1 February 1868 • Washington, D.C. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00188)
Dear Sir= I smouched those 3 Holy Land letters from the Alta & added 3 in at the end of the list to make up the deficiency, but the as you will see by the inclosed telegram, they don’t seem to understand it.1explanatory note So I wish you would tell Mr Hazard to forward them to me, & I will ship them out.2explanatory note
P.S. I told Jim Young all you said. You said you didn’t write that Washington letter & I had to believe it, though t but by George, Horace himself says you wrote it! And besides, they papers here call it the Occasional Editorial.3explanatory note Mrs. Wright told me what Mr Greeley said. His family has been stopping with the Wrights. I don’t say that these things look suspicious—I only Ⓐemendationinsinuate that Horace when Horace comes down here to look over his spectacles & beam on Congress, he has no business to circulate canards, you know!4explanatory note
There is nothing here of an exciting nature, except that the Intelligencer woke up in the most astonishing way this morning & told the world that there had been an eruption at Vesuvius. It is a wonderful paper.5explanatory note
S ⒶemendationL C.
letter docketed: File. JRY | M r . Hassard | File.
The enclosure has not been found, but it was doubtless a recent telegram to Clemens from the editors or proprietors of the Alta California, pointing out that among his still unpublished Holy Land letters, numbers 40, 41, and 42 were missing (see 24 Nov 67 to Young, n. 1click to open link). The Alta people had, in fact, grown suddenly touchy, probably—as Clemens himself predicted on 24 January—because of his plan to reuse the letters without permission (see 24 Jan 68 to SLC and PAM, n. 12click to open link). On 19 January, for instance, when the Alta published letter number 35 (which describes famous places in the Holy Land and briefly recounts several Bible stories), they added an uncharacteristically testy remark:
[Note by the Editors.—We have received a private letter from our correspondent, in which we expected some explanation of his strange conduct in presenting the above information to the public with such a confident air of furnishing news, but he offers none. He does not refer to the subject of the letter at all, except in the postscript, and then only to mention casually that he has inserted nothing in it but what can be substantiated.] (SLC 1868)
And on 21 January they published an emphatic claim to ownership of the Holy Land letters which went much beyond the simple copyright notice published at the top of each letter. The most immediate cause of their assertion was the Sacramento Union’s recent reprinting of a Mark Twain letter without a credit to the Alta:
As this series of letters were paid for in advance of the departure of “Mark Twain” on the expedition and are the exclusive property of the Alta, as well by purchase as copyright, neither the Union nor any other paper has the legal or moral right to publish them. To say the least, if the Sacramento Union needed the humorous letter of our correspondent to brighten up its heavy, dull columns, they could have partially atoned for the act of piracy by stating that they had copied the letter in question from the Alta California. If the Union is altogether destitute of that courtesy which generally obtains among journalists, and cannot afford to credit its contemporaries with matter which their own enterprise has procured for them, it might, at least, have a wholesome respect for the law of copyright, which protects us in this particular instance. (“The Sacramento Union ...,” San Francisco Alta California, 21 Jan 68, 2)
The Union replied by claiming that the omission of credit was unintentional (“credit was marked in the copy, but omitted by mistake in the setting up”) (“A Small Matter,” Sacramento Union, 23 Jan 68, 2). But the Alta editors rejoined even more aggressively, saying in part:
This is a small matter, to be sure, and the Union is welcome to continue its depredations, but it must not feel hurt if we speak out when its thefts are specially flagrant. It is the only paper in the State that has failed to recognize the legal protection of the law of copyright. It has no right to copy Mark Twain’s letters to the Alta, with or without credit. (“The Sacramento Union ... ,” San Francisco Alta California, 24 Jan 68, 2)
John Rose Greene Hassard (1836–88) joined the Tribune staff in 1866. By December 1867 he had “taken charge of the musical column,” while also serving as managing editor when Young was absent (“Personal,” New York World, 2 Dec 67, 4). According to his fellow Tribune employee Amos J. Cummings, Hassard was
a tall, straight gentleman, with a light complexion, blue eyes, regular features, sandy mustache and side whiskers, and legs like those of President Lincoln.... Mr. Hassard writes English as smooth as the music of a rippling brook, and frequently dashes off an editorial article steeped in an original solution of humor and sarcasm. (Cummings 1868, 107)
“The Political Situation. From an Occasional Correspondent,” dated “Washington, Jan. 4, 1868,” appeared on page one of the 6 January New York Tribune. The author of this bold article was an advocate of military enforcement of all Radical Reconstruction measures, and in favor of impeaching President Johnson. He attacked his fellow Republicans for their “halting, cowardly, and time-serving policy” and accused them of “eating turkey and plum pudding” while Johnson and his Southern supporters ignored all the Reconstruction laws. The author also seriously questioned the apparent choice of Grant as the 1868 Republican presidential candidate. He thought it was a sign of weakness to run a victorious general with no political experience, and further believed that Grant was controlled by a wealthy class of Northern investors who were selfishly demanding repayment of war bonds in gold from a financially vulnerable federal government. John H. Riley, Clemens’s friend and fellow Alta correspondent, was among those who attributed the piece to John Russell Young, who was responsible for many of the Tribune’s editorials at this time (Riley 1868). Its author, however, remains unidentified: the Tribune had not yet come out in favor of impeaching President Johnson. Young himself had been forced by Greeley in September 1867 to quash a pro-impeachment editorial; not until late February did he dare to defy his editor-in-chief and put the paper “firmly into the impeachment camp” (Broderick, 124–25).
Greeley had married Mary Youngs Cheney (1814–72) of Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1836. Mrs. Greeley was known as an ill-tempered eccentric who adhered to rigid dietary practices and dabbled in spiritualism. Only two of the seven children born to the Greeleys were still alive: Ida (b. 1848) and Gabrielle (b. 1857). George Washington Wright (1816–85) was a merchant, banker, and former congressman from California (1850–51), who had declined the post of secretary of the interior under President Johnson. The Wrights’ daughter, Eunice, was a special friend of Ida Greeley’s. Mrs. Wright has not been further identified (Henry Luther Stoddard, 37–38, 106–7, 154, 319; Van Deusen, 148–53; Ida L. Greeley to Mrs. Wright, 3 Sept 67 and 5 Dec 67, George Washington Wright Papers, DLC).
In late November, after a prolonged period of inactivity, Mount Vesuvius began to erupt, remaining active for several months. On 29 January the New York Tribune mentioned the continuing flow of lava, and on 30 January it reported that a landslide from the volcano had buried several houses and killed an unknown number of people. The Washington National Intelligencer failed to report this “unusual and very fatal catastrophe” until 31 January. On that date Clemens wrote the Chicago Republican that the Intelligencer “regularly comes out in the most sensational and aggressive manner, every morning, with news it ought to have printed the day before.” That same afternoon, however, the Washington Evening Star declared the landslide story a hoax, and on 1 February both the Tribune and the Intelligencer retracted their reports (SLC 1868; New York Tribune: “Eruption of Vesuvius,” 9 Dec 67, 1; “The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” 29 Jan 68, 1; “The Eruption of Vesuvius,” 30 Jan 68, 1; “A Hoax—No Caving in of Vesuvius,” 1 Feb 68, 1; Washington Evening Star: “The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” 30 Jan 68, 1; “The Vesuvius Story a Hoax,” 31 Jan 68, 1; Washington National Intelligencer: “Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” 31 Jan 68, 3; “The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” 1 Feb 68, 3).
MS, Papers of John Russell Young, Library of Congress (DLC).
L2 , 173–176.
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.