Only twenty-eight, Young had been the managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune since mid-1866. He would be forced to resign on 19 May, under much publicized charges of misconduct (Broderick, 127–28). In 1867 Young had arranged for Clemens to write letters to the Tribune from the Quaker City excursion. When Clemens subsequently took up his temporary post as secretary to Senator William M. Stewart in Washington, he became an “occasional” contributor to the Tribune, publishing five articles there in 1868 (SLC 1868 [MT00616], 1868 [MT00628], 1868 [MT00646], 1868 [MT00746], and 1868 [MT00755]). His normal rate of pay was forty dollars per column and he usually dealt personally with Young and his private secretary, Daniel Church McEwen (1843–1909), formerly secretary to Secretary of State William H. Seward ( L2 , 54–55, 60–61, 108–9, 113–14, 117–18; “Personal,” New York World, 24 Oct 67, 4; “Daniel Church McEwen,” New York Times, 2 Nov 1909, 9).

The enclosure has not survived, but it was most likely the manuscript of “The White House Funeral,” evidently the “long newspaper article” Clemens wrote on Sunday evening, 7 March. This article, to which Clemens assigned the fictional dateline, “Washington, March 4, 1869,” was a bitterly scornful, mock report of President Johnson’s final cabinet meeting on that, Grant’s inaugural, day. Clemens may have been prompted to the subject by Joseph Hawley, due back from the inauguration and pledged to call on him Saturday evening, 6 March (see 6 Mar 69 to OLL and CJLclick to open link 2nd of 2 , p. 145). The Tribune, under Young’s influence, had been very outspoken in calling for Johnson’s impeachment, and was therefore a logical place to publish “The White House Funeral.” The text survives only in a set of Tribune galley proofs now in the Mark Twain Papers. Preserved at the very end of the proofs, following the end of Clemens’s text, is the headline for someone else’s letter, published on 27 March, but “The White House Funeral” was not published then or at any other time. The existence of proofs shows that the decision to kill the article came at the last moment, perhaps when Clemens saw the following in the Elmira Advertiser for 26 March:

For the text of “The White House Funeral,”click to open link see Enclosure with 8–10 March 1869 to John Russell Youngclick to open link.

The span of dates estimated for this letter is based chiefly on the assumption that Clemens finished the article and mailed it to Young soon after he began it—probably before 10 March. Certainly by 13 March he would not have given his book’s title as “The New Pilgrim’s Progress,” or indicated that publication would occur in “3 or 4 weeks” (see 13 Mar 69 to Fairbanks, n. 5click to open link). And although he had actually seen only eighty engravings by 13 March, he invokes the round number of “200 engravings,” which Elisha Bliss had used in his letter of 10 February, to let Young know how many illustrations were projected (see 14 Feb 69 to Bliss, n. 1click to open link). Many of the 234 engravings eventually included in The Innocents Abroad were still unfinished.