CONFIDENCE MEN

In "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (1843), Edgar Allan Poe argues: "Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man. . . . To diddle is his destiny. 'Man was made to mourn,' says the poet. But not so:—he was made to diddle. This is his aim—his object—his end. And for this reason when a man's diddled we say he's 'done'" (p. 869). To Poe, diddling is a fundamental human behavior. To be a man is to lie, cheat, steal, and misrep-resent; every man is essentially a diddling confidence man, seeking the confidence of others for his own profit and amusement. Poe exposes the characteristics of confidence men in his definition of diddling and reveals their alignment with antebellum cultural values: "Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin" (pp. 869–870). In many ways, Poe sums up the love-hate relationship that Americans have with confidence men. For confidence men ambiguously represent shared national values. Americans admire success, expertise, and imagination. Americans are trusting and like to be considered trustworthy. But since the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower (1620), Americans have recognized that the devil has been active in the New World. And the problem of ascertaining identity—especially moral identity and intention—in a landscape without clear markers of class or lineage has become increasingly problematic. Americans want to trust everyone, to believe in the democratic promise that all people are equally good and equally engaged in cooperative and progressive personal and communal development. Americans want to believe in a Jeffersonian meritocracy of good individuals rising to leadership and receiving just rewards. Yet Americans suspect that often within the hearts of strangers (and sometimes within the hearts of close associates) lurks the very devil himself, waiting to spring upon one and rob one of his or her goods and good faith. Americans want to be trusting but do not want to be gulled.

HISTORICAL, MYTHICAL, AND LITERARY SOURCES

The confidence man inhabits a liminal space in American culture between faith and doubt, reality and appearance, truth and falseness. He owes fealty to a myriad of dissembling ancestors, including Hermes, Loki, Coyote, Satan, Till Eulenspiegel, the Elizabethan fool, and countless seducers and conycatchers (swindlers), all of which represent forces of social disorder. His American lineage might seem to begin with explorers' accounts of the New World, for Christopher Columbus, John Smith, and the writers of numerous promotional tracts insisted that their Old World readers have perfect confidence in the unbelievable (and often fictional) wonders of the New World they described. Exaggeration of the bounty of the New World and misrepresentation of the ease of its harvest often went hand in hand with the cardinal motive for exploration and settlement. As William Penn (1644–1718) clearly explained in A Further Account of the Province of Pennsylvania (1685), the enterprise was designed so that "those that are Adventurers, or incline to be so, may imploy their Money, to a fair and secure Profit" (quoted in Wayne Franklin, p. 101).

Despite its Puritan beginnings, the New World was populated by legions of shape-shifters and mischief-makers. William Bradford (1590–1657), who recorded the Pilgrims' struggles at Plymouth Plantation, is certainly disturbed by the presence of individuals who misrepresent themselves, their motives, or what Bradford takes to be God's truth. He comes to believe that John Lyford, for example, is a scoundrel who pretends to be a minister; identity is fluid, and it is impossible at Plymouth to verify or deny Lyford's professional claims (see Bradford, pp. 146–169). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writers from John Winthrop (1588–1649) to Cotton Mather (1663–1728) cataloged the infamous exploits of New World tricksters; Mather, in Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), warns against various ruses of counterfeit priests in the chapter called "Wolves in Sheeps' Cloathing" (chap. 5, 2:537–551).

FROM SELF-PROMOTION TO SELF-CREATION

By the time Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) published his Autobiography in 1791, the line separating historical record from imaginative literature—and absolute morality from moral relativism—had become blurred, the act of writing less a search for God's eternal truth and more a temporal performance of situational morality. Franklin can argue that a minister named Hemphill who plagiarizes sermons is neither a wolf in sheep's clothing nor a confidence man: "I rather approv'd his giving us good Sermons compos'd by others, than bad ones of his own Manufacture" (p. 168). Whether writing as Silence Dogood, Poor Richard, or the hero of the Autobiography, Franklin confidently assumes various fictional personae in the service of doing good, in a style that is at once detached, self-reflexive, and humorous. Franklin points directly to the development of the American confidence man: he delights in self-caricature, viewing the self as a fictive construction; he expresses a new relativism toward morality through humor; he reveals an excitement in the power of language; and he demonstrates the drive to create symbols of national identity.

It is a short step from the image of Franklin leaving his lamp on to give the citizens of Philadelphia the impression that he is laboring far into the night to the popularity of images of the shrewd and shifty Yankee, the wily Davy Crockett, and the boisterous Brom Bones of Washington Irving's (1783–1859) "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Shrewdness and comic detachment are paramount in tales of Mike Fink, Nimrod Wildfire, Sam Slick, Jack Downing, Hosea Biglow, and Major Jones, rough and tumble regional characters appearing in the pages of magazines such as William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times. Sharpers, swindlers, tricksters, counterfeiters, diddlers, and horse swappers overran the antebellum landscape, suggesting that they had humorously interpreted Poor Richard's proverb "God helps them that help themselves" (Franklin, n.p.) to mean that they should help themselves to the wealth of others by tricks, cons, or fast talk. Shifty characters such as Augustus B. Longstreet's horse-swapping Yellow Blossom, Joseph G. Baldwin's "Ovid Bolus, Esq.," George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood, and Johnson Jones Hooper's Simon Suggs dominate the frontier "flush times" and humorously give voice to its contradictions.

