by Yunte Huang
Most of these peddlers hailed from New England, or, to be more specific, Connecticut. Benedict Arnold, the infamous traitor, born in Norwich, Connecticut, spent his youthful years peddling woolen goods up and down the Hudson Valley, through the very same area where he would later operate as a military man and betray George Washington.6 Perhaps the Connecticut Yankee who had climbed the steepest social ladder was Collis Potter Huntington, best remembered today as the founder of the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads. Born in Poverty Hollow, Connecticut, west of Hartford, Huntington began his career as a peddler of clocks, watches, silverware, needles, knives, combs, and other Yankee notions that he had packed into two tin boxes two feet long and sixteen inches deep. It was during those early years of hawking and haggling that the future robber baron would hone his skills of profiteering. “These travels gave him an idea of the topography of the land that later helped him in his railroad developments,” writes Richardson Wright in Hawkers and Walkers in Early America.7
These sweet-talking Yankee peddlers, who also went by the term chapmen, were the lifeblood of early America, moving the goods around before mass transportation was even conceivable. But their craftiness gave them quite a reputation as well as a unique place in the American cultural imagination. As J. R. Dolan puts it in The Yankee Peddlers of Early America, “In the eighteenth century he was considered a rascal, in the nineteenth he was thought to be a cheat: he was sharp, crafty, mean, and always on the lookout for a chance to make a shady deal,” while in the early twentieth century he was symbolized by the crooked, ersatz bandleader Harold Hill in The Music Man.8 In the South, long before the atrocity committed by General Sherman and his army of bluecoats, Damnyankee had already become one word, without a hyphen, in the Southern lexicon, thanks to these creative peddlers from New England. Timothy Dwight, the stalwart—some might say uptight—president of Yale, had some harsh words reserved for these peddlers, most of whom were about the same age as the Yale students under his charge: “Many of these young men employed in this business, part at an early period with both modesty and principle. Their sobriety is exchanged for cunning, and their decent behavior for coarse impudence. . . . No course of life tends more rapidly or more effectively to eradicate every moral feeling.”9
In fact, Yankee peddlers were almost synonymous with humbuggery or huckstering. Sam Slick, one of the first humorous figures in American literature (though invented by a Canadian), is a Connecticut clock peddler, and his name says it all about his character, as does his fictional hometown, Slicksville. In Washington Irving’s timeless tale about Rip Van Winkle, when the henpecked protagonist wakes up from his twenty-year slumber in the Catskills and returns home, he learns to his relief that his wife died years earlier. His daughter, now a mother with a nursing baby, tells the Dutchman of the peculiar manner of his wife’s passing: “She broke a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New England peddler.”10 Nathaniel Hawthorne was both annoyed and amused by the peddlers who pestered graduates and guests at the Williams College commencement in 1838:
The most characteristic part of the scene was where the peddlers, gingerbread-sellers &c were collected, a few hundred yards from the meeting-house. There was a peddler there from New York, who sold his wares by auction; and I could have stood and listened to him all day long. Sometimes he would put up a heterogeny of articles in a lot—as a paper of pins, a lead pencil, and a shaving box—and knock them all down, perhaps, for ninepence. Bunches of lead pencils, steel pens, pound cakes of shaving soap, gilt finger-rings, bracelets, clasps, and other jewelry, cards of pearl buttons, or steel . . . bundles of wooden combs, boxes of loco-focos [matches], suspenders &c, &c &c—in short everything—dipping his hand down into his boxes, with the promise of a wonderful lot, and producing, perhaps, a bottle of opodeldoc [liniment], and joining it with a lead pencil.11
Perhaps the only honest, albeit exotic, salesman portrayed in American literature of that period was Herman Melville’s Queequeg, the heavily tattooed and tomahawk-wielding cannibal who arises from the South Seas to peddle embalmed human heads in New England. As the innkeeper Peter Coffin tells Ishmael, “He’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night, cause tomorrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about the streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions.” The Polynesian giant, it turns out, is a generous soul who does not care a farthing for money and has quite a potlatch mentality like the Indians, prompting Ishmael to declare, “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”12
Exotic and colorful like Queequeg, the Siamese Twins were also, in the loosest but best sense, peddlers. They did not just market their oddity—as Peter Coffin put it, “a great curio”—but they also literally sold merchandise on the side: Cuban cigars, lithographic portraits, and biographical sketches. So it is not surprising that one day, when they tried to quit showbiz and settle down, they would first choose to run a general store as a way to make a living, a career option that seemed inspired by their early years of peddling both as duck farmers in Siam and traveling salesmen on the American roads.
Besides Yankee peddlers, the roster of Chang and Eng’s fellow travelers on the open road also included itinerant preachers. As early as the First Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century, Puritan ministers like Jonathan Edwards—perhaps not surprisingly, a native of Connecticut—would head out on horseback and give sermons along the circuit. In 1738, George Whitefield would go from Savannah, Georgia, to Boston, drawing crowds as large as thirty thousand, before moving on to Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania before heading South again. During the Second Great Awakening, which coincided with America’s fast expansion into the wilderness, various churches sent hundreds of traveling preachers to save souls in newly settled areas. Facing practical issues of surviving on the frontier, many of these gospel peddlers also moonlighted, preaching on Sundays and doing productive work on weekdays—carpentry, tailoring, doctoring, and whatnot. Such a dual career sometimes made it hard to distinguish the clergymen from those whose chosen trade required constant itinerancy on the American roads and backwoods trails: blacksmiths, silversmiths, clockmakers, doctors, repairmen, dentists, artists, and more. Another quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who also had wandered during 1837 and 1838, might suffice to illustrate how things got done on the road:
30th July [1838]. Remarkable character.—A traveling “Surgeon Dentist,” who has taken a room here in the North-Adams House, and sticks up his advertising bills on the pillars of the piazza, and all about the town. He is a tall, slim young man, six feet two, dressed in a country-made coat of light blue (taken, as he tells me, in exchange for dental operations) black pantaloons, and clumsy cow-hide boots. Self-conceit—very strongly expressed in his air; and a doctor once told him that he owed his life to that quality; for, by keeping himself so stiffly upright, he opens his chest, and counteracts a consumptive tendency. He is not only a dentist—which trade he follows temporarily—but a licensed preacher of the Baptist persuasion; and is now on his way to the West, to seek a place of settlement in his spiritual vocation.
Habitually curious about human affairs and as insightful about the foibles of humans as any American writer, Hawthorne wrote again in his journal a few days later:
Scenes and characters—A young country fellow, twenty or thereabouts, pained with a toothache. A doctor, passing on horseback, with his black leather saddlebags behind him, a thin, frosty-haired man. Being asked to operate, he looks at the tooth, lances the gum; and the fellow being content to be operated upon on the spot, he seats himself in a chair on the stoop, with great heroism. The doctor produces a rusty pair of iron forceps; a man holds the patient’s head. . . . A turn of the doctor’s hand; the patient begins to utter a cry; but the tooth comes out.13
One such itinerant dentist was Charles Willson Peale,
who had been a traveling portrait painter, coach-maker, silversmith, saddle-maker, taxidermist, and veterinarian before founding the first public museum in Philadelphia in 1786. Given how polymath these traveling professionals were, it is easy to imagine the excitement they caused when they appeared on the village green of an isolated hamlet and opened a pack full of notions, Yankee or not—their often-tarnished reputations notwithstanding.
