by Twain, Mark
ELLA EVELINA (HUNTER) LAMPTON (18347–1904), the wife of JAMES ANDREW HAYS LAMPTON, was born in Virginia. Her birthdate is uncertain, in part because she may have deliberately reduced her age by as much as ten years. A notation in Jane Clemens’s Bible records Ella’s birth in May 1834 (Bible 1817), making her fifteen years old when she married James Lampton, even though one history of the Lampton family reports her earlier marriage to a man named Plunkett (Keith, 9). Other documents give 1837 as Ella’s birthdate. Her work as a newspaper correspondent, disparaged in “Villagers,” remains unidentified. James and Ella Lampton took young Dr. JOHN J. MCDOWELL into their home as a boarder probably in the late 1850s; in 1860 he lived with them in Carondelet, a St. Louis suburb. Ella and John McDowell’s intimacy, as “Villagers” (98) notes, was “an arrant scandal to everybody with eyes.” Although Clemens and his aunt cared little for one another, he assisted her when his uncle’s death left her in straitened circumstances. In 1881 he wrote his sister, Pamela: “I have no feeling toward Ella (now) but compassion for her bereavements & hard fortune, & admiration of her courage & spirit in facing disaster with a brave front” (4 Feb 81, NPV, in MTBus, 136). During the 1880s he sent her money and tried to find secretarial work for her daughter, CATHERINE, but was increasingly irritated by requests for assistance. On the envelope to one of her letters, he wrote: “Neither read nor answered—a woman who has been all her life a coarse, vain, rude, exacting idiot” (Ella Lampton to SLC, 2 Aug 85, CU-MARK†; St. Louis Census 1860, 656:637; St. Louis Census 1900, 893:15; Pamela A. Moffett to SLC, 7 Feb 81, CU-MARK; SLC to Charles L. Webster, 31 Mar 83, 17 May 83, NPV, in MTBus, 212–14; SLC to Annie Moffett Webster, 18 Oct 86, NPV, in MTBus, 366; “Funerals,” St. Louis Star, 23 Aug 1904, 8).
CATHERINE C. (KATE) LAMPTON (b. 1856), mentioned briefly in “Villagers” (98), was the only child of ELLA and JAMES ANDREW HAYS LAMPTON. Born in St. Louis, she had the red hair that was considered a Lampton family trait (Bible 1817; MTBus, 136; Gould 1882, 683).
LEAGUE, WILLIAM T. (BILL) (1832–70), was a printer’s apprentice in the Missouri Courier office, which opened in Hannibal in the spring of 1848. Clemens recalled him in a 1907 letter to the editor of the Hannibal Courier-Post: “Next spring it will be 59 years since I became an apprentice in the Courier office under Joseph P. Ament, along with William T. League, Wales McCormick & a Palmyra lad named Dick Rutter. Two of the group still survive: viz, the Courier & the undersigned” (3? Dec 1907 to W. H. Powell, MoHM†). In the fall of 1851 League helped to establish the weekly Hannibal Whig Messenger and in 1852 became its sole proprietor. It was League who bought out Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Journal in September 1853. Clemens mentions League in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). In noting in “Villagers” (98) that League became proprietor of the “ ‘Courier’ ” and “made it a daily and prosperous,” Clemens was thinking of the daily Hannibal Messenger, established by League in 1858 and renamed the Hannibal Courier in the mid-1860s. League, however, had sold the paper in 1860 (Marion Census 1850, 319; Shoemaker, 254; Orion Clemens 1853; Holcombe, 988; Ellsberry 1965a, 10).
LEATHERS, JESSE MADISON (1846?–87), a distant cousin of Clemens’s from Kentucky, wrote the author on 27 September 1875 and introduced himself as the great-grandson of Samuel Lampton, of Culpepper County, Virginia, whose brother William was Samuel Clemens’s great-grandfather. He believed he had legitimate claim to the earldom of Durham and expressed his hope of recovering the title and estate from the Lambton family in England. Clemens thought his relative’s chances “inconceivably slender” and said as much in a cordial letter of 5 October 1875 (“Mark Twain’s Blue Blood,” unidentified clipping, reprinting the Louisville [Ky.] Ledger of unknown date, CU-MARK). Leathers soon wrote that he was “out of business, and money, (a thing that has often happened with me)” and made the first of several requests for financial assistance (24 Jan 76, CU-MARK). Although Clemens sent Leathers small sums of money over the years, supplementing his meager and intermittent income as a newspaper advertising solicitor and a collections agent, he avoided meeting him and did nothing to further his claim to the earldom. He did, however, encourage Leathers to write and publish his autobiography as a means of earning money, a project begun but abandoned. Leathers died in a New York City charity hospital of tuberculosis complicated by alcoholism. Clemens used his story as the basis for The American Claimant, published in 1892 (Leathers to SLC, sixteen letters between 1875 and 1886; Leathers to Olivia L. Clemens, 6 Apr 81; G. E. Hutchinson to “Gentlemen,” 23 Oct 79; John W. Chapman to SLC, 7 and 14 Feb 87, all documents in CU-MARK; Chapman, 721).
