. Laisdell; and the humbug, who claimed that all Christian marriages were void and wicked, by some means induced the young wife to come to Sing Sing, where he whipped her more than once quite cruelly. Her husband came and took her away after encountering all the difficulty which Matthias dared make; and, at a hearing in the matter before a magistrate, he was very near getting tarred and feathered, if not something worse, and the danger frightened him very much.

He barely escaped being shaved by violence, and being thrown overboard to test his asserted miraculous powers, at the hands of a stout and incredulous farmer on the steamboat between Sing Sing and New York. While imprisoned at Bellevue before his trial, he was tossed in a blanket by the prisoners, to make him give them some money. The unlucky prophet dealt out damnation to them in great quantities; but they told him it wouldn’t work, and the poor humbug finally, instead of casting them into hell, paid them a quarter of a dollar apiece to let him off. When he was about to leave Folger’s house, some roguish young men of Sing Sing forged a warrant, and with a counterfeit officer seized the humbug, and a second time shaved him by force. He was one day terribly “set back” as the phrase is, by a sharpish answer. He gravely asserted to a certain man that he had been on the Earth eighteen hundred years. His hearer, startled and irreverent, exclaimed:

“The devil you have! Do you tell me so?”

“I do,” said the prophet.

“Then,” rejoined the other, “all I have to say is, you are a remarkably good-looking fellow for one of your age.”

The confounded prophet grinned, scowled, and exclaimed indignantly:

“You are a devil, Sir!” and marched off.

In the beginning of August, 1834, the unhappy Pierson died in Folger’s house, under circumstances amounting to strong circumstantial evidence that