The Exploited Life Of Joice Heth
By February 21, 2022
Joice Heth, a black slave, was well into old age when she was purchased by the Greatest Showman in 1835 but nowhere near as old as he claimed she was. In fact, he presented her as not only a miraculously living 161-year-old woman but a former nursemaid to the father of the nation. Even when Heth died a year later, Barnum wasn't done with her.
Joice Heth
Not a lot is known about Joice Heth's life before she became a public figure. Most likely, she was born in 1756, and she told people that she lived in Madagascar prior to her capture, but we have to take her word for it, and she wasn't exactly a reliable narrator. What is known is that in 1835, Heth was in her golden years, nearly blind, and partially paralyzed when her owner, a Kentuckian named John S. Bowling, sold her to two promoters, R.W. Lindsay and Coley Bartram, who he met in Louisville. Lindsay was the one who invented the claim that Heth had worked as a nanny for George Washington, necessitating the near doubling of her age, and Heth either played along or had dementia to the point that she herself believed the lie. Whatever the case, she delighted in telling stories of "my Georgie" to her audiences.
P.T. Barnum And Joice Heth
Despite their incredible claim, Lindsay and Bartram had little success peddling Heth around Louisville, so they sold her to P.T. Barnum. Heth was actually his first exhibition, but Barnum was already a master of marketing and showmanship. He further embellished her history, claiming she nursed the future president from her own body and was the first person to diaper and clothe him, and presented a document (either forged or coincidentally referring to a different slave of the same name) purporting that Augustine Washington, George's father, had owned a 54-year-old slave named Joice Heth in 1727 to back up his story. Barnum exhibited Heth throughout the United States, and wherever he went, he convinced local newspapers to run Heth's unbelievable biography.
Unfortunately, his success was short lived. Joice Heth was already frail and in poor health when Barnum purchased her, and she died of natural causes on February 19, 1836, but Barnum wasn't ready to disembark his gravy train. He sold about 1,500 tickets for 50 cents each to a public autopsy of Heth on the pretense of proving she was in the latter half of her second century when she died, but Dr. David L. Rogers announced that she was, in fact, about 80 years old. Barnum quickly changed course, insisting that Heth was actually alive, well, and on tour in Europe and the body examined by Dr. Rogers was a ringer, and boy, did he fool you, but the public finally started to suspect there was something fishy about Barnum's story. He was eventually forced to admit that it was all a hoax.
