In the fall of 1846 a short man with a great reddish-brown beard walked into the phrenology parlor of Fowler and Wells at 131 Nassau Street, New York City, to purchase a phrenological examination. He was barely five feet three and of slight build, but his full auburn beard, his curiously bulging forehead, and his intense, deeply set dark eyes gave him a vividness and dramatic presence that compensated, along with his black stovepipe hat, for his short stature. After the report of the examination was written by Samuel R. Wells, the short man read it with satisfaction and left.

A trip to the phrenology parlor was hardly a rare occurrence in mid-nineteenthcentury America. Nor was it even highly unusual that the short man in the stovepipe hat later published his nearly two-thousand-word phrenological description on the first page of a newspaper he edited. (Walt Whitman was so taken by the report Fowler and Wells wrote on him that he had it bound into early copies of Leaves of Grass.) But this particular visit to the phrenologist is of some interest because the man in the stovepipe hat was no ordinary person—as the phrenologist himself seemed to realize, even though his subject’s name, James J. Strang, meant nothing to him.

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