24 January 1868 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00182)
☞ Read this only to the family, & then burn it—I do hate to have anybody know anything about my business. Don’t mention the terms, herein, on your life. It is business secret.
This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office as I came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, & young James Gordon Bennett asked me to write impersonally twice a week for the Herald, & said if I would, I might have full swing, & abuse anybody & everybody I wanted to. I said I must have the very fullest possible swing, & he said, All right. I said “It’s a contract”—& that settled that matter. I’ll make it a point to write one letter a week, anyhow.1explanatory note
But the best thing that has happened was here. This great American Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till I Ⓐemendationthought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I met Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, & with his usual whole-souled way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he gets a chance, he said, “Now here—you are one of the talented men of the age.—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains.; I’ll tell you what to do, & how to do it.” And he did.2explanatory note And I listened well, & then came up here & have made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large paper pagesⒶemendation, with illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publishers’ hands by the middle of July. My per centage is to be a fifth more than they paid Richardson.3explanatory note They pay me more than they have ever paid any author except Horace Greeley.4explanatory note Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this. But I had my mind made up to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, & a good deal of it. I told them so. I had the misfortune to “bust out” one author of standing. They had his manuscript, with the understanding that they would publish his book if they could not get a book from me (they only publish two books at a time, & so my book & Richardson’s Life of Grant will fill the bill for next fall & winter,)—so that manuscript was sent back to its author to-day. These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books you can imagine.5explanatory note in margin: I have to make a speech at the annual Herald dinner on the 6th of May. 6explanatory note
I shall write to the Enterprise & Alta every week, as usual, I guess, & to the Herald twice a week—occasionally to the Tribune & the magazines (I have a stupid article in the Galaxy, just issued,)7explanatory note but I am not going to write to this, that & the other paper any more. The Chicago Tribune wants letters, but I hope & pray I have charged them so much that they will not close the contract.8explanatory note I am gradually getting out of debt, but these trips to New York do cost like sin. Sin.9explanatory note
I hope you have cut out & forwarded my printed letters to Washington—please continue to do so as they arrive.10explanatory note
I have had a tip-top time, here, for a few days (guest of Mr. Jno. Hooker’s family—Beecher’s relatives—& of in a general way of the hea Mr. Bliss, also, who Ⓐemendationis head of the publishing firm.) Puritans are mighty straight-laced, & they won’t let me smoke in the parlor, but the Almighty don’t make any better people.11explanatory note
Now don’t go & read this letter to anybody outside the family circle—I am sensitive on this point. If you have to talk, talk—but don’t read my letters.
I expect I have made the Alta people mad, but I don’t care. They did not telegraph me soon enough.12explanatory note
That cursed, infernal Patent Office business Commissionership has changed round again & gone into Cox’s hands. I expect that thing is going to both take me months to accomplish it. The way I’ll waltz into some of those people in the Herald the first thing they know, will make them think the Devil himself has got loose for another thousand years. If I ever do start in, to in good earnest, to fiddle for them I’ll bet they’ll dance. I want just one private talk with Andrew Johnson when I get back to Washington, & then I’ll know what course to pursue. If they don’t want any clerks in the Departments immediately, I will “show up” their damnable rottenness for not wanting clerks.13explanatory note Love to all—good-bye. I shall be in New York 3 days—then go on to the capital.
Clemens arrived in New York sometime between 17 and 19 January, remaining there and in Brooklyn until at least the evening of 21 January. He then went to Hartford for several days, returning to New York on 25 January (SLC 1868, SLC 1868). Members of the Herald editorial staff whom Clemens might have known are identified in 20 Nov 67 to JLC and family (2nd of 2), n. 2click to open link. At least three letters Clemens may have written from Washington (dated 1, 8, and 15 February) appeared, without signature, in the Herald for 3, 10, and 18 February: the first under the heading “Gossip at the National Capital,” the others under “Washington Gossip,” and all three identified as “Special Correspondence of the Herald” (Budd, 5–9; see SLC 1868, SLC 1868, SLC 1868).
Beecher’s expertise in such matters was demonstrated earlier in January when he executed a contract with J. B. Ford and Company, a recently founded New York subscription publisher, from which he received a “bonus” (probably an advance) of $10,000 for his still-to-be-written Life of Jesus, the Christ, the first volume of which was published three years later, in 1871 (“A New Work by Henry Ward Beecher,” New York Times, 13 Jan 68, 2; Howard, 215; Wilson 1868, 368, 522).
According to Paine, Elisha Bliss had been too ill to respond to Clemens’s 2 December letter “in detail” until 24 December; his reply survives only in a now-incomplete typescript, of unknown origin (CtHMTH):
Bliss had evidently seen the following announcement, whose source has not been discovered:
Mark Twain, one of the funniest writers of the day, who was one of the Quaker City excursionists, is preparing a volume descriptive of their voyage. It will be published by the American Publishing company of this city, and those who have laughed over Mark’s story of the Jumping Frog of Calaveras, Jim Wolfe and the Cats, or his inimitable letters from Italy and Palestine, will be apt to buy it. (“City and Vicinity,” Hartford Courant, 24 Dec 67, 8)
Paine, who had access to a complete version of Bliss’s letter, paraphrased the rest of its contents: Bliss “recited the profits made by Richardson and others through subscription publication, and named the royalties paid. Richardson had received four per cent. of the sale price” for each copy of his Beyond the Mississippi; Bliss “added that they had two arrangements for paying authors: outright purchase, and royalty” (MTB , 1:351). Clemens held out for a 5 percent royalty on each copy of The Innocents Abroad, rejecting a guaranteed fee of $10,000 “cash in hand” for outright purchase, which Bliss offered as an alternative (MTL , 1:146–47; see 27 Jan 68 to Blissclick to open link for further details of the contract). Clemens’s choice ultimately proved financially wise: The Innocents Abroad earned him about $14,000 in its first year of publication; in 1903 he claimed that his royalties from the first American edition had totaled $35,000 (Hirst 1975, 317–18).
Since Bliss’s company did not publish Greeley (1811–72)—politician, lecturer, author, founder and editor of the New York Tribune—Clemens may have misunderstood what Bliss, or Beecher, had said to him. Greeley did publish by subscription, however, beginning with The American Conflict in two volumes (1864, 1866), which issued through O. D. Case and Company of Hartford, and he was about to publish Recollections of a Busy Life (1868) through J. B. Ford and Company, Beecher’s new publisher (see note 2). His royalty percentage on these books remains unknown, but by 1 January 1867, the first volume of The American Conflict had sold nearly 125,000 copies, and the second, nearly 50,000 (Van Deusen, 355).
Richardson’s biography aimed “to tell the life-story of Grant the Man, rather than of Grant the General and the Statesman.” A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant was issued by the American Publishing Company in late July 1868, but The Innocents Abroad did not appear until the following July. The “author of standing” temporarily displaced by Clemens may have been Junius Henri Browne, another Tribune writer, whose Great Metropolis; A Mirror of New York was issued by the American Publishing Company in January 1869 (“Biography of General Grant,” New York Tribune, 24 Dec 67, 4; Bliss to SLC, 29 July 68, CU-MARK; SLC to Bliss, 22 July 69click to open link, transcript at WU, in MTLP , 22–24).
Clemens did not, in fact, speak at this dinner because in May he was living in San Francisco.
“General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant” in the February 1868 Galaxy, which had appeared by the time Clemens wrote this letter (SLC 1868; “The Deadliest Inhabitant Extant,” Washington Evening Star, 24 Jan 68, 1).
Since Clemens does not mention that within a week (on 31 January) he would write the first of six signed letters to the Chicago Republican, he may well have confused that newspaper with the Chicago Tribune. Nothing in the Tribune for 1868 has so far been identified as his. Clemens probably knew at least one newspaper editor who might have approached him on behalf of either the Tribune or the Republican: for most of 1867, V. B. Denslow was the managing editor of the Chicago Republican, having earlier been an editor on the Chicago Tribune. In September 1867 Denslow accepted a position on the editorial staff of the New York Tribune (SLC 1868; “Personal,” New York World, 7 Sept 67, 4; Cummings 1868, 107).
The creditor, cause, and extent of Clemens’s indebtedness remain unknown.
That is, his letters to the Alta from the Quaker City excursion.
Clemens stayed from 22 to 25 January at the home of John and Isabella Hooker, thus accepting the invitation he reported to his family on 8 January. In an Alta letter describing Hartford he explained,
I hear no swearing here, I see no one chewing tobacco, I have found nobody drunk. What a singular country it is. At the hospitable mansion where I am a guest, I have to smoke surreptitiously when all are in bed, to save my reputation, and then draw suspicion upon the cat when the family detect the unfamiliar odor. I never was so absurdly proper in the broad light of day in my life as I have been for the last day or two. So far, I am safe; but I am sorry to say that the cat has lost caste. (SLC 1868)
One of the three principal Alta editors at this time, Noah Brooks, recalled in 1898 that
while Clemens was in the Eastern States, there came to us a statement, through the medium of the Associated Press, that he was preparing for publication his letters which had been printed in the “Alta California.” The proprietors of that newspaper were worth. They regarded the letters as their private property. Had they not bought and paid for them? Could they have been written if they had not furnished the money to pay the expenses of the writer? (Brooks 1898, 99)
The “statement” was probably an announcement like the one in the Courant, or a similar, briefer one that had appeared in the New York World on 23 December and was reprinted in the Alta on 14 January: “A book is imminent, on the voyage of the Quaker City, from the pen of ‘Mark Twain’” (“Personal,” New York World, 23 Dec 67, 4; “Personal,” San Francisco Alta California, 14 Jan 68, 1). The proprietors evidently telegraphed Clemens protesting his decision to republish his letters without asking their permission. Clemens’s comment here suggests that he may have sent a somewhat intemperate reply to this telegram, which probably reached him before he left Washington on 17–19 January en route to Hartford. See 1 Feb 68 to Young, n. 1click to open link, for further details.
The clerkship Clemens hoped to secure, either in the Patent Office or in some other government department, was for Orion Clemens. Although the president had not yet sent the Senate any nominations for commissioner of patents, the Washington Evening Star reported the names of likely nominees as early as mid-December, a month before Commissioner Theaker’s resignation took effect on 15 January. Colonel John Cooke Cox (d. 1872), first mentioned in this connection on 14 December, was mentioned again on 17 January as one of the top three candidates. A former Union army officer from Pennsylvania and now chief clerk in the Department of the Interior, Cox was Secretary Browning’s choice as the new commissioner of patents. Clemens’s casual reference to Cox may imply that his candidacy was common knowledge, or that Clemens had mentioned him earlier, in a letter no longer extant. The appointment went ultimately to Elisha Foote (1809–83), a lawyer, inventor, and examiner for the Patent Office, who was confirmed on 25 July (Washington Evening Star: “The Vacant Commissionership,” 14 Dec 67, 1; “Commissioner of Patents,” 2 Jan 68, 1; “Hon. T. C. Theaker,” 17 Jan 68, 1; “Commissioner of Patents,” 17 Jan 68, 1; Senate 1887, 16:325, 368; Interior Department, 143, 150; Boatner, 206).
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L2 , 160–164; Paine, 937, and MTB , 1:357–58, excerpts; MTL , 1:145–46, excerpt; Davis 1954, brief excerpt.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.