The Etiquette ExhibitThe Lost Museum Archive

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper published this detailed account of a young woman’s surprisingly treacherous visit to the American Museum in December, 1843. According to historian Karen Halttunen, such tales of the “confidence man” who seduces an unwitting young man or woman in the city into a life of vice were a staple of antebellum advice literature. In an era when thousands of young people were leaving the familial and religious supervision of small communities for burgeoning, anonymous cities like New York, such cautionary tales functioned both as a pragmatic warning about specific behavior and, in a larger sense, as an expression of fear about the decline of American republican ideals and the future of American society.

In December, 1843, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported the story of a young female visitor to the American Museum who was approached by a strange man there, a man who subsequently followed her home. New proprietor P. T. Barnum—intent on enlarging the audience for his museum by making it an acceptable place of public amusement for middle-class women—was quick to respond. In this letter to the newspaper, Barnum expressed his outrage at the incident and detailed for readers the many ways that the Museum safeguarded its visitors from such “scoundrels.” Barnum took personal responsibility for maintaining “rigid decorum and propriety” at the Museum, keeping it safe for “daughters and wives” to visit often.

In the antebellum era, creating and policing middle-class society was a collective endeavor, requiring both the performance of good manners and the recognition of that performance by the like-minded. This introduction to an 1836 etiquette manual captures the paradoxical nature of middle-class American attitudes toward manners. While an acknowledged method of distinguishing among social classes by excluding some and including others, Americans also saw good manners as an essentially democratic route to social acceptance. This author, identified only as “a gentleman,” argues that the American social system is both more democratic and more exclusive than its European counterparts.

For antebellum-era middle-class urbanites, the rules of conduct for public and private social encounters were complex and precise. This 1836 etiquette manual lays out detailed instructions for managing social interactions in public, describing the intricacies of actions and responses based on gender, social status, and past communication.

These excerpts from an 1855 etiquette manual offer an example of the detailed social proscriptions and rituals that guided middle-class life in the antebellum city. Most of the era’s etiquette advice emphasized the importance of emotional and physical self-control, displays of restraint that would separate the respectable from the uncouth. These selections also reflect the difficulty of maintaining privacy and decorum in crowded city spaces.

This brief article from the “Police Intelligence” section of the New York Herald describes the arrest of William Thompson, whose brazen deceptions ushered the term “confidence man” into the American vocabulary. Historian Karen Halttunen notes that New York City in the antebellum decades was a growing urban society marked by anonymity, confusion, and an increase in movable wealth (such as paper currency). These conditions made possible all manner of frauds, forgeries, and “confidence” schemes like that pioneered by Thompson. According to Haltunnen, police estimated that during the 1860s one out of ten professional criminals in New York was a confidence man.