Nor should we forget the horse-mounted judges who meted out justice and maintained the rule of law. With the settlements of the still-inchoate democracy so far-flung, the American judiciary system, first created in 1789, divided the country into the Eastern, Middle, and Southern Circuits. The justices on these circuit courts had to travel around to hear cases, and most had to spend half a year on “circuit riding.” Judge William Cushing of the Eastern Circuit, for instance, would ride around in a four-wheeled phaeton drawn by a pair of horses. According to Richardson Wright, Cushing’s was an ingenious equipage, “for the justice enjoyed his comforts and relished the pleasures of the table, and had the carriage built after his own design with storage spaces for books and choice foods. A jet black and faithful negro servant rode behind and gave the requisite touch of dignity to His Honor’s peregrinations.” The honorable judge would also bring his wife along on the circuit, so that she could read aloud the law books for him. Less pretentious justices without the benefit of phaetons would simply ride their circuits on horseback. Justice Pinckney of Charleston, for example, would start out early each morning and consult with clients and lawyers en route. “As they rode side by side he would listen to their case. If he had to give an opinion, he always made it in writing and cautiously endorsed it as ‘given on circuit,’ since he had no law books with him to consult.” And that was how the colorful term horseback opinion came about.14
As the country mushroomed, Congress regularly had to expand and reorganize the system of judicial circuits, increasing the number of circuit courts to six in 1801, seven in 1807, and nine in 1837. The swelling roster of circuit judges made them more ubiquitous figures on the road. In the Middle West, they usually traveled by horseback. As one historian put it, “The years when Abraham Lincoln rode the circuit in Illinois form a definite and picturesque phase of his life.”15
These, in addition to singing masters, clockmakers, tinsmiths, wheelwrights, healers, quacks, dancing teachers, portrait painters, handwriting instructors, silhouette cutters, mesmerizers, and, one day, as we shall see, phrenologists, were some of Chang and Eng’s colorful fellow travelers on the American road.
Notwithstanding the fractious political discord and the controversies over the role of a centralized bank, Chang and Eng in the fall and early winter of 1832 continued to tour a broad swath of areas in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and what is now West Virginia. Not yet at the level where they could afford a luxurious phaeton, they traveled in a two-wheeled gig, drawn by a single horse, followed by a wagon. Like all two-wheelers, a gig had a higher accident rate than the more stable four-wheeled varieties, giving credence to the old saying that “half the coachmen were killed out of gigs.”16 As winter descended, the twins, who already had endured frequent accidents on New England’s icy roads, tried to stay clear of mountainous regions and moved into the flat terrain of the Ohio Valley.
An examination of the twins’ account ledger, kept meticulously in Harris’s neat script, reveals a steady, nonstop itinerancy in those waning months of 1832. After bidding a bitter farewell to Captain Coffin in Bath, New York, the twins moved on to the village of Angelica, at the foot of Bald Mountain in New York, on October 5. The next day, they arrived in Ellicottville, followed by Jamestown on the eighth, Mayville on the tenth, and Westfield, close to Lake Erie, on the twelfth. From there, they nipped the northern tip of Pennsylvania, making a stop in North East, before arriving on October 16 in Ashtabula, Ohio. Venturing south the next day, they reached Warren, Ohio, dubbed “the Capital of the Western Reserve” (and also the hometown of Earl Derr Biggers, the future creator of Charlie Chan). From there, they made a stop at Poland and, according to records, paid a bill of $4.50 to stay for two nights at Mr. Bidwell’s. They also spent $1.25 for washing and $2.37 for fixing the wagon. Sadly, we have no way of knowing whether the blacksmith who mended the wagon was someone hired by William McKinley Sr., father of the future president, whose family ran foundries and shops in Poland and nearby towns.
And so the journey continued.
October 24, Lisbon.
October 26, Mr. Fitch’s at Canfield.
On October 29, Chang and Eng arrived in Youngstown, in northeastern Ohio, and then Salem the next day. While in Canfield, they had left behind a watch and had to pay two dollars to recover it a few days later. The month ended in Wellsville, a hamlet by the Ohio River where, in 1774, a group of Virginia frontiersmen had brutally killed several Mingo Indians at Yellow Creek, triggering the outbreak of Lord Dunmore’s War. On the last day of the month, as usual, the twins paid Charles Harris his monthly $50 salary and the driver, Thomas Crocker, $10.
