Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  7 Death on the Mississippi

  “HENRY DIED THIS MORNING,” said the telegram, “leave tomorrow with THE CORPSE.” So wrote a tearful Sam Clemens to his sister Pamela and her husband, Will Moffett, in St. Louis on June 21, 1858. Henry, very likely the model for Sid in Tom Sawyer and possibly a lingering image in Twain’s 1870 Galaxy sketch entitled “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper,” was fatally injured in the explosion of the Pennsylvania on June 13.1 Three days before sending the telegram, Sam had written Mollie Clemens, Orion’s wife, predicting his younger brother’s imminent death: “Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry,—my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. O, God! this is hard to bear.”2 Henry’s violent death on the Mississippi is conceivably the reason Twain waited until the 1870s to use the matters of Hannibal and the River in his work. Indeed, the tragedy actively haunted him as late as 1872, when he visited a spiritual medium in New York City to inquire about his lost brother. In chapter 48 of Life on the Mississippi, he pretended that he had seen the spiritualist about a dead uncle, but the manuscript for this notebook entry reveals that the object of his visit was Henry.3

  Mark Twain told the story of the fight with William Brown and the explosion of the Pennsylvania in chapters 18 to 20 of Life on the Mississippi. During Sam’s second hitch as a cub under Brown on the fated steamboat, Henry Clemens came aboard at St. Louis as third or “mud” clerk on February 17. For bed and board, he ran errands and performed odd jobs. When Brown threatened him with a ten-pound piece of coal on June 3 as the steamboat neared Vicksburg on the way south, Sam allegedly hit the pilot over the head with a heavy stool and continued pummeling him while the steamboat went unmanned. As a result, Sam was barred from returning from New Orleans to St. Louis on the Pennsylvania when it departed on June 9, and Henry made the trip on the boat without him. Henry was completing his sixth round-trip between St. Louis and New Orleans when the explosion occurred at the foot of Bordeaux’s Chute, about sixty miles south of Memphis. (A chute is a passage between a river island and the main shore that is preferable to the open river because its current is weaker and the distance is shorter.) Sam Clemens was following the Pennsylvania by two days on the Alfred T. Lacey, which was itself destroyed by fire two years later. This similarity of fates gives us some idea of the danger on the river and adds a deeper hue to the significance of Huck’s telling Aunt Sally that he was delayed because his steamboat had blown a cylinder head.

  Mark Twain blamed himself for this death, as he would blame himself for other deaths in his family. If he had not hit Brown with a stool in the pilot house on June 3, his brother would not have been without him on the Pennsylvania when the explosion occurred. But, of course, Henry would still have been on the boat when it blew up, just with his older brother, who might have somehow saved him, assuming he could have saved himself. The boat’s entire superstructure, from the side wheels forward, was destroyed by an explosion that sent most of its one-hundredplus fatalities into the air, after which they landed on the boilers. The explosion was probably caused by damage to the boat sustained when the Pennsylvania ran aground during a race with the Duke on June 9. It was later speculated during a formal investigation of the tragedy that the grounding might have led to a separation of the parts of the steamer that supported the five boilers (not eight, as Twain reports in Life on the Mississippi). The accident became even more deadly about a half hour after the explosion, when the boat’s cargo, which included barrels of turpentine, caught fire.

  Hot steam alone was enough to kill anybody. Henry, after evidently inhaling some of it, allegedly dived into the river to make his escape to safety. He “believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!),” Twain wrote in chapter 20 of Life, “and therefore [swam] back to the boat [to] help save the wounded.” In fact, Henry may have been so seriously injured that he never even left the scene of the explosion on his own or tried to save anybody. In his detailed study of the tragedy, Edgar Marquess Branch cites a statement Clemens later made in June or July 1859 in an unidentified newspaper (and recorded in one of Twain’s scrapbooks at the MTP) which suggests that in 1883 Twain was writing more river fiction. The clipping indicates that the location where Henry was sleeping (the explosion took place on a Sunday morning) was directly over the boilers. Henry was evidently thrown skyward, then landed on the exploded boilers with a piece of the superstructure also falling on him. Not yet dead, he was not only burned by the steam but suffered a concussion from the falling debris that rendered him senseless.

  The notion that Henry was heroic in his last moments probably originated in Twain’s imagination from a discussion about steamboat disasters the two brothers had had on the wharf in New Orleans the night before the departure of the Pennsylvania. “We doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic,” Twain wrote in chapter 20 of Life. “Still, they might be of some use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and acted accordingly.” In reality, Henry was probably among the wounded and dying removed in boats before the wreck burst into flames.

  The rescue vessels consisted of the steamboat’s yawl (or lifeboat) and a wood flat brought out to the scene by George Harrison along with his father and two others. The yawl was of relatively little help, but the wood flat accommodated some two hundred persons (out of nearly four hundred on board the steamboat that morning), many of them finding only standing room. Among this suffering human mass was Henry Clemens, who—Twain later wrote in the scrapbook material—“lay exposed (with a hundred others) to the wind and the scorching rays of a Southern sun, for eight hours.”4 As the flaming steamboat drifted downriver away from the large flatboat, Harrison was unable for a long time to bring the flatboat to land because of heavy flooding of the shore area on both sides of the river. The weight of the flat’s load also made it unmanageable, but it was finally rendered stationary. The injured baked in the sun until midmorning, when a skiff from the Arkansas shore arrived bearing linseed oil and liniment, which was applied to the victims’ burns with cotton taken from quilts.

