The Life of Mark Twain Page 5
As had been the case in the Knobs, John Marshall Clemens’s future in Florida seemed promising at first; he became a trustee of the new Florida Academy and began to practice law again. In November 1837 he took the oath of office as a judge of the Monroe County Court and for the rest of his life he was known as Judge Clemens. A county judge was “the position of highest dignity in the gift of the ballot,” Sam reflected in 1897, and he characterized Judge Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) with only a hint of irony as “a prodigious personage” and “most august creation.” Marshall Clemens dissolved his partnership with John Quarles and opened his own mercantile store across the street, and he was locally esteemed as a well-born descendant of the First Families of Virginia. As his son Sam would explain in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), in Missouri “a recognized superiority attached to any person who hailed from Old Virginia; and this superiority was exalted to supremacy when a person of such nativity could also prove descent from the First Families of that great commonwealth.” An advocate of internal improvements and a supporter of the political agenda of Henry Clay, Marshall lobbied state authorities to select Florida as the seat of Monroe County and the federal government to authorize the bonds necessary to dredge the Salt River and construct a series of dams and locks to enable steamboats to navigate it. The scheme inspired Sam’s satirical reference to the fraudulent Columbus River Slack-water Navigation Company in The Gilded Age (1873). Marshall Clemens also hoped that a railroad might be built between Florida and Paris, Missouri, twelve miles away. He built a four-room house—actually a pair of two-room cabins—for the family on the homestead site he had acquired north of town.
By 1837 the village was growing rapidly, with three mills and four distilleries. According to Margaret Sanborn, the distilleries annually produced some “ten thousand gallons of whisky and three thousand gallons of brandy and gin.”2
Then all went to smash in the credit crunch and long economic depression that followed the Panic of 1837.3 John Quarles wrote his brother from Florida, Missouri, in August 1838 that “times are very hard in this State” and that “the Merchants are breaking on every hand.” Marshall Clemens’s store failed because he could no longer buy inventory on credit in St. Louis. Neither the dredging project nor the railroad was financed, nor was Florida named the county seat. The village was doomed; today it is uninhabited. The seventh and last of the Clemens children, son Henry, was born there on July 13, 1838. A year later their daughter Margaret died within a week of contracting “bilious” or yellow fever. She had been “in disposition & manner like Sam full of life,” Jane Clemens later wrote, but after she fell ill she “never was in her right mind 3 minutes at a time.”4
With a wife and five surviving children, Marshall Clemens rolled the dice again. In mid-November 1839, two weeks before Sam’s fourth birthday and three months after Margaret’s death, he sold his real estate holdings in Monroe County, including his homestead north of town, to a land speculator named Ira Stout for $5,000 and bought from him a quarter of a city block, about nine thousand square feet of property with a hotel on it, in Hannibal, Missouri, thirty miles to the east, on the Mississippi River, for $7,000 in gold. He borrowed $250 for the down payment from his distant cousin James Clemens Jr. (a prosperous St. Louis lawyer, merchant, and one of the directors of the Phoenix Insurance Company, headquartered in St. Louis) and nearly $750 from Jane’s half brother James Andrew Hays Lampton, aka Uncle Jim, who had also settled near Florida with his family.5 James A. H. Lampton had been trained as a doctor at McDowell’s Medical College in St. Louis but was sickened by the sight of blood—an occupational hazard for a physician.
