Joice Heth: Exploited in Life and Even in Death

P.T. Barnum is remembered as an American legend, bringing joy to generations of children under his big tents full of spectacle and calliope music. In 1870, Barnum started the circus for which he is most famous, establishing his legacy as “The Greatest Showman on Earth.” Even back then, Barnum’s performances drew demonstrations, as the animal rights activists of the day protested the cruelty on display. A perennial hoaxer and hustler, Barnum was no stranger to controversy, though it is his first exhibition that stands out in American history as a benchmark of exploitative suffering.

Barnum became famous in 1835, when, at age 25, he exploited a loophole in the law which allowed him to “lease” Joice Heth, an enslaved woman, for exhibition in the so-called “free state” of New York. Her former owner, R.W. Lindsay, had unsuccessfully exhibited Heth, claiming she was George Washington’s 161 year old nursemaid. Barnum moved the spectacle to New York City, where she was made to tell stories of “Little George” and sing hymns. Medical ethicist Harriet Washington’s research on Heth reveals that Barnum forcibly extracted her remaining teeth to make her look older and exhibited her for up to fifteen hours a day, until her death seven months later, at what is believed to be the age of 80.

The liberal press decried Joice Heth’s exhibition, insulting the sensibilities of those who would pay to see “a breathing skeleton.” When pressed about the true nature of his chosen profession, at times Barnum would lie outright, claiming Heth was “an automaton.” Blaming robot technologies as an obfuscating scapegoat to shield from the magnitude of one’s evil may seem like a particularly modern endeavor, but here we see how it is merely a part of American tradition.

The administration currently governing this country is engaging in a deliberate effort to erase the historical contributions of anyone not matching the demographic ideals of acceptable heroism. As a straight, white man, Barnum makes the cut, but Joice Heth and millions of others make up an inconvenient truth which threatens their version of things. History is written by the victors, and one might hope that it is shame that motivates this desire to control the narrative, but considering the conspicuous consumption on display by the perpetrators, it seems likely that mortification by any measure is beyond the scope of their emotions.

By erasing the contributions of people whose names and memories are lost to time, those in control can perpetuate certain myths, advancing the idea that certain people—people like them—are inherently more capable of achieving success than others. Via this method of retconning history, painting over roles played sometimes by millions of people, they anoint and elevate certain figures to demigodhood, perpetuating a falsehood that allows them to declare something akin to divine right, so as to justify and excuse their behaviors.

When credit for success is assigned, it is piled on the auteur-like figure, whose “genius” and “tenacity” are lauded as the de-facto explanation for their achievements. We are taught that these are the people who “built America,” though little is ever said about those ground up by the gears of enterprise and progress, except for occasional references to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. This 1906 novel is remembered mostly for acknowledging the callousness of industry and presenting it in an unignorable way.

Sinclair shed light on the systemic servitude of the lower classes, who are expected and forced to provide labor in a system that provides no opportunity to advance beyond their station. This not only disregards The American Dream, it scoffs at it, as sharecroppers and those who owe their soul to the company store have always understood. Exploitation and desperation is the lifeblood of Capitalism, but we accept it, rarely attempting to pull back the curtain and examine the hard truths. It is likely that people trapped in such indenture assembled the very device you are reading this on, but we accept this, as it is happening far away and out of sight.

By identifying the exception that proves the rule, Sinclair exposes it for what it is. He wrote of meatpacking plants where the bodies of workers who fell into rendering vats would be processed without work ever stopping to separate their remains from the other products being produced. The idea of human flesh in the meat supply hit the public in the gut and shocked their sensibilities, resulting in an outcry. That this was the cost of doing business was seen as the unacceptable obscenity it is, though government and industry decried it as “fake news,” a tactic still popular today.

The Jungle remains notable, as it exposed just how much people will tolerate in pursuit of progress and convenience. That they draw the line at cannibalism is important to acknowledge, as it seems a rather high bar to establish. It also reveals how broad a spectrum of suffering we are willing to accept before we say “this is too much.” Industrial workers, even children, ground up by gears are merely part of the accounting of business. Bodies rendered by the system can be abided in great numbers until they end up on our dinner plates.

The rendering of Joice Heth is unusual only in its visibility. The people she arrived here with were ground up as well, but we have not even the opportunity to know their stories, as their suffering is deemed by history to be too mundane to be remembered, despite the enormity of its scope and the lasting benefits still wrung from it. Even of Joice, we only know of her final months, when she crossed paths with an American titan to-be, though he was of note to few outside Connecticut at the time.

To this day, few Americans do not encounter P.T. Barnum’s name at least once a year when the circus comes to town, but in 1835 he was merely a rabble-rousing newspaperman who’d been briefly imprisoned for libel. Dedicated to pushing boundaries beyond the bounds of acceptability, while appealing to the masses’ most basic curiosities, he is remembered as “The Greatest Showman,” and if that is a measure of his ability to turn spectacle into dollars, he has few equals. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, billed as “The Greatest Show on Earth,” is undoubtedly the most visible aspect of the man’s legacy. However, his methods of appealing to the worst of people’s inquisitive impulses and profiteering from the exchange of empathy for entertainment is as popular today as it was in his time, though its execution may have changed.

Few in history have so openly plied cruelty and evil on display to turn a quick buck, but we do ourselves a disservice to not acknowledge Barnum’s influence, which persists even today. He must also be understood as an example of capitalism working as intended, but as a one-time slave owner, he was extremely well versed in the fundamental functioning of such a system. Though Barnum eventually became a Republican and adopted staunch abolitionist attitudes, he must be seen as a person seemingly able to change his attitudes on a whim upon discerning the prevailing winds of public opinion.

