A prosperous pilot at last, Sam invited his mother and two young women to be his guests aboard the Child on a St. Louis–New Orleans round-trip between February 27 and March 15. “Ma was delighted” by the excursion, Sam reported to Orion, “but she was disgusted with the girls”—one of them perhaps his second cousin Ella Creel from Keokuk, the other an otherwise unidentified Miss Castle—“for allowing me to embrace and kiss them.” Sam had learned to dance at so-called play parties in Hannibal when the children romped through such melodies as “King William Was King George’s Son” and “Green Grow the Rushes, O.” His mother was “perfectly willing for me to dance” on the hurricane deck until midnight “at the imminent peril of my going to sleep on the after watch—but then she would top off with a very inconsistent sermon on dancing in general; ending with a terrific broadside aimed at that heresy of heresies, the Schottische.” Though she had been an accomplished dancer as a young woman in Kentucky, Jane Clemens was “horrified at the Schottische,” with its pivots and spins, “as performed by Miss Castle and me.” On March 7, the only full day of their New Orleans layover, Sam escorted his mother and the two young women around the Garden District in a carriage and “out to Lake Pontchartrain in the cars.” And though “it was a blazing hot dusty day, they seemed hugely delighted.”51
One evening in St. Louis soon after their return, certainly between March 15 and 20, Sam also escorted his mother and her friend Betsey Smith to a performance at the St. Louis Theater of the Christy Minstrels, “in that day one of the most celebrated of such troupes, and also one of the best.” Neither of the women had ever attended a minstrel show, but “they were fond of excitement, fond of novelties, fond of anything going that was of a sort proper for members of the church to indulge in,” and in St. Louis they wanted to see “something exciting and proper.” Sam convinced them, or so he remembered in his autobiographical dictation, that they ought to attend a convention of African missionaries—that is, the Christy troupe. “We went early, and got seats in the front bench. By and by, when all the seats on that spacious floor were occupied, there were sixteen hundred persons present. When the grotesque negroes came filing out on the stage in their extravagant costumes, the old ladies were almost speechless with astonishment.” Sam assured them that all the performers were “employed by the American Missionary Society,” and they were thus mollified.52
On March 18 Sam also accompanied Pamela to an exhibition of Frederic Edwin Church’s painting Heart of the Andes at the Western Academy of Art. Church, a Luminist painter and, with Asher Durand and Thomas Cole, a founder of the Hudson River school of painting, was well known for his idealized landscapes. In his first extant comment on fine art, Sam raved over the highly romanticized scene in a letter to Orion. He considered it “the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen.” It depicted “a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all the bloom and glory of a tropical summer—dotted with birds and flowers of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners, and twilight groves, and cool cascades—all grandly set off with a majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in everlasting ice and snow!” Sam had viewed it “several times, but it is always a new picture—totally new—you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first.” The exhibitors included the loan of a pair of opera glasses with the price of admission, so he was able to examine “its beauties minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside flowers, and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden bunches of grass and jets of water which form some of its most enchanting features.” He was particularly impressed by the pantheism implicit in the painting: “You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections—your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something—you hardly know what—will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief.”53 Never an astute judge of art, Sam nevertheless always knew what he liked.
