by Yunte Huang
They may well have heard that the almost supernatural scene in front of them, overwhelming hundreds of visitors each day, had inspired a popular parable: “A man in a daydream drifts toward the precipice of Niagara Falls unaware of the danger. On the opposite side, someone watches. Just as the man is about to plunge, the observer cries out ‘STOP!’ The shout awakens the man from his reverie, and at the critical moment he is saved.”2 The charismatic evangelist Charles Finney, who had introduced this parable at his fiery sermons and led a sweeping religious revival called the Second Great Awakening in the early 1830s, had meant to urge wandering sinners, like the daydreamer in the story, to wake up to the voice of God and choose salvation. For the twins, however, Niagara Falls suggested a different allegory. Rather than stop on the edge and return to the safety of the master’s arms, they were taking a headlong plunge into the unknown by cutting themselves off from the Coffins. Whether they could land safely or would simply ruin themselves, whether it would be a splash of success or a self-annihilating dive, the answer awaited them at the bottom of the unfathomable abyss.
Having celebrated their freedom, Chang and Eng left the Buffalo area and made their first stop in Rochester, New York. They had kept Charles Harris as their manager, and he would now work for them rather than for the Coffins. They had also bought from Mrs. Coffin the horse Charley, and the carriage in which they had been traveling, at a bargain price of $103. The kind of business acumen that had once made them successful duck farmers in Siam came in handy again as they set out to manage their own affairs. In fact, before severing ties with the Coffins, they had secretly prepared themselves for all the challenges of conducting business transactions: improving their English language skills until they were “able to read and write very creditably” and mastering arithmetic in order to be able to “keep their own accounts and to make their own calculations.”3 Ready as they were, however, difficulties abounded.
Rochester, the most thoroughly evangelized of American cities in the 1830s, afforded Chang and Eng their first challenge as self-supporting showmen. Here they had to compete with fervent revivalists—not for souls, but for paying audiences. The fire of the Great Awakening that was sweeping across America had an especially powerful effect on this country town on the banks of the Genesee River. Founded in 1812, Rochester had been a village of fifteen hundred as recently as 1821. The opening of the Erie Canal connected the area’s vast wheat fields and ubiquitous mills to the urban centers on the East Coast. By 1830, the former Rochesterville village had turned into a bustling entrepôt of ten thousand residents. “But with growth came discord,” writes Louis Masur. “The middle class divided on political and religious issues and united against the laboring classes on moral questions such as the consumption of alcohol. The story repeated itself in scores of other towns and cities. With expansion and wealth came dissension and strife. Only a revival of religion, many believed, could preserve the nation ‘from our vast extent of territory, our numerous and increasing population, from diversity of local interests, the power of selfishness, and the fury of sectional jealousy and hate.’ ”4
In the fall of 1830, the elders of the Third Church invited Charles Finney, a rising star in the revival movement, to preach in Rochester. Born in 1792 and reared in Oneida County, New York—a breeding ground for nonconformist communities in the nineteenth century—Finney had begun a career in law when one day, during a walk in the woods, he experienced an epiphany. The next day, instead of showing up in court to argue a case, he skipped the appointment and told his client, “I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause.” And plead he did, with impressive fervor and enthusiasm. In Rochester, where Finney would do God’s work at the pulpit from September 1830 to March 1831, he preached three evenings a week and three times on Sunday, always to overflowing crowds. Like a manager of a circus show, Finney carefully orchestrated all aspects of his sermon to achieve maximum theatrical effects. He would allocate seats near the pulpit for worried sinners, calling those seats “the anxious bench,” reserved only for prominent citizens who had spoken with him privately. As Paul E. Johnson points out in his trailblazing study of the revivals in Rochester, “None sat on the anxious bench who was not almost certain to fall. Separated from the regenerate and from hardened sinners, their conversions became grand public spectacles.”5 Finney’s final sermon in Rochester was a “Protracted Meeting,” which lasted five days, blazing from morning to night, bringing the entire city to a halt.