P.T. Barnum did not invent the idea of cruelty for entertainment. The Colosseum in Rome stands as the pursuit’s most conspicuous temple, but public executions long provided fodder for the bored and curious. The adventurer Giacomo Casanova was present at the 1757 torture and execution of Robert-Francoise Damiens, attempted assassin of King Louis XV. Accounting the scene in his memoirs, Casanova writes, “I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and the fat aunt did not budge an inch. Was it because their hearts were hardened? They told me, and I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch's wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited.“ It has been said of the modern political era that “The cruelty is the point,” but here Casanova demonstrates that it long has been.

The tragedy of Joice Heth is specifically unique in that while we cannot imagine the scope of her suffering, we can, in real numbers, see what value was placed on it. P.T. Barnum made approximately $1,500 dollars ($54,500 today) a week exhibiting a living woman. By exploiting her very existence, stealing her remaining time, and engaging in daily tortures from which she had no legal recourse to escape from, he was able to earn the equivalent of $1,500,000 today in just over half a year. This is Capitalism working as designed and The American Dream on full display. Do not look away.

Heth died on February 19, 1836, and while one might expect the story to end there, Barnum had one final ignomininity in store for her. The callous obscenity of this choice stands as a peculiar example, again, only because of how openly it was conducted. On February 26, 1836 Barnum hosted Joice Heth’s public autopsy at a saloon in New York City, charging an admission fee of 50 cents. 1500 people attended. What is this, if not peak Capitalism, exploiting not just a worker, but a slave, beyond death?

This chapter of Barnum’s life is omitted from the 2017 musical biopic The Greatest Showman, but such is the nature of propaganda. Instead, we are again presented the myth of the scrappy bootstrapper overcoming the odds and achieving success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The financial achievements are undeniable, and Barnum was able to facilitate incredible incomes for those in his orbit. Notably, 3’4” Charles Sherwood Stratton, billed as “General Tom Thumb,” owned a yacht and retired to a private island with a home custom built for him and his 2’8” wife, Lavinia, a fellow performer. Likewise, Barnum was able to offer Jenny Lind, “The Swedish Nightingale” $1,000 ($41,000 today) per performance.When she became aware of the hype Barnum, who employed up to twenty-six journalists at a time, had generated surrounding her arrival, she demanded more money, which he obliged.

These examples stand in contrast to others. William Henry Johnson was the microcephalic son of former slaves. Barnum billed him as “Zip the Pinhead,” presented him as a “missing link,” dressed as a gorilla, and encouraged the public to throw coins at him. Do-Hum-Me, was a Native American dancer employed by Barnum for some months until she died at 18, succumbing to influenza along with much of her troupe after being exposed to the unfamiliar disease on tour. Even a cursory examination of Barnum’s choices reveals how his racism facilitated his success. He parlayed his own ability to dehumanize others into broad appeal for the public’s inclination to do the same.

It is comfortable for historical revisionists to claim how different mores were back then, blaming the zeitgeist for the eras’s atrocities, but this requires deliberately ignoring critical voices of the time. When Barnum lost his fortune in 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed it evidence of “the gods visible again.” His exploits also attracted the attention of Henry Bergh, and his newly established American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA.) The profundity of the inhumanity at work in Barnum’s endeavors was not lost on compassionate people of the time, it was merely outweighed by the curiosity of a callous public.

America seems to have collectively agreed to work under these power structures, and it has been a long time since The Jungle provided us with a visceral reaction to that acknowledgment. Now, more than ever, though, it is important to examine these systems and how we enable them as we go about our lives. Joice Heth’s life and death is a microcosm of Capitalism working in its purest form. By ignoring her story we ignore the hard truths of our own story, and in doing so exhibit disrespect and willful blindness.

By 1865 The Civil War had changed the fabric of America, and Barnum’s opinions on certain matters seem to have conveniently changed. He said, “I whipped my slaves. I ought to have been whipped a thousand times for this myself.” Yet, five years later, he would find himself once again, with a whip in his hand. At age sixty Barnum began the circus for which he is most famous, coalescing his keen understanding of spectacle and the public’s hunger for entertainment into the most lasting vestige of his legacy. He again found himself at odds with Henry Bergh, who attempted to apply New York’s new animal cruelty laws against Barnum, to no avail. Bergh was motivated, in part, by the deaths of nine beluga whales who had been exhibited.

In 2025, Elon Musk referred to empathy as a “weakness,” a sentiment embraced whole-heartedly by the cohort of right wingers who have made “F Your Feelings” their motto. It is easy to identify such a misguided ideal, which inadequately understands the scope of the human experience, as the creed of a culture based in cruelty, even for whom “the cruelty is the point.” willing to abide, or even take pleasure in, a great measure of suffering to achieve their goals. Whether sadism or indifference, this is the path by which we damn ourselves, and so it is critical to now remember the stories of the past, which have paved the way to the sorry present state of things.

The suffering of Joice Heth has been deliberately forgotten, while the myths of P.T. Barnum—and men like him—have flourished. Her story stands as an outlier not only in the scope of its public visibility, but as a hard accounting of what a human life is worth to those possessed of the sort of anti-empathy we laud in our robber barons and business tycoons. We do ourselves a great disservice to engage in the sort of willful ignorance required to shield ourselves from the true truths of our history. We cannot continue the implicit agreement to remain silent as the accoutrements of convenience are carried to market buoyed by the suffering of the unseen, raising our voices only when the product on offer is as nauseating as human meat in the food supply.

We must, like Casanova, demand answers from those who are able to observe the situation with callous detachment and remain unmoved by the horrors on display. If they grace us with a response, we may, as he did, pretend to believe them, but more evolved circles must begin discussing the ramifications of this status quo. Joice Heth, and millions of people, living and dead, deserve no less. To disregard these uncomfortable truths makes us as complicit in the cycle of suffering as anyone who paid to attend her autopsy.