LEVERING family. Alice and Franklin Levering came to Hannibal in 1841 (Marion Census 1850, 307; Holcombe, 962). Clemens knew their two oldest children.
CLINT LEVERING (1837?–47), a playmate of Clemens’s, died at the age of ten. While “bathing with a number of his playmates, [he] was carried beyond his depth, and in spite of the exertions of those who were with him, was drowned” (Hannibal Gazette, 20 Aug 47, in Wecter 1952, 169). In chapter 54 of Life on the Mississippi (1883), where he called Clint “Lem Hackett,” Mark Twain described the terrified reaction of the village boys, who were encouraged to view Clint’s death as divine retribution for sinfulness. In his 1897 notebook, he wrote that the drowning was regarded as “a judgment” on Clint and his parents because Clint’s great-grandmother had given protection to two Jewish boys “when they were being chased & stoned” (NB 41, CU-MARK†, TS p. 59); in the notebook entry, however, he mistakenly calls the drowned boy “Writer” (i.e., “Righter”), the name of Clint’s younger brother. Clint Levering’s drowning is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” and in “Villagers” (20, 101).
AARON RIGHTER LEVERING (1839–1912), referred to in “Villagers” (101), was a Cadet of Temperance with Clemens. At thirteen he began work in a hardware store and at twenty started his own hardware business. In 1870 he helped to organize the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Hannibal, and became the cashier. A deacon in the Fifth Street Baptist Church, he was for many years a Sunday school superintendent and public school director. When Clemens visited Hannibal in 1902, he attended a reception at the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank where he was greeted by Levering and fellow bank officers JOHN LEWIS ROBARDS and WILLIAM R. PITTS (Holcombe, 962, 1064; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 252 n. 7; Cadets of Temperance 1850; “The Farmers & Merchants Bank,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 22 Apr 1905, 1; “Mark Twain Sees the Home of His Boyhood,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 May 1902, 1).
LOCKWOOD, LUCY. NO information. Though Clemens says in “Villagers” (95) that she married LOT SOUTHARD, the Hannibal Missouri Courier of 8 November 1849 records Southard’s marriage to Emma Beecham.
M. See MARGARET L. CLEMENS.
MCCORMICK, WALES R., mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was a printer’s apprentice with Clemens on Joseph P. Ament’s Hannibal Missouri Courier. In his autobiography, Clemens recalled that he and McCormick boarded with Ament’s family. Although paid no wages, they were promised two suits a year, but instead received their employer’s old clothes. Cast-off shirts gave Clemens “the uncomfortable sense of living in a circus-tent” and were so snug on the “giant” McCormick as to nearly suffocate him, “particularly in the summertime.” Clemens characterized Wales as “a reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles, and was delightful company” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:276). In his notebook for 1887–88, Clemens remembered that McCormick had been reprimanded several times by the itinerant preacher Alexander Campbell for saying “Great God! when Great Scott would have done as well. . . . Weeks afterward, that inveterate light-head had his turn, & corrected the Reverend. In correcting the pamphlet-proof of one of Campbell’s great sermons, Wales changed ‘Great God!’ to ‘Great Scott,’ & changed Father, Son & Holy Ghost to Father, Son & Caesar’s Ghost. In overrunning, he reduced it to Father, Son & Co., to keep from overrunning” (N&J3, 305). McCormick also abbreviated Jesus Christ to J. C., and when told by Campbell never to diminish the Savior’s
name, “enlarged the offending J. C. into Jesus H. Christ” (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:279–82). In another reminiscence, Clemens wrote that “Wales inserted five names between the Savior’s first & last names—said he reckoned Rev. Campbell will be satisfied now” (SLC 1898b, 5–6†). By 1850 McCormick had left Hannibal, eventually settling in Quincy, Illinois, where Clemens saw him while on a lecture tour in 1885. McCormick was the inspiration for the handsome and flirtatious printer named Doangivadam in “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”: “Hamper him as you might, obstruct him as you might, make things as desperate for him as you pleased, he didn’t give a damn, and said so. He was always gay and breezy and cheerful, always kind and good and generous and friendly and careless and wasteful, and couldn’t keep a copper, and never tried” (MSM, 268). Letters from McCormick indicate that Clemens regularly gave him financial assistance in the middle and late 1880s (SLC to Olivia L. Clemens, 23 Jan 85; Wales R. McCormick to SLC, 3 Feb 85, 23 Jan 88, 12 Nov 88, all in CU-MARK; Jackson and Teeples, 239).
