For two weeks Sam rode a recalcitrant yellow mule, named Paint Brush for his stubby tail, and tried to stay dry. In the words of Thomas Paine, he was a “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” who was inconvenienced by the heat and humidity. Every time he mentioned his wartime experience in later years, he treated it as a lark, as though it were a mere adventure of Tom Sawyer’s Gang. Walt Whitman famously declared that “the real war will never get in the books,” and this statement is especially true of Sam Clemens’s books. He trivialized the war in his writings when he did not simply ignore it. As Cox notes, in The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), Sam’s first two major works, “there is hardly a mention of the Civil War; it remains the blank space between the books, and there is no reference to Mark Twain’s having served. What Samuel Clemens had succeeded in inventing was a ‘Mark Twain’ who could in turn forget the Civil War.” The strategy worked: his reputation survived despite the criticism he received from both Southerners (for the brevity of his military service) and Northerners (for serving on the wrong side). But make no mistake: the Marion Rangers were liable to be shot on sight. If captured, they would surely have been punished, perhaps even executed. The Union general John Pope ordered the confiscation of property of those who aided or abetted the Missouri militias—that is, Sam Clemens risked life, liberty, and property at the outbreak of hostilities, but it is impossible to draw this conclusion from anything he wrote about the war.8
To judge from Sam’s occasional comments about these two weeks, the Marion Rangers engaged in no military maneuvers except retreating along the Salt River. The way he tells the story in “The Private History,” the boys objected even to marching and picket duty. Instead, they reacted to rumors of imminent attacks by Union soldiers in the region by abandoning their positions. “We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another and eating up the farmers and their families,” he wrote, until “I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.” As he told an interviewer in 1895, “I was engaged in retreating the whole of the fortnight. Then my company became so fatigued that we couldn’t retreat any more, and I resigned.” He made a similar joke three months later: “I was very fond of exercise in those days; had to be to keep in health.” But two retreats a day every day for two weeks “was too much exercise. I wanted less violent exercise, so resigned my commission as second lieutenant.” In Following the Equator (1897), he cracked that the orders he gave his men to fall back were intended “to tire the enemy.” And he told an interviewer when he returned to Hannibal in 1902, over forty years after his wartime escapades, that he and John Briggs “were the best retreaters in the company.”9
Twenty years after the end of the war, Sam popularized the erroneous notion that the Marion Rangers had been stalked in June 1861 by Union soldiers under the command of Colonel Ulysses S. Grant. In fact, his working title for the essay eventually published as “The Private History” was “My Campaign against Grant.” By 1885, of course, Grant had retired as commanding general of the U.S. Army and two-term president of the United States and was writing his memoirs for Sam’s publishing house. “I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was myself,” Sam asserted. In truth, the two men missed each other by a few miles and several weeks, but the myth of their near encounter became a convenient untruth. In 1885 he even briefly contemplated writing a Tom and Huck sequel in which the boys and Jim meet Grant in Missouri during the early weeks of the war. With sham bravado, Sam told an interviewer in 1902 that “Grant’s soldiers never showed their faces. They never got that near to us, though I think if they had there would have been trouble. . . . I still think that, if we’d have met Grant and that Twenty-first Illinois Infantry of his, there would have been trouble.” In a biographical sketch he wrote sub rosa with his nephew Sam Moffett, he quipped that he had narrowly escaped “the distinction of being captured by Colonel Ulysses S. Grant” after he “had become ‘incapacitated by fatigue’ through persistent retreating.”10
Unlike an overnight fishing trip to Jackson’s Island, Sam’s two weeks in the militia were an ordeal. Never much of a rider, he developed a boil or saddle sore from hours on Paint Brush. He “had a lot of straw put into the feed trough” in the barn where the boys stayed a few nights, and he spent all of his time lying on it. Then he fell from a hayloft and sprained his ankle. On June 17, the pro-Southern troops under the command of Sterling Price were routed at Boonville, Missouri, forcing them to retreat, thus demoralizing the Home Guards sympathetic to the Confederate cause and precipitating wholesale defections from their ranks—including, as the Hannibal Messenger put it, “quite a number of . . . duped and misguided young men of this and Ralls County.” Louis S. Gerteis, a historian of the Civil War in Missouri, has fairly concluded that Price’s defeat at Boonville “marked the end of orderly recruitment for the State Guard.” The debacle enabled the Union to secure control of the Missouri River, effectively dividing the state and separating the Confederate militias. In late June, moreover, the monsoon season began.11
