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Role in politics and minstrel shows

Barnum was significantly involved in politics, focusing on race, slavery, and sectionalism in the period leading up to the American Civil War. He had some of his first success as an impresario through Joice Heth, a slave he hired. Around 1850, he was involved in a hoax about a weed that would turn black people white.

Barnum was a producer and promoter of blackface minstrelsy. Barnum's minstrel shows often used double-edged humor. While replete with black stereotypes, Barnum's shows satirized as in a stump speech in which a black phrenologist (like all minstrel performers, a white man in blackface) made a dialect speech parodying lectures given at the time to "prove" the superiority of the white race: "You see den, dat clebber man and dam rascal means de same in Dutch, when dey boph white; but when one white and de udder's black, dat's a grey hoss ob anoder color."

Promotion of minstrel shows led to his sponsorship in 1853 of H.J. Conway's politically watered-down stage version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; the play, at Barnum's American Museum, gave the story a happy ending, with Tom and other slaves freed. The success led to a play based on Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. His opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which supported slavery, led him to leave the Democratic Party to become a member of the new anti-slavery Republican Party. He had evolved from a man of common stereotypes of the 1840s to a leader for emancipation by the Civil War.

While he claimed "politics were always distasteful to me", Barnum was elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as Republican representative for Fairfield and served four terms. In the debate over slavery and African-American suffrage with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Barnum spoke before the legislature and said, "A human soul, 'that God has created and Christ died for,' is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot – it is still an immortal spirit."

Barnum was notably, as a Connecticut state senator, the legislative sponsor of a law enacted by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1879 that prohibited the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception", and also made it a crime to act as an "accessory" to the use of contraception, which remained in effect in Connecticut until being overturned in 1965 by the U.S. Supreme Court Griswold v. Connecticut decision.

Barnum ran for the United States Congress in 1867 and lost to his third cousin William Henry Barnum. In 1875, Barnum as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, worked to improve the water supply, bring gas lighting to streets, and enforce liquor and prostitution laws. Barnum was instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital, founded in 1878, and was its first president.