The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Would that the record of Sam’s reporting on behalf of the St. Louis fair and the U.S. Sanitary Commission ended here. Instead he used the occasion to skewer the Virginia City Daily Union. At the Sanitary Fund meeting at Maguire’s Opera House on May 1, attended by Gridley with the flour sack, the employees of the Territorial Enterprise pledged $300 toward the fund and the staff of the Union pledged $200. During an auction of the flour sack in Virginia City the evening of May 16, however, representatives of the two newspapers engaged in a bidding war. The Union pledged another $100, the Enterprise $150, and the Union called and raised another $50. The staffs of the two papers had pledged virtually the same amount of money to a noble cause. Ironically, there is no concrete evidence that Sam contributed any money, though as an Enterprise employee he likely did so. But for whatever reason, perhaps merely the long-standing rivalry between the papers, Sam injudiciously chose to challenge the loyalty of the Union employees. In an editorial titled “How Is It? How It Is,” he acknowledged that “the Union overbid us for flour,” but he had learned “that the Union (or its employés, whichever it is,) has repudiated the bid. We would like to know about this matter, if we may make so free.” This contrived controversy during Goodman’s absence is eerily reminiscent of Sam’s allegation in 1852, when Orion was traveling and Sam was temporary editor of the Hannibal Journal, that J. T. Hinton of the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger had contemplated suicide after he was jilted. James L. Laird of the Union replied to Sam’s editorial the next day. Laird had run against Goodman for the office of state printer in January 1864—both of them lost in the election that was nullified—but the experience exacerbated the hostilities between the papers. Laird reported that $315 pledged by the Union employees had been paid by May 17 but that the treasurer of the local Sanitary Fund “does not show the receipt of any moneys from the Enterprise newspaper.” Moreover, according to Laird, “last year the Enterprise appeared for a long time on the Sanitary Fund delinquent list, thus furnishing another evidence that its chief characteristic is impulsiveness which immediately cools.” The “despicable attempts” of the Enterprise “to misrepresent us in this particular have no parallel in unmanly public journalism,” Laird added, and Sam’s allegation “could only emanate from a person whose employer can find in his services a machine very suitable to his own manliness.” Sam had thrown down the gauntlet, Laird had slapped him in the face with it, and Sam quickly backpedaled without apologizing. The Union employees, he lamely asserted, “had not intended” to honor their pledges until he had called them out, whereupon “for the sake of saving an entirely imaginary reputation for virtue and honesty, [they] concluded to do so.”60

  Meanwhile, as this cause célèbre festered, Sam made another foolish decision, this time to satirize the charity ball hosted on May 5 by the women of Carson City to raise money for the Sanitary Fund. Prominent among the organizers of the event were Hannah Clapp, principal of the Sierra Seminary; Sam’s sister-in-law, Mollie Clemens; and Ellen Cutler, who had been unanimously elected president of the Carson City Sanitary Ball Committee. A former resident of St. Louis, Cutler was a member of the Sierra Seminary faculty and likely had been one of Jennie Clemens’s instructors there. She was locally celebrated as an “elocutionist and vocalist,” “one of the guardian angels” of Nevada’s “bright future” in the arts, with “no superior on the coast” as a music teacher. She had been honored the previous July during a benefit in Virginia City. A friend described her before her singing debut at the Academy of Music in San Francisco as a “charming and cultivated” lady who was “eminently deserving of respect.”61

  As was his occasional wont, Sam overstepped the bounds of good taste by insulting Cutler and the other women who had raised money for the Sanitary Fund. On May 17, even as he was accusing the Union employees of defaulting on their pledges, he suggested in an unsigned editorial that “the reason the Flour Sack was not taken from Dayton to Carson was because it was stated that the money raised at the Sanitary Fancy Dress Ball, recently held in Carson for the St. Louis Fair, had been diverted from its legitimate course, and was to be sent to aid a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East; and it was feared the proceeds of the sack might be similarly disposed of.” Sam conceded he was concocting fake news before withdrawing the concession, because it was “not all a hoax, for an effort is being made to divert those funds from their proper course.”62 His crack about the diversion of Sanitary Commission funds to a Miscegenation Society would have been a joke had it been funny. In deploying the race-baiting scare tactics of a white supremacist, Sam doubly insulted the women of Carson by accusing them of both misappropriating funds and promoting miscegenation.

