The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  McDermid had been employed by John Moorman Johnson—coincidentally, the same farmer who had loaned Orion the money to buy his newspaper—and had “proved himself a very good-hearted, clever, honest man.” He had left Johnson the previous spring to work on the plank road under construction between Hannibal and New London, but

  indulged in drinking too freely, and lost his senses. For several months past, he seems to have had on him a kind of perpetual delirium tremens. A few pieces of burnt flesh and bones were gathered from the ruins, deposited in a box, and interred in the city burying ground. Thus, living and dying alone and friendless, he suffered in life, met a tragic death, and at last sleeps in a grave that no man honors.

  Sam reminisced with Will Bowen in 1870 about “that poor fellow in the calaboose” whom “we accidentally burned up,” and he evoked his memory of McDermid in chapter 23 of Tom Sawyer. After Muff Potter is falsely accused of Dr. Robinson’s murder and jailed, Huck and Tom slip him “some tobacco and matches” through the cell grating and his “gratitude for their gifts . . . smote their consciences.”61 Fortunately, art failed to imitate life. Potter does not use the matches to burn down the jail. (Of course, had Potter died in a jail fire like McDermid, then Sam could not have portrayed his trial in the novel.)

  The next month a celebrated fugitive slave case with links to Hannibal came to a head. Jerry McReynolds, an escaped slave belonging to John McReynolds of Marion County, was discovered in October 1851 living in Syracuse, New York, where he had worked as a carpenter for several years. In a vain attempt to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, the authorities arrested him and planned to return him to his owner in Missouri, but an outraged mob stormed the courthouse jail and freed him—this over two years before similar tactics failed to liberate Anthony Burns in Boston. Orion reprinted an article from the Buffalo Commercial about the confrontation and commented on it. He complained that there was “a disposition” in Northern cities “hostile to extending to Southern men rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and laws of the land.” That is, Orion supported the Fugitive Slave Act and opposed efforts to subvert it. “Slaveholders may now set it down as an established fact,” he added, “that their chance of recovering a fugitive slave is almost as good in Canada, a foreign country, as in the Northern States of the Union.” The owner of an escaped slave “may calculate on recovering his lost property, in those States, if at all, at the imminent risk of failure, after incurring heavy expense, and at the hazard of his life.” Sam may well again have typeset his brother’s editorial. In any event, he could hardly have been oblivious to the controversy. Sixteen months later, the two dozen abolitionists who incited the “riot” stood trial in Albany, New York, and Orion reprinted an article critical of them from the Albany State Register, which claimed that the abolitionists had committed a “high handed outrage” in Syracuse in the course of “one of their fanatical orgies.” They were not, however, genuinely sympathetic to Jerry’s plight in the opinion of the editorialist. “Having effected their object—excitement, agitation, and a heinous and indictable offence against the laws and the Constitution of the United States,” or so went the argument, “they turn the cold shoulder to their penniless victims, and leave them to shift for themselves as best they can. This is a perfect illustration of the character of abolition fanatics.”62 Orion reprinted this piece in the Journal without comment, though he doubtless shared the sentiment.

  In September 1851 Pamela became the first of the Clemens siblings to marry. She wed William Anderson Moffett, a former Hannibal resident and a prosperous St. Louis merchant, the head of the commission business Moffett, Stillwell, & Co., whose offices in 1859 were located next to the Boggs & U. S. Grant real estate agency on Locust Street. Pamela became pregnant within a few days of the wedding and bore a daughter she and Will named Annie exactly forty weeks later. In his autobiography, Sam remembered Moffett as “a merchant, a Virginian—a fine man in every way.” As for his sister Pamela, the model for Tom’s cousin Mary in Tom Sawyer, she was “a good woman, familiar with grief, though bearing it bravely & giving no sign upon the surface; & she is kind-hearted, void of folly or vanity, perfectly unacquainted with deceit or dissimulation, diffident about her own faults, & slow to discover those of others.” He remarked after her death in 1904 that her “character was without blemish, & she was of a most kindly & gentle disposition.”63

