Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Sellers was humiliated, to Sam’s distress: “I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print.”11 Years later, perhaps as penance, he claimed that he had taken Sellers’s journalistic pen name for his own: Mark Twain.*

  Sam’s own pride took a bruising in the summer of 1860: at the wheel of the huge City of Memphis, Sam crashed it into the New Orleans levee. He had been awaiting orders to “back” from his captain,† whom he thought he could glimpse out of the corner of his eye. The shape turned out to be the captain’s coat, draped over the big bell. No serious harm was done and no blame assigned. Less excusable was his grounding of the A. B. Chambers and later the Alonzo Child, with Bixby and William Bowen as co-pilots. These incidents shook his confidence but they did not harm his reputation. Horace Bixby spoke well of his abilities in later years, and Sam, looking back, rated himself as “a good average St. Louis and New Orleans pilot.”12

  He began to indulge volatile tendencies that would consume him later in life. He picked a shipboard fight with Will Bowen, the closest of his boyhood friends.* Jane Clemens later repeated a rumor that “when Sam and W B were on the Alonzo Child they quarreled and Sam let go the wheel to whip Will for talking secesh [secession] and made Will hush.”13 He was enjoying this new taste for confrontation. “I have disobeyed the Captain’s orders over and over again,” he boasted to Susan Stotts, Mollie’s sister, “and I am ready now to quarrel with anybody in the world that can’t whip me.”14

  In May Orion moved to Memphis and tried to set up a law practice; Mollie and Jennie followed a few weeks later. In that same month Lincoln was nominated for the presidency by the Republicans in Chicago. Following the lead of his mentor Edward Bates—himself by now a powerful political figure—Orion at thirty-three launched himself into Lincoln’s campaign, bravely speechifying through the hostile territories of northern Missouri for the candidate, a suspected abolitionist.

  In St. Louis, William and Pamela Moffett had risen in society. William was founder and president of the Merchants’ Exchange. His business was doing better than the real estate and rent collection firm next door, a firm called Boggs & Grant. The company’s bored and floundering junior partner, Ulysses S. Grant, killed time by hanging out in Moffett’s office.

  “YOU MAY not be interested in war,” as Leon Trotsky later famously remarked, “but war is interested in you.” In November 1860, Lincoln narrowly won the U.S. presidency, gaining only 40 percent of the popular vote. Convinced that Lincoln planned to abolish slavery, South Carolina seceded from the Union fourteen days later. Soon, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed. The Confederate States of America were formed on February 9, 1861, with Jefferson Davis as president.

  On June 15 of that year, Ulysses S. Grant found himself a steady job.

  Sam Clemens was not interested in war, at least on available evidence. The few letters that survive from these months show no concern over the fact that the Union had dissolved. He stuck doggedly to the river, as if it were exempt from the widening schism. His fantasies of the supernatural muted the disturbing realities of the time. It was as if he’d summoned Uncle Dan’l’s storytelling voice as a means of keeping genuine terror at bay. Sometime in that spring, in the Moffett parlor, he read aloud a sketch he’d been working on. Annie remembered that it was

  a ghost story about a phantom pilot. I was about seven. He was reading the story in his slow, drawling voice that was just like Grandma’s, and acting it out as he read it. He was a beautiful reader. The family was gathered in my mother’s room. As he read my grandmother touched his arm and said, “Sam, look at Annie.” I stood in the middle of the room transfixed with horror, and yet fascinated. I have read the story since, but I have never experienced the same thrill.15

  This was almost certainly an early draft of “Ghost Life on the Mississippi,” a tale about a pilot who tries to run a dangerous channel on a snowy night. As the pilot is blinded at the wheel, the boat is guided by the ghost of an old “King of Pilots” who had run the channel years earlier, in similar conditions, before having fallen to his death.16

  And then the war grew interested in him. On May 14, 1861, the twenty-five-year-old Sam left New Orleans aboard the Nebraska. He was a passenger, looking for a new pilot’s assignment: the secessionist captain of his previous boat, the Alonzo Child, had decided to keep that craft in Deep Southern waters. Sam’s friend from the John J. Roe, Zeb Leavenworth, had the Nebraska’s wheel, and Sam kept him company.

  Just south of St. Louis, the steamer passed the federally held Jefferson Barracks. A day or so earlier, the Nebraska had been allowed through the newly formed Union blockade at Memphis—the last nonmilitary boat to cross that line during the war years. No such luck this time. Some artillerymen in the barracks fired a warning shot across the Nebraska’s bow. Leavenworth, stunned and confused, continued steering. The next shell hit near the pilothouse, “breaking a lot of glass and destroying a good deal of the upper decoration,” according to biographer Paine.

  Zeb Leavenworth fell back into a corner with a yell.

  “Good Lord Almighty! Sam,” he said, “what do they mean by that?”

  Clemens stepped to the wheel and brought the boat around. “I guess they want us to wait a minute, Zeb,” he said.17

  Sam’s aplomb didn’t last long. Once ashore, he hurried to the Moffett household, Annie recalled, “obsessed with the fear that he might be arrested by government agents and forced to act as a 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.”18 Eight-year-old Annie now watched her conflicted Uncle Sam struggle with his sympathies, as tens of thousands of his countrymen were also doing during this period before the war’s defining carnage began. Watching a group of boys parade down Chestnut Street one day, brandishing a Confederate flag and chanting Jeff Davis’s name, Sam sent Annie upstairs to fetch some red-and-white ribbons in his room. He distributed these to the young Confederates. Not long afterward, he watched from a window as a small boy from the neighborhood, innocently waving a Union flag, was overwhelmed by a gang of kids. Sam dashed outside, grabbed the flag back from the attackers and chased them away.

  He came in furiously angry; strangely enough not with the hoodlums, but with [the boy] because he did not fight. Grandma said, “But Sam, probably he has been taught that he must not fight.” He turned on her and said furiously: “Not fight? He should have guarded that flag with his life!”19

  Years later Annie, perhaps fortified with a shot of Freud, ascribed meaning to Sam’s actions: “it was a case of conflicting loyalties. It was not [the boy] that he felt should guard the flag with his life but Sam Clemens.” She added, “He loved his country’s flag and all that it symbolized…I know he would gladly have given his life for his country, but he was a Southerner…his sympathies were with the South.”20

  RESOLUTION CAME in mid-June, via a knock on Sam’s door. A friend named Smith was enlisting Hannibal-area men to join a Missouri State Guard to resist the Federals, who had occupied Jefferson City, the state capital. Would Sam join up? War had found its way to Sam at last. But if he had to fight, he would fight alongside lifelong comrades, instead of with strangers. Sam left St. Louis for Hannibal accompanied by hometown friends Sam Bowen and Absalom Grimes. A few days later, he was sworn into the Missouri State Guard.

  Missouri’s political sympathies before and during the Civil War were complex. Most slaveholding Missourians did not favor secession. For one thing, as an isolated northerly catch basin for slave owners, the state would have been virtually surrounded by a hostile nation. Missouri had voted for the pro-Union (and pro-slavery) Stephen Douglas in the 1860 election, and it sent nearly three times as many men to fight for the North as for the South.

  Sam Clemens’s zigzag march into the military reflected the seriocomic confusion that prevailed during these chaotic days of
choosing sides. He and his friends reached Hannibal half-expecting the secession matter to be resolved without combat. These illusions were dissolved one morning when the three young men idly sat near the Hannibal levee, watching the packets go by, and one of the boats docked and discharged some Union troops. A lieutenant cordially offered the trio the “option” of either accompanying him to St. Louis for enlistment as Union pilots, or being clapped in irons.

  The stunned boys boarded a downriver packet. But at St. Louis, Sam’s fate and perhaps his literary future were spared, by, of all things, the timely appearance of a pair of “stylishly dressed young ladies” who beckoned at the office door of the general about to enlist the trio.21 The officer excused himself, murmuring about a business matter. The three conscripts-to-be could not have been more understanding. As soon as the door closed, they grabbed luggage, squeezed through a side door, clattered down the stairs and into the street as fast as they could, and hightailed it back north to Hannibal.