  In his defense, Sam protested that he had been drunk when he wrote the editorial, that Dan De Quille had dissuaded him from publishing it, and that instead it had appeared by accident. In truth, too, the circular publicizing the St. Louis Sanitary Fair had noted that some of the proceeds might be sent to the Freedman’s Bureau to assist newly manumitted slaves, though the bureau could hardly be mistaken for a Miscegenation Society. Moreover, the very term miscegenation was contested at the moment Sam wrote this editorial. It had only been coined in the spring of 1864 as a synonym for amalgamation, another multisyllabic term with too favorable a connotation in a mining community to be used to criticize race mixing. Both Democrats and Republicans accused the other party of inventing the inflammatory word. Miscegenation had been the topic of a pair of recent editorials in the Virginia Daily Union, where it was described as a “fearful word of five syllables, which cannot be found” in Webster’s Dictionary, as if that detail proved the indecency of both the term and the practice. Less than a month later, the term was defined by the Virginia Evening Bulletin as “used to denote the abstract idea of the mixture of two or more races,”63 as if an all too routine biological norm was entirely theoretical.

  Not only had Othello, a story of a doomed interracial marriage, been staged at Maguire’s Opera House on April 23, but Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon, based on a novel by Mayne Reid about the love affair of a mixed-race couple, had also been performed there two weeks earlier. That is, amalgamation or miscegenation was part of the zeitgeist in Virginia City when Sam’s “fatally clumsy wisecrack” appeared. Five years later, Sam still referred to Othello as “the great miscegenationist.” But it remains inexplicable that he would question the integrity of the Sanitary Commission, a cause championed by both his sister and sister-in-law. DeLancey Ferguson asserted that it was “the jest of a Missouri Copperhead” and “could not have been worse timed or in worse taste” and the fact he “realized how ridiculous” he had been was proven seven years later when “the subject was still too sore for him to mention it in Roughing It.” Kenneth S. Lynn charged that Sam “reached for the immemorial smear bucket of Southern polemics.”64

  It was, by any account, the most shameful episode of Sam’s life, and he was swiftly and predictably censured for his comments. Paul Fatout considers it “as thorough a drubbing as [he] had ever received.” The women of the Carson City Sanitary Ball Committee sent a letter of protest about the “libelous article” and “scurrilous item” to the Territorial Enterprise, which failed to print it. Sam was caught in a bind, as Leland Krauth has explained: “He could not apologize in print (in his own name) for a tasteless, ungentlemanly slur upon the ladies of Carson at the very moment he was staunchly demanding of Laird ‘the satisfaction due to a gentleman.’ Clearly the first admission would invalidate the second claim.” “I know I am in the wrong,” Sam admitted to Mollie. “I wrote the squib the ladies letter refers to” and “whatever blame there is, rests with me alone.” Because it angered the women, he said, “I am sorry the thing occurred” but “that is all I can do, for you will see yourself that their communication is altogether unanswerable.” He could not publicly “explain it by saying the affair was a silly joke, & that I & all concerned were drunk. No—I’ll die first.”65 What had begun as an insensitive joke about miscegenation had evol
ved into an affair of honor.

