During the nineteen months he was affiliated with the Express Sam contributed over a hundred articles to its pages, including at least thirty-seven anonymous editorials. In addition, he briefly collaborated with Larned on a daily column titled “People and Things,” a potpourri of local gossip that betrayed his continued fascination with human deformity by mentioning circus freaks, a two-headed girl (“she sings duets by herself”), and a dwarf princess. The conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, he observed, “have an aggregate of seventeen children, but most of them belong to Chang, because Eng was absent part of the time.” In a series of eight pieces he rallied to the defense of Harriet Beecher Stowe, with whom he had dined in Brooklyn in January 1868, whose half sister Isabella was one of Livy’s best friends in Hartford, and whose half brother Thomas was the Langdons’ minister in Elmira. Stowe was under fire for her revelation of Lord Byron’s incestuous relationship with his half sister Augusta Leigh, an explosive exposé in the Atlantic Monthly that resulted in significant financial losses for the magazine when some fifteen thousand readers canceled their subscriptions. (Ironically, Harte was the inadvertent beneficiary of the controversy when the owners of the Atlantic hired him to attract new readers and advertisers.) Sam published a satirical ghost story, a pair of essays about his holiday in Niagara Falls with the Langdons, and a comic piece about famous last words (e.g., “It’s on a down grade and I can’t reach the brake”). He contested a proposal to move the U.S. capital to St. Louis and he composed obituaries of his friends Sandy Baldwin and Anson Burlingame. He accused the “pompous and officious” Buffalo city coroner of greed, much as he had excoriated the Carson City, Nevada, undertaker for overcharging for his services after the death of Jennie Clemens in 1862. In an unsigned antilynching editorial, Sam sarcastically condemned lynch law by Southern mobs: “surely there is no good reason why Southern gentlemen should worry themselves with useless regrets, so long as only an innocent ‘nigger’ is hanged, or roasted or knouted to death, now and then.” He assailed the safety record of the Erie Railroad, and he endorsed George William Curtis’s candidacy for New York secretary of state, though Curtis declined the Republican nomination. He chided Cuban patriots for fomenting a type of tin-pot revolution against their Spanish colonial overseers.65
Sam also lifted a joke from A. D. Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi about Horace Greeley’s atrocious handwriting. Richardson had complained about Greeley’s illegible manuscript and illustrated the point with a specimen page of it.
Sam echoed the gag in his “People and Things” column in the Express by observing that Greeley “has been appointed Professor of Penmanship in Union College” in Schenectady, and he plagiarized the joke in his western travel book by reproducing a similar page of manuscript, which he apparently wrote with his left hand on a blank sheet of New York Tribune stationery.
Sam joked about Greeley’s supposedly illegible handwriting in “Private Habits of Horace Greeley” (1868) and “proposed that whenever his proofreaders could not decipher a word, they simply insert ‘reconstruction’ or ‘universal suffrage.’” Albert Bigelow Paine eventually reproduced in Mark Twain: A Biography a manuscript letter that Greeley sent Sam in his “characteristic scrawl” and argued that it “furnished . . . the model for the pretended facsimile of Greeley’s writing” in Roughing It (1872).66 Greeley’s letter may have been a source, but Richardson’s reproduction was no doubt Sam’s inspiration.