THE CONFIDENCE MAN AS A LITERARY CONVENTION

The term "confidence man" first appears in public discourse in 1849 as a description of what the New York Literary World called "a new species of the Jeremy Diddler" (Melville, p. 227). Less than ten years later, in a review of Herman Melville's (1819–1991) novel The Confidence-Man (1857), the confidence man is recognizable as "one of the indigenous characters who has figured long in our journals, courts, and cities" (Melville, p. 270). The confidence man has evolved into a localized American version of the archetypal trickster, a figure that developed through the interaction of fictional and historical sources—witness the cultural prominence of Davy Crockett, who in one tale trades a single coonskin for ten successive bottles of rum and who in reality became a congressman and then a hero martyred at the Alamo, and P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), who promoted scores of self-proclaimed "humbugs," such as the Feejee Mermaid yet who made and lost several very real fortunes—and remains in the American mind as a cultural as well as a literary convention. These blurred outlines have led to differing scholarly points of view. Gary Lindberg in The Confidence Man in American Literature argues that the confidence man is a "covert cultural hero for Americans" (p. 3). William E. Lenz in Fast Talk and Flush Times concludes that the confidence man "personifies the ambiguities of the new country in a non-threatening form" (p. 20). And Kathleen De Grave in Swindler, Spy, Rebel reminds one that confidence women joined the confidence men, "women who used disguise, deception, and manipulation to become human" (p. 245). Despite these varieties of interpretation, clearly nineteenth-century Americans admired the confidence man's intuition, imagination, self-confidence, and inspired smooth talk yet condemned his dishonesty, misrepresentation, self-serving greed, and felonious fast talk. In his popular autobiography, Barnum insisted, "When people expect to get 'something for nothing' they are sure to be cheated, and generally deserve to be" (quoted in Harris, p. 54).

In 1845 Johnson Jones Hooper's (1815–1862) Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs codified the American confidence man in a mock campaign biography that pokes fun at the standard democratic genre of self-promotion as it also suggests that in a democratic society, any man—even the most dishonest—may offer himself for political office. In fact, as Hooper's narrator explains of Simon:

His whole ethical system lies snugly in his favourite aphorism—"It is good to be shifty in a new country"—which means that it is right and proper that one should live as merrily and as comfortably as possible at the expense of others; and of the practicability of this in particular instances, the Captain's whole life has been a long series of the most convincing illustrations. (P. 12)

As articulated by Simon Suggs, the American confidence man abuses the confidence of everyone he meets for personal profit. At the same time, his "snaps" expose a pattern of faith betrayed that mirrors the antebellum cycle of boom and bust. His escapades form a checklist of confidence gambits: Suggs begins playing at cards, then speculates in frontier lands, then impersonates in turn a politician, a military hero, a fearless Indian fighter, and a reformed sinner at a revivalist camp meeting.

In a typical adventure, Suggs travels to a gambling house in Tuscaloosa, where he confidently assumes the identity of one General Thomas Witherspoon, a wealthy hog farmer from Kentucky, who had never been seen by anyone at the gambling hall, including Witherspoon's own nephew. The gentlemen engaged in cards and dice ("a large proportion members of the legislature" [p. 55]) represent the discrepancy between public appearance and private practice; these men are hypocrites and deserve to be conned. By the end of the evening "General Witherspoon" has won and lost $1,500, subjected the general's nephew to a thorough cross-examination to verify the nephew's identity (and thereby his own), borrowed several hundred additional dollars from this nephew, and treated the entire company to a champagne-and-oyster supper on the general's credit, guaranteeing the whole lot by the promise of the general's hogs supposedly arriving to be sold tomorrow.

"Gentlemen," said he "I'm devilish glad to see you all, and much obleeged to you, besides. You are the finest people I ever was amongst, and treat me a d—d sight better than they do at home"—which was a fact! "Hows'ever, I'm a poor hand to speak, but here's wishing luck to you all"—and then wickedly seeming to blunder in his little speech—"and if I forgit you, I'll be d—d if you'll ever forgit me!" (Pp. 66–67)

The narrative dramatizes not only the fluidity of identity but also the mercurial nature of flush-times life. Everyone in Hooper's world is a gambler, tossing the dice in a frenzy of speculation, manipulation, or legerdemain. Legislators, military officers, bank directors, Indian agents, revival preachers, even fathers—all are dishonest. Proven false, they are humorously, subversively, violently fleeced. They will, as Suggs swears, never forget him. And the brilliance of Suggs's performance is that, like thousands of Americans held up as paragons of Franklinian success, he quite literally makes his fortune out of nothing. In a comic form that distances the reader from the rude vernacular action, nineteenth-century Americans admired the skill with which Suggs revealed the greed and desire at the heart of the American Dream.