On one of their final trips together aboard the Child, Sam quarreled with Will Bowen for reasons that are not entirely clear. Sam’s mother believed that her son “let go [of] the wheel to whip Will for talking secesh and made Will hush.” That is, according to Jane Clemens, the boys argued over politics. Certainly Will sympathized with the Confederacy, though he was compelled under threat of prison to pilot a Union transport during the Civil War. But it is doubtful that Sam would have resorted to fisticuffs to silence Will. More likely their falling out was related to two hundred dollars that Sam had lent him. In late April 1861, while the Child was unloaded in St. Louis, Sam made a hurried trip to Hannibal in a vain attempt to collect the money from his friend, who was there to supervise the construction of a boardinghouse to be operated by his mother. Sam fictionalized their dispute in the opening paragraphs of “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885); his piloting partner at first “was strong for the Union; so was I,” though Sam’s loyalty “was smirched, to his [partner’s] eye, because my father had owned slaves.” Within a month they had both flip-flopped on the war issue. Sam “became a rebel” and so did his partner, who complained that Sam “came of bad stock, of a father who had been willing” to free his slaves. The next summer the partner “was piloting a Union gunboat and shouting for the Union again and I was in the Confederate army. I held his note for some borrowed money. He was one of the most upright men I ever knew but he repudiated that note without hesitation because I was a rebel and the son of a man who owned slaves.” Sam and Will eventually repaired their friendship. In a note to Will in August 1866 Sam dismissed their quarrel as a “misunderstanding all around” that had been exacerbated when Jane Clemens tried to dun Will to repay the money during the war and Will refused. But, Sam assured him, they had been chums too long “ever to have anything like sordid business engagements” interfere with their mutual affection.54
Sam’s career on the river ended soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. He seems to have been largely oblivious to events that precipitated the conflict. He chewed the war talk without tasting it, as the saying went. Or, as Arthur Pettit has remarked, he “gave little thought or attention to the approaching collision between North and South or to his own position on the twin issues of slavery and sectionalism.” Sam was in New Orleans on January 26, 1861, when Louisiana seceded, and he remembered “Great rejoicing. Flags, Dixie, soldiers.” At Vicksburg en route to New Orleans on April 19, he heard about the firing on Fort Sumter the day before, and the crew of the Alonzo Child, on orders from its secessionist captain, David DeHaven, “hoisted the stars & bars & played Dixie” in celebration. While the gesture may seem innocuous enough, it was in fact an act of treason. According to Horace Bixby, who had by this time retired from the Alonzo Child, Sam “piloted . . . for the Confederacy” between March and May 1861 before “he got through the lines and went home.” For many months as a pilot on the lower Mississippi, Sam had landed at no free port except those in southwestern Illinois such as Cairo, so the “Irrepressible Conflict” must have seemed Distant and/or Eminently Avoidable. The states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, all of which he passed every couple of weeks while piloting, seceded from the United States to join the Confederacy. Sam was earning $250 a month at a job for which he had been painstakingly trained, and the war seemed more a nuisance to him than a moral crusade. “I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel,” he wrote in Life on the Mississippi. Instead, he was bumped off his boat in New Orleans in mid-May 1861, nearly a month after the war began, because the owners of the Child had decided to sell it at nominal cost to the Confederate Navy. Its engines were removed and installed on the CSS Tennessee, an ironclad warship seized in February 1864 by the Union at the Battle of Mobile Bay. The shell of the Child was converted into a barge.55
After some sixty round-trips piloting on the lower Mississippi, Sam was again out of work. He hastily returned to Missouri as a passenger aboard the Nebrask
a, piloted by his friend Zeb Leavenworth, leaving New Orleans on May 14 and arriving in St. Louis on May 21. It was the last steamboat allowed through the Union blockade at Memphis before the lower Mississippi was closed to civilian traffic. As the Nebraska approached the federal arsenal at Jefferson Barracks below St. Louis, the boat was attacked. A bomb exploded near the pilothouse, breaking the windows. Bixby saw bullet holes in its smokestacks a few days later, “and the Civil War had only begun.” In the days to come, according to Sam, the pilots who remained on the river “used to hold up a spittoon or a cane seat chair to protect their heads & hide behind a bit of canvass or lie down on the floor. One in white linen held a spittoon to his head, with the breaking glass rattling around him; the content spilt on his clothes.” Soon after the Nebraska docked in St. Louis, Sam and his friends Sam Bowen and Absalom Grimes, an upper Mississippi pilot, embarked aboard the packet Hannibal City for refuge in their hometown.56
CHAPTER 6
The War
You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war; is it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who started out to do something in it, but didn’t?