Located in the hollow between Holliday’s Hill to the north and Lover’s Leap to the south, founded by refugees from the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12 and named for the defeated Carthaginian general, Hannibal was little more than a one-horse hamlet in 1840, with a cigar factory, a tobacco warehouse, and a weekly newspaper. W. D. Howells once described it as a “loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi River town,” but within a couple of years it boasted four general stores, three sawmills, two planing mills, three blacksmith forges, two hotels, three saloons, two churches, a hemp factory, and a distillery. Its pork-packing plants, where some ten thousand hogs were slaughtered every fall and winter, were located on the south side of Bear Creek, which flowed eastward through the center of town before emptying into the Mississippi. Marshall Clemens moved his family into the Virginia House, the hotel he had acquired at the corner of Hill and Main Streets, and opened a store on the premises stocked with inventory he was allowed to buy on credit in St. Louis, some fourteen hours downriver by steamboat. Fifteen-year-old Orion worked in the store and seven-year-old Ben was enrolled in a boys’ academy. Twelve-year-old Pamela and four-year-old Sam attended a dame school on Main Street run by Elizabeth Horr, wife of the town cooper and a New England lady of middle age, who charged twenty-five cents per week per student for instruction. Whereas Pamela was commended by the teacher in November 1840 for her “amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies,” Sam claimed later that he was switched for misbehavior on his first day of class. He remembered, too, that Lizzie Horr always began the day “with prayer and a chapter from the New Testament.”6
For a few months, all was well. As Sam later wrote in his essay “Villagers of 1840–3” (1897), his father was “still a small storekeeper—but progressing.” After more than a decade of tribulation, he seemed finally to have landed on his feet. Enter Ira Stout in the role of serpent in this tale of woe. The surviving records are not entirely clear, but Stout apparently bought a consignment of merchandise from Marshall Clemens’s store in the fall of 1840 and then either declared bankruptcy or simply refused to pay the debt. In either case, Sam’s father was unable to pay for the stock in his store and his store failed in the fall of 1841. On October 13, he was forced to surrender his Hannibal property, including the Virginia House, to James Kerr, the St. Louis merchant who had fronted him the money to buy his inventory. Kerr repossessed, Orion recalled in 1894, “all the dry goods, groceries, boots and shoes and hardware” in the store. Marshall Clemens even offered “his cow and the knives and forks from his table,” but Kerr “told him to keep these.” When the property was sold in 1843 on behalf of Marshall’s creditors, the price was less than four thousand dollars, a sum that later persuaded Sam that Stout had taken advantage of the bankruptcy law to ruin his father—an action that “made a pauper of him.” Dixon Wecter, who researched the early history of Hannibal exhaustively, concluded that Stout was “clearly a dead beat” who became enmeshed in “a web of litigation” with several Hannibal citizens, some of whom sued him successfully for failing to pay his debts. In 1847 Stout sold off his holdings in Marion County, including a large house, seven lots on Main Street, and forty acres of timberland and pasture. In 1850 he moved to Quincy, Illinois, twelve miles upriver from Hannibal, but in 1858 he was literally hoist by his own petard: after his conviction in Rochester, New York, on a charge of murder, he was hanged.7
Marshall Clemens desperately tried to reverse his slow spiral into destitution in the winter of 1841–42. He apprenticed Orion to the owner of the Hannibal Journal, which like the sale of the slave Green in 1825 at least reduced his expenses. “I do not know yet what I can commence at for a business in the spring,” he lamented to Jane Clemens in January 1842. “The future taking its complexion from the state of my health of mind, is alternatively beaming in sunshine, or overshadowed with clouds; but mostly cloudy, as you will readily suppose.”8 In a vain attempt to keep the wolf at bay, Marshall traveled to Mississippi in December and to Tennessee and Kentucky in the spring to scrounge for money and, while en route, to sell an aged slave named Charley. He had been given Charley in November 1840 in payment of a bill, but he soon discovered that the slave was so old he was almost worthless. He was offered fifty dollars for Charley in New Orleans and forty dollars in Vicksburg, Mississippi,9 and ev
entually traded him in Natchez, Mississippi, for ten barrels of tar worth forty dollars.