Above all, Sam excoriated in his Buffalo editorials the use of the insanity defense in capital murder cases after his friend A. D. Richardson was murdered by the outraged ex-husband of his fiancée. The killer’s exoneration by a jury became a watershed case in Sam’s thinking about criminal justice. In a jealous rage on November 29, 1869, Daniel McFarland, a habitual and violent drunk, gutshot Richardson, who was engaged to Abby Sage McFarland, in the New York Tribune building. The couple was married the next day by Henry Ward Beecher, and Richardson died from his wounds on December 2. In an apparent bid to boost circulation, the New York Sun editorially commended McFarland for defending his (failed) marriage even before Richardson succumbed to his wounds: “Driven to frenzy, by the loss of his more than life, and by the contemplation of wife . . . reposing in the arms of her seducer, he shot that seducer.”67
McFarland’s trial for murder the following spring became a public cause célèbre that cast him in the role of guardian of traditional family values and his former wife and her fiancé as adulterers. After testimony lasting five weeks, the jury deliberated less than two hours on May 10, 1870, and found McFarland not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, whereupon the judge released him. In effect, the verdict argued that Abby Sage Richardson had driven her first husband mad with jealousy and provoked the crime of passion that resulted in her second husband’s death. Sam was no less outraged by the case of the Comstock concubine Laura Fair, charged with murdering her ex-lover, the San Francisco lawyer A. P. Crittenden, in November 1870. Fair was eventually acquitted, like McFarland, on the grounds of temporary insanity. Sam and Charles Dudley Warner re-created these events in the trial of the femme fatale Laura Hawkins in The Gilded Age and Sam echoed them in his play Colonel Sellers (1874).68
Predictably, Sam ridiculed McFarland’s trial and its outcome in his Galaxy column and Express editorials. In effect, he argued that no one could go crazy who had no brains in the first place and thus McFarland should have pled innocent by reason of idiocy. “Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane,” he reasoned, “but now if you kill a man it is evidence that you are a lunatic.” He harbored no doubt that McFarland had physically abused Abby Sage, and “when a man abuses his wife as McFarland seems to have abused his,” a jury should “punish him severely, and do it with a relish.” The jury, “twelve good and true men,” could have sent McFarland to the gallows but instead “proclaimed under oath he was a lunatic.” The court not only freed him but most onlookers celebrated his release. In his Galaxy memoranda for July 1870, written soon after the acquittal was announced, Sam complained that the McFarland trial had been nothing more than “sublimated burlesque” and a “mockery.” He growled that “the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock” with the insanity defense, and in a letter to Elisha Bliss a year later Sam joked apropos the McFarland trial that Cain had suffered the “misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea.”69 Ironically, Daniel Sickles, the Union general in whose regiment Joe Twichell served as chaplain during the Civil War, had pioneered the temporary insanity defense in his 1859 trial for killing his wife’s lover, the son of Francis Scott Key.
The verdict and the release of McFarland reinforced Sam’s long-standing doubts about jury trials. Whereas his father, who served on a jury that convicted abolitionists, viewed such service “as supporting law and order,” as Gregg Camfield suggests, Sam “came to see it as merely endorsing injustice through organized violence.” As early as November 1863 Sam complained that “about four murders in the first degree” were committed each month in Virginia City “but we never convict anybody. The murder of Abel, by his brother Cain, would rank as an eminently justifiable homicide” in Nevada. Put another way, McFarland’s exoneration for Richardson’s murder prompted San to question the justice rendered by juries in chapters 48–49 of Roughing It, the book he was contracted to write shortly after McFarland’s trial. “The men who murdered Virginia’s original twenty-six cemetery-occupants were never punished,” Sam explained, because when Alfred the Great invented trial by jury in the ninth century he “was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive.” In an age of telegraphs and newspapers, ignorance and stupidity trumped honor and intelligence. Only “idiots, blacklegs” and “fools and rascals” sat on juries “because th
e system rigidly excludes honest men and men of brains.”70
Though Sam never sat on a jury, he was a witness in a few civil suits and his stories are rife with trial scenes. Such plot devices enabled him to dramatize clashing points of view, though they rarely offered simple or easy resolutions to the clashes. Many of the characters who stand trial are falsely accused of crimes, including Muff Potter in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), the miner Broderick in Ah Sin (1877), Edward VI in The Prince and the Pauper (1881), the Boss and King in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Luigi Capello in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Uncle Silas in Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), and Father Peter in “The Chronicle of Young Satan” (written intermittently between 1897 and 1900). Several of these defendants are prematurely found guilty in the court of public opinion; all of them are eventually freed, but Father Peter is driven insane when Satan tells him he has been convicted—an ironic twist on the insanity defense. In a couple of cases, the real killer is treated to a type of ironic justice: Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer, though a suspect in five murders, becomes the object of pity on the part of bleeding hearts who start a petition to pardon him posthumously; and Tom Driscoll in Pudd’nhead Wilson escapes the gallows because as a slave he is worth money and is sold down the river.