  Instead, the letter by the women of Carson appeared in the rival Union for May 25. The “whole statement is a tissue of falsehoods, made for malicious purposes,” the women declared, “and we demand the name of the author. The ball was gotten up in aid of the Sanitary Commission,” for “the aid of the sick and wounded soldiers, who are fighting the battles of our country, and for no other purpose.” Sam expressed genuine contrition and sincerely if belatedly apologized to Ellen Cutler in a private note on May 23:

  I address a lady in every sense of the term. Mrs. [Mollie] Clemens has informed me of everything that has occurred in Carson in connection with that unfortunate item of mine about the Sanitary Funds accruing from the ball, and from what I can understand, you are almost the only lady in your city who has understood the circumstances under which my fault was committed, or who has shown any disposition to be lenient with me. Had the note of the ladies been properly worded, I would have published an ample apology instantly. . . . But my chief object, Mrs. Cutler, in writing you this note (and you will pardon the liberty I have taken,) was to thank you very kindly and sincerely for the consideration you have shown me in this matter, and for your continued friendship for Mollie while others are disposed to withdraw theirs on account of a fault for which I alone am responsible.

  In the next issue of the Enterprise, Sam finally apologized publicly for his blunder:

  We published a rumor, the other day, that the moneys collected at the Carson Fancy Dress Ball were to be diverted from the Sanitary Fund and sent forward to aid a “miscegenation” or some other sort of Society in the East. We also stated that the rumor was a hoax. And it was—we were perfectly right. However, four ladies are offended. We cannot quarrel with ladies—the very thought of such a thing is repulsive; neither can we consent to offend them even unwittingly—without being sorry for the misfortune, and seeking their forgiveness, which is a kindness we hope they will not refuse. We intended no harm, as they would understand easily enough if they knew the history of this offense of ours, but we must suppress that history, since it would rather be amusing than otherwise, and the amusement would be at our expense. We have no love for that kind of amusement—and the same trait belongs to human nature generally. One lady complained that we should at least have answered the note they sent us. It is true. There is small excuse for our neglect of a common politeness like that, yet we venture to apologize for it, and will still hope for pardon, just the same. We have noticed one thing in this whole business—and also in many an instance which has gone before it—and that is, that we resemble the majority of our species in the respect that we are very apt to get entirely in the wrong, even when there is no seeming necessity for it; but to offset this vice, we claim one of the virtues of our species, which is that we are ready to repair such wrongs when we discover them.

  In brief, Sam tried to put the best face possible on his gaffe. Nevertheless, on May 26, the women of Carson “interested in the Sanitary Commission” met and “gave three cheers” for the women who had organized the charity ball, including Ellen Cutler, “and three groans for the Territorial Enterprise.” Sam’s apology likely enabled him to avoid a duel with William Cutler, Ellen’s husband, who sent Sam a challenge a day or two later. “Having apologized once for that offensive conduct, I shall not do it again,” Sam replied with (false?) bravado. But he had already made plans “before I received your note to leave for California, & having no time to fool away on a common bummer like you, I want an immediate reply to this.” Cutler traveled to Virginia City to confront Sam, who sent Steve Gillis, his second in the pending duel, to Cutler’s hotel to placate him. “When Cutler found that Steve was my second he cooled down; he became calm and rational, and was ready to listen,” Sam remembered in 1906. “Steve gave him fifteen minutes to get out of the hotel, and half an hour to get out of town or there would be results.” Cutler “immediately left for Carson.”66

  But there was still the unresolved war of words with Laird and the other employees of the Union, which continued to escalate. In its May 21 issue, the Union launched a fusillade, a pair of unsigned articles by printer James W. Wilmington and editor Laird. In his attempt “to injure a cotemporary,” Wilmington charged, Sam had slandered “in a cowardly manner the printers of this city.” By asserting “that but for his promptings, the employees of the Union would never have paid their last contribution . . . he willfully lies.” All of the pledges to the Sanitary Fund by the Union employees had been honored. Unwittingly echoing J. T. Hinton’s indictments of Sam in Hannibal a dozen years earlier, he added, “We can only view his blackguardism as an attack upon the members of our craft. . . . [H]e has endeavored to misinterpret the generous, patriotic promptings of laboring men who gave their little mite willingly; and in so doing he has proved himself an unmitigated liar, a poltroon and a puppy.” On his part, Laird reiterated his allegation that the Enterprise “only pretended to contribute” to the fund. It had “paid nothing . . . which it, with great self-show, promised—always in the presence of a crowd.” Then he delivered the coup de grâce:

