Mark Twain & The Civil War

By Morley Swingle

          This Missourian was 25 years old when the War broke out.  He was single with no children.  His President was calling for Missouri to supply 75,000 men to fight the rebellion.  His Governor was seeking volunteers for the State Militia to fight the President.  What would Mark Twain do?

            When the cannon of General P.G.T. Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, officially igniting the Civil War, Samuel Clemens was a steamboat pilot, carefully guiding the Alonzo Child downriver from St. Louis to New Orleans.  He was 25 years old, single, with no children.  He lived in St. Louis when he wasn’t manning the pilothouse of a steamboat.  His country was splitting apart.  Life as he knew it would never be the same.  Survival itself was not a certainty, for either his country or himself.

            Clemens had grown up in Hannibal, Missouri, dreaming of someday becoming a steamboat pilot.  In those days, Mississippi River steamboat pilots were revered and respected men.  With salaries greater than that of the Vice President of the United States ($250 per month), these men had the responsibility for the lives of many others in their hands.  Their job was to memorize the details and dangers of the river’s channel in order to prevent steamboat disasters.  Clemens became a “cub pilot” in 1857 and earned his pilot’s license on April 9, 1859.  Ever since, he had been guiding at least eighteen different steamboats on roundtrips up and down the river between St. Louis and New Orleans.

            After a four-day stay in New Orleans, a city preparing for war, Clemens headed back upriver for St. Louis as a passenger on the Nebraska.  With news of Fort Sumter inflaming the country, Sam Clemens seriously pondered what he would do when he reached St. Louis.  The Union would undoubtedly need pilots for war service.  In fact, rumor had it they would commandeer them and force them to serve at gunpoint.  Is that the way he wanted to spend the war?

            Which side did he really favor?

            Within twenty-four hours of the fall of Fort Sumter, newly-elected President Abraham Lincoln was calling for each state to supply 75,000 men to put down the rebellion.  Four days later, Missouri Governor Claiborne Jackson called Lincoln’s request for troops “diabolical” and was soon encouraging Missouri to secede from the Union.  He urged 50,000 Missourians to join the militia to stand ready to fight Lincoln.

            Sam Clemens was as conflicted as his home state.

            On the one hand, he had grown up in the slave state of Missouri.  His family owned a slave.  Regarding slavery, he later explained:  “I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it.  The local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it.”  His mother made no secret of her hatred for Yankees.  Many of his friends were planning to fight for the South.  Was it feasible he could take up arms against them?

            On the other hand, his brother, Orion Clemens, was an abolitionist who had campaigned vigorously for Abraham Lincoln.  So much so that it seemed likely that Lincoln might appoint Orion to an office in the administration.  Could Sam fight against his own brother?

            Did he even want to fight at all?

            As the Nebraska churned upriver, he found that the Union had blockaded the river at Memphis.  His boat was one of the last to slip through.  At Cairo, Union soldiers boarded and searched the boat.  The Nebraska probably docked briefly at Cape Girardeau on May 21, 1861.   Later, when the boat neared St. Louis, a canon from Jefferson Barracks fired a warning shot.  When it was ignored, a second shot was fired.  A shell exploded directly in front of the pilot house, shattering its glass.  Sam Clemens was in the pilothouse when the shell struck.  The Nebraska dutifully stopped for another inspection.

            One thing became vividly clear to the man who would become Mark Twain as he stood in the pilot house, within easy firing range of rifles on either side of the river:  he did not want to spend the coming months or years as a sitting duck in a pilothouse.

            When he reached St. Louis, Sam Clemens disappeared into the night. 

            He returned to his hometown of Hannibal, where he briefly caught the martial fever of the hometown boys incensed that the federal government would try to tell them how to live their lives.  He joined the Marion (County) Rangers, who vowed to glorify themselves fighting Union forces.  He was elected second lieutenant.  After two weeks of camping out and drilling, the outfit scattered rather ingloriously when pursued by a unit of federal soldiers sent from St. Louis to catch them.  In later years, Clemens described his brief rebel service in his colorful and partly-fictionalized reminiscence:  “A Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”  He spoke of his knack for retreating:  “When I retired from the rebel army in ’61 I retired in good order, at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius . . . I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.”

            In Hannibal, as in other towns across Missouri, it was becoming impossible to remain neutral.  Mark Twain’s dilemma was that he really didn’t feel strongly enough about the issues involved that he wanted to kill anyone.  Nor did he have any desire to die young.  Actually, he just wanted the war to be over so he could get back to the river.  But fence-sitting was not permitted.  Both sides were saying, “You are either for us or against us!”

            Lincoln soon appointed Orion Clemens to the position of Secretary to the Territory of Nevada.  This required Orion to move to Carson City, where he would manage government affairs in this brand-new territory not yet part of the United States.  Sam Clemens saw his chance to place himself far away from clashing armies, and from the recruiters for those armies.  He signed up to serve as an Assistant Secretary to his brother.  The position was not a paid one, but what it lacked in money it made up for with location.  The Clemens brothers left St. Louis for Carson City on July 10, 1861.