To be sure, Sam was critical of both trial by jury and vigilantism, the former for often failing to render deserved punishment, the latter for sometimes meting out undeserved punishment, as in the lynching of peasants in A Connecticut Yankee and the stoning of a supposed witch in “The Chronicle of Young Satan.” His lifelong condemnation of mob rule culminated in his essay “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901). He preferred public exposure of criminal acts and the administration of justice by a worthy tribunal, such as that of Judge P. W. Shepheard of San Francisco. He thought that cases of murder by reason of insanity raised two separate issues, and if “judged to be insane, the murderer ought, of course, to be held in custody as a dangerous lunatic” and receive treatment. In Sam’s ideal world, depicted in chapter 50 of Roughing It, the ship captain Ned Blakely, modeled on his friend Ned Wakeman, summarily executes a killer on his own authority. While the death penalty was no deterrent to future crimes, Sam conceded, it was justified by the biblical principle of lex talionis.71
In most cases Sam’s contributions to the Express were unexceptional or, as Jeffrey Steinbrink has observed, he “produced little memorable copy during his first six-weeks’ residence” in Buffalo. In fact, he wrote most of his original articles for the paper during these weeks—before he began to lose interest. Josephus Larned admitted that Sam apparently “expected a more rapid increase and wide extension of circulation for the paper to be caused by his writing in it than occurred, and was disappointed by the result.” In early September 1869, only two weeks after assuming a management role with the newspaper, Sam changed his mind about lecturing that winter. Redpath had been unable to cancel Sam’s speaking dates in Boston “& 2 or 3 other places,” he explained to Livy,
& so I submit, & have written him to let me out to lyceums far & near, & for half the winter or all of it—do with me as he chooses while the lecture season lasts. There was no way that was better. It isn’t worth the bother of getting well familiarized with a lecture & then deliver it only half a dozen times. I considered the matter well, & concluded that I ought to have some money to commence married life with, & if I tried to take it out of the office I might fail to be able to pay the first note that falls due next August. And yet the distress of it is, that the paper will suffer by my absence, & at the very time that it ought to keep up its best gait & not lose the start we have just given it & have the long, hard pull of giving it a new start after a while. I feel sure that the money I make lecturing, the paper will lose while I am gone—but you see how I am situated. When I once start in lecturing I might as well consent to be banged about from town to town while the lecture season lasts, for it would take that shape anyhow.
Sam publicly announced his change of plans in the Express on September 11: “after recently withdrawing from the lecture field for next Winter, I have entered it again (until Jan. 10), because I was not able to cancel all my appointments, it being too late, now, to find lecturers to fill them.” With his change in plans, he canceled his contemplated West Coast trip and discarded the prospect of speaking on “Curiosities of California.” Instead, he switched the topic and title of his winter lecture to “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,” a reworked version of his old talk on Hawaii. By September 27 he acknowledged to Bliss that, while he liked “newspapering very well, as far as I have got,” he would “adjourn, a week hence, to commence preparing my lecture” in Elmira.72 He left Buffalo and the inner sanctum of the Express for Elmira and the Langdon mansion on the evening of September 30 and, though he mailed occasional contributions to the newspaper while on tour, he did not resume his editorial duties until after his wedding the following February 2.
