The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 16

Reconnecting America: P.T. Barnum
Following the Civil War, two
uniquely American elements carried
the country into the Gilded
Age and the beginning of the twentieth
century: P.T. Barnum’s Greatest Show
and the Transcontinental Railroad.
While England’s Philip Astley is credited
with founding the modern circus
and bringing some of his acts to the
United States in the later 1700s, the father
of the modern American circus is
Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–1891).
His original American Museum flourished
during and after the Civil War despite
multiple fires destroying much of
his curiosities. Barnum took to the rails
with his extravagant showmanship and
a circus of animals and actors, which he
marketed as family-friendly and educational.
Barnum began using the newly
finished Transcontinental Railroad in
1872, a ribbon of iron that stretched
from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean,
and for the first time, connected America’s
east and west coasts.
The completion of the railroad
known as the Pacific Railway revolutionized
the country’s economy and
culture during Reconstruction. It not
only provided more efficient means of
transporting goods and people around
the country, it physically connected a
nation that was struggling to reunify itself
after secession and civil war. When
the Golden Spike was pounded into the
ground to signal the completion of the
Pacific Railway, the United States was
in the middle of an era of redemption
and rebirth that saw the country wanting
to rebrand itself as a progressive,
technology-driven Western country.
Reconstruction and the later years of
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