            Ironically, during the next four years, Samuel Clemens, who had briefly served the Southern cause as a Marion Ranger, now served the North as a part (albeit a very small part) of the Lincoln administration.  During those years, while the battles of Wilson’s Creek, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg raged, Orion Clemens, the second-highest government official in the territory, was working with a territorial governor to lay the foundations of government, such as the formation of a legislature.  Sam quickly discovered that being “secretary to the secretary” was a job with nonexistent duties commensurate to its lack of pay.  He spent much of his time prospecting for silver and contributing articles to Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, Nevada’s first newspaper.

            The Territorial Enterprise eventually hired him to a full-time job as its local reporter.  While the Civil War raged back East, Clemens frequented saloons, theaters, courthouses and police stations for material for his articles, and drank, smoked, swore and played cards and billiards with other rowdy newsmen.  His stories (sometimes hoaxes) gained popularity.  After trying out several pen names, he finally used “Mark Twain” for the first time on February 3, 1863, a month after Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation.  By the spring of 1864, his articles were appearing regularly in California newspapers and occasionally back East.  In May of 1864, he left the Nevada Territory to avoid a duel and landed in San Francisco, where he wrote for a local newspaper and prospected for gold until the war ended.

            After the South’s surrender, Samuel Clemens remained out West writing and lecturing as a humorist.  His experiences gave him the background to write the short story that launched his career:  “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”  His tale about a gambler who entered a frog in a frog-jumping contest would never have been written had he followed the course of many other Marion Rangers, like Absalom Grimes, who joined the Confederate Army after the humiliating flight from Hannibal.  He did not head back East until December, 1866.

            In the hindsight of Post-War years, Mark Twain vocally favored the North.  As a friend and neighbor of Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) in Hartford, Connecticut, pangs of guilt over slavery blossomed into full disgust.  His depiction of slavery’s effect upon a human being named Jim in Huckleberry Finn was a bold denunciation of slavery when published in 1885.  That same year he paid the college expenses for one of Yale’s first black students, Warner T. McGuinn, who graduated at the top of his law school class and later became a mentor for Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

            Twain clearly came to revere Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant.  To him, Grant embodied the commitment to “honor, duty and country” that the young Clemens had so ingloriously fled.  In fact, Twain was the single person most responsible for the writing and publication of Grant’s memoirs.  Twain urged the dying icon to write them.  Twain published them himself, acting as both cheerleader and proofreader as Grant, riddled with cancer, hand-wrote the manuscript in a race with death, finishing the last page just thirteen days before he died.  Twain’s contract with Grant guaranteed that most of the profits went to the impoverished General’s widow.  Thus, Sam Clemens’ last service to the North was to see that the widow of its best general received $400,000.00 from her husband’s book.  Critics over the years have said that Grant’s Personal Memoirs are the most candid words ever written by a former president.

            In 1905, Twain wrote “The War Prayer,” but withheld its publication until after his death.  In this anti-war satire, young troops about to march into battle gather for prayer at a church, where the minister prays for their victory.  A stranger appears, however, and vividly points out the unlikelihood that God is rooting for either side to kill and maim the other. 

            Even though “The War Prayer” was written when Twain was seventy, perhaps it stands as the best explanation why the young Sam Clemens, at age 25, “skedaddled” (his word) from the hotbed of Missouri.

            Morley Swingle’s Civil War novel The Gold of Cape Girardeau was recently awarded the 2005 Governor’s Book Award and selected as one of the books in Cape Girardeau’s 2006 United We Read program.

Excerpt From “A Private History of a Campaign That Failed”

            “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?  Thousands entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped out again permanently.”

            “[After being elected Second Lieutenant] I ordered Sergeant Bowers to feed my mule; but he said that if I reckoned he went to war to be a dry-nurse to a mule it wouldn’t take me very long to find out my mistake.  I believed that this was insubordination, but I was full of uncertainties about everything military, and so I let the thing pass, and went and ordered Smith, the blacksmith’s apprentice, to feed the mule; but he merely gave me a large, cold, sarcastic grin, such as an ostensibly seven-year-old horse gives you when you lift his lip and find he is fourteen, and turned his back on me.”

            “For a time life was idly delicious, it was perfect; there was nothing to mar it.  Then came some farmers with an alarm one day.  They said it was rumored that the enemy were advancing in our direction from over Hyde’s prairie.  The result was a sharp stir among us, and general consternation . . . we did not know which way to retreat.  [Captain] Lyman was for not retreating at all in these uncertain circumstances; but he found that if he tried to maintain that attitude he would fare badly, for the command were in no humor to put up with insubordination.”

Excerpt From “The War Prayer”

            “Oh Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them!  With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.  [H]elp us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief . . . blast their hopes, blight their lives . . . stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!  We ask it in the spirit of Love . . . Amen.”