Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  My eldest brother was four or five years old when the great purchase was made, and my eldest sister was an infant in arms. The rest of us—and we formed the great bulk of the family—came afterwards, and were born along from time to time during the next ten years. Four years after the purchase came the great financial crash of ’34, and in that storm my father’s fortunes were wrecked. From being honored and envied as the most opulent citizen of Fentress county—for outside of his great landed possessions he was considered to be worth not less than three thousand five hundred dollars—he suddenly woke up and found himself reduced to less than one-fourth of that amount. He was a proud man, a silent, austere man, and not a person likely to abide among the scenes of his vanished grandeur and be the target for public commiseration. He gathered together his household and journeyed many tedious days through wilderness solitudes, toward what was then the “Far West,” and at last pitched his tent in the almost invisible little town of Florida, Monroe county, Missouri. He “kept store” there several years, but had no luck, except that I was born to him. He presently removed to Hannibal, and prospered somewhat, and rose to the dignity of justice of the peace, and was candidate for county judge, with a certainty of election, when the summons came which no man may disregard. He had been doing tolerably well, for that age of the world, during the first years of his residence in Hannibal, but ill fortune tripped him once more. He did the friendly office of “going security” for Ira ——, and Ira —— walked off and deliberately took the benefit of the new bankrupt law—a deed which enabled him to live easily and comfortably along till death called for him, but a deed which ruined my father, sent him poor to his grave, and condemned his heirs to a long and discouraging struggle with the world for a livelihood. But my father would brighten up and gather heart, even upon his death-bed, when he thought of the Tennessee land. He said that it would soon make us all rich and happy. And so believing, he died.

  We straightway turned our waiting eyes upon Tennessee. Through all our wanderings and all our ups and downs for thirty years they have still gazed thitherward, over intervening continents and seas, and at this very day they are yet looking toward the same fixed point, with the hope of old habit and a faith that rises and falls, but never dies.

  After my father’s death we reorganized the domestic establishment, but on a temporary basis, intending to arrange it permanently after the land was sold. My brother borrowed five hundred dollars and bought a worthless weekly newspaper, believing, as we all did, that it was not worth while to go at anything in serious earnest until the land was disposed of and we could embark intelligently in something. We rented a large house to live in, at first, but we were disappointed in a sale we had expected to make (the man wanted only a part of the land and we talked it over and decided to sell all or none,) and we were obliged to move to a less expensive one.

  Paine published this manuscript, with typical errors and omissions, under a title he contrived for it, “Early Years in Florida, Missouri” (MTA, 1:7–10). The text itself shows that Clemens wrote it in 1877, heading it simply “Chap. 1” (omitted by Paine). Neider copied Paine’s version (errors and all), but he left off the last sixty words and inserted three paragraphs from “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” two after the first sentence and one at the end (AMT, 1–3). It seems likely that the manuscript was the “beginning,” or one of the beginnings, of an autobiography that Clemens made in response to prodding from his friend John Milton Hay (see “John Hay”). The manuscript was doubtless part of the Mark Twain Papers on which Paine drew for the biography and other works, but in about 1920 he gave the manuscript to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where it now resides.

  [Early Years in Florida, Missouri]

  Chapter 1

  I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe county, Missouri. I suppose Florida had less than three hundred inhabitants. It had two streets, each a couple of hundred yards long; the rest of the avenues mere lanes, with rail fences and corn fields on either side. Both the streets and the lanes were paved with the same material—tough black mud, in wet times, deep dust in dry.

  Most of the houses were of logs—all of them, indeed, except three or four; these latter were frame ones. There were none of brick, and none of stone. There was a log church, with a puncheon floor and slab benches. A puncheon floor is made of logs whose upper surfaces have been chipped flat with the adze. The cracks between the logs were not filled; there was no carpet; consequently, if you dropped anything smaller than a peach, it was likely to go through. The church was perched upon short sections of logs, which elevated it two or three feet from the ground. Hogs slept under there, and whenever the dogs got after them during services, the minister had to wait till the disturbance was over. In winter there was always a refreshing breeze up through the puncheon floor; in summer there were fleas enough for all.

  A slab bench is made of the outside cut of a saw-log, with the bark side down; it is supported on four sticks driven into augur-holes at the ends; it has no back, and no cushions. The church was twilighted with yellow tallow candles in tin sconces hung against the walls. Week-days, the church was a schoolhouse.

  There were two stores in the village. My uncle, John A. Quarles, was proprietor of one of them. It was a very small establishment, with a few rolls of “bit” calicoes in half a dozen shelves, a few barrels of salt mackerel, coffee, and New Orleans sugar behind the counter, stacks of brooms, shovels, axes, hoes, rakes, and such things, here and there, a lot of cheap hats, bonnets and tin-ware strung on strings and suspended from the walls; and at the other end of the room was another counter with bags of shot on it, a cheese or two, and a keg of powder; in front of it a row of nail kegs and a few pigs of lead; and behind it a barrel or two of New Orleans molasses and native corn whisky on tap. If a boy bought five or ten cents’ worth of anything, he was entitled to half a handful of sugar from the barrel; if a woman bought a few yards of calico she was entitled to a spool of thread in addition to the usual gratis “trimmins;” if a man bought a trifle, he was at liberty to draw and swallow as big a drink of whisky as he wanted.

  Everything was cheap: apples, peaches, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, and corn, ten cents a bushel; chickens ten cents apiece, butter six cents a pound, eggs three cents a dozen, coffee and sugar five cents a pound, whisky ten cents a gallon. I do not know how prices are out there in interior Missouri now, (1877,) but I know what they are here in Hartford, Connecticut. To wit: apples, three dollars a bushel; peaches five dollars; Irish potatoes (choice Bermudas), five dollars; chickens a dollar to a dollar and a half apiece according to weight; butter forty-five to sixty cents apound, eggs fifty to sixty cents a dozen; coffee forty-five cents apound; sugar about the same; native whisky four or five dollars a gallon, I believe, but I can only be certain concerning the sort which I use myself, which is Scotch and costs ten dollars a gallon when you take two gallons—more when you take less.

  Thirty and forty years ago, out yonder in Missouri, the ordinary cigar cost thirty cents a hundred, but most people did not try to afford them, since smoking a pipe cost nothing in that tobacco-growing country. Connecticut is also given up to tobacco raising, to-day, yet we pay ten dollars a hundred for Connecticut cigars and fifteen to twenty-five dollars a hundred for the imported article.

  At first my father owned slaves, but by and by he sold them, and hired others by the year from the farmers. For a girl of fifteen he paid twelve dollars a year and gave her two linsey-wolsey frocks and a pair of “stogy” shoes—cost, a modification of nothing; for a negro woman of twenty-five, as general house servant, he paid twenty-five dollars a year and gave her shoes and the aforementioned linsey-wolsey frocks; for a strong negro woman of forty, as cook, washer, etc., he paid forty dollars a year and the customary two suits of clothes; and for an able bodied man he paid from seventy-five to a hundred dollars a year and gave him two suits of jeans and two pairs of “stogy” shoes—an outfit that cost
about three dollars. But times have changed. We pay our German nursemaid $155 a year; Irish housemaid, $150; Irish laundress, $150; negro woman, as cook, $240; young negro man, to wait on door and table, $360; Irish coachman, $600 a year, with gas, hot and cold water, and dwelling consisting of parlor, kitchen and two bed-rooms, connected with the stable, free.

  THE GRANT DICTATIONS

  The following six typed dictations, known ever since Paine published them (out of order) in 1924 as “The Grant Dictations” (MTA, 1:13–70), are now in the Mark Twain Papers. They were all created in May and June 1885; Clemens dictated to his friend and colleague James Redpath, who transcribed his shorthand notes on an all-capitals typewriter (for Redpath see “Lecture-Times,” note at 148.8). Redpath then reviewed the typescripts, adding punctuation but overlooking many errors, and passed them on to Clemens, who lightly revised and corrected them. They make up the earliest known substantial body of texts that Clemens said were intended for his autobiography. The subjects he covered were all of recent date, and all touch on one aspect or another of his relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, who was by then dying of throat cancer. The six dictations are here printed for the first time in the order they were created.

  • “The Chicago G.A.R. Festival” is about Clemens’s experience, including his toast to “The Babies,” when Grant was honored at the convention of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1879. This is the only one of the six Grant dictations that Neider chose to reprint, and he followed Paine’s text in all of its details (AMT, 241–45).

  • “A Call with W.D. Howells on General Grant” treats three seemingly unrelated topics: Grant’s help for the father of William Dean Howells, Grant’s appreciation of George Horatio Derby (John Phoenix), and Clemens’s own efforts to persuade Grant to write his memoirs. The title adopted here was supplied by Paine.

  • “Grant and the Chinese” describes Grant’s efforts to preserve a program for educating Chinese students in the United States.

  • “Gerhardt” (previously unpublished) is about the frustration that Clemens’s protégé, the sculptor Karl Gerhardt, experienced in competing to make a statue of Nathan Hale. Gerhardt also made a commercially successful bust of Grant, discussed in the fifth dictation, “About General Grant’s Memoirs.”

  • “About General Grant’s Memoirs,” a long and detailed account of how Clemens secured the contract for Grant’s Personal Memoirs, was written to some extent in response to newspaper comments insinuating that he had done so unethically. Paine published the first section and part of the third as continuous text, and made the middle section into a separate dictation, which he titled “Gerhardt and the Grant Bust”; he also omitted the newspaper clippings at the end of this section.

  • “The Rev. Dr. Newman” is about Grant’s spiritual adviser during the days approaching his death on 23 July 1885. Paine suppressed the identity of the Reverend John Philip Newman, altering every mention of his name to “N——.” He also provided the title adopted here.

  Clemens was not pleased with the text that Redpath prepared. As he explained to Henry Ward Beecher after he had called a halt to his dictation, this part of the autobiography was “pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to jack-plane it a little before I die, some day or other; I mean the rude construction & rotten grammar. It is the only dictating I ever did, & it was most troublesome & awkward work” (11 Sept 1885, CU-MARK). Clemens never did polish the texts or prepare them for publication. In fact, many years after his death his former secretary, Isabel Lyon, annotated a copy of Paine’s edition, saying in part that “Mr Clemens would not have allowed” the Grant dictations “to be included in the autobiography without serious editing. . . . These Redpath notes were notes only, & held for drastic revision” (page 13, quoted courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell). Clemens did go on to retell the story of his involvement with Grant’s memoirs in his 1906 Autobiographical Dictations (see “About General Grant’s Memoirs,” note at 75.28).

  The Chicago G.A.R. Festival

  1866.

  The first time I ever saw General Grant was in the fall or winter of 1866 at one of the receptions at Washington, when he was General of the Army. I merely saw and shook hands with him along with a general crowd but had no conversation. It was there also that I first saw General Sheridan.

  I next saw General Grant during his first term as President.

  Senator Bill Stewart of Nevada proposed to take me in and see the President. We found him in his working costume with an old short linen duster on and it was well spattered with ink. I had acquired some trifle of notoriety through some letters which I had written in the New York Tribune during my trip round about the world in the Quaker City expedition. I shook hands and then there was a pause and silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I merely looked into the General’s grim, immovable countenance a moment or two in silence and then I said: “Mr. President, I am embarrassed—are you?” He smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image, and I got away under the smoke of my volley.

  I did not see him again for some ten years. In the meantime I had become very thoroughly notorious.

  Then, in 1879 the General had just returned from his journey through the European and Asiatic world and his progress from San Francisco eastward had been one continuous ovation and now he was to be feasted in Chicago by the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee—the first army over which he had had command. The preparations for this occasion were in keeping with the importance of it. The toast committee telegraphed me and asked me if I would be present and respond at the grand banquet to the toast to the ladies. I telegraphed back that the toast was worn out. Everything had been said about the ladies that could be said at a banquet, but there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon such occasions and if they would allow me I would take that class for a toast: “The Babies.” They were willing—so I prepared my toast and went out to Chicago.

  There was to be a prodigious procession. General Grant was to review it from a rostrum which had been built out for the purpose from the second story window of the Palmer House. The rostrum was carpeted and otherwise glorified with flags and so on.

  The best place of all to see the procession was of course from this rostrum. So I sauntered upon that rostrum while as yet it was empty in the hope that I might be permitted to sit there. It was rather a conspicuous place, since upon it the public gaze was fixed, and there was a countless multitude below. Presently two gentlemen came upon that platform from the window of the hotel and stepped forward to the front. A prodigious shout went up from the vast multitude below, and I recognized in one of these two gentlemen General Grant. The other was Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, with whom I was acquainted. He saw me, stepped over to me and said wouldn’t I like to be introduced to the General? I said, I should. So he walked over with me and said, “General, let me introduce Mr. Clemens,” and we shook hands. There was the usual momentary pause and then the General said: “I am not embarrassed—are you?”

  It showed that he had a good memory for trifles as well as for serious things.

  That banquet was by all odds the most notable one I was ever present at. There were six hundred persons present, mainly veterans of the Army of the Tennessee, and that in itself would have made it a most notable occasion of the kind in my experience but there were other things which contributed. General Sherman and in fact nearly all of the surviving great Generals of the war sat in a body on a dais round about General Grant.

  The speakers were of a rare celebrity and ability.

  That night I heard for the first time a slang expression which had already come into considerable vogue but I had not myself heard it before.

  When the speaking began about ten o’clock I left my place at the table and went away over to the front side of the great dining room where I could take in the whole spectacle at one glance. Among others, Colonel Vilas was to respond to a toast and also Colonel Ingersoll, the silver-tongued infidel, who had
begun life in Illinois, and was exceedingly popular there. Vilas was from Wisconsin and was very famous as an orator. He had prepared himself superbly for this occasion.

  He was about the first speaker on the list of fifteen toasts and Bob Ingersoll was the ninth.

  I had taken a position upon the steps in front of the brass band, which lifted me up and gave me a good general view. Presently I noticed, leaning against the wall near me, a simple-looking young man wearing the uniform of a private and the badge of the Army of the Tennessee. He seemed to be nervous and ill at ease about something. Presently, while the second speaker was talking, this young man said: “Do you know Colonel Vilas?” I said I had been introduced to him. He sat silent a while and then said: “They say he is hell when he gets started!”

  I said: “In what way? What do you mean?”

  “Speaking! Speaking! They say he is lightning!”

  “Yes,” I said, “I have heard that he is a great speaker.”

  The young man shifted about uneasily for a while and then he said: “Do you reckon he can get away with Bob Ingersoll?”

  I said: “I don’t know.”

  Another pause. Occasionally he and I would join in the applause when a speaker was on his legs, but this young man seemed to applaud unconsciously.

  Presently he said, “Here in Illinois we think there can’t nobody get away with Bob Ingersoll.”

  I said: “Is that so?”

  He said, “Yes: we don’t think anybody can lay over Bob Ingersoll.”

  Then he added sadly, “But they do say that Vilas is pretty nearly hell.”

  At last Vilas rose to speak, and this young man pulled himself together and put on all his anxiety. Vilas began to warm up and the people began to applaud. He delivered himself of one especially fine passage and there was a general shout: “Get up on the table! Get up on the table! Stand up on the table! We can’t see you!” So a lot of men standing there picked Vilas up and stood him on the table in full view of the whole great audience and he went on with his speech. The young man applauded with the rest, and I could hear the young fellow mutter without being able to make out what he said. But presently when Vilas thundered out something especially fine, there was a tremendous outburst from the whole house and then this young man said in a sort of despairing way: