In February, 1836, Barnum’s brother sent a message to the boarding house in New York, which Mrs. Barnum was still operating, that Joice Heth, who had been resting at Bethel after an illness, was dead. The body was sent to Barnum in New York. He called upon a well-known New York surgeon, who had once expressed a desire to hold a post-mortem examination of Joice Heth, if she should not prove to be immortal. The body was dissected before a large and distinguished company of doctors, clergymen, and editors, and the operating surgeon found an absence of ossification of the arteries in the region of the heart, leading him to the opinion, he told Barnum and Levi Lyman privately, that Joice Heth was probably not more than eighty years old. Thus with a few strokes of a surgeon’s knife were dispelled all the eye-witness stories of the birth and youth of George Washington, and apparently the surgeon did not keep his opinion private, for _The Sun_ on the day following the operation printed the story of the dissection and accused Barnum of fraud in Joice Heth’s age. Levi Lyman, interested in playing jokes on editors, then called upon James Gordon Bennett, and told him that as a matter of fact Joice Heth had never died, that she was still living in Connecticut, and that the dissection had been performed on the body of an old Harlem negress. Bennett was thankful for the story and printed these revelations in full. When his story was emphatically denied by the surgeon, Levi Lyman offered to give the editor the real inside history of Joice Heth. He told Bennett that Barnum had invented Joice Heth’s background and had taught her the hymns and instructed her in the George Washington family history. Bennett printed this account, and that story was generally accepted thereafter as the truth about Joice Heth. Barnum himself never denied any of these stories until twenty years later, when in his first autobiography he told the facts as they have been presented here. Barnum inaugurated then a policy which he maintained throughout his long public career, namely, never to contradict any implication, nor to protest against any epithet. When people read that Joice Heth was a fraud perpetrated upon their credulity by Barnum, what must have impressed them most in the controversy was Barnum’s cleverness, and it was for the general propagation of this impression that he was striving always. “... Never, until the present writing,” he said in his autobiography, “have I said or written a word by way of contradiction or correction. Newspaper and social controversy on the subject (and seldom have vastly more important matters been so largely discussed) served my purpose as ‘a showman’ by keeping my name before the public.” Joice Heth was buried respectably at Bethel, Connecticut. She must be regarded as one of the most interesting of Barnum’s ventures, not only because she was the first of her kind, but because of his unique exploitation of