The Slippery Enchanter of 1876: Charles Barker Nixon

Charles Barker Nixon, an itinerate magician who once styled himself “the Slippery Man,” came to Charleston in the summer of 1876 to present the most elaborate and dangerous illusion of his career. Over the course of a few weeks, this flamboyant, bohemian showman enthralled and terrified the local population by holding séances and speaking of ancient Egyptian prophecies. Nixon’s story is a tragi-comical tale set in the depths of the Reconstruction-era Charleston, about a mysterious enchanter who baffled the nation by charging admission to his funeral and inviting spectators to watch him rise from the grave.

Charles Barker Nixon said that he was born in Glasgow, Scotland, around the year 1830. The date of his emigration to the United States is unclear, but a member of the Charleston press observed that Nixon spoke “in an unmistakably Down East dialect,” a fact that suggests he had spent some significant time along the coastline of New England, especially that of Maine. In the U.S. census of 1870, we find Charles Nixon, a 40-year-old native of Scotland, working as a “corn doctor” (a branch of podiatry) and living in a rented house in Saratoga Springs, New York. His family included Rose Nixon, a 22-year-old native of Maine, and their three-month-old daughter, Emma Nixon, who was born in New York. A few years later, while he was in Charleston, Nixon said that he had performed in Saratoga, so it’s possible that the census-taker in 1870 caught the family in that New York town during a business trip. Nixon also described himself as a veteran of the U.S. armed forces, who was “ready to shake hands and make friends with the Rebs as we used to do in the army.” Nixon was certainly of the right age for service in the Civil War, but I haven’t yet found confirmation of his enlistment, posting, or discharge. 

At some point in his American life, Charles Nixon took to the stage and began a career as a traveling showman. His specialty was, in the broadest of terms, theatrical magic. More specifically, he excelled in the art of illusion, sleight-of-hand, and prestidigitation, using his hands and a variety of props. These talents were apparently dulled by a fondness for the bottle and card games, however, a dangerous combination that likely stunted his career and contributed to his obscurity. In Kennebec, Maine, in late 1874, for example, the local newspaper identified him as “Prof. Nixon, or Jack o’ Clubs, the reformed gambler.”[1] If Nixon the magician was remembered by anyone, however, it was for his talents as an escape artist. Like the famed Harry Houdini, who represented the next generation of professional illusionists, Charles Nixon fascinated audiences by allowing himself to be physically bound by ropes, chains, and handcuffs, and then escaping before their eyes. According to newspaper reports of the 1870s, Nixon excelled in these arts, and his performances were described as being superior to those of the Davenport Brothers, a fraternal band of traveling magicians popular at that time.

Like the Davenport clan and a host of other stage performers, Charles Nixon’s theatrical illusions often exploited the mid-nineteenth-century American fascination with Spiritualism. Beginning in the 1840s and continuing into the twentieth century, Spiritualism was a movement founded on the belief (or marketing premise) that dead people have both the ability and the desire to communicate with the living. Many performers of that era capitalized on the popularity of Spiritualism by incorporating elements of the supernatural into their acts, suggesting that mysterious forces beyond the visible realm were responsible for the dramatic illusions presented on theatrical stages. Such claims were often enhanced by staged séances and exotic props that drew inspiration from the contemporary interest in the cultures of ancient Egypt and pre-Christian, pagan Europe. The romance of the mysterious Gypsy was in high gear and high style. In short, the United States was a great marketplace in the late-nineteenth century if you happened to be a swaggering bohemian magician draped in chains and communicating with the dead.

The earliest record that I can find of Charles Nixon in Charleston dates to the spring of 1874, when he performed at least two one-man shows at the Academy of Music, a post-Civil War theater located at the northwest corner of King and Market Streets. The solo magician advertised himself as “the Great Wonder, Professor Nixon, the Slippery Man,” who promised “to accomplish feats that will throw the performances of the celebrated Davenport Brothers in the shade.” The Davenports were known for escaping from ropes with mysterious supernatural assistance while locked inside a cabinet, but the Charleston News and Courier stated that “Professor Nixon dispenses with the darkness and the spiritual mediums, and unties his knots in the presence of his audience, under the rays of the gaslight.” On stage at the Academy of Music, Nixon allowed two of Charleston’s best nautical knot-tiers to bind him with their best handiwork before he magically slipped from the ropes. He then was suspended by the feet above the stage and escaped from a binding made of fifty feet of chain. He also introduced (but did not describe) a new trick he called “the Mysterious Handcuffing Feat,” from which he promised to escape in full view of the audience.[2]

Beyond a few lines in the newspaper of mid-May 1874, I know of no other records documenting Charles Nixon’s brief sojourn to Charleston, or why he chose to come to this sleepy backwater during the height of our tumultuous era of Reconstruction. Perhaps Nixon had been in Charleston nearly a decade earlier, as one of the thousands of Union soldiers who camped in and around the city at the end of the Civil War. We’ll never know for certain, but, for the purposes of encouraging someone to transform this story into a screenplay, let’s all wink and agree that Nixon had become enamored of the Lowcountry during his stint as a blue-capped soldier in the 1860s. Perhaps he returned briefly in 1874 to test the waters, renew old contacts, and plan for a more ambitious visit in the future. Perhaps the citizens of New York and New England had grown weary of Nixon’s character flaws and had encouraged him to move far, far away.

Fictional hypothesizing aside, Charles Nixon did in fact return to Charleston, in the mid-summer of 1876, along with his wife, Rose, and their six-year-old daughter, Emma. Rather than arriving on a steamboat and checking into a downtown hotel, as most traveling performers did, it appears that the Nixon clan wandered in from the countryside, or perhaps rode the rails, and set up a makeshift camp on the rural outskirts of the city. They pitched a bohemian tent decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphics in a grove of live oak trees near the banks of the Cooper River, at a site just north of Magnolia Cemetery known as Belvidere farm. I know of no records that might tell us how the Nixon family spent their days and nights at Belvidere that July, but we can imagine that they occasionally wandered into the city and made a few friends who might have joined them for a fireside chat under the summer stars. Regarding their activities in the early days of August, 1876, there is just one fact we can know for sure: Charles Nixon carefully dug his own grave and planned an elaborate funeral for the entertainment of Charleston.

On the morning of August 15th, the Charleston News and Courier published a notice that must have caught some readers off-guard while sipping their morning coffee. Under a column of upcoming “Amusements,” the notice read as follows: “To Be Buried Alive, Professor Nixon, the Prophet and Enchanter, on the 28th day of August, at 4 o’clock p.m., at Live Oak Grove, Belvidere Farm, near Magnolia. This strange man will astonish our citizens in his wonderful feat of Life in Death. The Enchanter will be placed in a handsome coffin, put into a grave six feet deep, covered up with mother earth, and after remaining in the grave one hour and a half, his Resurrection will take place.” The price of admission to this fantastic spectacle was fifty cents for adults and twenty-five cents for children—not exactly cheap entertainment in 1876. In advance of the main event, Professor Nixon promised to parade through the city “in his native costume” (a home-made pseudo-Egyptian ensemble) on the Saturday before the event and on the morning of the big show. In the meantime, he explained to the curious public, “the grave and coffin will be on free examination at the grove from [September] the 18th to 26th.”[3]

Nixon’s initial public notice was clearly designed to shock Charleston and to induce readers to wonder aloud in unison: who is this strange man? Anticipating the question, the Scottish-born ex-soldier offered a brief and mysterious answer. “The public question concerning the Egyptian Prophet and Enchanter is, is he a Magician, Wizard, or spiritual Medium? He is a riddle for our medical, professional, and scientific community.”[4] The local press noted only that Nixon was “a stranger to these parts, who has been living in Gypsy style at Belvidere Grove for some weeks, [and] promises to perform rather a novel trick on the 28th instant.” Intrigued by the bizarre advertisement published on August 15th, an unknown reporter ventured up the road to Belvidere to interview the self-proclaimed Egyptian Prophet. On August 19th, the local newspaper printed a brief but valuable summary of their conversation. “He proposes to allow himself to be placed in a coffin,” the reporter stated, [the lid] “screwed down and [the coffin] placed in a grave six feet deep. He will remain there for one hour and a half, and then, by an agency, which he leaves to the public to discover, he will rise from the grave through the soil and make his appearance to the crowd. The grave, which has already been dug at Belvidere, together with the coffin, will be on exhibition until the 25th instant. This is the fourth time that the professor has tried this little trick, and he says that if he fails he hopes that the crowd will be large enough to ensure a respectable legacy to his wife and children.”[5]

