The Life of Mark Twain Page 7
Jane Clemens treated Sam with castor oil and hot salt water with mustard and pressed socks full of hot ashes to his chest, though he “was too weak and miserable to care much.” She also inflicted the water cure on him. As he testified before a New York State legislative committee on public health in 1901, “I remember how my mother used to stand me up naked in the backyard every morning and throw buckets of cold water on me. . . . And then, when the dousing was over, she would wrap me up in a sheet wet with ice water and then wrap blankets around that and put me into bed. . . . I would get up a perspiration that was something worth seeing.” Sam reconstructed the experience both in the abandoned early version of Tom Sawyer that Paine titled “Boy’s Manuscript” (written circa 1868) and in Tom Sawyer: Aunt Polly herded Tom “out at daylight every morning, stood him up in the wood-shed and drowned him with a deluge of cold water; then she scrubbed him down with a towel like a file, and so brought him to; then she rolled him up in a wet sheet and put him away under blankets till she sweated his soul clean and ‘the yellow stains of it came through his pores.’” Despite this treatment, Sam recovered. He claimed later that had he not contracted the measles, his mother would not have allowed him to drop out of school or apprenticed him to a printer—thus the disease was the first in a chain of events that led inexorably to his literary career. Or, as he joked in 1901, he joined the literary profession “because I had the measles.”35
During the two weeks that Tom Sawyer is ill, as Sam wrote in the novel chronicling Tom’s adventures, “a melancholy change” came “over everything and every creature” because “there had been a ‘revival,’ and everybody had ‘got religion.’” Within another two weeks, however, the villagers suffered a “relapse” and backslid into their sinful ways. In the 1840s and 1850s Hannibal was in fact a welter of millennial and evangelical zeal. On the evening of October 22, 1844, Sam watched as the local Millerites, believers in the prophecy of William Miller that the Second Coming of Christ would occur that night, climbed Holliday’s Hill (Cardiff Hill, in Tom Sawyer) to await the end of the world. The appearance in March 1843 of the most brilliant comet of the century had been hailed by some enthusiastic Millerites as an omen from heaven, a last warning that corroborated the calculations of their prophet. To judge from his occasional references to them in his writings, the Millerites made a lasting impression on Sam, though he was barely eight years old at the time. In The Innocents Abroad, for example, he explained how “twenty-five years ago a multitude of people in America put on their ascension robes, took a tearful leave of their friends, and made ready to fly up into heaven at the first blast of the trumpet. But the angel did not blow it. Miller’s resurrection day was a failure. The Millerites were disgusted.”36
Religious rivalries in Hannibal were often contentious, to be sure. When Melicent Holliday quit or “withdrew from the jurisdiction” of the local Episcopal church in April 1853, she wrote a card to that effect for publication in the Hannibal Journal. Marshall Clemens “attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation.” If Bence Blankenship’s father was the village drunk, Sam’s father was the village atheist. As was his wont, brother Orion, portrayed as Oscar Carpenter in the unfinished “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (written in 1897), a “creature of enthusiasms” with unsettled religious convictions, waffled like a spinning top among the Methodist Sunday school, then “the Campbellite Sunday school,” then the Baptist and Presbyterian churches. As a character declares in The American Claimant, “I think he was a Mohammedan or something last week.” Orion “belonged to as many as five different religious denominations,” Sam asserted in 1879.37
Sam was more constant if less faithful. During his first year in Hannibal, he attended Sunday school at the Old Ship of Zion Methodist Church on the town square. His teacher was the local stonemason, Joshua Richmond, whom he came to admire. From the ages of five to seven, he recalled, “I was under Mr. Richmond’s spiritual care every now and then.” Under the tutelage of this “most kind and gentle-spirited man” Sam “became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about him”—or so he claimed. Hardly attracted to religious orthodoxy even as a child, he also concluded that the Prodigal Son was “the stupidest youth that ever lived, to go away from his father’s palace where he had a dozen courses for dinner, and wore handsome clothes, and had fast horses, and dogs, and plenty of money to spend, and could go to the circus whenever he wanted to.” Soon after his mother and sister Pamela joined the Presbyterian Church in