MCDERMID (or MCDAVID), DENNIS (d. 1853), was “that poor fellow in the calaboose” recalled in “Letter to William Bowen” (21). He died in the fire that destroyed Hannibal’s small jail in the early hours of 23 January 1853. Writing in the Hannibal Journal on 27 January, Orion Clemens reported that Dennis McDermid (called McDavid in the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger of 25 January) had been made “insane by liquor” and was imprisoned for “breaking down the door of a negro cabin with an ax, and chasing out the inmates.” He had started the blaze when he “set his bed clothes on fire with matches, as he usually carried them in his pocket to light his pipe” (Wecter 1952, 254–55). In 1883, in chapter 56 of Life on the Mississippi, Clemens remembered giving the matches to the “whiskey-sodden tramp.” Claiming to have been only ten years old at the time (in fact, he was seventeen), he confessed to having felt “as guilty of the man’s death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them.” In an autobiographical sketch written in 1900, he explained that it was his “trained Presbyterian conscience” that made him feel guilty even though he had meant the tramp “no harm, but only good, when I let him have the matches” (SLC 1900, 6, in MTA, 1:131).
MCDONALD, ALLEN B. (b. 1805?), “the desperado” mentioned in “Villagers” (95), was a plasterer from Kentucky (Marion Census 1850, 323). The story of McDonald’s fight with CHARLEY SCHNEIDER (or SCHNIETER) is given in the History of Marion County, Missouri much as it is in “Villagers” (101). When John Marshall Clemens was justice of the peace,
Charlie Schnieter and a carpenter named McDonald got into a scuffle on the sidewalk in front of Mr. Clemens’ office. They were litigants in his court, and he stepped out to see what was going on. McDonald was trying to make Schnieter shoot himself with his own pistol. Mr. Clemens commanded the peace, and not being obeyed he struck McDonald on the forehead with a stonemason’s mallet. The plan succeeded, though McDonald expressed doubts of its legality. McDonald was so frequently in difficulties, and so desperately reckless, that he was regarded by most people as half insane and very dangerous. He afterward leveled a shot-gun at Col. Elgin from behind, but the Colonel turned his head, revealing part of his face. McDonald said he believed he was attacking John M. Clemens, but nobody else believed him. (Holcombe, 914)
MCDOWELL, JOHN J. (b. 1834?), a native of Kentucky and a physician, was the son of Joseph Nash McDowell (1805–68), a brilliant, but eccentric, surgeon who in 1840 helped to found the first medical college in St. Louis. (A discussion of the father can be found in Wecter 1952, 160–61, where, however, he is confused with his uncle, Ephraim D. McDowell, “the originator of ovariotomy.”) John McDowell started living with Clemens’s aunt and uncle, ELLA and JAMES ANDREW HAYS LAMPTON, by the summer of 1860, and Clemens comments in “Villagers” (98) on the “arrant scandal” of McDowell’s affair with Ella. In 1870 McDowell described his relationship with the Lamptons in more innocent terms: “When I was a youth, I determined to leave home to find some one who would be kind to me. My mother was dead, and my father . . . had a second time entered the marriage relation. My stepmother and I could not agree. Mr. and Mrs. Lampton met me, took me to their home and were so kind to me that I never left them. I have felt as one of the family ever since that day” (Keith, 10; St. Louis Census 1850, 415:258; St. Louis Census 1860, 656:637; Scharf, 2:1526–27; Varble, 252–53).
MCMANUS, JIMMY, mentioned in “Villagers” (97), was a boatman who robbed Clemens in June 1858 after the explosion of the steamboat Pennsylvania, in which Henry Clemens died. In an 1882 notebook, Clemens recalled: “McManus (Jimmy) robbed me of brass watch chain, & $20—& robbed old Calhoun of underclothes” (N&J2, 454; Kennedy 1860, 333).