The direct impact of revivalism on Chang and Eng was its crackdown on leisure activities such as theatergoing, drinking, and circus attendance. Deep down, the Great Awakening was partly a response to the rise of the new working class and the changing habits of life that arrived in tandem with industrialization and capitalism. The revivalists regarded the entertainments of working men as evil and wasteful, beclouding their minds and thus blocking the millennium.6 In the wake of Finney’s evangelical work, a push for temperance began in earnest in Rochester. Foreshadowing the scenes during the Prohibition era in the twentieth century, people rolled barrels of whiskey down to the sidewalk and smashed them in front of cheering Christians and awestruck sinners. While whiskey ran in the gutter or into the canal, two brothers, John and Joseph Christopher, Episcopalian converts, bought the local theater, shut it down, and converted it to a livery stable. The other two brothers, members of the Presbyterian Church, “bought the circus building and turned it into a soap factory.”7
Against these God-loving brothers who called the shots in town, the Siamese brothers, pagan and freakish, stood only a whisker of a chance when they arrived in Rochester. They had difficulty even booking a room (a familiar obstacle) to display themselves, let alone luring paying customers from their daily prayer sessions, busy church events, and weeklong camp meetings that were in vogue throughout the nation. Earlier, when traveling in Maryland and still working for the Coffins, the twins had already tasted the fierce competition from revival activities. As Harris wrote in January 1832, “We opened a room in Greencastle & only took $15—but the cause of this was evident to me on learning that there has been (& still continued when we left) a four days meeting which was protracted to 10 days & as might be expected all the good folks were literally mad on the subject.” Harris concluded the letter on a worrisome note: “I fear religion stood much in our way.”8 And he was right; religious enthusiasm was raging everywhere in America. Finney called the movement he had led “the greatest revival of religion throughout the land that this country had then ever witnessed.”9 Not to be outdone in hyperbole, Finney’s chief rival, Lyman Beecher, declared the 1831 awakening to be “the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival of religion, that the world has ever seen.”10 With Rochester as the epicenter of revival, the entire region of western New York shuddered and came to be known as the Burnt-Over District, because the blazes of revivalism roared most intensely there.
Regrettably, the Burnt-Over District was also the stomping ground of Chang and Eng in the summer of 1832, as they set out to seek their own destiny. The result, as reflected in cash receipts, was, well, less than ideal. Except for the little town of Auburn, where the twins got lucky on the night of July 4, when locals were in an especially festive mood, they were barely able to cover their expenses at most of the stops. They even sought other ways of making a profit, including selling cigars on the side—the five hundred cigars they had bought wholesale in Buffalo for $9 now went on sale at their exhibitions. But the area was literally burned out by religious fervor.
Adding to their misfortune, they continued to be dogged by the Coffins, who refused to give them a clean break. Despite repeated requests, Susan Coffin failed to return some of their personal effects left in her care in Newburyport. Instead, she sent along her bitter recriminations. Throughout the summer, the twins continued to exchange acrimonious letters with her and fend off her vile accusations. One thorny issue that resurfaced was the matter of their first trip to England in 1829, when Chang and Eng ha
d to travel in steerage while the Coffins had enjoyed the luxuries of first-class cabins on the Robert Edwards. At the time, Captain Coffin had blamed the shipmaster for overbooking the cabins, claiming that he had bought the twins first-class tickets. In July, Chang and Eng had an unexpected visit from Captain Samuel Sherburne, who had commanded the Edwards. According to Sherburne, Coffin had in fact bought steerage tickets for the twins and listed them as servants. This revelation infuriated the twins, and they shot off an angry missive to Mrs. Coffin, inveighing against the “cold ingratitude of those for whose benefit I have so long & so laboriously toiled & endured hardships.”11 It should be noted that Chang and Eng referred to themselves in writing sometimes by the singular pronoun “I” and sometimes by the plural “we”—a grammatical choice that resembles the speech pattern of two Old Testament brothers. Moses was a stutterer, so Aaron acted as his spokesman. The alternating between singular and plural pronouns and verbs, by both Chang-Eng and Moses-Aaron, would give future scholars of bioethics much fodder for thought.12
On October 5, 1832, the long-anticipated showdown finally took place upon Captain Coffin’s return to America. After what he dubbed “a wild goose chase,” Coffin caught up with the twins in Bath, New York, where the two parties held a long talk. Chang and Eng, as Coffin told his wife in a letter that night, were glad to see him but also seemed “to feel themselves quite free” from him. A ship captain accustomed to giving orders and a master cocksure about ownership, Coffin was shocked by the twins’ revolt. Not knowing the degree of their determination, Coffin even had high hopes of whisking them off to France, where they had previously been denied entry.
Counting on the rhetorical prowess that ran in his Puritan blood, Coffin reminded the twins of the contract they had signed, adding that the arrangement with the Siamese government was in fact for seven years, not five, and that he had intentionally shortened the term of ownership on paper in order to assuage their mother’s fears. But Chang and Eng had learned not to trust Coffin’s words, especially after learning the truth about that voyage on the Edwards. They saw through Coffin’s ruse and knew instinctively that, as they later told Robert Hunter, it was a trick calculated to induce them to stay longer with him. They were adamant about quitting him, telling the former master that they wanted to settle the score once and for all and be done with it. In his letter to Susan, Coffin was vague about the terms of the settlement, stating only that the twins, having become savvy in business dealings, had referred Coffin to “their man,” apparently Harris, to finalize the separation. “That is the only way I can settle with them,” Coffin wrote. “I shall settle as soon as possible & return home.” He felt defeated but unwilling to admit it: “I am almost beat out with the rough roads.” And he would not cut the twins loose without letting them have a piece of his mind. A Bible-thumping Puritan, Coffin delivered a sermon on the spot, à la Charles Finney, chastising the twins for indulging in all sorts of dissipation—whoring, gambling, and drinking. He urged them to repent their sins, almost as though God was speaking through him.13
These were shocking accusations. The twins were known to be interested in women, just like any other young men. Given their abnormal condition, they apparently had not had any luck with ordinary females, so it is not inconceivable that they might have explored sexuality with prostitutes. They also enjoyed hard liquor, and, based on their later lifestyle, they would indeed try their luck at card tables occasionally, just as they were interested in chess, checkers, hunting, and fishing. But having their way of life condemned in such moralistic terms by a Christian who had exploited and cheated them was more than the twins could bear. It added fuel to their discontent with those pulpit-pounding preachers who had kept potential customers from them. Their riposte to Coffin was succinct and firm: “They had as good right to a woman as he had.”
With no other recourse, Coffin settled with the twins and stormed off the next day. He told others that when the twins refused to repent, he beat them, giving them “the damnedest thrashing they ever had in their lives.” But James Hale, who knew the twins well and had seen their fistfights with troublemakers, thought that Coffin had made up the story to save his own face. “It cannot have been so,” said Hale, because Coffin “is yet alive.”
This would be the last time Chang and Eng ever saw the man who had radically changed their destiny, turning them from two Siamese duck fanciers in a remote corner of Earth into world-famous showmen. In less than five years, on August 27, 1837, Captain Coffin, commanding the Boston ship Gentoo, would die of consumption on St. Helena Island, the same place where years previously he had sent his wife the good tidings: “Susan, I have two Chinese Boys 17 years old grown together. . . .” Not to put too fine a point on it, but, like adding an extra nail to his coffin, the New York Spectator ended his obituary with an acknowledgment of Coffin’s major contribution to American cultural history: “The Siamese Twins were brought to this country by Capt. C.”14
20
America on the Road
With the Coffins finally no longer able to claim ownership, Chang and Eng did not need to perform tricks, both literally and figuratively, for anyone anymore. Suddenly, they found that what lay between them and their future was only the open road of America—a kind of liberation that was hardly open to freed blacks, who putatively posed a greater threat to America’s early nineteenth-century race hierarchy. As the entrepreneur twins would discover, America in the 1830s was a nation on the move; or, as a foreign visitor commented, “There is more travelling in the United States than in any part of the world. . . . Here, the whole population is in motion, whereas, in old countries, there are millions who have never been beyond the sound of the parish bell.”1 Even the slaves, whom this visitor did not mention, were also perpetually on the move, sold to other owners when their masters died or to other areas when the masters deemed it profitable to do so. If mobility then defined the American character, we can already get a glimpse of that trait in the period when Chang and Eng, freakishly exotic and barely human in the eyes of most, visited every nook and cranny of the country. A picturesque sight on the open road, the conjoined Siamese brothers had, we will discover, plenty of company and competition.