  [N]ever before in any contact with a cotemporary, however unprincipled he might have been, have we found an opponent in statement or in discussion, who had no gentlemanly sense of professional propriety, who conveyed in every word, and in every purpose of all his words, such a groveling disregard for truth, decency and courtesy, as to seem to court the distinction of being understood as a vulgar liar. Meeting one who prefers falsehood; whose instincts are all toward falsehood; whose thought is falsification; whose aim is vilification through insincere professions of honesty; one whose only merit is thus described, and who evidently desires to be thus known, the obstacles presented are entirely insurmountable, and whoever would touch them fully, should expect to be abominably defiled.

  Nothing in Laird’s article began to defuse the situation, and the bomb had been lit. “I was ashamed of myself, the rest of the staff were ashamed of me,” Sam admitted over forty years later, “but I got along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation. I bore it very well.” Still, his honor—such as it was—was at stake, and he forced the issue in a private note filled with bluff and bluster to Laird later the same day. The “two anonymous articles” in the Union leveled “a series of insults” at the author of the editorial in the Enterprise, and Sam was that author. “I demand of you a public retraction of the insulting articles I have mentioned, or satisfaction. I require an immediate answer to this note. The bearer of this—Mr. Stephen Gillis—will receive any communication you may see fit to make.” Wilmington replied within hours that he had written one of the articles and “I have nothing to retract.” Sam responded later that day by both dismissing this note—“Mr. Wilmington is a person entirely unknown to me in the matter, and has nothing to do with it”—and ratcheting up the tension by demanding of Laird “the satisfaction due to a gentleman—without alternative.” The state of affairs was fast approaching a crisis, and Sam began to pack a pistol, probably the Smith and Wesson seven-shooter he carried west. Twenty years later, with the benefit of hindsight, he denounced the “imbecile custom, this ridiculous custom, this cruel & brutal custom” of dueling. Still, as he remarked in 1895, “I have carried a revolver” as “lots of us do, but they are the most innocent things in the world.”67 Had the threatened duel between Sam and Laird (the Enterprise versus the Union) occurred, they would have fought along the same lines that Goodman and Fitch battled.

  Laird flinched first. He temporized in his reply by suggesting that Sam was not a gentleman and so had no right to the satisfaction he demanded and insisting that “Wilmington has a prior claim upon your attention. . . . If you decline to meet him after challenging him, you will prove yourself to be what he has charged you with being, ‘a liar, a poltroon and a puppy.’” Sam was not mollified and rushed in where angels fear to tread. In his longest letter to Laird during the enti
re confrontation, he accused his antagonist of trying to shield his “craven carcass behind the person of an individual who in spite of your introduction is entirely unknown to me, and upon whose shoulders you cannot throw the whole responsibility.” He had “twice challenged you, and you have twice attempted to shirk the responsibility.” Wilmington’s note “could not possibly be an answer to my demand for satisfaction from you; and besides, his note simply avowed authorship of a certain ‘communication’ that appeared simultaneously with your libelous ‘editorial,’ and stated that its author had ‘nothing to retract.’” Sam reiterated his challenge, which he urged Laird to accept “if you do not wish yourself posted as a coward,” meanwhile ominously assuring him that “Wilmington’s case will be attended to in due time.” Steve Gillis wrote Wilmington later that day that he should mind his own business: “A contemptible ass and coward like yourself should only meddle in the affairs of gentlemen when called upon to do so. I approve and endorse the course of my principal in this matter, and if your sensitive disposition is aroused by any proceeding of his, I have only to say that I can be found at the Enterprise office, and always at your service.” Wilmington, who had no quarrel with Gillis, sensibly ignored this note. Sam later remembered the mood in the Enterprise office while they awaited Laird’s response to the renewal of his challenge: