22 November 1867 • Washington, D.C. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00157)
I called at the Tribune several times but failed to find you in. I had an article partly written about the Quaker City humbug, which I thought you might possibly accept, although it was rather roughly written, & may be even a little coarse—but I did not like to consult with a stranger about it, & so I never told any one what I came for. When it grew late, I answered a call from the Herald, & finished & printed it there. I was at the Tribune office twice on succeeding days, but they always said you were out.1explanatory note What I wished, was to leave you some Holy Land letters to accept or refuse. I don’t know any way now but to send you two or three by mail, asking as a favor that if you do not approve them you will return them to me directed to 242 F F Ⓐemendationstreet Washington,2explanatory note cor. 14th. I stopped writing for the Tribune, partly because I seemed to write so awkwardly, & partly because I was apt to betray the glaring disrespect for the Holy Land & the Primes and Thompson’s who have glorified it which travel there had created in me.3explanatory note But coming home I cramped myself down to at least something like decency of expression, & wrote some twenty letters, which have survived the examinedation of a most fastidious censer censor Ⓐemendationon shipboard and are consequently not incendiary documents. There are several among these that I think you would probably accept, after reading them.4explanatory note I would so like to write some savage letters about Palestine, but it wouldn’t do. I And I would so like to modernize the biographies of some of the patriarchs—but that would not do, either.5explanatory note
I have some hope that the harmless squib in the Herald will bring out bitter replies from some of the Quaker City’s strange menagerie of ignorance, imbecility, bigotry & dotage, & so give me an excuse to go into the secret history of the excursion & tell truthfully how that curious company conducted themselves in foreign lands and on board ship.
I have located here for the winter. Have called 3 times at the Tribune bureau, but always missed the staff by some five aggravating minutes. I know Mr. Foley.6explanatory note
If I had known the Ⓐemendationletters in the Tribune were Ⓐemendationbeing copied I would have Ⓐemendationcontinued them anyhowⒶemendation—for to copy a letter is to invest it with importance, at any rate, whether it has any ac actual merit or not.7explanatory note
I wish I could have talked with you. The letters I have sent you heretofore have been—well, they have been worse, much worse, than those I am sending you now.
letter docketed: File | Y.
In 1868, Amos J. Cummings, then the Tribune’s “City and Political Editor,” published a vivid, insider’s description of Young at the Tribune offices:
Our cards go in, and in ten seconds we are ushered into the presence of the Managing Editor of The Tribune.... What! this blue-eyed boy the Managing Editor of the most influential journal in America! You can hardly believe it. In personal appearance Mr. Young is the most insignificant person about the office. He is light-complexioned, has a large, sloping head, thatched with brown hair, a clear forehead, and a prominent nose, and is as quick of motion as a sparrowhawk. He is of medium height—say five feet eight. His words flow from his lips in rapid succession, as if each one was struggling to get out of his mouth ahead of the other....
Young is a strict disciplinarian. He runs the editorial department like a machine. Every cog strikes its groove with punctual regularity. When he is absent his duties fall on Mr. John R. G. Hassard. If Hassard is missing, Mr. Amos J. Cummings takes the manager’s chair, and so perfect does everything jibe, that if all the editors were absent the oldest reporter, like the senior sergeant of a company destitute of commissioned officers, would take charge. (Cummings 1868, 106–7)
Probably Clemens took the night train of 21 November to Washington, D.C., arriving on the morning of 22 November. He roomed with his employer, Senator William M. Stewart, at 224 (not 242) F Street North. Forty years later, Stewart published the following description of their rooms and Clemens’s arrival that morning:
About the winter of 1867, I think, while my family was in Paris, I lived in a rather tumble-down building which at that time stood on the northwest corner of Fourteenth and F Streets, N. W., opposite the old Ebbitt House, where many of my Congressional cronies had quarters. The house was a weather-beaten old place, a relic of early Washington.
Its proprietress was Miss Virginia Wells, an estimable lady about 70 years of age, prim, straight as a ramrod, and with smooth-plastered white hair. She belonged to one of the first families of Virginia, which were quite numerous in Washington, and was very aristocratic; but having lost everything in the war, she had come to Washington, and managed to make a precarious living as a lodging-house keeper.