Traveling southward, the twins arrived in Steubenville, Ohio, on November 3 and paid $5 in town tax. A few days later, on their way from Washington, Pennsylvania, to Pittsburgh, they apparently were ripped off, for the November 9 entry read: “Tax to the Wise Men of Canonsburgh $5.” An equally colorful entry from the previous day read: “To the one eyed nigger at Irons’s $0.50.” It must have been for the black servant at Mr. Irons’s in Washington, where they had spent the night of November 8. They usually paid hotel servants between twenty-five cents and a dollar as tips, depending on how long they had stayed.
Somewhere along the way, their horse Charley took ill. A vet was called, resulting in two related entries in the ledger: “Horse Doctor for Charley $1.50” and “Hire of a horse from Pittsburgh to Burgettstown $4.” Other expenses that regularly show up in the ledger include tolls, postage, candles (spermaceti or tallow), horseshoeing, washing, whips, combs, gloves, horse feeds, cigars (for their own consumption, while those bought at wholesale would be retailed at exhibits), guns, and haircuts. From Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, they made stops in the following places before the end of December: in present-day West Virginia, Wellsburgh, Wheeling; in Ohio, St. Clairsville, Barnsville, Washington, Cambridge, Zanesville, Gratiot, Brownsville, Newark, Granville, and Utica.
Just before Christmas, from December 22 to 24, as young urchins prayed to St. Nicholas, the twins stayed in Mount Vernon, Ohio. They paid $8 in town tax, 75 cents for advertising, $21 for lodging at Plummer’s, and 50 cents for tips to the servants at the inn. Also, the ledger has an entry, “Dec. 24, Expenses at Kenyon College, Gambier, $1.50,” indicating that they visited the college that had been founded eight years earlier to train much-needed clergy. We don’t know what those expenses were for. It could be something they didn’t want to describe, because they were usually very meticulous and exact. They moved on to Sunbury on Christmas Day, after fixing their gig and wagon. On December 27, they arrived in Worthington and spent the last days of 1832 at Colonel Kilbourne’s Inn outside of Columbus, Ohio.
Chang and Eng celebrated the New Year 1833 with a small shopping spree: six silk pocket kerchiefs, $6.50; cigars, 18 cents; a pair of scissors, 30 cents; two pairs of suspenders, $1.75; a pair of Monroe shoes for Eng, $3; and a pair of overshoes for Chang, $3.12. On January 5, they spent $4 on a book and presented it to Kenyon College, where they had apparently made some friends during their visit. Today, this two-volume set of Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, one of Chang and Eng’s favorite books and a popular item on the bookshelves of nineteenth-century households, remains in the Special Collections of Kenyon College’s library.17
The other expense items for those days included horseshoeing, 45 cents; repair for the gig, $2.25; horse doctor, $1.25; cutting hair, 50 cents; tipping a boy, 10 cents; postage, 10 cents; and opodeldoc, 40 cents. It seemed that they were getting ready to open the first show of 1833 and to spend another year on the road, as the ledger indicates:
“Advertising and Printing at Columbus, O. $9” and “Through brace for wagon and other repairs $12.87.”
Despite the acrimony that came to dominate American politics during that era, the Siamese Twins remained strongly in the public consciousness. In fact, during the 1832 presidential campaign, “the Siamese Twins” was an expression dropped freely by Americans as a metaphor for the freakish or anything deemed inseparable. An anonymous “Citizen of Alabama” wrote to the United States’ Telegraph to express his utter abhorrence at the nomination of Martin Van Buren to succeed John Calhoun as the vice-presidential candidate. That nomination speech, so opined the Southern gentleman, “may fairly be viewed as a mental lusus! It leaves the Siamese Twins far behind.”18 In a marathon speech on the general pension bill in April, Congressman Warren R. Davis of South Carolina insisted that the chain of measures in the proposed legislation was “connected as indissolubly as the Siamese Twins.”19 Even though they had been traveling in backwoods areas rather than in the more metropolitan centers in the Northeast, the twins were very much on the mind of Americans.
