26 April 1861 • Hannibal City en routefrom St. Louis to Hannibal, Mo. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00028)
I am on the wing for Louisiana,1explanatory note Hannibal to collect money due me. I shall return to St Louis to-morrow.2explanatory note
Orion bring down “Armageddon” with you if you have it. If not, buy it.3explanatory note
Louisiana, Missouri, some twenty-five miles below Hannibal.
Clemens arrived at St. Louis aboard the Alonzo Child on 25 April. Paine has hinted, and Samuel C. Webster has suggested, that Clemens’s purpose in making this trip was to size up the small group of his rebel friends which may even then have been forming in Hannibal (MTB , 1:163; MTBus , 61). But Clemens’s brief military experience came almost seven weeks later. It is more likely that, as he states, his purpose was to collect on outstanding debts. William Bowen, for one, had borrowed $200 from him, promising—but failing—to repay the loan on 26 February 1861. Clemens may have hoped to settle this debt now, although later he claimed that he had never intended to collect it (see 25 Aug 66 to Bowenclick to open link). Bowen, who had left the Child, had just completed supervising the construction of a Hannibal boardinghouse to be run by his mother—“a commodious and tastefully finished building, three stories high and containing 20 rooms. These have been furnished in magnificent style at considerable trouble and expense” (“A New Private Boarding House,” Hannibal Weekly Messenger, 18 Apr 61, 2). Clemens probably returned to St. Louis on 28 April as a passenger on the Die Vernon.
Armageddon, by Samuel D. Baldwin, was first published in about 1845. In 1880 Orion described it in a note on Clemens’s letter:
“Armageddon” was a book written by a Baptist preacher of Nashville, to prove that the end of the world would come about 1860 to 1875. The author located Armageddon in the Mississippi Valley. In the battle of Armageddon the United States would defeat Russia and other European powers, after which Republicanism and the milennium would reign universally.
Orion was expected in St. Louis to confer about his plans to move to the West. On 27 March notice of his appointment as secretary of Nevada Territory reached him in Memphis, Missouri, and his commission itself arrived on 20 April. Six days later he left Memphis with his wife and daughter, arriving with them in Keokuk, Iowa, Mollie Clemens’s home, on 27 April. That night he started alone for St. Louis to see his mother, brother, and sister (MEC, 10). The North and South had now been at war for two weeks, and Orion, before returning to Keokuk to prepare to assume his Nevada post, may have suggested that Clemens accompany him to the new territory.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L1 , 120–122; MTBus , 61.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 459–61. The MS was in the possession of Orion Clemens at least as late as 1880, when he added a note to it (see p. 121, n. 3).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.