Mark Twain's Civil War

Mark Twain’s Civil War

Mark Twain’s

Civil War

Mark Twain

Edited by

David Rachels

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Frontispiece: Mark Twain, 1907. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction # LC-USZ62-5513)

Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date) reprinted by permission of the Mark Twain Foundation; Campaigning with Mark Twain by Absalom Grimes reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

Copyright © 2007 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

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11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910.

[Selections. 2007]

Mark Twain’s Civil War / edited by David Rachels.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-2474-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Literary collections.

2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Literature and the war.

I. Rachels, David. II. Title.

PS1303.R33 2007

818\409-dc22                                        2007028706

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Contents

Introduction

NONFICTION

from Roughing It (1872)

Mark Twain’s First Civil War Autobiography (1877)

from Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion (1877)

from Life on the Mississippi (1883)

The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885)

An Author’s Soldiering (1887)

General Grant’s Grammar (1887)

How Twain Saved the Union (1901)

A Selection from Mark Twain’s Autobiographical Dictations (1907)

Albert Bigelow Paine, The Soldier (1912)

Absalom C. Grimes, Campaigning with Mark Twain (1926)

FICTION

Anonymous, An Exchange of Prisoners (1863)

Lucretia Smith’s Soldier (1864)

The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract (1870)

from The Gilded Age (1873)

"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard If (1874)

A Curious Experience (1881)

Coda: Battle Hymn of the Republic (Brought Down to Date) (c. 1900)

Notes

Sources

Introduction

On January 24, 1940, after New York Congressman Samuel Dickstein’s impassioned speech condemning Nazi atrocities against Polish Jews, talk in the U.S. House of Representatives turned to domestic matters. Representative William Jennings Miller of Connecticut took the floor to discuss the Famous Americans series of postage stamps. The first five stamps in the series were to honor authors. The first two, picturing Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, would go on sale in five days. The Irving stamp would be sold first in Tarrytown, New York, where Irving had lived the final years of his life; the Cooper stamp would be sold first in Cooperstown, New York, his boyhood home. Stamps honoring Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott would follow on February 5, first appearing in Boston, Massachusetts, and Concord, New Hampshire, respectively. The final author stamp, featuring Mark Twain, was scheduled to debut on February 13 in Hannibal, Missouri. But Congressman Miller wondered if Hannibal were the proper place for launching the Twain stamp. Consulting Albert Bigelow Paine’s biography of Twain, Miller had discovered that Twain was not born in Hannibal. Furthermore, Miller learned that the famous writer had lived in Hannibal for only five years (although fourteen years is closer to the truth). By contrast, Twain lived in Hartford, Connecticut—in Miller’s congressional district—for forty-three years. Most of his well-known works, Miller noted, were written and published in Hartford. Thus, Miller requested that the Twain stamps be divided between Hannibal and Hartford, with at least half going to Connecticut.

(Collection of David Rachels)

The following day Representative Joseph B. Shannon of Missouri responded. Surprisingly, Shannon declared that, as far as he was concerned, Connecticut could have all the stamps, for Mark Twain was not of the same kidney as real Missourians. At issue was Twain’s service during the Civil War. On the floor of Congress, Shannon gave this largely inaccurate summary of Twain’s military career:

When the call to arms came, he was living in Hannibal. Col. Jack Burbridge, of Pike County, organized the Confederate forces in that portion of Missouri. A meeting was held at Hannibal for the purpose of enlisting men to fight for the Confederacy. The colonel took charge of the meeting, which was well attended. Among those who were there on that night was Mark Twain. Mark joined the forces and became a lieutenant.

His company had no sooner organized, however, when a fighting Kentucky Democrat, Frank P. Blair … organized four regiments in eastern Missouri … and offered these regiments to the Union cause. These soldiers gave contest to Colonel Burbridge and his forces in northern Missouri. Colonel Burbridge met them, and so did Mark Twain—for a few moments only. Mark Twain met them; and, as someone said, a Minié ball came whizzing past his ball came whizzing past his ears, and he started running. He ran; and, oh, how fast he did run. He never stopped until he got to Keokuk, Iowa. Colonel Burbridge fought 4 years in the Southern Army; Mark Twain about 4 minutes.

