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

by Mark Twain

  94.34–35 in the way of abuse] Clemens’s dictation ends here. Redpath added two typed comments. The first, “To be followed by Duncan’s libel suit,” referred to the lawsuit for libel that Charles C. Duncan—former captain of the Quaker City and organizer of the 1867 Holy Land excursion—brought against the New York Times in 1883. Duncan objected to an article published on 10 June which reported remarks of Clemens’s condemning his misuse of public funds in his position as New York shipping commissioner. Clemens claimed that the Times reporter had misrepresented his comments. Duncan technically won his suit in March 1884, but was awarded only twelve cents in damages. No 1885 dictation about the lawsuit has been found (N&J3, 18 n. 34; “Mr. Mark Twain Excited,” New York Times, 10 June 1883, 1; see also N&J2, 35 n. 26). Redpath’s second note read: “See two pages of newspaper statements about Grant’s book and the Century people and Mark Twain affixed.” These “statements,” which survive in four clippings preserved with the typescript, are transcribed at the end of Clemens’s dictated text.

  94.36–38 GEN GRANT, MARK TWAIN AND THE CENTURY . . . correspondent of the Boston Herald] The first part of this article (through “news is true,” 95.10), from the Springfield (Mass.) Republican of 9 March 1885, reports information published in the Boston Herald, presumably on 7 or 8 March; no copy of the Herald has been located.

  95.3–4 Webster & Co . . . his son Jesse] Jesse and Fred Grant were both interested in a partnership in Webster and Company, an arrangement that neither Clemens nor Webster favored. Clemens’s first known mention of the idea was in a letter of 21 July 1885 to Edward H. House: “Neither of the General’s sons is a partner. We all talked about that, but it was never seriously considered. Col. Fred talks about it yet—but if seriously it doesn’t sound so” (ViU). On 20 December 1885 Clemens alluded to the scheme in a letter to Webster. At that time the partnership was “a consideration” in the firm’s negotiations to secure the right to publish Grant’s letters to his wife—a deal that was never concluded (NPV, in MTBus, 347). Although discussions of a Grant partnership continued into early spring 1886, neither of Grant’s sons joined the business (8 Feb 1886 to Webster, NPV, in MTBus, 353–54; Webster to SLC, 10 Feb 1886 and 20 Mar 1886, CU-MARK; see N&J3, 218, 220, 222).

  95.10–21 “Brunswick,” . . . publish the book] Jeannette Gilder’s column, “New York Gossip,” which began with a long section on Grant’s medical news, appeared in the Saturday Evening Gazette on 7 March 1885. The Springfield Republican accurately quoted her discussion of Grant’s book, omitting only two brief passages about subscription books and the series of war articles in the Century Magazine.

  96.28 N.Y. World] From the issue of 9 March 1885.

  97.30 N.Y. Tribune] From the issue of 10 March 1885.

  97.38 General’s connection with Lincoln’s assassination] Abraham Lincoln and his wife invited the Grants to accompany them to Ford’s Theater on 14 April 1865, the night that John Wilkes Booth assassinated the president. The Grants did not attend because they were visiting their children at school in New Jersey. Booth’s co-conspirators planned to assassinate two men who were not at the theater: Secretary of State William Seward (who was injured but survived) and Vice-President Andrew Johnson (who was not actually attacked). It is probable, but not certain, that Grant was another intended victim.

  98.20–39 work of Gen. Adam Badeau . . . book which I did not write] Grant prepared most of the manuscript of his Memoirs himself, but occasionally dictated to his son Fred, or to a stenographer, Noble E. Dawson. Badeau provided editing services, for which he was to receive nothing if the book earned less than $20,000, $5,000 if it earned $20,000, and $5,000 more if it earned $30,000. The false accusation that Grant was not doing his own writing was based on information from “General George P. Ihrie, who had served with Grant in Mexico. Ihrie had inadvertently remarked to a Washington columnist that the General was no writer” (Goldhurst 1975, 118, 153, 193–94). Clemens was so outraged by the World article that he briefly considered initiating a lawsuit. He wrote to Fred Grant on 30 April 1885:

  The General’s work this morning is rather damaging evidence against the World’s intrepid lie. The libel suit ought to be instituted at once; damages placed at nothing less than $250,000 or $300,000; no apologies accepted from the World, & no compromise permitted for anything but a sum of money that will cripple—yes, disable—that paper financially. The suit ought to be brought in the General’s name, & the expense of it paid out of the book’s general expense account. (NPV, in MTBus, 319)

  By 3 May he had reconsidered and wrote to Webster:

  I have watched closely & have not seen a single reference to the World’s lie in any newspaper. So it is possible that it fell dead & did no harm. I suppose Alexander & Green have decided that a libel suit against a paper which hasn’t influence enough to get its lies copied, would be a waste of energy & money (as you give me no news of any kind about the matter.) If that is their verdict, & if the lie has not been copied around, it is no doubt the right & sensible verdict. I recognize the fact that for General Grant to sue the World would be an enormously valuable advertisement for that daily issue of unmedicated closet-paper. (NPV, in MTBus, 323)

  Badeau responded to the World article by demanding a new financial arrangement with Grant: $1,000 a month until the book was done, and 10 percent of the profits. After a bitter exchange of letters, Badeau withdrew from the project. He and Grant never met again (Goldhurst 1975, 194–200, 251). After Grant’s death, Badeau threatened Mrs. Grant with a lawsuit to claim what he was owed. The dispute was settled in 1888, when Badeau accepted $10,000 plus interest (as stipulated in the original contract), and agreed that the composition of the Memoirs “was entirely that of Gen. Grant, and to limit his claim to that of suggestion, revision, and verification” (“Gen. Badeau’s Suit Ended,” New York Times, 31 Oct 1888, 8).

  98.44 N.Y. World] From the issue of 6 May 1885.

  [The Rev. Dr. Newman]

  99.2 Extract from my note book] This extract is a near verbatim rendering of Clemens’s notebook entry (see N&J3, 117–18).

  99.12 Rev. Dr. Newman] John Philip Newman (1826–99) was ordained as a minister in the Methodist Episcopal church in 1849. After serving as chaplain of the U.S. Senate from 1869 to 1874—during which time he became a confidant of Julia Grant’s—he was appointed inspector of U.S. consuls in Asia by President Grant (Goldhurst 1975, 187–88).

  99.14 ex-Governor Stanford] Leland Stanford (1824–93) was trained in the law. He went West in 1852 to join his brothers in various mercantile pursuits, and served as governor of California from 1861 to 1863. He became immensely wealthy from his partnership in the Central Pacific Railroad corporation, which completed the transcontinental railroad in 1869. His only son, Leland, Jr., died at age fifteen in March 1884 while visiting Italy. His body was brought home and held in a vault while his family built a mausoleum on their property in Palo Alto, said to be “as magnificent as an Oriental palace.” At the memorial service held in Grace Church in San Francisco on 30 December, $20,000 was spent on floral decorations. Newman delivered a eulogy, the “most fulsome ever delivered in the Western Hemisphere,” comparing “young Stanford to all the great of earth, and then, as if weary of the effort to find a fitting prototype for him among human beings, he boldly declared that the boy was some sort of a reproduction of Jesus Christ” (“California Astonished,” Chicago Tribune, 2 Jan 1885, 3).

  99.33–34 “Thrice have I been . . . come out again.”] A similar version of Newman’s remark was reported in the New York Times on 16 April 1885, and doubtless in other newspapers as well (“A Day of Hopefulness,” 4).

  The Machine Episode (Source: MS in CU-MARK, written in 1890 and 1893–94)

  101.4–7 Ten or eleven years ago, Dwight Buell . . . was about finished] Dwight H. Buell owned a shop on Main Street in Hartford, and was a director of the Farnham Type-Setter Manufacturing Company. The machine he wanted Clemens to invest in was invented by James W. Paige, who—in collaboration with the F
arnham Company—was building a prototype in a workshop at Samuel Colt’s firearms factory in Hartford. Clemens first purchased stock in the Farnham Company in the fall of 1881 (Geer 1882, 341, 455; 180 Oct 1881 and 25 Oct 1881 to Webster, NPV, in MTBus, 171–73).

  101.21–22 rate of 3,000 ems an hour . . . four case-men’s work] A compositor setting material by hand pulled the metal types for characters and spaces one at a time from a case—a wooden tray divided into compartments—and placed them, in reverse order, in a composing stick. The full stick was then transferred to a galley tray, where the types were held in place to allow a proof to be printed. The “dead matter”—types that had already been set and used for printing—was then distributed by hand back into the case for reuse. An “em” was a measure equal to the square of the height of one type, and therefore varied according to the size of the font. The ems in one line were multiplied by the number of lines to determine the quantity of typeset material (Pasko 1894, 145; Stewart 1912, 21, 61, 85). In September 1890, shortly before writing the present account, Clemens claimed that an operator of the Paige compositor could set 8,000 ems of type per hour, more than ten times what a hand typesetter could produce (11 Sept 1890 and 27 Sept 1890 to Jones, CU-MARK; printed document enclosed with the letter of 11 Sept, “Saving-Capacity of the Several Machines,” annotated by Clemens, photocopy in CU-MARK).