I had the second floor of her residence, one of the rooms, facing upon both streets, a spacious apartment about seventy-five feet long, which I had divided by a curtain drawn across it, making a little chamber at the rear, in which I slept. The front part was my sitting room. I had a desk there, and tables, with writing materials, and my books, and a side-board upon which I kept at all times plenty of cigars and a supply of whiskey, for I occasionally smoked and took a drink of liquor.
I was seated at my window one morning when a very disreputable-looking person slouched into the room. He was arrayed in a seedy suit, which hung upon his lean frame in bunches with no style worth mentioning. A sheaf of scraggy black hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance. He was a man I had known around the Nevada mining camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens. (William M. Stewart, 219–20)
Circumstances since mid-October obliged Clemens to use the Holy Land for the subject of his letters, since the Mediterranean ports from Egypt onwards, about which he originally planned to write “oftener” than twice a month, went largely unvisited because of quarantine restrictions. William Cowper Prime (1825–1905) was the son of a Presbyterian minister and currently editor of the New York Journal of Commerce as well as president of the Associated Press. He published Tent Life in the Holy Land in 1857. William McClure Thomson (1806–94) was a Presbyterian minister and missionary in Syria for over forty years. (He visited the Quaker City when it arrived at Beirut in September.) Thomson published The Land and the Book in 1858, which, when republished in England, ostensibly sold more copies than “any previous American book except Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Clemens was familiar with both books and did not hesitate to ridicule Prime’s, at any rate, in his letters to the Alta (DAB, 18:490; Mary Mason Fairbanks 1867; SLC 1868).
This burst of writing between 25 October and 11 November produced at least twenty-one letters, including the one just published in the Herald, contrary to the advice of his “censor,” Mrs. Fairbanks. Solon Severance informed Paine of an instance of her censorship that preceded the trip home:
One afternoon I saw him tearing up a bunch of the soft, white paper—copy paper, I guess the newspapers call it—on which he had written something, and throwing the fragments into the Mediterranean. I inquired of him why he cast away the fruits of his labors in that manner.
“Well,” he drawled, “Mrs. Fairbanks thinks it oughtn’t to be printed, and, like as not, she is right.” (MTB , 1:328)
Emma (Beach) Thayer recalled Clemens’s reading his work aloud “for the sake of Mrs. Fairbanks’ criticism by which I think he abided, as he would declare that she had destroyed ‘four hours of work’ or such and such an amount. I think it was what seemed to her irreverence or too much profanity that she objected to” (Thayer to A. B. Paine, 22 June 1907, Davis 1967, 2).
In a 3 September 1867 notebook entry, Clemens wrote “Biography of Samson for N. Y. Tribune,” but no text has been found (N&J1, 414).
John P. Foley had recently left the New York editorial staff of the Tribune and taken on a new assignment as the paper’s Washington correspondent, “until the first of April.” In 1866, when John Russell Young became managing editor of the Tribune, he had appointed his brother—James Rankin Young (1847–1924), nearly seven years his junior—head of the Washington bureau. According to Cummings, this bureau was “the most important and expensive Bureau attached to the journal,” employing five men (“Personal,” New York World, 18 Nov 67, 4; Baehr, 31; Cummings 1868, 89; Cummings 1868, 109).
Although newspapers as diverse as the Brooklyn Eagle and the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise—as well as the San Francisco Evening Bulletin and even the Alta itself—felt free to copy Clemens’s occasional letters in the Tribune, some editors judged them unworthy of reprinting. The New York Round Table, for instance, observed that “Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog book contains better things than those who have read only his letters to The Tribune might believe possible.” And the editors of the San Francisco Californian wrote only partly in jest when they declared Mark Twain “not the sort of man to be sent to the Holy Land.... We will not republish the wicked things that Mark Twain says—we are surprised that the Tribune did not cut out some of them” (“Library Table,” Round Table 6 [7 Dec 67]: 376; “Wicked Mark Twain,” Californian 7 [7 Dec 67]: 1).
After inscribing only the first four lines on the last leaf of the MS (‘[¶] If . . . anyhow’, 108.33–109.1), Clemens trimmed the right margin, probably to make it more nearly the same size as the two previous leaves, which were a different kind of paper. He inadvertently trimmed off the end of the last word in those four lines, then repaired some of the damage by deleting the damaged words and reinscribing them at the beginning of the line below.
MS, Papers of John Russell Young, Library of Congress (DLC).
L2 , 108–111; Dickinson, 117–19, with omissions.
donated to DLC in 1924 by Mrs. John Russell Young and Gordon R. Young.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.