The terms of this particular transaction are charged with irony. In an early draft of the novel that became Pudd’nhead Wilson, one of the leading characters takes a similar journey to sell a slave and collect a debt. “It never occurred to him,” Sam writes, that the slave “had a heart in his bosom to break, & left hearts behind him that could break also.” Sam’s father was just as oblivious to Charley’s plight, but even more so: forty years later, when Sam returned to the river to gather material for his book Life on the Mississippi (1883), he belittled the town of Natchez, where his father had sold Charley and where he had often landed during his piloting career. He recalled in chapter 39 its “desperate reputation, morally” in those days and added that it “has not changed notably.” It was “still small, straggling, and shabby,” with “plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river.”10
Moreover, the number forty, the dollar equivalent in tar for which Marshall Clemens traded Charley, is numerically significant in Sam’s writing, perhaps for biblical reasons. Noah suffered a flood lasting forty days and nights, and the first Nevada territorial legislature in the winter of 1861, over which Orion Clemens presided (with Sam’s assistance), debated a deluge of laws in a session that lasted forty days and nights. The children of Israel wandered in a desert beyond the Mountains of Moab for forty years, and as it so happened the Nevada miners crossing from Virginia City and Carson City to the silver fields in the Humboldt district—including Sam, in 1861—crossed Forty Mile Desert. In 1864 Sam was hired by the San Francisco Morning Call at a salary of forty dollars per week, and in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) Jim Smiley and a stranger wager forty dollars on the length of frogs’ leaps. The martyred Christ descends to hell for forty days and nights, and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) a pair of slave hunters who nearly capture Jim instead give Huck two twenty-dollar gold pieces, the king later sells Jim back into slavery for forty dollars, and Tom Sawyer pays Jim forty dollars “for being prisoner for us so patient.” If Judas’s reward for betraying Christ was thirty pieces of silver, the cost of submitting to slavery and other forms of humiliation in Sam’s world (e.g., the purchase price of a slave, a freedman’s payment for acting like a slave, the amount of a lost bet to a stranger who fills a frog with quail shot, the weekly salary paid a reporter for drudge work) is forty dollars—exactly the same amount in value that Marshall Clemens received for Charley. Forty is also the number of thieves who conspire to deny Ali Baba a fortune in gold in the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, one of Sam’s favorite books.11
In Vicksburg Marshall Clemens presented William Lester with the unpaid IOU he had received in exchange for Green almost twenty years earlier. With interest, the debt had almost doubled, from $250 to $470. But Lester pled poverty and Clemens relented. “It seemed so very hard upon him [in] these hard times to pay such a sum that I could not have the conscience to hold him to it,” he wrote Jane. He agreed to take Lester’s note, “payable 1st March next for $250”—that is, for the original amount of the debt, with all interest forgiven—“and let him off at that.” He could not squeeze blood money from a turnip. Lester “had no money on hand and I could not get it. Everyone I enquired of said he was entirely solvent and good for it.” He planned to sell some of the Tennessee land “and then return to see Lester about the time the note falls due.” On this occasion he failed to sell any of it. He spent the remainder of the winter in Kentucky with his mother before returning to Hannibal in the spring via Louisville with a side trip to Vicksburg in another failed attempt to collect the debt Lester owed him. He was still trying to collect the money as late as November 1844,12 and there is no evidence he ever succeeded.