Though Twain’s four minutes were actually two weeks, no credible evidence indicates that he ever saw anything resembling combat. Shannon concluded his fanciful remarks by quoting the company commander of the Burbridge Brigade: We went to war. We remained at war for 4 years. We came back home. I can say to my fellow Missourians that we had but one coward in our whole group, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens.

Representative Miller of Connecticut, a legless veteran of World War I, did not come to Twain’s defense. Rather, he interrupted his colleague only once to ask a clarifying question: I take it the gentleman from Missouri would be just as well satisfied if the Mark Twain commemorative stamp were put on sale elsewhere?

Twain would be defended, after a fashion, two weeks later in the New York Times. In an article prompted by Congressman Shannon’s comments, the newspaper opined, Whether the desertion was anything more than technical, one doesn’t know or care. On both sides that war was singularly rich in desertions. Lieutenant Clemens might have been killed, instead of completing his education. So we praise his absquatulation as we do Horace for abandoning his shield. In other words, had Sam Clemens been killed, there would have been no Mark Twain. True enough. At the time of the war, however, there was no reason for Clemens—or anyone else, for that matter—to suspect that he would later become Mark Twain. We may be glad, in retrospect, that he fled the war, but our hindsight has nothing to do with his wartime behavior and its possible justifications.

In addition to charges of cowardice, Twain has been faulted for fighting on the wrong side in the war (inasmuch as he fought at all). In March 1901, for example, when Twain condemned American troops for participating in a land-stealing and liberty-crucifying crusade in the Philippines, the Army and Navy Journal responded, It is unfortunate for the reputation of Mark Twain that he should go out of his way to slander these men because they believe in the right and duty of our Government to enforce its authority over all of the territory belonging to the United States. Mr. Clemens denied that proposition during our civil war, when he enjoyed the experience of a guerrilla rebel, chased all over the State of Missouri, which he has so amusingly described.

Twain gave his first public explanation of his stint as a guerrilla rebel on October 2, 1877, more than sixteen years after the fact. The occasion was a visit to Hartford by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, the third-oldest chartered military organization in the world. Twain’s speech set the pattern for his future remarks on his military service. Not surprisingly, his tone was humorous. Twain’s most significant joke on this occasion pointed to his reasons (or lack thereof) for joining the fight: [Colonel Ralls] made us swear to uphold the flag and the constitution of the United States, and to destroy any 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 other words, his decision to join the fight had neither moral nor political substance. He and his friends wanted to play soldier, and they proceeded to do so despite not knowing for whom or for what they were fighting.

In Twain’s longest narrative of his military experiences, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885), he elaborates on this theme of confusion. He writes that, as the war was approaching, it was hard for us to get our bearings. Twain gives an example: He was piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi when he learned that South Carolina had seceded. At the time, Clemens was strong for the Union, as was his fellow pilot, a New Yorker. This New Yorker, however, bristled at Clemens’s claims of loyalty to the Union because Clemens’s father had owned slaves. Clemens protested that his father had wanted to free his slaves, but the New Yorker countered that wanting to do something means nothing. The next month, after Louisiana had seceded and the rebellion was gaining momentum, both Clemens and the New Yorker began to support the rebellion. But the New Yorker rejected Clemens’s secessionist credentials because Clemens’s father had been willing to free his slaves!

Regardless of whether this story is true, it reflects the confusion in the state of Missouri in 1861. Judged by their votes in the 1860 presidential election, most Missourians would have preferred to remain neutral in the growing sectional conflict. More than 70 percent voted for either John Bell of Tennessee or Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, both advocates of compromise. But when Abraham Lincoln became president and the war began, neutrality was no longer an option. Lincoln called for seventyfive thousand troops to fight the rebellion and asked Missouri to provide four thousand of these. Governor Claiborne F. Jackson refused. Lincoln’s call for troops, he said, was illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary; in its objects inhuman and diabolical.