  In early afternoon, they were also assisted by the Imperial, which was headed downriver. For the next two hours this boat lay at Austin, Missis sippi, waiting for a northern-bound boat to take the wounded to Memphis. When the Kate Frisbee arrived to take the injured and dying there, the pilot, William Brown, was not among them. Blown into the river, he was found by a coal boat pilot who had been returning home on the Pennsylvania. Brown’s last words were “My poor wife and children.” Twain reported in chapter 20 of Life that his nemesis was “never seen or heard of after the explosion.” But Brown and Bixby would live forever as the Bad Boy and Good Boy of Mississippi piloting in the works of Mark Twain.

  Sam arrived in Memphis two days after Henry. Henry got to Memphis at three in the morning of June 14. He was among thirty-two victims taken to the Memphis Exchange, where mattresses were spread out and the patients attended to by doctors and nurses. In the scrapbook clipping, Sam wrote that Henry “lingered in fearful agony seven days and a half, during which time he had full possession of his senses, only at long intervals, and then but for a few moments at a time. His brain was injured by the concussion, and from that moment his great intellect was a ruin. We were not sorry his wounds proved fatal, for if he had lived he would have been but the wreck of his former self.” Sam wasn’t doing so well himself. His niece Annie Moffett remembered that he had to be accompanied back to St. Louis (he was eventually coming home to Hannibal with the body). He “was so overcome with grief,” she remembered, “that they were afraid he would go insane.” She added that her uncle was “shadowed for years” by the loss.5

  This tragedy, only the first in a series of calamities to rain down upon this otherw
ise singularly successful American life, had a long-lasting impact on Sam Clemens and Mark Twain. Not only did Twain wait to use his river background in his fiction, but Clemens never returned to the river as a pilot after 1861. He often said that he had wanted to return and that piloting for him would have been the most satisfying career in the world, but he no more wanted to return to the river as a pilot than he wanted to return to Hannibal to live—as an adult. The Hannibal he remembered was gone forever because it was the Hannibal of his boyhood. As he later told Will Bowen’s widow (see chapter 2), he would have liked to relive his youth and then get drowned with his comrades.

  He probably could have returned to the river as a pilot after the war (since Bixby continued in the profession, curtailed though it was by the ascent of the railroad). Few would have known that he had served briefly in a Missouri state militia unit that could—had it survived—have become part of the Confederate army. When the war ended in the spring of 1865, his future as a reporter and certainly as a writer was not altogether bright. Although he had been lauded in the San Francisco Golden Era as the “Washoe Giant” as early as 1863 (while still in Virginia City, Nevada), he did not publish the Jumping Frog story until November 1865 and didn’t become fully aware of his newly won fame until he had traveled to New York in January 1867.6 Living at Angel’s Camp and then in San Francisco on the edge of poverty in 1864 and 1865, he might then—with the war coming to a close—have returned to the river. But he didn’t.

  8 Fetching Grant

  We come now to the question of Sam Clemens’s military activities during the Civil War and specifically whether he was in fact a deserter from the Confederate army. In spite of the numerous biographies and extensive studies of this writer, one of the most remarkable areas of neglect is exactly what he did in the Civil War and why. All we have, it seems, is “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” along with a few other primary sources that contain sometimes conflicting information.1 They suggest only that Clemens served briefly in a state militia informally called the Marion Rangers (so named for Hannibal’s main county) and that the unit disbanded after two or three weeks in June 1861 because of a lack of leadership and the soldiers’ wavering commitment to a wartime experience. As the war raged between North and South, Sam Clemens lived safely outside the war zone, in the territory of Nevada and the state of California, which was as isolated as any territory before the completion of the transcontinental railroad. His letters back home during this period suggest that he tried to forget the war, seldom mentioning it in his extant correspondence.2

  While Walt Whitman, for example, fretted about his soldier-brother after the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Sam Clemens—perhaps having heeded the stories in the St. Louis newspapers about mining discoveries in Nevada—was prospecting for silver in Esmeralda County. By the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, almost a year later, when Whitman in his role as “wound dresser” in Washington was tending to the flood of casualties coming in from the Pennsylvania farmlands, Twain was soon to be dazzled by the serene beauty of Lake Tahoe, then called Bigler. At least six of Twain’s letters are missing from the time of Gettysburg, between June 4 and July 18, 1863, but in the letter of July 18 the subject is not the Union victory in Pennsylvania or even Grant’s at Vicksburg the same week, but his own behavior in San Francisco, where he promises his mother that he is drinking nothing “stronger than claret or lager beer.”3 Otherwise, the subject is his hope for another silver mine claim, this one outside Virginia City.