  On his part, Sam had plenty of adolescent sweethearts in addition to Laura Hawkins. The first target of his infatuation was probably Mary Miller, who was twice his age and broke his heart by ignoring his suit. But there were other objects of his calf love: Mary Bowen, sister of the Bowen brothers; Jennie Brady, sister of another of Sam’s friends; Mary and Artemisia Briggs, sisters of John Briggs; Bettie Ormsley; Arzelia Penn, daughter of one of the founders of the town; Margaret Sexton, whose family briefly boarded at the Clemens house; and Kitty Shoot, daughter of a local hosteler. He may even have briefly been engaged to one of them. According to Sam’s niece Annie Moffett, a “young married woman who had formerly lived in Hannibal” once claimed that “she had been engaged” to her uncle. When Annie asked Sam about the truth of her statement, she quoted his reply: “Well, if she says so, it must be true.” The woman in question likely was Artemisia Briggs, whose marriage in Hannibal to a local bricklayer in March 1853 may have hastened Sam’s departure from the village two months later. At any rate, Sam noted in his autobiography in 1906 that Artemisia Briggs “got married not long after refusing me.”64

  Sam learned a few tricks of the advertising trade as a typesetter, too—in particular, how to scream a lead that had nothing to do with the product that was promoted. It was a variation of bait and switch. A long-running ad in the Hannibal Journal for a stove store on Main Street, for example, was headlined “Railroad Depot / Located! / It is not yet determined where.” Such advertisements inspired Sam’s first hoax, a short item in the Journal for May 6, 1853: “Terrible Accident! 500 Men Killed and Missing!! We set the above head up, expecting (of course) to use it, but as the accident hasn’t happened yet we’ll say (To be Continued).”65 It foreshadowed the type of prank he played many times in the future, especially in advertising his first lectures in California and Nevada.

  Sam eventually became the de facto foreman of his brother’s shop and, even as a teenager, he wrote items for the paper about violent and broken families. He expressed in his juvenilia a special disgust for husbands who abused their wives. In “A Family Muss,” his first substantial article in the Hannibal Journal, published on September 9, 1852, under his first pseudonym, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins, he detailed the abusive behavior of a sadistic husband and father. Two months later, in the ironically titled “Connubial Bliss,” written shortly before his seventeenth birthday, he referred to the cautionary tales of “bloated, reeling” drunks who sleep “in the gutter at night” and abuse their wives and children by day. The following spring he suggested in the Journal that a man guilty of “unmercifully beating and maltreating his wife and children” ought “to be ducked, ridden on a rail, tarred and feathered, and politely requested to bundle up his ‘duds’ and make himself scarce.”66

  After working for Orion for a year and a half, he seemed ready to assume a larger role in the production of the paper. So when Orion left Hannibal in mid-September 1852 on a two-week business trip to Tennessee to try again to sell some of the family land, he left Sam in charge. The interim subeditor literally took a page from big-city editors who stirred controversy with mock feuds and ad hominem attacks on their peers in order to attract readers, and he took a cue from Ben Franklin, who in 1722 contributed columns under a pseudonym to the New-England Courant, his brother James’s newspaper. In “Blabbing Government Secrets” Sam invented the W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab persona to criticize the Democratic governor of Missouri and its Democratic legislature for squandering time and tax money.67