Despite the American penchant for motion, the early 1830s remained what Harriet Beecher Stowe called “the ante-railroad times,” a period when travel could be excruciatingly slow and challenging. Roads in America were a confusing quiltwork, controlled even more confusingly by state, county, and local authorities. Since the colonial era, the old Indian trails, after years of exploration by frontiersmen and buckskin marauders like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, had turned into tote roads, and then newer paths were cut, followed by highways and toll roads. “In the 1830s,” as Jack Larkin describes in his study of everyday life in America between 1790 and 1840, “the best roads in the United States were the major county roads and turnpikes of southern New England, the lower Hudson Valley and southeastern Pennsylvania. . . . Elsewhere the American landscape continued to present impressive obstacles to travel.”2 As we shall see, the twins and their fellow travelers on the American roads would encounter a plethora of challenges—providing insight into the American lifestyle of two centuries ago.
The fall of 1832 was also a time of great political upheaval and change in America. Andrew Jackson fought a bitter reelection battle and ended up beating Henry Clay by 219 to 60 in the Electoral College and by 700,000 to 329,000 in the popular vote. But Old Hickory’s landslide victory only served to galvanize his political opponents, the Whigs, who would fight him in major national issues, condemning him as an uncouth lout and a despot. The nation was as ideologically divided as it had ever been since its founding. Reflective of the growing tension was South Carolina’s passage of the Nullification bill in October 1832, threatening secession from the Union, a move that threw the political calculus into chaos. On October 8—three days after Chang and Eng freed themselves from Captain Coffin—the US Army, in the wake of the Black Hawk War, took the first ste
p in removing Indians from their homes on the East Coast, thus beginning a six-year campaign that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. “The Indian races are melting in the presence of European civilization like snow beneath the rays of the sun,” Tocqueville euphemistically observed in his notebook, suggesting that what we now call “ethnic cleansing” was little more than a literary deliquescence.3 In fact, the removal of more than forty-five thousand East Coast Indians, of whom thirteen thousand would perish in a forced march on the road, opened up one hundred million acres of land, mainly in the South, including the area where Chang and Eng eventually would settle down. Seeing a golden opportunity for wealth, white settlers quickly poured in—not necessarily to farm but to turn over the land claims to later settlers for profit, a nineteenth-century version of real-estate flipping, an early “land rush.” The land-grab craze molded a national character, or malaise, that Tocqueville would once again euphemistically diagnose as “American restlessness.” Settlers plunged into the wilderness with as little gear as an ax and the obligatory Bible. In Ohio, a popular staging area for further migration, as well as the stomping ground for the Siamese Twins in the waning months of 1832 and the first half of 1833, one could find, according to a guidebook for settlers, “hundreds of men . . . who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners.” One fecund woman from Illinois bore twelve children, every one of whom had been born in a different house.4
On their peripatetic journeys, these pioneering settlers, hardly people of means, would carry with them only what they could put on a packhorse or an oxcart, if they were lucky enough to be able to afford either. Their material needs created an opportunity for one of the most colorful figures that had ever graced the American open roads in those early years: the Yankee peddler. In fact, most European tourists to this country prior to the Civil War noted two great points of divergence between the crude life in the New World and the more genteel civilization of their own: the seemingly vulgar American habit of spitting and the ubiquitous presence of Yankee peddlers.5 Claiming a long line of genealogy stretching from early Indian traders to modern-day door-to-door salesmen (whose death knell has once and for all been sounded by Amazon), nineteenth-century peddlers were a familiar sight on the highways, byways, and waterways of America in the 1830s. Carrying a basket or a trunk, or driving a one-horse shay, they hawked an assortment of useful “Yankee notions”: pins (from which we get the term pin money), needles, hooks, scissors, razors, knives, combs, buttons, spoons, pots, pans, brooms, books, cotton goods, lace, perfume, clocks, chairs, spices, essences, dyes, woodenware, pottery, and so on.