  Missouri was a slave state, and if its governor had had his way at the outset of the war, it would have seceded and fought for the South; yet this border state was quickly neutralized, and Twain in his “Private History” essay claims that he was in the final analysis “strong for the Union,” or at least not totally invested “in the cause of the Southern Confederacy.” In other words, he was possibly on the “right” side during most of the war, not simply after it, when the winners and losers were known. This is a credible assertion given his brother Orion’s early allegiance to the Republican Party and Lincoln. A recent study has made a probable case for Orion’s influence over his younger brother at least through the 1860s and perhaps until the publication of Roughing It—for which Orion provided valuable recollections of the journey from Hannibal to Carson City in 1861. Yet one has to wonder exactly where young Sam Clemens stood on the issues in 1860, though we surely know of his later position on the awful institution of slavery from “A True Story” (1874) and the ironic denunciation of it in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Unlike Orion, Sam did not vote for Lincoln in 1860 but supported instead the pro-slavery ticket of John Bell and Edward Everett, or the Constitutional Party, which was nevertheless dedicated to keeping the Union intact.4

  It is entirely possible that his two-week enlistment was based solely on personal opposition to the Yankee invasion of his state rather than on the States’ Rights issue of the legality of slavery. Along with pilots Absalom Grimes and Sam Bowen, he was taken by federal officers to St. Louis in May 1861 and confronted by a Union colonel. The three Mississippi pilots were about to be inducted into Union service on the Missouri River. But when the officer was distracted by a visit of prominent ladies, they slipped away and returned to Hannibal to help form the Marion Rangers. Clemens states in the “Campaign That Failed” that he and his military comrades were sworn “on the Bible to be faithful to the State of Missouri and drive all invaders from her soil, no matter whence they might come or under what flag they might march.” Another recent study contends that Clemens did not swear allegiance to the Confederate government, but Twain does state in his military memoir that it was quite clear that they “had been invested . . . in the cause of the Southern Confederacy.”5

  Almost a quarter century later Twain became the publisher of Grant’s memoirs, a business deal that made both author and publisher a great deal of money. This former military deserter—if that is indeed an accurate description of Samuel Clemens in 1861—was even a featured speaker at the gathering of Union officers in honor of Grant’s return from his world tour in 1879, a six-hour orgy of speeches and whiskey that went long into the night. His reports to friends and family of that evening in Chicago are simply ecstatic. There is no evidence of any tinge of guilt for not having served in the war and avoiding most of it, nor any embarrassment whatever about occupying a public stage with these famous military titans of the Union.6

  Six years later he could even make light of his conduct in the war in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” It is as if the mantle of humorist somehow relieved him of the responsibility he had accepted as a Marion Ranger while also bestowing upon him the privilege of sitting shoulder to shoulder with such military idols as Sherman, Sheridan, and Pope, along with the iron man Grant. Twain’s anti-heroic account of his brief military service appeared in Century magazine’s “Battles and Leaders” series in December 1885, a publication that otherwise celebrated military courage and leadership and that to this day is considered one of the outstanding sources for Civil War historians. (Twain’s contribution was omitted from the subsequently published four-volume edition of the series.) The Century editors enlisted not only accounts from the victors such as Grant and McClellan but from Confederate generals such as Beauregard and Longstreet.7 This was the context for Twain’s essential confession of his confusion and fear in the face of the enemy, an admission relieved only in the fictional killing of a mysterious stranger—not the first of such ironic intruders in the writings of Mark Twain. Here he merely embellished an event in which nervous, trigger-happy Marion Rangers open fire in the blackness of night on tall grass or mullein stalks blowing in the wind. There is no such traumatic killing in the Putnam Phalanx Dinner Speech, an earlier version of the “Private Campaign” given in Hartford in 1877.8 There he depicted himself and his compatriots as buffoons in constant retreat from the enemy and focused mainly on the unmilitary behavior of a character called Ben Tupper.

  Perhaps in 1885 Twain felt c
ompelled to publish a more dignified version of the speech, following the death of Grant on July 23 and the deathbed publication of his Personal Memoirs. Now Twain’s military desertion is presented as primarily a reaction to the killing of strangers, war or no war. Justin Kaplan suggests that Twain was intoxicated with Grant’s military courage and saw their friendship as a surrogate for his own lack of valor. (In fact, much of Clemens’s experience as a soldier was too embarrassing to reflect upon accurately: throughout his unit’s skirmishing with a phantom enemy, he suffered from a boil on his backside, was chased by a woman whose husband was fighting for the Union, fell out of a barn onto rocks ten feet below while sleeping and sprained his ankle, and was accidentally set afire by a blaze in the barn.)9

  For someone who didn’t want to be known solely as a humorist throughout most of his career, humor became his suit of armor—not only in the “Campaign That Failed” but also that night in Chicago. Grant, he told both his wife and brother, had sat “like a graven image” through fourteen speeches that evening, “but I fetched him!”10 The speech was “The Babies,” and like the one on women that he had given to a Washington press club years before and was asked to give on this occasion, it toyed with the eminence of its subject without belittling it.