  101.23 William Hamersley] Hamersley (1838–1920), an attorney, served from 1868 to 1888 as the state prosecutor for Hartford County. In 1886 he was elected to the lower house of the Connecticut General Assembly, and in 1893–94 served as Superior Court Judge. As president of the Farnham Company, he was one of the earliest investors in the typesetting machine (Connecticut State Library 2006; N&J3, 141 n. 50).

  102.1–2 I set down my name for an additional $3,000] In mid-1882 Clemens recorded in his notebook that he owned two hundred shares in the Farnham Company, worth $5,000 (N&J2, 491).

  102.9 Hamersley wrote Webster a letter which will be inserted later on] Clemens did not insert a letter into this account, nor has any letter from Hamersley to Webster been found.

  102.10 James W. Paige] In the early 1870s in Rochester, New York, Paige (1842–1917) set about inventing a typesetting machine, which was granted a patent in 1874. This original machine, however, lacked any mechanism for justifying or distributing type. Paige moved to Hartford, and in 1877 joined with the Farnham Company, which was developing a distributor for its own typesetter, a “gravity machine with converging channels” (Legros and Grant 1916, 378). Paige began to design a new machine that could both set and distribute type. By 1882, when he produced a working model, the enterprise had cost nearly $90,000. The Farnham Company withdrew its support, and Clemens agreed to find additional investors (Lee 1987; “Private Circular to the Stockholders of the Farnham Type-Setter Manufacturing Company,” 26 Jan 1891, CU-MARK; N&J3, 36 n. 69).

  102.34–35 wonderfully valuable application of electricity] Clemens may be referring to another of Paige’s inventions, a printing telegraph. Clemens tried to promote the project for several months in 1885 (N&J3, 170, 181 n. 12).

  102.38 splendid thing in electricity] In the summer of 1887, while perfecting a dynamo for his typesetter, Paige had an idea for a revolutionary electromagnetic motor that might be very lucrative. Although Clemens briefly supported his experiment, on 16 August he signed a contract stipulating that Paige was to proceed at his own expense. Clemens received a one-half share in the invention and agreed to reimburse Paige should it prove successful (N&J3, 338 n. 111; “1887. Agreement of J. W. Paige regarding Magnetic Electro Motor dated 16th August,” CU-MARK).

  103.7 he could apply the alternating test and come out triumphant] In a notebook entry dated 1 November 1888 Clemens remarked on Nikola Tesla’s recently patented alternating-current motor:

  I have just seen the drawings and description of an electrical machine lately patented by a Mr. Tesla, & sold to the Westinghouse Company, which will revolutionize the whole electric business of the world. It is the most valuable patent since the telephone. The drawings & description show that this is the very machine, in every detail which Paige invented nearly 4 years ago.

  Tesla “tried everything that we tried, as the drawings & descriptions prove; & he tried one thing more—a thing which we had canvassed—the alternating current. That solved the difficulty & achieved success” (N&J3, 431).

  103.20–21 another piece of property . . . assignment, Aug. 12, 1890] This contract stipulated that Paige would grant Clemens all “right, title and interest in his inventions . . . and in the domestic and foreign patents obtained and that may be obtained therefor,” in return for one-quarter of the gross receipts from the eventual sales or rentals of the machine. For the agreement to be valid, Clemens had to pay Paige $250,000 within six months. The property that “already belonged” to Clemens was evidently the foreign royalties. He made the following notebook entry in April 1893, when he met with Paige in Chicago:

  Paige . . . called again tonight. I asked him if his conscience troubled him any about the way he had treated me. He said he could almost forgive me for that word. He said it broke his heart when I left him and the machine to fight along the best way they could &c. &c.. . . When his European patent affairs are settled, he is going to put me in for a handsome royalty on every European machine. This would be very generous except for the fact that his present contract with the Connecticut Co already does that for me. We parted immensely good friends. (Notebook 33, TS pp. 8–9, CU-MARK; N&J3, 576 n. 4; “Copy of Contract between S. L. Clemens & James W. Paige—Aug 12th 1890,” CU-MARK)

  103.38–39 contracts will be found in the Appendix] No such appendix—presumably a collection of all the contracts with Paige—has been found.

  104.6 Pratt & Whitney’s] The Pratt and Whitney Company, a machine and tool manufacturer incorporated in Hartford in 1869, was engaged to produce the prototype (Geer 1882, 254, 459).

  104.16–17 Jones . . . lose his interest in the thing] John P. Jones (1829–1912), a native of England, went to California at the start of the gold rush, settling in Nevada in 1867. He became superintendent and then part owner of the Crown Point mine in Gold Hill, which struck a rich vein of silver and made him wealthy: by 1874 his monthly income was reported to be half a million dollars (29 Mar and 4 Apr 1875 to Wright, L6, 439 n. 5). He represented Nevada as a U.S. senator from 1873 to 1903. Clemens’s attempts to induce Jones to invest in the typesetter began in early 1887, and continued for several years. In July 1890 Jones inspected the machine during one of its operational intervals and made a token investment of $5,000. In early September Clemens had a contract drawn up whereby Jones agreed to “use his best endeavors” to raise $950,000 and “organize a corporation” which would purchase Clemens’s interest and assume his obligation to pay Paige $250,000 by February 1891. Jones may never have signed this agreement; in any event, on 11 February he wrote that he had been unable to interest any investors. In fact, two of the men he had approached were “large stockholders in the ’Mergenthaler,’ ” the Paige machine’s chief competitor (Jones to SLC, 11 Feb 1891, CU-MARK; see the note at 106.23–24). Clemens drafted a reply, which he apparently never sent: “For a whole year you have breathed the word of promise to my ear to break it to my hope at last. It is stupefying, it is unbelievable” (14–28 Feb 1891 to Jones, CU-MARK; N&J3, 278–79 n. 183, 565 n. 261, 572–73, 576–77 n. 6; 8 Sept 1890 [with enclosed contract] and 11 Sept 1890 to Jones, CU-MARK; 22 Feb 1891 to Goodman, NN-BGC).

  104.27 End of 1885] These words mark the beginning of the second section of Clemens’s account, written several years after the first part. It begins on a new sequence of pages, and was probably written in late 1893 or early 1894, when Clemens was in New York working with Henry Rogers to negotiate a new contract with Paige (see the note at 106.23–24).

  105.1–6 The contract . . . $30,000 and 6 per cent interest] A contract of 6 February 1886 stipulated that Clemens would pay Paige’s expenses up to $30,000, plus an annual salary of $7,000, and
Hamersley would provide “professional services,” while the machine was perfected. After a successful prototype was tested, Clemens and Hamersley were to raise the money to manufacture it. A corporation would then be formed, with Clemens receiving 9/20 of the stock. If they failed to obtain the “necessary capital” within three years, however, they were entitled to reimbursement of the money they had advanced, from any profit that “may at any time thereafter accrue.” In the meantime, Paige retained “title of the property purchased with the money furnished . . . in pursuance of this agreement” (“Agreement,” CU-MARK).

  105.17 F. G. Whitmore] Franklin Gray Whitmore (1846–1926), owner of a real estate office and Clemens’s Hartford business agent, supervised the building of the typesetter at the Pratt and Whitney works in 1886 (Burpee 1928, 3:952; N&J3, 189 n. 27).

  105.27 royalty deed was made and signed] By the terms of a deed of 26 September 1889 Clemens paid Paige $100,000 (presumably with funds already advanced) in return for a royalty of $500 on every machine that would eventually be sold. Clemens then tried to sell his interest at a cost of $1,000 for each “five hundredth part of my interest in the royalty of five hundred dollars” (“Deed” in CU-MARK; N&J3, 518 n. 119).

  105.33–38 contract No. 2 . . . contract No. 3 (the May contract?) . . . “June” contract] A contract drawn up in December 1889 (“No. 2”), which provided for the establishment of a corporation and gave Clemens 9/20 of the stock (an amount equal to his current interest in the typesetter), may never have been ratified. The “May” and “June” contracts have not been found (N&J3, 576 n. 5, 579 n. 23; contract of 14 Dec 1889 in CU-MARK).

  106.11–13 I signed it . . . It had but six months to run] That is, the contract signed in August 1890 (see the note at 103.20–21).

  106.20 Charley Davis, take a pen and write what I say] Charles E. Davis was the Pratt and Whitney engineer who supervised the manufacture of the typesetter. When Clemens visited Chicago in April 1893 to check on the progress of the machine, he received a visit from Davis, who mentioned that he “still holds the paper which Paige dictated to him one day to quiet me, in which he says that no matter what happened he and I would always share and share alike in the results of the machine” (Notebook 33, TS p. 9, CU-MARK; N&J3, 246 n. 71).