MCMURRY, T. P. (PET) (d. 1886), mentioned in “Villagers” (98), was the journeyman printer for the Hannibal Missouri Courier office in the late 1840s, when Clemens and WALES MCCORMICK were apprentices there. He married in 1853 and became a merchant, eventually settling in Knox County, Missouri. In a letter to Clemens of 16 July 1872, McMurry recalled him as “a little sandy-headed, curly-headed boy . . . mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge Cigar, or a diminutive pipe,” who loved to sing “the poor drunken man’s expression, who was supposed to have fallen in the rut by the wayside: ‘If ever I git up agin, I’ll stay up,—if I kin!’ ” (CU-MARK). When Clemens lectured at Quincy, Illinois, in 1885, he was visited by McMurry, “an old man with bushy gray whiskers down to his breast, & farmer-like clothes on”:
When I saw him last, 35 years ago, he was a dandy, with plug hat tipped far forward & resting almost on his very nose; dark red, greasy hair, long, & rolled under at the bottom, down on his neck; red goatee; a most mincing, self-conceited gait—the most astonishing gait that ever I saw—a gait possible nowhere on earth but in our South & in that old day; & when his hat was off, a red roll of hair, a recumbent curl, was exposed (between two exact partings) which extended from his forehead rearward over the curve of his skull, & you could look into it as you would into a tunnel. But now—well, see O W Holmes’s “The Last Leaf” for what he is now. (SLC to Olivia Clemens, 23 Jan 85, CU-MARK, in LLMT, 233)
McMurry was probably the model for the title character of “Jul’us Caesar,” a sketch Clemens wrote in 1855 or 1856 but never published (see ET&S1, 111–17). In an 1897 notebook, Clemens alluded to a prank he had played on McMurry: “Drinking Pet’s bottle of medicine & re-filling it” (NB 41, CU-MARK†, TS p. 60; Hannibal Journal, 15 Aug 53, cited in Wecter 1950, 7; Mrs. T. P. McMurry to SLC, 18 Aug 89, CU-MARK).
MEREDITH family.
HUGH MEREDITH (1806–64), recalled in “Villagers” (93), was born in Pennsylvania. He was the Clemens family’s physician in Florida and Hannibal, Missouri. Meredith and John Marshall Clemens were active in planning improvements for both towns, and in 1844 both helped found the Hannibal Library Institute. Dr. Meredith joined the Gold Rush in 1849, but returned home early in 1851. He took charge of Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Journal for several weeks during the winter of 1851/52, while Orion was in Tennessee attending to the Clemens family’s property there. In his autobiography Clemens recalled the occasion when Orion—making a surprise visit to Hannibal, but unaware that Meredith’s family was living in the Clemenses’ former house—unwittingly climbed into bed with the doctor’s “two ripe oldmaid sisters” (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:272–74; Marion Census 1850, 326; Gregory 1965, 31; Wecter 1952, 55, 111, 116–17, 241–42; Brashear 1934, 200 n. 11; “We received . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 3 Jan 50; “Returned Californians,” Hannibal Western Union, 9 Jan 51; “Dr. Hugh Meredith . . . ,” Hannibal Western Union, 3 Apr 51).
CHARLES MEREDITH (b. 1833?), mentioned in “Villagers” (93), was born in Pennsylvania and was the oldest of the doctor’s five children. He once saved Clemens from drowning in Bear Creek. In 1849–51 he traveled to the California gold fields with his father, and in the spring of 1852 made a second trip west (Marion Census 1850, 326; SLC 1903, 3; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 91; �
��From the Plains,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 24 June 52).
JOHN D. MEREDITH (1837–70), mentioned twice in “Villagers” (93, 96), was born in Missouri. He was a Cadet of Temperance with Clemens. Orion Clemens taught the trade of printing to one of Dr. Meredith’s sons—probably John, who made printing his profession and in the late 1850s worked for the Hannibal Messenger. In his autobiography Samuel Clemens recalled Meredith as “a boy of a quite uncommonly sweet and gentle disposition. He grew up, and when the Civil War broke out he became a sort of guerrilla chief on the Confederate side, and I was told that in his raids upon Union families in the country parts of Monroe County—in earlier times the friends and familiars of his father—he was remorseless in his devastations and sheddings of blood” (AD, 9 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:185; Marion Census 1850, 326; Hagood and Hagood 1986, 128; Cadets of Temperance 1850; Orion Clemens 1880–82, 4; Fotheringham, 41).
