As a young man, Barnum briefly owned slaves. During a swing through the South in the late eighteen-thirties, he acquired a man and an unrelated woman and her child; then, before heading north again, he sold them. But by the mid-eighteen-fifties, at least on paper, Barnum had become an abolitionist. In a letter dated 1855, he wrote that he had “grown to abhor the curse from witnessing its fruits.” (In the same letter, Barnum claimed to have “spent months on the cotton plantations of Mississippi”; as Wilson notes, this was almost certainly a fabrication.)
Also around 1855, Barnum switched his allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party. During the Civil War, he ardently supported the Union, filling his museum with military paraphernalia and staging patriotic dramas in the theatre. The museum came to be identified with the Northern cause, and when Confederate agents travelled to New York in the fall of 1864, planning to burn down the city, one of the blazes they set was at Barnum’s establishment. (All the fires were quickly put out, and Barnum capitalized on the plot by commissioning a wax figure of an agent named Robert Cobb Kennedy, who was later executed.) As the war was drawing to a close, Barnum decided to run for the Connecticut state legislature, and won. Once in office, he fought to extend voting rights to blacks.
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