Governor Jackson, who considered Missouri a southern state, would have preferred to provide troops to the rebels, but when Jefferson Davis requested them, he had to refuse: Missouri, you know, is yet under the tyranny of Lincoln’s Government, so far, at least, as forms go. Despite Jackson’s efforts for secession, Missourians had voted to stay in the Union. Their votes, however, had been motivated largely by economic self-interest, not by the desire to fight the rebels. Thus, most Missourians probably agreed with Jackson’s refusal to provide Union troops, just as they certainly would have agreed with his refusal to provide Confederate troops.

Thus, Governor Jackson was caught between two governments, unwilling to help one, unable to help the other, and with constituents who were mostly ambivalent. It was in this environment that Sam Clemens answered the call for troops. Missouri had not seceded, so Clemens and his fellow soldiers pledged their loyalty to both their state and the Union. But their governor wanted them to keep the Union army out of Missouri, claiming that he, not President Lincoln, was fighting for the true principles of the Union. Therefore, although Clemens may have pledged his loyalty to the Union, it would have been clear to him and the rest of his guerrilla outfit that they had answered the call of the Confederacy.

In The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, when Twain retells his swearing in, he changes a crucial detail from his 1877 version of the story: [Colonel Ralls] swore us on the Bible to be faithful to the State of Missouri and drive all invaders from her soil, no matter whence they might come or under what flag they might march. This mixed us considerably, and we could not make out just what service we were embarked in; but Colonel Ralls, the practiced politician and phrase-juggler, was not similarly in doubt; he knew quite clearly that he had invested us in the cause of the Southern Confederacy.

In this version, Ralls has Clemens and his comrades swear allegiance not to the United States but to the state of Missouri. In swearing loyalty to Missouri, allegiance to the United States is implicit, but Ralls, as Twain notes, is being disingenuous. Like Governor Jackson, Ralls considers Missouri a Confederate state (even though it was not). Thus, although Sam Clemens was briefly enlisted in the Confederate cause, he was technically never a member of the Confederate Army.

On June 17, 1861, at Boonville, Union troops under Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon defeated Governor Jackson’s Missouri State Guard (not including Sam Clemens, who was playing soldier elsewhere). The next day General Lyon offered amnesty to those soldiers who had been lured into the war under false pretenses by Governor Jackson:

Having learned that those plotting against the Government have falsely represented that the Government troops intended a forcible and violent invasion of Missouri, for the purposes of military despotism and tyranny, I hereby give notice to the people of this State that I shall scrupulously avoid all interference with the business, rights and property of every description, recognized by the laws of this State, and belonging to law abiding citizens….

All persons who, under the misapprehensions above mentioned, have taken up arms, or who are now preparing to do so, are invited to return to their homes and relinquish their hostile attitude to the General Government, and are assured that they may do so without being molested for past occurrences.

Many young soldiers, including Clemens, chose to lay down their arms. On June 23, 1861, Sam Clemens’s hometown newspaper, the Hannibal Daily Messenger, reported that quite a number of the daring adventurers, and chivalrous, but duped and misguided young men of this and Ralls Co., who participated in the late action near Boonville, are returning perfectly satisfied with their brief campaign.

In explaining his absquatulation, however, Twain never mentions Lyon’s offer of amnesty. In 1877, in his first telling of the story, Twain claims that his unit disbanded en masse after General Tom Harris reprimanded them for having not yet captured the enemy. Then in 1885 Twain changed his story. In The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, Twain claims that he and his comrades, while hiding in a corncrib, killed a man. Having heard many false rumors of an approaching enemy, they had learned not to take such rumors seriously, but on this night the rumor turned out to be true. A man approached on horseback, and Sam and five others fired their rifles from between the logs of the corncrib. The man fell out of his saddle. Soon he was dead. Twain writes, My campaign was spoiled.

But no such thing ever happened. According to Twain’s official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, The incident was invented … to present the real horror of war. But Clemens did not experience the real horror of war. How, then, could Twain justify including this event in an autobiographical narrative? And how could he claim that it was his motivation for quitting the war?

A defense of Twain might begin by invoking Tim O’Brien’s distinction between happening-truth and story-truth. Although O’Brien experienced the real horror of war in Vietnam, in The Things They Carried he finds he must invent things to convey his experiences. He writes, I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth, and he gives this example:

Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in this throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.

O’Brien concludes, "What stories can do, I guess, is