February 1841, he began to attend services with them. As he testified in 1866, “I was brought up a Presbyterian”—he had been “sprinkled in infancy” and considered “that as conferring the rank of Brevet Presbyterian”—and he nominally identified as a Presbyterian for the rest of his life. He was attracted to the austere theology of the denomination: “The heaven and hell of the wildcat religions” such as spiritualism “are vague and ill defined but there is nothing mixed about the Presbyterian heaven and hell. The Presbyterian hell is all misery; the heaven all happiness.” In any event, he learned from the Presbyterians, as W. D. Howells later noted, “to fear God and dread the Sunday School.” Or as Dixon Wecter put it, Sam Clemens “did not believe in Hell, but he was afraid of it.” His Presbyterian Sunday school teacher was David L. Garth, a slaveholder, grain merchant, owner of the local tobacco shop, and the father of his classmate and friend John Garth. In 1885, as he wrote his friend Charles Warren Stoddard, he looked back with “shuddering horror upon the days” in his adolescence “when I believed I believed.” “To this day,” he told Paine in old age, “I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave.”38
Surprisingly, Sam harbored an ambition in adolescence to become a minister. It never occurred to him, he later joked, “that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job.” The “only genuine ambition I ever had,” he wrote his nephew Sammy Moffett in 1866, was to preach the Gospel, “but somehow I never had any qualification for it but the ambition.” He had admitted to Orion a year earlier that “he could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade—i.e. religion” and that he “never had a ‘call’ in that direction, anyhow, & my aspirations were the very ecstasy of presumption.” Still, he always counted liberal-minded ministers—those “fast nags of the cloth,” he once called them—among his closest friends. As late as 1902, during his final trip to Hannibal, he candidly admitted that as a child he had “once started out to be” a clergyman and had wanted to stand in the Presbyterian pulpit “and give instructions—but I was never asked until today. My ambition of two generations ago has been satisfied at last.”39
The religious sect that exerted the greatest influence on young Sam Clemens was perhaps the Disciples of Christ, or Campbellites, so named for their founders Thomas Campbell, a former Presbyterian, and his son Alexander. Harold K. Bush Jr. suggests that the group “was of great interest” to Sam because the “Campbellites were religious rebels.” He “found aspects of the teachings of both Campbell and [his disciple Barton] Stone rather attractive, especially their willingness to question ossified belief and tradition,” an element of the come-outer tradition of evangelicalism. Yet in advocating the restoration of “primitive Christianity,” the Campbellites also appealed to baser instincts. The sect was virulently anti-Catholic, theological allies of the Know-Nothings of the 1840s and 1850s. The religious bias was deeply ingrained in Campbellite doctrine, which in its most extreme form identified the pope with the Antichrist, the “whore of Babylon” or the beast prophesied in the book of Revelation. Alexander Campbell belittled “the impious and arrogant pretensions of the haughty and tyrannical See of Rome,” the “pretended vicar of Christ” on Earth, and equated Catholicism with such �
�antichristian” powers as Islam, paganism, and atheism. In the same vein, Orion once editorialized in the Hannibal Journal that the Catholic Church was a form of blight that threatened “to stretch over us her icy hand and bring upon us everlasting winter and barren desolation.” Catholics were so unwelcome in Hannibal that the first Catholic church was not built there until 1854, the year after Sam left town.40
Sam’s lifelong antipathy to Catholicism was stoked, ironically, by the Campbellite sermons he heard as a child, and he never completely outgrew the zeitgeist of anti-Catholic prejudice and superstition in which he was raised. He once admitted that he had been “educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits.”41 He betrayed his anti-Catholic prejudice in February 1855 by reporting from St. Louis that a “new Catholic paper (bad luck to it)” was “soon to be established” there “for the purpose of keeping the Know Nothing organ straight.” Hank Morgan eerily echoes the anti-Catholic bias of the Campbellites (and others) in chapter 8 of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889): “that awful power, the Roman Catholic Church” in only “two or three centuries” had “converted a nation of men to a nation of worms.”42 In context, then, the Battle of the Sand Belt that closes the novel is nothing less than Armageddon, the apocalyptic final war between the forces of holiness and evil—in this case, the Roman Church.
The Campbellites certainly left their mark on young Sam. Barton W. Stone, Campbell’s chief lieutenant, was the grandfather of the Bowen brothers, Will, Sam, and Bart, the latter even named for him. In 1839, before she became a Presbyterian, Pamela Clemens was recruited to the sect by Stone’s daughter Amanda, the Bowen boys’ mother.43 Even Marshall Clemens “inclined to the Campbellites” if to any church, according to Orion.44 The original Campbellite congregation in Hannibal was established in March 1843, when Sam was only seven, and within a year it had grown to fifty members. They soon built a brick meetinghouse on Center Street. Other Campbellites with whom Sam was acquainted in his childhood were his classmate John Robards, whose father was an elder in the church; John’s sister Sally Robards, who later married Bart Bowen; John Briggs’s sister Artemisia, one of Sam’s first sweethearts; and John D. Dawson, the model for Archibald Ferguson, the Scotch schoolmaster in “Schoolhouse Hill,” and the prurient, sadistic schoolmaster Dobbins in Tom Sawyer.45
Sam Clemens also knew Barton Stone, who held a revival five miles southwest of Hannibal in mid-October 1844, soon after the measles epidemic began to wane; it may have been the revival mentioned in Tom Sawyer. In an autobiographical note probably written in the mid-1870s, he recalled a “Campbellite revival. All converted but me. All sinners again in a week,” exactly as in the novel. The identification of the revival in the novel with the Campbellites is even more explicit in the original manuscript. There Sam wrote, then deleted, this line: “As usual, the first revival had bred a second, the second a third, and so on, the Presbyterians following close upon the heels of the Methodists, & the Camp—.” In a lecture in 1871, too, Sam reminisced about a prank he and Will Bowen ostensibly played on Barton Stone about this time. They “got hold of a pack of cards and indulged heavily in euchre.” A minister was “stopping at the [Bowen] house, and to secrete the cards they placed them in his black gown, which hung in a closet.” While the minister stood in the robe baptizing converts in the Mississippi a few days later, “the cards commenced to float upon the water, the first cards being a couple of bowers and three aces.” One of the boys—probably Will—“got walloped” by his mother, though Sam later protested, “I don’t see how [the minister] could help going out on a hand like that.” The anecdote is probably apocryphal—Sam admitted in 1906 that he had “invented that story forty years ago.” In any event, after leading another revival near Columbia, Missouri, in late October 1844, Barton Stone fell ill, returned on horseback to Hannibal, and died on November 9 in his daughter Amanda’s home. After his death, Stone’s widow moved from Illinois to the Bowen house, where she died thirteen years later.46
Alexander Campbell also preached in Hannibal while on a tour of northeastern Missouri in the fall of 1845. He spoke in Palmyra on November 3 and traveled the next day, he reported, “to Hannibal, an infant but rapidly rising mercantile city, on the bank of the Mississippi. While there we . . . enjoyed a visit to Mr. [Samuel] Bowen’s, at whose residence departed this life the venerable Barton W. Stone. His daughter . . . is one of the most kind and amiable of human kind, and all worth of the admiration and affection of those who know the value and liveliness of female excellence.” Campbell delivered a sermon in Hannibal on November 4 that inspired “a prodigious excitement,” as Sam Clemens remembered sixty years later. “The farmers and their families drove or tramped into the village from miles around to get a sight of the illustrious Alexander Campbell and to have a chance to hear him preach.” The church on Center Street was too small to seat all of them, however, and Sam recalls that he spoke “in the open air in the public square, and that was the first time in my life that I had realized what a mighty population this planet contains when you get them all together.” Strangely enough, Tom Blankenship, the younger brother of Bence and the model for the character Huckleberry Finn, was dressed in hand-me-downs by the mothers of John Robards and Barney Farthing, the latter another of Sam’s classmates, and sent to hear Campbell’s sermon. As incongruous as it may seem, Tom Blankenship may have been temporarily “converted,” much as Huck greets Tom after the revival “with a Scriptural quotation.”47