Charles Nixon’s “queer and startling advertisement” exited a tidal wave of curiosity through the city and beyond. “The women and children ran nearly crazy over it,” said the News and Courier, “and men offered to bet even that he wouldn’t allow himself to be buried, or three to two that if he was buried, he would never come up out of the grave alive.” Even the New York Times, which had a correspondent in Charleston, picked up the excitement surrounding Nixon’s proposed “entertainment.” In a brief story rife with sarcasm, the Times noted that “the means by which he manages to breathe while six feet underground, and those by which he expects to open his coffin and burrow to the surface are as yet a secret, but after Mr. Nixon shall have patented them, they will doubtless be at the service of every enterprising corpse who is willing to pay the price set upon them by the inventor. It has long been felt by the lovers of funerals that there has been a sad want of economy in using up an entire corpse at each and every funeral. Mr. Nixon intends to show how funerals may be conducted without this lavish extravagance, for in an hour and a half after his funeral he will be ready for a repetition of the whole affair.”

As promised, on Saturday, August 26th, the citizens of Charleston were treated to an exotic parade that succeeded in ratcheting up the anticipation. Nixon dressed for the event in his most outlandish pseudo-Egyptian “toggery, with ear rings in his nose and lips, and other kinds of rings hanging from all sorts of impossible places.” Accompanied by a “dismal” drum and fife band and riding in a “rickety”  baggage cart carrying a banner painted with the phrase, “This man will be buried alive at Belvidere Farm on Monday,” Nixon kicked off the parade at nine in the morning. The ramshackle suite rolled south on King Street all the way to Broad Street, then up East Bay Street to the City Market, west to Rutledge Avenue, and then returned north “to his grave.” “Charleston could scarcely stand it,” said the News and Courier. “People began to handle their silver half-dollars uneasily and to long and pine for Monday to come.”

On the morning of Monday, August 28th, the day of the big event, the self-proclaimed Egyptian Prophet repeated the parade through the streets of Charleston in a final push to stoke public interest in his burial. Nixon boldly invited the mayor, the chief of police, and members of the local press to witness the unusual event. “The operation of the burial and rising again from the grave is a novel entertainment for these parts,” the press reported, “and, as it has something of the awful in its nature, a large crowd of the superstitious will probably be on hand to witness it.” The performance was re-scheduled to commence at 5 p.m., but “as early as three o’clock, the awe stricken multitude began to wend their way to Belvidere Farm, the scene of the prophet’s resurrection.”[6] Fortunately for us, an intrepid reporter from the Charleston News and Courier accepted Professor Nixon’s invitation to witness the performance at Belvidere. At this point, I’m going to let that unnamed reporter narrate the rest of the story with his eye-witness testimony and colorful commentary:

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“The prophet himself was at the entrance of the grounds in a musty Gypsy tent, daubed with hieroglyphics of such diabolical shape as were well calculated to impress the spectators with a sense of the supernatural. For one hour and a half the crowd flowed down the avenue into the grounds, and the prophet continued to scoop in the filthy lucre after the manner of money changers in the temple. By 5 o’clock [there were] between four and five hundred persons, men, women and children, learned men and horse jockeys, bootblacks and butchers. The grave was there—six feet long and six feet deep, apparently freshly dug, and having a very somber appearance. To add to the solemnity of the scene there was the coffin leaning against one of the majestic old oaks, with the lid laid crossways on the head, just as natural as any coffin would look in the chamber of death. It was made of plain pine boards, stained a somber brown, and had a profusion of pewter screw-heads stuck all over it. The interior was lined with cheap paper cambric [a kind of cheap fabric], which, together with the pewter screw-heads, gave it a neat but not gaudy appearance. The grave was surrounded by a rough board fence, about twelve feet long and eight feet wide.