  Small battles were breaking out all over Missouri. Hannibal teemed with Union troops. The boys melted into the countryside south of town, where new units were forming under the command, more or less, of one General Thomas H. Harris, lately an operator in the Hannibal telegraph office. In the farmhouse of a veteran named John Ralls, Sam and about a dozen other Hannibal boys took an oath of allegiance to the Guard, and formed a training camp. The Green Berets, they were not. No two dressed alike. Weapons ranged from hunting knives to shotguns to squirrel rifles. (A nearby squad bristled with scythes, sickle bars, and its own three-piece orchestra.) They cropped their skulls close with sheep shears, to give them an edge should a battle degenerate, as battles so often do, into a hair-pulling contest.

  Grimes recalls that Sam showed up for war on a four-foot-high yellow mule, clutching a valise, a homemade quilt, a frying pan, a squirrel rifle, twenty yards of seagrass rope, and an umbrella. The mule was named Paint Brush. Sam soon developed a painful boil in an area that made mule-sitting an ordeal. The outfit called itself the Ralls County Rangers. Sam was elected second lieutenant, and gave a speech standing on a log. Then they all went haring around the county, cadging meals at farmhouses, sleeping in the rain, and laughing at any passing officer who dared give them an order. In early July, about two weeks before the battle of Bull Run in Virginia, rumor spread that Union troops had broken camp at Hannibal and were marching southward toward the militia groups. The Ralls County Rangers prepared for battle. That night they threw together a picket guard with Sam in charge. The strange nocturnal comedy of errors that ensued likely inspired Mark Twain’s 1885 fictionalized magazine memoir of his militia adventure, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”

  According to Grimes’s account, the pickets took cover at the mouth of a country lane, their horses tied in a nearby grove. At around 1 a.m., Grimes thought he heard hostile troops approaching. He woke the others and they took up firing positions. He spotted some moving shapes, stood, leveled his shotgun, and fired both barrels at them. Then everybody turned and ran like hell for their horses.

  To our horror we saw our lieutenant more than a hundred yards off and still going. We called to him to halt, and finally Bowen leveled his shotgun and yelled, “Damn you, Sam, if you don’t stop I’ll let her go!” Clemens halted, and when we caught up with him (Bowen still swearing) he said, “ ‘Paint Brush’ got so excited I could not hold him.” We mounted and rode away at full speed for our camp, leaving our lieutenant and “Paint Brush” far in the rear. The last we heard of him he was saying, “Damn you, you want the Yanks to capture me!”22

  Back at camp, the Rangers braced for battle. Soon they heard hoofbeats and again raised their weapons. At the last moment, someone recalled that Second Lieutenant Clemens was still at large. They held fire, “And so it was! We drew a sigh of relief as he came into the gangway full tilt. He made no effort to stop ‘Paint Brush’ until he had reached the rear end of the line and then you may bet his picket guards heard from him. Among other abuse he gave us was a special clause for the loss of his hat.”23 At daybreak Grimes and Sam Bowen returned to the mouth of the lane to view the casualties. A mortifying realization took hold of Grimes. He confessed it to Sam Bowen, swearing his friend to secrecy. He pointed to some wildflower stalks near a hill. “Well, last night the wind probably caused them to wave and I would have sworn they were Federals on horseback.”24 Bowen kept his promise of silence until they had reached camp, and then spilled the beans to everyone.

  There was one further eruption of gunfire: a drunken Ranger named Dave Young heard tramping in the night. He called for the password, was ignored, and opened up with his shotgun. He nailed his own horse.