  But the more immediate target of his satire was J. T. Hinton, editor of the rival Tri-Weekly Messenger. Orion had
recently complained about the noise of barking dogs in town, and Hinton had responded by branding Orion “a fierce hater of the canine race.” During Orion’s absence, Hinton was jilted and apparently resolved to drown himself in Bear Creek before changing his mind. The affair became grist for the local gossip mill. Hinton was “a simpering coxcomb of the first water,” according to Sam, and posed as “an inveterate woman-killer,” so the teenaged interim editor decided to ridicule him. He “wrote an elaborately wretched account of the whole matter” for the Journal “and then illustrated it” with a “villainous” woodcut engraved with a jackknife of Hinton with the head of a dog and “a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny.” Seeing it in print “was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line I have ever experienced since,” Sam declared sixty years later. The finger piece appeared in the September 16 issue of the paper and, Sam allowed, “I never knew any little thing to attract so much attention” as his “playful trifle. . . . For once the Hannibal Journal was in demand—a novelty it had not experienced before.” Hinton was outraged, of course. He stormed the Journal office the next morning with a shotgun, Sam recalled, but when “he found that it was an infant (as he called me) that had done him the damage, he simply pulled my ears and went away.” Whether or not he actually confronted Sam, Hinton replied to his insinuations in the next Messenger. His antagonist has neither “the decency of a gentleman, nor the honor of a blackguard,” he charged, but “displays an amount of egotism that is a universal characteristic of all blackguards” and dismissed Sam’s insults as “the feeble eminations [sic] of a puppy’s brain.”68

  Orion “was very angry when he got back—unreasonably so,” Sam thought, “considering what an impetus I had given the paper”—but “he softened,” Sam claimed, “when he looked at the accounts and saw that I had actually booked the unparalleled number of thirty-three new subscribers, and had the vegetables to show for it, cordwood, cabbage, beans, and unsalable turnips enough to run the family for two years!” Orion allowed that the tempest in a teapot had “riveted the town’s attention, but not its admiration.” He tried to calm the waters in the next issue of the paper with a nonapology apology: “The jokes of our correspondent have been rather rough, but originating and perpetrated in a spirit of fun, and without a serious thought, no attention was expected to be paid to them, beyond a smile at the local editor’s expense.” In the same issue, Blab announced that he had “retired from public life to the shades of Glasscock’s Island,” three miles downstream from Hannibal.69 Blab never again contributed to the columns of the Journal. Still, Sam remembered, “it took [his brother] several weeks to quiet down and pacify the people whom my writings had excited.”70

  The brouhaha did not prevent Orion from leaving Sam in charge again the following May when he went to St. Louis on business for ten days or so. Orion had launched a daily edition of the Journal in March and its condition was so fragile he may have admonished his younger brother to publish nothing that would cause a stir. If so, Sam ignored the admonition. On page 1 of the issue of the Journal for May 12, the day after his brother’s departure, Sam inserted an ironic disclaimer with a sarcastic jab at his brother: “The Editor left yesterday for St. Louis. This must be our excuse if the paper is lacking in interest.” The several issues of the Hannibal Daily Journal published in his absence again betray Sam’s heavy editorial hand. He obviously wanted to spice up the pages of the paper. On the first day he printed a bit of his own tortured verse titled “Love Concealed” (“Oh, thou wilt never know how fond a love / This heart could have felt for thee”),71 and the next day he editorially praised people with red hair, including Jesus and Thomas Jefferson (and by implication, his mother) in the mock-epic sketch “Oh, She Has a Red Head.” With characteristic ingenuity he contended that the local whiskey tax made chugging liquor a civic duty, and he lambasted the Hannibal City Council for voting to ban Sunday liquor sales. As far back as February 1853, Orion had begun to reprint articles from temperance journals in support of the local effort to suppress the liquor trade, but Sam neither shared his view nor approved it. As he explained, local residents would either buy liquor legally on Sunday, if available, or illegally from bootleggers, if necessary. In his opinion, the health risks to Hannibalians sickened by adulterated moonshine bought on Sunday trumped the calls to prohibit legal liquor sales on the Sabbath. Sam was outspoken on the issue: “Now we think that if this is the effect of stringent temperance laws; if the health, comfort and happiness of free people are to be obstructed, and their rights trampled upon in this manner, then I say, for one, that this is no longer a free country; and that our constitution is abused, and we had best not have any at all.”72