Alexander Campbell returned to Hannibal in 1852 while on a fund-raising tour for Bethany College, a school he had founded in Virginia. He arrived on Sunday, November 14, some two weeks before Sam’s seventeenth birthday. The village had “greatly improved and grown since my first visit in 1845,” Campbell discovered. “It is now quite a commercial place.” He delivered two talks, the first on Sunday in the sanctuary of the Campbellite church “on the Christian Religion, and one on Monday, on the great subject of Education, domestic and scholastic, with reference to the whole destiny of man, and especially in his moral and religious relations and obligations to the church and to the state.” A short piece in the Hannibal Journal, almost certainly written by Orion, noted that Campbell had preached “to very large audiences. His sermon on Sunday was the most instructive and one of the best arguments we have ever heard from any pulpit.” The poor but proud Campbellites in Hannibal pledged some five hundred dollars toward the Bethany College endowment before Campbell’s departure. On his part, Sam remembered that when he “was seventeen years old and miserably ignorant, the great preacher, Alexander Campbell, came to our town and preached. . . . Nothing was talked of for days afterward” but his “wonderful sermon. . . . He was a very grim, frozen, unapproachable man, and very particular about every little thing.”48 Campbell’s influence was felt throughout northeast Missouri for years to come, even after his death in 1866. The Paris Female Seminary in Monroe County and the Palmyra Female Seminary in Marion County were both founded by graduates of Bethany College.
Sam eventually realized the futility of religious fanaticisms. As early as 1860 he observed to Orion that “what a man wants with religion in these breadless times passes my comprehension.” He might as well have referred to religious faith as the opiate of the people. In the first chapter of Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) Huck remarks on an eclipse “that started a revival, same as it always does”—likely an allusion to the solar eclipse in Missouri that occurred on July 8, 1851, when Sam was fifteen. (He also ridiculed the superstitious souls who considered an eclipse a sign from God in chapter 6 of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.) In his essay “The New Wildcat Religion” (1866) he remembered when “Methodist camp-meetings and Campbellite revivals used to stock the asylums with religious lunatics.” As late as 1888, in taking notes for an incident he planned to include in A Connecticut Yankee, Sam jotted in his journal that he “made a Campbellite out of th
e skunk man, for this would require him to bathe & keep clean.”49
Sam recorded in his autobiography another vivid boyhood recollection of Alexander Campbell. Not surprisingly, it is demonstrably untrue. The anecdote is based on an entry jotted in his notebook, again probably in 1888:
Rev. Alex Campbell, founder of the Campbellites, gently reproved our apprentice, Wales McCormick,
As Sam recounted the events in 1906, Campbell had preached a sermon in Hannibal that his local followers wanted to have printed. But Wales McCormick, the apprentice printer, accidentally left out a few words, and to save type and time in correcting the mistake he reduced “Jesus Christ” to “J.C.” Campbell was outraged, admonishing McCormick, “So long as you live, don’t you ever diminish the Saviour’s name again. Put it all in.” To exact revenge, so the story goes, McCormick reset the final three pages of the sermon to “improve upon the great preacher’s admonition. He enlarged the offending J.C. into Jesus H. Christ.”50