Soon after arriving in upstate New York, Sam struck on a scheme for a series of forty to fifty travel essays for publication in the Express over the next several months. The Langdons had hired Darius Ford, professor of physical sciences at Elmira College, who had recently tutored Livy in “natural philosophy,” to accompany Charley on an eighteen-month grand tour around the world—another effort by his parents to finish his education and curb his drinking. As Livy explained to Alice Hooker, Jervis Langdon “wanted to compensate Charley as much as he could for his inability to study” and “felt that if he could get Pro[fessor] Ford to go as Charley’s companion, he would be just the right man. When they were on ship board Charley would be able to study with him some.” Ford also agreed to mail occasional articles during the trip to Sam, who would rewrite them for the paper. That is, Ford would circumnavigate the world for Sam by proxy, supplying him with the material for a travel book without requiring Sam to travel. Ford and Charley departed for the West by rail on September 30 and, in anticipation of the first pieces the professor would send him from Japan, Sam excerpted a description of Mono Lake from the “Curiosities of California” lecture he had shelved. Under the title “Around the World Letter No. 1” and dated October 10, this essay appeared in the Express for October 16. Unfortunately, Ford was a flop as a travel writer and Sam eventually canceled the series. As he wrote Jervis Langdon on March 27, 1870, “I have given up Prof. Ford, & shall discontinue the ‘Round the World’ letters—have done it. The Prof. has now been 6 months writing 2 little letters, & I ten—making 12 in all. If they continue their trip 18 months, as they propose, the Prof. will succeed in grinding out a grand total of 6 letters, if he keeps up his present vigor.”73
After spending the month of October with the Langdons in Elmira—“it was very delightful, and we all missed him very much when he went away,” according to Livy—Sam opened his fifty-one-stop, nearly three-month lecture season on Sunday, November 1, at the Academy of Music in Pittsburgh before an audience of two thousand, including five hundred people in standing room. It was, according to the Pittsburgh Gazette, “the very largest audience we have ever seen assembled to greet a lecturer,” and his “able and brilliant effort” justified his “high reputation.” The Pittsburgh Commercial echoed the praise (“kept the audience in the best humor”), and the Evening Chronicle added that the lecture may not have been as “delightful as that on the ‘American Vandal,’” which Sam had delivered on the same stage almost exactly a year before, “but it was very delightful, notwithstanding,” and suffered from only “one grave fault—it was not long enough.” He performed in the rural regions of Pennsylvania for the next few days, then pitched his tent in Boston, where he spoke briefly at the annual press dinner at the Revere House the evening of November 6. He lectured before a crowd of eighteen hundred at Harrington’s Opera House in Providence on November 9, and the Providence Herald reported that the address was a delicious “mixture of sense and nonsense, the driest humor, bits of fine word painting, and covert satire,” and Sam bragged to Livy
that he “gave good satisfaction.” But, more to the point, it was his last tryout of the lecture before he debuted in Boston the next evening. “Tonight, my darling—tonight is the rub,” he wrote Livy anxiously. His appearance at the Music Hall near the Commons in the largest city in New England the evening of November 10 was arguably his most important public performance to date. “All the lyceums in the country determined” the value of a lecture and a lecturer by the verdict of the Boston critics, Sam explained in 1898, and so “we did not appear in Boston until we had rehearsed about a month” in surrounding towns “& made all the necessary corrections” to the text and its delivery. At the Music Hall, moreover, he could neither plant friends in the audience ready to laugh on cue, as when he spoke at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco in October 1866, nor paper the house with free tickets, as when he spoke at Cooper Union in New York in May 1867. That is, he would either stand or fall in Boston entirely on his merits. On his performance at the Music Hall, he informed Pamela the day before his lecture, “depends my future success in New England. But I am not distressed.” Built in 1852, with a seating capacity of about twenty-six hundred, the Music Hall was the most prestigious commercial venue in the country. Theodore Parker held religious services there in the late 1850s, and Oscar Wilde lectured there in 1882. Henry James alluded to it in his novel The Bostonians as a “high, dim, dignified” building “which has echoed in its time to so much eloquence and so much melody.”74
The Life of Mark Twain Page 75