While waiting for the appearance of the prophet the crowd wandered uneasily about the grounds. You may be sure that each one went up to the grave, poked it with a stick, then went to the coffin, examined it, rapped on it, pulled the paper cambric lining out, and then sauntered off, some to take a drink of straight-out and others to think about it. Upon the face of every man you met could be seen a smile of incredulity which plainly said, I’m [damned] if I believe he’ll go down; it’s all a hoax. The crowd now began to show their impatience. The grave had been inspected, the coffin examined, and the matter talked over; but the prophet had not yet been buried, and that was what they had paid their half dollars for. At length, The Prophet put in an appearance. Now, to say that the prophet had a decidedly seedy look would be to do faint justice to his appearance. He looked like the quintessence of ten thousand Micawbers [that’s a reference to the perpetually poor but optimistic clerk in Charles Dickens’s novel, David Copperfield]. Upon his head was a piece of blue paper cambric, from which straggled a couple of strands of black tow, which was supposed to represent Egyptian hair. [Over his blue head covering,] A band of tin encircled the brow of the prophet, and in this was stuck three rooster feathers. Around the professor’s neck hung a string of seedy glass beads. He wore a black vest—seedy—and over it a loose jacket of faded yellow long cloth—seedy. His knees-breeches were cut in a style suggestive of brown paper bags, and were made of faded lilac paper cambric. A pair of whitey-brown hose and a half-worn pair of shoes, completed the costume of the great Egyptian prophet, who, from the time of his first appearance, was sadly chaffed [that is, heckled] by the crowd.

Having inspected the grave and coffin, the prophet requested the crowd to retire to the [nearby] platform, and made several persons get down from the limbs of the trees which overlooked the grave. The request to retire to the platform—[a sort of temporary grandstand] about fifty feet distant [from the grave]—was not complied with. In vain the prophet begged, pleaded, and commanded; his mourners would not budge a foot from the grave as long as the prophet remained there. They were afraid he might slip into it and slip out again without their seeing him. So the prophet then did the best he could under the circumstances. He went there [to the platform] himself, and the crowd of course followed. Then he mounted a stand and made a speech. Thus spake the prophet: “I don’t want the New York Times to say that South Carolinians are disorderly; I want them to see that you are as orderly as anybody in the North.” (It may be mentioned that the prophet spoke in an unmistakably down East dialect.) “I expected to see not less than 8,000 persons to-day to see my trick. At Saratoga I had 8,000 to see me, but I was hired by a party and only got three hundred dollars. Now I am not going to rob you or steal from you. I want you to see my trick and see what you think of it. I don’t want to discredit your intellects, because I think the people of Charleston are as bright and keen as any Yankee. I have myself been in the Northern army, but I am ready to shake hands and make friends with the Rebs as we used to do in the army. I am going to do what I promised to do. You have had from the 18th to the 28th to examine everything and see if there are any air-pipes or air-pumps about the grave or coffin.  I tell you now there are none. But there is a little more at the bottom of this trick which you may learn before I get through with it [emphasis original].”[7]

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With that startling and mysterious statement, I hope you’re sitting on the edge of your seat with anticipation, eager to discover the secret behind Charles Nixon’s death-defying spectacle. Unfortunately, I’m out of time for this week, so I hope you’ll tune in next week, when we’ll see the gravediggers shovel the earth over the bohemian Enchanter and hear the crowd wail in disbelief. Did Professor Nixon arise from the grave and claw his way back to the surface, or is he still planted six feet under the ground at Belvidere farm? What magical powers or supernatural agents did the so-called Prophet summon to his assistance? Next week on the Charleston Time Machine, I promise that all will be revealed.