He arrived back in Hannibal empty-handed and two hundred dollars poorer for the expense of the trip. Orion remembered in his autobiography, which was available to Albert Bigelow Paine but has since been lost, how his mother chided her husband for his failure. Marshall Clemens replied that, as a gentleman, “I cannot dig in the streets.” Orion added, “I can see yet the hopeless expression of his face.” To make matters worse, in May 1842, the month after Marshall Clemens returned to Hannibal, nine-year-old Ben Clemens fell ill and died within a week. He was the third of Sam’s siblings to die before the age of ten, and the only kiss Sam ever saw his parents exchange was beside Ben’s deathbed. Jane Clemens “made the children feel the cheek of the dead boy” so that they would “understand the calamity that had befallen” the family—or so Sam remembered later. It was one of his earliest memories. According to the most reliable mortality statistics, the death of a child was an all too common event in Hannibal in the mid-nineteenth century. A quarter of the children in the town died before the age of one, and half of the others died before attaining their majority.13
By the end of 1842, with his apprenticeship in Hannibal completed, Orion gravitated to St. Louis and went to work in Thomas Watt Ustick’s print shop, sending a few dollars home to his parents. Marshall Clemens was still so poverty-stricken that he was compelled to sell Jenny, his only remaining slave and virtually his only asset, for five hundred dollars.14 At her request, he offered her to the most benign of the three local slave traders, William Beebe—who promptly sold her down the river. Sam remembered that her sale was “a sore trial, for the woman was almost like one of the family.” Years later Jenny resurfaced as a chambermaid on a Mississippi steamboat, like the character Roxy in Pudd’nhead Wilson, and “cried and lamented” her fate. She may have been forced to turn to prostitution to survive.15 Meanwhile, Beebe failed to pay for her, so Marshall Clemens sued him and was awarded damages consisting of “some tin plates, sacks of salt, a screw press, some barrels, and a nine-year-old Negro girl” whom he sold at auction the following year.16
Slavery, the “peculiar institution,” was woven like raw cotton into the social fabric of Marion County. Largely settled by emigrants from other slave states, it was known as the South Carolina of Missouri for its Southern sympathies. According to the 1840 census it boasted a population of about 10,000, including over 7,000 whites, a few dozen free blacks, and about 2,300 slaves. A decade later, the slave population had increased to about 2,850, and Terrell Dempsey estimates that 44 percent of all white families in the county owned at least one slave. Even Laura Hawkins, the model for Becky Thatcher, the epitome of childhood innocence in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was a slaveholder. While Sam never witnessed a slave sale, he observed slaves with “the saddest faces I ever saw” lying in chains on the Hannibal dock awaiting shipment down the river. For the record, moreover, 16 percent of the slaves in Hannibal in 1860 were of mixed race—irrefutable evidence of the sexual exploitation of black women by their white masters. Sam remembered later that “the wise, the good, and the holy” Christian ministers in Hannibal “were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for.” At the time, he certainly shared the racist assumptions of the adults. In 1852, at the age of sixteen, he referred in his brother’s newspaper to the “fat, lazy ‘niggers’” who “begin to sweat and look greasy” in warm weather. As he wrote in the winter of 1897,
In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery, they were wise and said nothing.
But there were dissenting voices. A Hannibal chapter of the American Colonization Society was established in June 1847. The Reverend David Nelson, who had founded the First Presbyterian Church in Hannibal, which Jane and her children attended, w
as expelled for his opposition to slavery. He later established the antislavery Presbyterian Mission Institute in nearby free-soil Quincy, Illinois. The Reverend Joseph L. Bennett, Nelson’s successor, later became a convert to abolitionism. Given its location a mile across the river from Illinois, Hannibal was also a clandestine stop on the Underground Railroad.17
To be sure, there was little public sympathy for the antislavery cause. “In that day,” as Clemens recalled in 1894, “for a man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could not be in his right mind.” A case in point was the summer of 1841 trial in Palmyra, the Marion County seat, of three abolitionists from Quincy charged with grand theft for inciting three slaves to escape across the Mississippi River to Illinois and thence to freedom in Canada. (Slaves were considered “contraband,” and the joke went around that abolitionists were “contra-bandits.”) The slaves were allowed to testify for the prosecution, despite a law prohibiting the testimony of blacks against whites. The case attracted national attention, with reports of it in the St. Louis Missouri Republican reprinted in newspapers from New Orleans, Charleston, and Washington to Philadelphia and Boston, including the Liberator, the antislavery paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. Marshall Clemens served on the circuit court jury of twelve men who voted to convict the abolitionists, each of whom was sentenced to twelve years of hard labor in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, also known as “the bloodiest 47 acres in America.” The case supplied the premise of Sam’s unfinished novel “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” written in 1897 and narrated by Huck Finn, about a group of rumored “ablitionists laying for a chance to run off some of our niggers to freedom.” Sam caricatured William Beebe in the story as Bat Bradish, a cruel slave trader and “the orneriest hound in town,” and later as Henry Bascom’s father, who was “unloved” but “respected for his muscle and his temper,” in the unfinished “Schoolhouse Hill” version of The Mysterious Stranger, written between 1897 and 1908.18