  Orion could not have been pleased that during his absence Sam had expressed a view in print contrary to his own editorial position. The best circumstantial evidence suggests that Sam and his brother had a spat soon after Orion’s return from St. Louis in late May. Sam had filled the paper with his own poems, criticized his editorial policy on Sunday liquor sales, and fabricated a silly dispute between two fictional contributors, Rambler and Grumbler. Moreover, the seventeen-year-old Sam, who worked long hours for Orion for nothing more than room and board, wanted to buy a pistol, but his older brother refused to advance him the money. Orion tried to placate his brother by giving him the honorific title of editorial assistant and his own column in the paper—which lasted exactly three issues. In one of his columns, Sam lampooned Abner Gilstrap, editor of the Bloomington, Illinois, Republican. In the Journal for May 23, Sam made Gilstrap the target of a satirical parody of Charles Wolfe’s poem “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Cities across the region, including Bloomington, were quarreling over the route of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, so Sam picked a fight with Gilstrap, who thought his town—instead of Hannibal, by then the second-largest city in Missouri—should have been selected as the terminus of a major rail route west. “It struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge” Gilstrap “with a piece of gratuitous rascality” and watch him “squirm,” Sam remembered.73 Orion apparently had not seen the poem before it appeared in print, else he likely would have quashed it. He had always tried to conciliate rival editors, but Sam ridiculed them. In short, the crude parody hastened the inevitable.

  Sam chafed under Orion’s authority like Tom Sawyer sewn into his Sunday shirt, and in early June he quit the paper. Orion admitted later that he had been

  tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry’s dirty proofs.

  In his final “Assistant’s Column” in the Journal for May 26, Sam noted that “from fifteen to twenty thousand persons are continually congregated around the new Crystal Palace in New York City, and drunkenness and debauching are carried on to their fullest extent.” He was attracted to the spectacle like a moth to a flame. Frustrated and itching for a change, much as Franklin fled his apprenticeship in his brother’s print shop rather than continue to submit to his authority, Sam “ran away” from home, as he put it, without so much as a fine howdy-do to Orion.74

  CHAPTER 4

  Journeyman Printer

  I disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis. There I worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a time, and then started on my travels to see the world.

  —Autobiography of Mark Twain

  IN LATE MAY 1853 Sam Clemens left Hannibal and, according to his brother Orion, “went wandering in search of that comfort and that advancement and those rewards of industry which he had failed to find where I was—gloomy, taciturn, and selfish.” Leaving aside the ambiguity of the statement—who, exactly, was “gloomy, taciturn,
and selfish”?—the older brother admitted that he “not only missed” Sam’s labor but that “we all missed his bounding activity and merriment.” At his mother’s insistence, Sam took an oath on the Bible not to throw a card or drink a drop of intoxicating liquor or swear during his journey. Jane Clemens claimed many years later that “that oath saved him.” Sam caught the night boat for St. Louis on the initial leg of his first great adventure. Orion advertised for a new apprentice from May 27 until June 10. With the loss of Sam’s assistance, Orion suspended publication of the Daily Journal for an entire month, from June 11 until July 11, even though the daily edition mostly consisted of boilerplate, and of both the daily and weekly editions of the paper on September 22. The Hannibal Courier published a satirical obituary to the effect that the paper had died of “a protracted and painful attack of water on the brain”—that is, as the result of Orion’s advocacy of temperance—“and was consoled and tenderly cared for by a host of benevolent old ladies.” By the end of the month Orion had folded his tent in Hannibal and sold the backlog of advertising in the Journal to William League of the Whig Messenger for five hundred dollars, the amount of his debt. He purchased a half interest in the Muscatine Journal and moved over two hundred miles north to the free state of Iowa with his mother and Henry. No member of the Clemens family ever lived in Hannibal again. The first issue of the Muscatine Journal under his co-ownership appeared on September 30.1