Herman Melville, in The Confidence-Man (1857), suggests that cynicism and distrust are turning that dream into a nightmare. The avatars of the confidence man have become travelers on a symbolic American ship of fools, the Fidèle. The mute in cream colors sets the novel's ironic tone by writing a slogan on a slate, "Charity thinketh no evil" (p. 2), which is canceled by the barber, who posts his motto at the novel's end, "No trust" (p. 194). Within these parameters the reader is ricocheted between faith and doubt as character after character makes an appeal for confidence that seems legitimate and worthy of trust and then has that appeal narratively undermined as a possible confidence trick. How can reality be determined based solely on appearance? What is an adequate basis for identifying truth and falsehood? Is every appeal for confidence really a confidence game?

The relationship between social history and literary history was especially close in the nineteenth century, as authors such as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Herman Melville enjoyed blurring the distinction between truth and fiction. Popular culture and elite culture often cross-fertilized one another, as witness the almost simultaneous appearance in a New York newspaper and a literary journal of the "confidence man" figure in 1849. Even in these relatively factual, objective accounts, a deep American ambivalence about the need for confidence and the anxiety of distrust is readily apparent.

Arrest of the Confidence Man

For the last few months a man has been traveling about the city, known as the "Confidence Man;" that is, he would go up to a perfect stranger in the street, and being a man of genteel appearance, would easily command an interview. Upon this interview he would say, after some little conversation, "have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow;" the stranger, at this novel request, supposing him to be some old acquaintance, not at the moment recollected, allows him to take the watch, thus placing "confidence" in the honesty of the stranger, who walks off laughing, and the other, supposing it to be a joke, allows him to do so.

( New York Herald, 8 July 1849)

The New Species of Jeremy Diddler

It is not the worst thing that can be said of a country that it gives birth to a confidence man. . . . "That one poor swindler, like the one under arrest, should have been able to drive so considerable a trade on an appeal to so simple a quality as the confidence of man in man, shows that all virtue and humanity of nature is not entirely extinct in the nineteenth century. It is a good thing, and speaks well for human nature, that, at this late day, in spite of all the hardening of civilization and all the warning of newspapers, men can be swindled."

(Literary World, 18 August 1849)

Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, pp. 227–228.

To Melville, the confidence man's humor is at root bitter. His narrator plays a game of fast and loose with the reader, replacing the comforting frame technique of Hooper's humorous snaps with a narrative structure that denies certainty of intention and suggests that all relationships are essentially dishonest. Is Black Guinea a man to pity or a confidence man? Does the man with a wooden leg in fact have a wooden leg? Are these characters deserving of confidence? If they are strangers, how can one tell? Is the agent of the Black Rapids Coal Company trustworthy? How about the man in gray, ostensibly soliciting funds for the Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum? The herb doctor, the Philosophical Intelligence Office agent, and finally the cosmopolitan all perform an elaborate masquerade on April Fools' Day. The purpose of their tricks seems no longer to expose the greedy and unscrupulous in a comic catharsis but to imprison the reader in an elaborate funhouse of distorting cultural mirrors. Melville dramatizes doubts of the American promise of plenty that would soon erupt in the Civil War.

TO THE GILDED AGE AND BEYOND

The Civil War effectively derailed the American confidence man. Humor, detachment, and self-caricature were no longer effective mechanisms to explain or resolve American cultural anxieties. The pursuit of happiness, democratic freedom, rugged individualism, and Franklinian industriousness seemed a vast confidence trick. In the following years, authors including Mark Twain, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Thomas Pynchon, and Louise Erdrich would reimagine the confidence man as trickster, jester, and victim. The confidence man's nineteenth-century masquerade had concluded with the flush times.

See alsoThe Confidence-Man;Humor; Satire, Burlesque, and Parody

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Barnum, P. T. The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. New York: Redfield, 1855.

Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647 byWilliam Bradford. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Knopf, 1966.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of BenjaminFranklin. 1791. Edited by Leonard W. Labaree et al. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964.

Franklin, Benjamin. Poor Richard's Almanack: Being theChoicest Morsels of Wit and Wisdom Written during the Thirty Years of the Almanack's Publication by Dr. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia. Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Peter Pauper Press, 1936.

Hooper, Johnson Jones. 1845. Some Adventures of CaptainSimon Suggs. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature Press/Gregg Press, 1970.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana; or, TheEcclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1698. 1702. 2 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.

Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. 1857. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1971.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences." 1843. In Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.

Secondary Works

Bergmann, Johannes Dietrich. "The Original Confidence Man." American Quarterly 21 (1969): 561–577.

Blair, John G. The Confidence Man in Modern Fiction: ARogue's Gallery with Six Portraits. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979.

De Grave, Kathleen. Swindler, Spy, Rebel: The ConfidenceWoman in Nineteenth-Century America. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

Franklin, Wayne. Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The DiligentWriters of Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: AStudy of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

Kuhlmann, Susan. Knave, Fool, and Genius: The ConfidenceMan as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973.

Lenz, William E. Fast Talk and Flush Times: The ConfidenceMan as a Literary Convention. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985.

Lindberg, Gary. The Confidence Man in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Maurer, David W. The American Confidence Man. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1974.

Wadlington, Warwick. The Confidence Game in AmericanLiterature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.

William E. Lenz