—“The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”
AT THE START of the Civil War, Hannibal was already occupied by three companies of loyal Missouri Home Guards and, according to Absalom Grimes, the three unemployed pilots—Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Sam Bowen, and Grimes—were met at the wharf by a Union lieutenant with orders to accompany them back to St. Louis for impressment into the Union Navy. President Abraham Lincoln had warned that experienced pilots might be drafted and that they should expect to be fired upon if they failed to comply. The new recruits were escorted to a steamboat headed south,1 occupying staterooms with guards stationed at the doors. In Grimes’s version of events, in St. Louis they were marched to the headquarters of Brigadier General John B. Grey, commander of the District of St. Louis, to be sworn into service, but instead they managed to escape out a window. In another version, almost certainly apocryphal, Sam was briefly imprisoned in a tobacco warehouse on Washington Avenue until he pledged his allegiance to the Union and was released. For the next few weeks, he “was obsessed with the fear that he might be arrested by government agents and forced to act as pilot on a government gunboat while a man stood by with a pistol ready to shoot him if he showed the least sign of a false move,” according to Annie Moffett. He hid in Cousin Jim’s house or the Moffetts’ new three-story brick house on Chestnut Street in St. Louis, with all visitors screened by his mother, who “gave strict orders that if anyone called and asked for Mr. Clemens she was to be called.”2
In short, Sam was a pawn caught in the byzantine politics of eastern Missouri. In the election of 1860, over 70 percent of Missouri voters cast their ballots for either John Bell or Stephen Douglas, both of them pro-Union candidates. Nevertheless, on March 16, the Confederate flag was raised in Marion County for the first time. On April 14, after the assault on Fort Sumter, and anticipating the war that would soon erupt, President Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron called for four thousand troops from Missouri to be mustered into service in the Union Army. The pro-Confederacy governor of the state, Claiborne Fox Jackson, refused to honor the order and even declared it “illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary; in its objects inhuman and diabolical.” Instead, Jackson arranged for the proslavery legislature he had installed in Neosho, in the southwestern part of the state, to pass a secession resolution on May 14. The rump legislature in Jefferson City removed Jackson and laid plans for a provisional state government loyal to the Union. In response, Jackson issued a call for fifty thousand troops under the command of Sterling Price to repel the Northern “invader” from the sacred soil of Missouri.3 In other words, the Civil War was fought on a miniature scale in Missouri.
Sam soon learned from Hannibal friends of a plan to organize a company of rebel Missouri Home Guards in response to Jackson’s call for volunteers. He jumped at the opportunity. That is, while the extent of his support for the Confederate cause, as James M. Cox observes, “will perhaps never be known,” if Sam had itched to enlist in the Confederate Army, he would have done nothing differently. A native of a slaveholding community, he “naturally sympathized at first with the South,” as he later conceded. Two of his Quarles cousins, Benjamin and Fred, also joined the Confederate Army. Horace Bixby and Ed Montgomery, Sam’s mentors on the river, both led distinguished wartime careers, though they led opposing navies at Memphis. Bixby piloted the Benton, the flagship of the Union ironclad fleet named for Thomas Hart Benton, and Admiral Andrew Hull Foote, commander of the Western Gunboat Flotilla, called him “the best pilot that he had ever seen.” Sam probably wrote a letter that appeared in the St. Louis Missouri State Journal on June 18 and was reprinted in the Hannibal Messenger on June 20, reporting on the state of readiness in Hannibal. While there had been a few desertions from the ranks of the rebel Home Guards, some 250 remaining men were prepared for deployment. “The boys are responding bravely to the call of the Governor” on June 12, Sam attested, and were ready “to strike when the proper time comes.” While the editor of the Messenger quibbled with some of these assertions—for example, that “there are only two hundred and fifty Home Guards” in Hannibal—this letter betrays Sam’s embrace of the Confederate cause at the beginning of the war.4
