The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  A month after the trial concluded, Marshall Clemens surrendered all his property to his creditors. Yet in the fall of 1844 the voters of Marion County elected him a justice of the peace. Sam thought, or so he wrote in Life on the Mississippi, that his father in this august office “possessed the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended him.” In fact, the job provided a meager income, barely adequate to provide for his family, and required him to enforce the local ordinances regarding slaves and free blacks. Specifically, no freedman could live in Hannibal without a license; any unlicensed black person without proof of freedom could be arrested and jailed as a runaway slave; any black person on the streets of the village after nine in the evening without a pass was subject to a fine; and blacks were not allowed to assemble at night without permission from the mayor. As justice of the peace, Marshall once found a slave guilty of insolence and ordered him “to receive twenty lashes at the hands of the constable.” Though Sam asserted in 1885 that he had once heard his father say that “slavery was a great wrong” and that he would have freed Jenny “if he could think it right to give away the property of the family when he was so straitened in means,” this memory seems to be what Dixon Wecter calls an “act of filial whitewashing.”19 Even after Marshall sold Jenny he continued to lease slaves.

  In fact, he was never one to spare the rod and spoil the child, especially a slave child. He was known locally as “a severe disciplinarian.” That is, Sam grew up in a home over which the specter of physical punishment always loomed. Orion bitterly remembered as late as 1873 the frequency of “my father’s reprimands,” and on his part Sam recalled, “My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.”20 Years later he joked, “I somehow didn’t like being round him when I’d done anything he disapproved of,” as when Sam stowed away on a steamboat. He was discovered before the boat landed in Louisiana, Missouri, twenty-five miles downriver. “I was sent home by some friends of my father’s,” he later explained, and his father “met me on my return.” Years later, in a magnanimous mood, Sam claimed that his father had “laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life”—once presumably for hiding on the boat, the other time for telling him a lie—“which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort. He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless [leased] slave boy . . . for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses.”21

  In the manuscript of this reminiscence Sam had originally written “lashed” instead of “cuffed,” but when his wife Olivia read the manuscript she glossed in the margin, “I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy.” Sam responded by changing the word: “it’s out, and my father is whitewashed.” But the revision could not obscure the fact that Marshall Clemens was a stern master. On another occasion, after Jenny grabbed a whip from the threatening hand of Jane Clemens, he punished her by binding her wrists with a bridle rein and flogging her with a cowhide. Sam explained that his father “had passed his life among slaves from his cradle” and “acted from the custom of the time, not his nature.” As Arthur G. Pettit adds, “For a man who thought slave cruelties in Missouri were rare, [Sam] remembered quite a few of them.”22

  In 1843, seven-year-old Sam Clemens spent the first of five summers with his mother, sister Pamela, and brother Henry at Patsy and John Quarles’s farm northwest of Florida. Soon after Marshall Clemens left Florida in despair, Uncle John had bought an additional 230 acres of farmland four miles from the village and built a two-story, four-room log house. The Quarles’s farm became the model for the Phelps farm in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), as well as a homestead in the fragment “Tupperville-Dobbsville” (ca. 1876–80). As Huck describes it, it was

  one of these little one-horse cotton plantations, and they all look alike. A rail fence round a two-acre yard; a stile made out of logs sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a different length, to climb over the fence with, and for the women to stand on when they are going to jump on to a horse; some sickly grass-patches in the big yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the nap rubbed off; big double log-house for the white folks—hewed logs, with the chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud-stripes been whitewashed some time or another; round-log kitchen, with a big broad, open but roofed passage joining it to the house; log smoke-house back of the kitchen; three little log nigger-cabins in a row t’other side the smoke-house; one little hut all by itself away down against the back fence, and some outbuildings down a piece the other side; ash-hopper and big kettle to bile soap in by the little hut; bench by the kitchen door, with bucket of water and a gourd; hound asleep there in the sun; more hounds asleep round about; about three shade trees away off in a corner; some currant bushes and gooseberry bushes in one place by the fence; outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch; then the cotton fields begins, and after the fields the woods.

  The farm “was a heavenly place for a boy,” Sam remembered in his autobiography.23

  There slavery existed in perhaps its most benign form. His aunt and uncle apparently never sold a slave, and Sam insisted in later years that he never saw one “misused” on their farm. According to census records, they owned six slaves in 1840 and eleven in 1850, including Aunt Hannah, “a bedridden white-headed slave woman whom we visited daily and looked upon with awe,” and Uncle Dan’l, the original of Uncle Dan’l in The Gilded Age, Dan’l in The American Claimant (1892), and Jim in Huck Finn and several Tom/Huck sequels. Sam allowed in his autobiography that he had “staged him in books under his own name and as ‘Jim,’ and carted him all around—to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon” in Tom Sawyer Abroad. Sam remembered to the end of his life the evenings he spent in the slave quarters on the farm with his Quarles and Lampton cousins and the slave children. He heard from Uncle Dan’l the story “The Golden Arm,” which years later he sometimes performed onstage. He learned, too, the Negro spirituals that he often sang for his family in later years. From these songs he gleaned the impression, as he reminisced in The Innocents Abroad (1869), “that the river Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide.” In 1881 he reminisced in a letter to Joel Chandler Harris about the “impressive pauses and eloquent silences” in Uncle Dan’l’s delivery,24 and he remembered in 1907 “the look of Uncle Dan’l’s kitchen as it was on privileged nights when I was a child and I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear, and I can hear Uncle Dan’l telling the immortal tales.”25 At the Phelps farm, too, Sam “gradually absorbed” the “different dialects” spoken by the slaves, “who had been drawn from two or three States.” He would exhibit his gift for dialect thirty years later by recreating seven nuanced ones in Huck Finn.26

  The color line was not entirely erased there, however. Given the strict social customs of the time, Sam could mingle with slaves more readily and informally on the farm than in the village. But the white children alone attended a country school three miles away once or twice a week in the summer, and even as a child Sam intuited a difference between white and black: “We were comrades and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” Still, “it was on the farm that I got my strong liking” for the African race “and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities,” he remarked in his autobiography. “This feeling and this estimate have sto
od the test of sixty years and more, and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then.”27 Unfortunately, he overstated his lack of racial prejudice; in fact, he harbored some biases for the rest of his life. He may have been a nineteenth-century progressive on issues of race, but Sam was nevertheless more a creature of his own time than of ours.

  Back in Hannibal in the fall of 1843 young Sam was exposed for the first time to the murderous violence that was all too common in frontier towns. On September 4, a local farmer named James McFarland was stabbed through the heart in a bar brawl and died an hour later; it was the first recorded murder in the history of Hannibal. McFarland’s body was carried to Marshall Clemens’s office to await an inquest because, as justice of the peace, Sam’s father doubled as the local coroner. As Sam remembered later, he played hooky that day and, to delay the inevitable whipping at home, he crawled in a window of his father’s office to hide. In the moonlight he saw the body and leaped out the window to escape the horror. “When I reached home, they whipped me,” he added, “but I enjoyed it” compared to the trauma he had suffered. He “slept in the same room” with McFarland’s body in nightmares for years to come.28 The story, first recounted in The Innocents Abroad, became a staple in his stage repertoire.

  The nightmares became part of a larger pattern of sleep disorders he suffered his entire life. According to one of his Quarles cousins, even as a child Sam “was a victim of somnambulism” or sleepwalking “and a close watch had to be kept on him to keep him from meeting with some mishap.” He interrupted the comic narrative of The Innocents Abroad to allude, quite unexpectedly, to the night terrors he endured on the “pleasure excursion” to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867: “to bed, with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes up pictures of France, of Italy, of the ship, of the ocean, of home, in grotesque and bewildering disorder. Then a melting away of familiar faces, of cities, and of tossing waves, into a great calm of forgetfulness and peace. After which, the nightmare.” The reference anticipates similar nightmares suffered by characters in The Prince and the Pauper (“Troublous dreams, troublous dreams!”), Pudd’nhead Wilson (“Now what was that dream?”), and other works. “With the going down of the sun my faith failed, and the clammy fears gathered about my heart,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse.” From “the cradle up,” he confessed, he had never been “quite sane in the night.”29

  Two years after McFarland’s death, Sam was privy to the first premeditated murder in Hannibal history. Around noon on January 24, 1845, William Perry Owsley, a merchant and slave trader, killed Sam Smarr of rural Marion County. According to testimony at the trial, Smarr thought Owsley had cheated one of his friends, and he publicly vilified Owsley for several weeks. Owsley confronted him at the corner of Hill and Main Streets, mere feet from the Clemens house, and shot him twice in the chest at point-blank range. A witness testified that after Smarr fell, Owsley turned and walked away. Smarr was carried into Grant’s Drug Store, where he died a half hour later. Sam was among the crowd of villagers who watched him breathe his last. As with the corpse of James McFarland, the death of “poor Smarr,” Sam remembered,

  supplied me with dreams and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture—the great family Bible spread open upon the profane old man’s breast by some thoughtful idiot . . . adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles. We are curiously made. In all that throng of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism and swifter in its atrocious work. In my nightmares I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night.

  He dramatized the incident in chapters 21 and 22 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Colonel Sherburn shoots the drunken Boggs in cold blood. In 1900, Sam wrote a friend that he could not “ever forget Boggs, because I saw him die, with a family Bible spread open on his breast. . . . Boggs represents Smarr in the book.” In fact, Owsley was arrested for murder, and like Sherburn he seems to have defied a lynch mob. In “The United States of Lyncherdom” (written in 1901), Sam remembered that as a boy he “saw a brave gentleman deride” a clique of vigilantes intent on hanging him. That is, in Sam’s imagination Sherburn is an ambiguous figure who both murders an innocent drunk and then boldly taunts a masked throng modeled on the Ku Klux Klan. In any case, as justice of the peace Marshall Clemens was able to turn the gunplay to his advantage. He was paid over fifteen dollars by the county for transcribing legal documents and deposing witnesses.30 Owsley was acquitted at his murder trial in March, but “there was a cloud upon him—a social chill,” Sam remembered. Owsley sold his store on Main Street in May 1849 and emigrated to the gold fields in California the next month, though he returned to Hannibal in 1852. In early March of that year he defaulted on a debt and on March 17 a slave woman he owned hanged herself, apparently because he planned to sell her. The two lots he had put up as collateral on the loan were sold at auction on April 17. Owsley was still buying and selling slaves in Hannibal as late as April 1853.31

  There are three more instances of Sam’s exposure to violence when he was a child. In about 1845, not long after witnessing Smarr’s death, he watched as two young men tried to murder their uncle. One of them held the victim to the ground while the other tried to shoot him with an Allen revolver that repeatedly misfired. The next year, when he was ten (or so he claimed in 1897), he watched in horror as an angry white man flung “a lump of iron-ore” at a leased slave merely for “doing something awkwardly—as if that were a crime.” It crushed the skull of the black man, who died within the hour. Sam conceded that the white man “had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing & somehow wrong.” Nobody in Hannibal “approved of that murder,” he added, and the citizens felt “considerable sympathy” for the slave’s owner, “who had been bereft of valuable property by a worthless person who was not able to pay for it,” but “no one said much about it.” And in August 1847, while swimming and boating with his friends John Briggs and the Bowen brothers on the Mississippi near Sny Island, across from Hannibal on the Illinois side of the river in free territory, he saw the bloated and mutilated body of a fugitive slave named Neriam Todd surface from its underwater grave. Todd had escaped to Illinois, where Bence Blankenship, oldest son of the town drunk, found and fed him instead of reporting him to the authorities and claiming a reward. Eventually Todd was discovered by some woodcutters, who chased him into the swamp where he died, either by drowning or lynching. His body was “much mutilated” when it was recovered.32

  Late in 1843 the Clemens family moved out of the Virginia House and into a small home next door. James Kerr had sold the building lot, about twenty feet in width, to James Clemens Jr. in late October for $330, and Marshall Clemens leased the land from his well-to-do cousin for $28 a year and built on it a white clapboard house, the “Mark Twain Boyhood Home” that attracts tourists to Hannibal to this day.33

  What Sam only half facetiously later called “the turning point of my life”—an outbreak of measles in Hannibal—occurred in the spring of 1844. Nearly forty people died, including seven in one day. Sam remembered, accurately enough, that

  for a time a child died almost every day. The village was paralyzed with fright, distress, despair. Children that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned in their homes to save them from the infection. In the homes there were no cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no singing but of solemn hymns, no voice but of prayer, no romping was allowed, no noise, no laughter, the family moved spectrally about on tiptoe, in a ghostly hush. I was a prisoner. My soul was steeped in this awful dreariness—and in fear. At some time or other every day and every night a sudden shiver shook me to the marrow, and I said to myself, “There, I’ve got it! and I shall die.” Life on these miserable terms was
not worth living, and at last I made up my mind to get the disease and have it over, one way or the other.

  His best friend Will Bowen was bedridden with the illness, which was as contagious as laughter, and Sam snuck into the Bowen house and climbed into bed with him. By the time he was discovered, he was infected, and he was sick for two weeks. But the measles “were not what I expected they would be,” he told an interviewer in 1902; the disease “brought me within a shade of death’s door.”34 He put the incident to good use later in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (1897–1902), in which Tom contracts the measles from his friend Joe Harper exactly as Sam contracted them from Will.