Worse yet, the Marion Rangers were under the immediate command of General Tom Harris, a former telegraph operator from Hannibal. “He was a townsman of ours, a first rate fellow and well liked,” Sam remembered, “but we had all familiarly known him as the sole and modest-salaried operator in the telegraph office, where he had to send about one dispatch a week in ordinary times and two when there was a rush of business.” Like Orion Clemens, Harris was a Know-Nothing who had supported Millard Fillmore for president in 1856; that same year he opened a Hannibal law and real estate office and was elected Missouri secretary of state. As a member of the Missouri General Assembly in the spring of 1861 he introduced a bill that required “every man of the State to do military duty under the penalty of a fine of one hundred and fifty dollars . . . and every citizen shall be compelled to take an oath of allegiance to the State alone, or be convicted of treason.” When the Rangers learned that Harris was “living on the fat of the land” in a farmhouse two miles away “while we were in the swamp and rain,” they rebelled from the rebellion. They regarded Harris’s neglect of them as “perfidy.” In response, they seceded from the Confederacy and decamped. Skedaddling east, they met Harris and his entourage in civilian clothes because, as yet, “uniforms had not come into vogue.” Harris ordered them back to camp but, according to Ab Grimes, they laughed at his assumption of authority and, according to Albert Bigelow Paine, “admonished him to ‘go there himself.’” He “begged them, but it was no use.” While retreating they passed through Florida, likely the last time Sam ever visited the village where he was born. After reaching Louisiana, Missouri, they scattered to the winds; Grimes refers coyly to their “demobilization.” Sam addressed a formal, albeit undated, resignation letter to John Ralls. Paint Brush was soon confiscated by the enemy and pressed into service, and Sam headed back to his family in St. Louis. Sixty years later, according to one of his friends, he admitted that he had been “troubled in my conscience a little, for I had enlisted, and was not clear as to my lawful right to disenlist.”12
The question of Sam’s military status after the Marion Rangers disbanded has been debated since the publication of his essay about the “Campaign That Failed” in 1885. At least two of his former compatriots served the Confederacy in other capacities. Grimes enlisted in the First Missouri Cavalry CSA and became a celebrated Southern spy. Sam Bowen was arrested by Northern troops in the autumn of 1861 and confined in a military stockade in Hannibal, where he chopped wood until he pledged allegiance to the Union, the so-called big swear, but as pilot of the G. W. Graham,13 a packet captained by his brother Bart that regularly steamed between St. Louis and Memphis, he became a trusted Confederate courier. Sam might have joined the war effort, too, had he been so inclined.
Was Sam Clemens simply a runaway? The question has vexed researchers for years. Among those who charge him with desertion are a formidable array of biographers and scholars, including Louis J. Budd, James M. Co
x, Philip Foner, Joe B. Fulton, Lawrence Howe, Justin Kaplan, Andrew Levy, Jerome Loving, Edgar Lee Masters, Fred Lewis Pattee, Tom Quirk, and Neil Schmitz. Roy Blount Jr. even describes him as “an unrepentant traitor” to both the United States and the Confederate States of America,14 a crime punishable by death. On the other hand, among those who defend him are Terrell Dempsey, Everett Emerson, Return I. Holcombe, Fred Lorch, and Edward Wagenknecht.15 In their view the Marion Rangers were a local militia, a posse comitatus, freely organized and freely disbanded. Sam was never formally inducted into the Confederate Army, so he was at liberty to leave. Harold Meyer negotiates a middle position by concluding that Sam “resigned after the approved French manner.” As late as 1901, in any case, Sam was an apologist for the so-called Lost Cause. “The hearts of this whole nation, North and South, were in the war,” he insisted. “We of the South were not ashamed of the part we took. We believed in those days we were fighting for the right—and it was a noble fight, for we were fighting for our sweethearts, our homes, and our lives. Today we no longer regret the result, today we are glad that it came out as it did, but we of the South are not ashamed that we made an endeavor.”16 Despite his protests, he was on the losing side of the war and on the wrong side of history, and he was occasionally compelled to defend his military record—or lack of one—for the rest of his life.