One evening during the second week of June 1861, perhaps June 8, the darkest night of the month, Sam rendezvoused with a dozen other Hannibal boys “up a gorge behind an old barn in Ralls County” to organize the Marion County Rangers, a ragtag band of irregulars. “We waited for a dark night,” Sam remembered, “then toward midnight we stole” in groups of two and three “from various directions” for “the hamlet of New London, ten miles away in Ralls County.” Sam walked to New London with his friends Ed Stevens and Sam Bowen. Despite their name, the Marion Rangers spent no time in Marion County; they operated exclusively in Ralls and Monroe Counties. Ab Grimes learned the next day “that a whole brigade of recruits had formed a camp” at the home of Nuck Matson, a prominent local farmer, miller, and stock breeder, two miles west of New London. The volunteers included Sam, Sam Bowen, Jack Coulter, William Ely, Arch Fuqua, Asa Glasscock, Ab Grimes, Sam Lyon, John Meredith, Charley Mills, John Robards, Perry Smith, and Ed Stevens. Ely was elected company captain, Glasscock first lieutenant, Sam second lieutenant, Bowen sergeant, and Lyon orderly sergeant. After the officers were selected, the detachment contained only three privates. Or, as Sam wrote with pardonable hyperbole in “Boy’s Manuscript” (ca. 1868), “We’ve got thirty-two officers and fourteen men in our army.” One of the privates probably was Stevens, son of the Hannibal jeweler, who was “trim built, handsome, graceful, neat as a cat, bright, educated, but given over entirely to fun. There was nothing serious in life to him.” Robards or RoBards, who frenchified his name (much as Dunlap in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” [1885] changed the spelling, if not the pronunciation, of his name to d’Unlap) was, Sam wrote, “perhaps a fair sample of the kind of stuff we were made of. He was young, ignorant, good natured, well meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric novels and singing forlorn love ditties.” In his autobiography, Sam described him as “devilishly amiable; fiendishly amiable; exasperatingly amiable.” Bowen, portrayed as Joe Bowers in “The Private History,” was “a huge, good natured, flax headed lubber, lazy, sentimental, full of harmless brag, a grumbler by nature.” The boys were sworn into service by the farmer John Ralls, a retired U.S. Army colonel who had served with distinction in the Mexican-American War fifteen years earlier.5
Exactly what the oath administered by Ralls meant is unclear, however. He was probably not entitled to administer any oath, though Grimes insisted that Ralls “was duly authorized by Governor Jackson to enroll recruits for the Southern army.” But Jackson did not issue this order until the following month. In his 1877 account of events Sam underscored the ambiguity of the occasion: “He made us swea
r to uphold the flag and Constitution of the United States, and to destroy every other military organization that we caught doing the same thing, which, being interpreted, means that we were to repel invasion. Well, you see this mixed us. We couldn’t really tell which side we were on.” In Sam’s 1885 account Ralls clearly enlists the boys on the Confederate side of the struggle, but he again urges them to “resist all foreign invaders.” The admonition is nothing if not ironic. Ralls was, after all, a veteran of the War with Mexico, the epitome of a conflict for imperial conquest. Harold K. Bush Jr. notes that Sam took an oath of allegiance “to the state of Missouri, not the Confederacy”; Joe B. Fulton emphasizes that “there is no evidence that Clemens ever took the loyalty oath” to the Confederacy; and Terrell Dempsey concludes that “to call him a Confederate in any sense is simply unsupportable.” Yet Sam always self-identified as a former Confederate soldier when he commented on the Civil War, as in “The Private History” (“I was in the Confederate army”), in an interview in 1902 (“My conscience directed me to take up the Confederate cause”), in his autobiography (he had enlisted as a “soldier on the Confederate side”), and in a speech in 1910 (“I was a second lieutenant in the Confederate service”).6
The Marion Rangers were no doubt un(der)equipped for their military mission, whatever it might have been. They deployed to the field “without tents, arms,” or “commissary stores,” Grimes recalled. In early June 1861 some of the Missouri Home Guards around Hannibal were supplied with muskets seized from the U.S. arsenal near St. Louis to protect the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, but the Rangers were overlooked in this distribution of arms. Instead, Sam went to war, according to Grimes, with only a valise, a carpetbag, a pair of blankets, a quilt, a frying pan, a squirrel rifle, twenty yards of seagrass rope, and an umbrella. Jane Clemens joked that Sam’s motley crew was “ragged and dirty” when “they went to the lakes” in Ralls County. Ella Hunter Lampton, Uncle Jim’s wife, visited their camp “and gave a most amusing account,” no longer extant, of the disreputable-looking band of Confederate recruits. They depended almost entirely on the kindness of neighbors for their meals.7
The Life of Mark Twain Page 21