  Mark Twain tirelessly inventoried his life to service his fiction (especially when the fiction was presented as nonfiction). “A Campaign That Failed” shows this process consummately at work. The tale, couched as a memoir, displays Mark’s knack for knowing exactly when to depart from truth in the service of morally charged literature. The story begins as a comic reminiscence of boy soldiers frolicking and bumbling as they prepare for war. It shifts to horror when an unarmed stranger is shot for a Union soldier by the scared boys in the moonlight, and dies on the ground as he mutters about his wife and child. Then the tale plunges darkly into themes of shame, remorse, and the soul-sickening question of cowardice. Pursued by “a Union colonel…sweeping down on us with a whole regiment at his heels,”25 the scared company falls back from camp to camp until they reach the village of the narrator’s birth. There, he deserts.

  It is easy to imagine Mark Twain fashioning the climactic scene from a combination of Grimes’s firing on the wildflowers and Dave Young’s bringing down his own horse. But from that point, the narrative escalates into Mark Twain sole and incomparable, a chant of moral anguish that has given it life across three centuries—“…And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just that—the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it…”26

  ONE DETAIL was consistent both in historical fact and in Mark Twain’s fiction: the officer at the head of the Union regiment in Missouri was Colonel Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, approaching middle age, had nearly missed the war. After failing at Boggs & Grant in St. Louis, he had accepted a job as a clerk in his father’s Galena, Illinois, leather-goods store. In April 1861 he had offered his experience as a military academy graduate and veteran to the Illinois governor, who brushed him off with menial duties: clerk, mustering officer. Back home in Galena, he wrote to Washington offering to command a regiment. Nobody answered. He traveled to Cincinnati to seek a staff appointment with General George B. McClellan. McClellan didn’t receive him.

  Grant pried hmself into the army just at the right moment to place him on a potential collision course with the militia irregular Samuel L. Clemens. The Illinois governor finally offered Grant a colonelcy of a regiment, and he accepted. He led his troops across the Mississippi twenty-three miles upstream from Hannibal. Then the force proceeded southward, with orders to move against Thomas Harris’s Missouri Guard forces at Florida.

  Mark Twain stretched the truth by several miles—and weeks—when he wrote that “I came within a few hours of seeing [Grant]” in Missouri in the spring of 1861.27 Research has shown that, far from “sweeping down” on the Rangers, Grant’s march to Florida was interrupted by several diversions, including a two-week stint guarding some bridge builders on the Salt River twenty-five miles north of Florida. When he finally reached the hamlet, Harris’s troops were forty miles away and Sam Clemens was long gone.28

  Still, the implications of what might have been are too striking, given the later convergence of the two men, to let pass without notice. Ulysses Grant would have fought the first battle of his Civil War career at the site of Mark Twain’s birthplace, had not Harris abandoned his encampment there before Grant’s regiment arrived. Sam Clemens would have been there t
o meet him, had he not ridden away from the war.

  Sam Clemens did not stop running from the war until he reached Nevada several weeks later. He sat out the conflict there and in California, about as far as one could get from the four-year mass slaughter without leaving the territories. The man who seems to have been eyewitness to so many consequential moments of the 19th century seemed determined to remove himself from the most consequential of them all.

  And yet not quite. He lingered just long enough to take the necessary accounting. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” stands alongside Stephen Crane’s novel, The Red Badge of Courage, as one of the most enduring pieces of literature inspired by the Civil War.

  * There is no evidence that Sellers ever signed a dispatch that way.

  † The captain retained authority over a boat’s movements while it was entering or leaving a port.

  * The dispute involved money Will may have owed Sam, as well as the pair’s diverging North-South loyalties, although Sam’s loyalties tended to swing back and forth, depending on his mood and surroundings.

  10

  Washoe

  (1861–62)

  In late October 1861, Jane Clemens received a letter from her son Sam reporting, among other newsy nuggets, that he and a friend had accidentally set a mountain on fire. The mountain overlooked a lake called Bigler (later Tahoe), and was located in the territory of Nevada, roughly two thousand miles west of the Mississippi River.

  Sam was discovering something about Nevada’s mountains even more interesting than their flammability: that beneath their surface lay seams and veins of silver ore that shriveled Marshall Clemens’s old dreams of wealth from the Tennessee land. Below their surface lay the Comstock Lode.