In June 1857 Orion Clemens finally disposed of his half interest in the Muscatine Journal at auction and sold his print shop in Keokuk, Iowa. Three months later he moved to Jamestown, Tennessee, with his wife Mollie and their baby daughter Jennie in another vain attempt to sell some of the family land there—a leitmotif that runs through the story of his life. He studied law and was admitted to the bar, but he was unable to earn a living. He briefly returned with his family to Keokuk in July 1858 and soon resettled in Memphis, Missouri, where he opened a law office. In May 1860 he became a Republican Party functionary, campaigning for the party across northern Missouri. Annie Moffett remembered later that she heard her uncle described at the time as a “Black Republican.” He stumped for Abraham Lincoln in northern Iowa during the fall of 1860, and Lincoln carried the state and its four electoral votes. In January 1861, two months after the election and two months before Lincoln’s inauguration, Orion traveled to St. Louis to ask his old friend Edward Bates, the U.S. attorney general designate, for a patronage job. He hoped to become a “third or fourth grade clerk” in Washington, perhaps in “one of the Bureaus of the Department of the Interior” or Department of Justice. As Orion wrote Sam on January 7, “It will be a great advantage to me to get some such office, as I can then support myself and family, which will be a huge gratification, and probably be able to pay some debts, which will also be gratifying.” William McKee of the St. Louis Missouri Democrat confirmed to Bates a few days later that Orion “was in the late canvass an ardent and unflinching supporter of Mr. Lincoln devoting his whole energies . . . to secure his election.”17 On his part, Sam supported neither Lincoln nor Douglas, the Democratic candidate who carried Missouri, but John Bell, a compromise(d) candidate, the last redoubt of the remnant of voters who still believed a Union divided against itself could stand.
Orion soon appealed to R. P. Lowe, the former Republican governor of Iowa, to start a few logs rolling on his behalf. As Lowe wrote Bates from Keokuk on January 24, “I find much pleasure in bearing testimony to the moral worth, integrity and soundness of political sentiments of Orion Clemens Esq. Before his remove to Missouri Mr. Clemens resided 4 or 5 years in this city and proved himself to be a lawyer of fair abilities and unexceptionable habits for industry and morality.” As soon as Lincoln was sworn into office on March 4, Orion again contacted Bates to beg for his help in obtaining a government office “suitable to his degree & qualifications.” On March 12, Bates in turn wrote William Seward, the new secretary of state, entitled to select territorial officials, to urge him to appoint Orion to the position of “Secretary of a Territory—any Territory except Utah.” He added that Orion
was bred a printer—I knew him in his apprenticeship—a good boy, anxious to learn, & using all means in his power to do so. He edited a newspaper in a country town of Mo., with fair success. Studied law, & practiced for several years, in N.E. Mo. His success as a lawyer was not great, chiefly, I am told, because his politics did not suit his locality. He was a Whig, but joined the Republicans, & that, while it was honest & manly, subjected him to an opposition amounting almost to persecution. I consider him an honest man of fair mediocrity of talents & learning—more indeed of both than I have seen in several Territorial secretaries. Without being very urgent with you, I commend Mr Clemens to you as a worthy & competent man, who will be grateful for a favor.
Seward appointed his own former presidential campaign manager, James W. Nye, a former president of the New York Metropolitan Board of Police and a creature of Tammany Hall, to the governorship of Nevada. As Sam recalled in his autobiography, Nye was
an old and seasoned politician from New York—politician, not statesman. He had white hair; he was in fine physical condition; he had a winningly friendly face and deep lustrous brown eyes that could talk as a native language the tongue of every feeling, every passion, every emotion. His eyes could outtalk his tongue, and this is saying a good deal, for he was a very remarkable talker, both in private and on the stump.
Sam’s friend Frank Fuller was more blunt: Nye was a “fat, vulgar, profane fellow whose colloquialisms were tainted with obscenity.” Still, the governor acquiesced to the appointment of Orion as territorial secretary. Lincoln nominated Orion on March 26, and he was confirmed pro forma by the U.S. Senate the next day. The job paid eighteen hundred dollars per year in greenbacks, less than the salary of a well-paid schoolteacher or parish minister. Orion had difficulty persuading friends to pledge the money to secure his ten-thousand-dollar bond, however, and he had no money to pay to travel to his post. He appealed through Seward to the Treasury Department to advance him his first quarter’s salary—or even his first two quarters’ salary—so that he could take his wife and daughter with him. But the petty/petit bureaucrats in Washington either ignored or denied his request.18
On July 2 Orion finally received his instructions and a notice that his bond had been filed. On July 4, the same day that Governor Jackson called for fifty thousand more troops to expel the Union invaders from eastern Missouri, Orion arrived in St. Louis to bid his family farewell before he left for Nevada—though he was still unsure how he would finance his passage. As Mollie Clemens noted in her diary, he soon “prevailed upon his brother Sam to go to his new home with him.” While Orion had been instructed by the State Department that “as a general thing” the territorial secretary should “in person perform all the duties pertaining to his office,” he was authorized to hire a “messenger or porter at a small compensation during the Session of the Assembly” and, if necessary, acquire “additional help—on a scale and at a rate as reasonable as the exigency demands.” Orion hired his unemployed brother as his personal secretary on the condition that Sam pay their travel expenses to Carson City. Sam, who had saved nearly a thousand dollars during his months on the river, agreed. When Orion “offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him,” he wrote in Roughing It, “it appeared to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll!” Much as Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) escapes from slavery by rafting south, Sam fled impressment in the war by scurrying west. In effect, he wished a plague on both halves of the house divided. The war “was supposed to last for just three months,” he remembered in 1895, so he declared a separate peace, “took three months’ holiday” and, like Huck Finn at the close of the book that recounts his adventures, lit out for the Territory.19
CHAPTER 7
The Mines
Those were the days!—those old ones. They were so full to the brim with the wine of life; there have been no others like them.
—Samuel Clemens to Ro
bert Fulton, May 24, 1905
SAM CLEMENS WAS raised to the rank of Master Mason in the Grand Lodge of St. Louis on July 10, 1861, and his brother Orion was sworn into office by a federal judge the next day. On July 18, two days after the First Battle of Bull Run in Virginia, they headed west aboard the decrepit packet Sioux City for the six-day trip to St. Joseph, some two hundred miles away on the western border of Missouri. Sam expected to return to Missouri soon after his holiday. “I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business,” he reminisced in chapter 1 of Roughing It (1872). The voyage up the Missouri River “was so dull, and sleepy, and eventless” that it “left no more impression on my memory than if its duration had been six minutes instead of that many days.” Though Horace Greeley had completed the journey by rail across the state two years earlier, before the war, in only twelve hours, the Clemens brothers avoided the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, which would have saved time if not money, because as a wartime asset it invited attack. Upon their arrival in St. Joe, Sam spent four hundred dollars of his nest egg on two one-way tickets to Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory, via the Central Overland and Pike’s Peak Express Company. On July 26, two days after their arrival, they embarked by Concord stagecoach for the Far West.1
The Life of Mark Twain Page 22