3 January 1873 • (2nd of 2) • Hartford, Conn. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00852)
The Lord knows I grieved to see the old Tribune wavering & ready to tumble into the common slough of journalism, & God knows I am truly glad you saved it. IⒶemendation hope you will stand at its helm a hundred years.
To speak truly, I would rather those islands remained under a native king, if I were there, but you can easily see that that won’t suit those planters.1explanatory note Mr. Burlingame told me privately that if he were minister there he would have the American flag flying on the roof of the king’s palace in less than two weeks. And he was in earnest, too. He hungered for those rich islands.2explanatory note
Telegraph me if you want another column of this stuff—for I dasn’t fool away a day at work that may not be needed, for I am pretty busy.3explanatory note
letter docketed: 3 Jan. 1872. 1873.Ⓐemendation
The death of King Kamehameha V (b. 1830) on 11 December 1872, and the publication of his obituary in the New York Tribune on 2 January 1873, had prompted Clemens to write about the Sandwich Islands (“Death of King Kamehameha,” 2 Jan 73, 5). The manuscript for his article is not known to survive, but it was dated 3 January and published in the Tribune on 6 January: see Enclosure with 3 January 1873 to Whitelaw Reidclick to open link for the full text. Clemens had corresponded from the islands for the Sacramento Union from March until July 1866, and found the raw material for this Tribune letter (and the second one, published three days later) in the notebooks he kept during his trip ( N&J1 , 91–237), as well as in the Union letters themselves, which in the summer of 1871 he revised for Roughing It ( RI 1993 , 861–62). He concluded his first article with a brief paragraph in which he asked why Prince William Lunalilo (1835–74), the “true heir to the Sandwich Islands throne,” was being ignored by the Tribune correspondents “as if he had no existence and no chances.” Clemens had seen Lunalilo during his visit to the islands, and considered him “a splendid fellow, with talent, genius, education, gentlemanly manners, generous instincts, and an intellect that shines as radiantly through floods of whisky as if that fluid but fed a calcium light in his head” (Enclosure with 3 January 1873 to Whitelaw Reidclick to open link; RI 1993 , 715). Although Lunalilo, whom the Legislative Assembly elected king on 8 January 1873, was known to favor American over British influence, many American sugar growers pressed for an even closer tie to the United States, believing that annexation would greatly increase their profits by eliminating high import duties on sugar. Native Hawaiians were strongly opposed to annexation, however, which did not occur until 1898, when Hawaii became a U.S. territory (Kuykendall and Gregory, 225–33, 285–89; “The Sandwich Islands,” New York Tribune, 8 Jan 73, 9).
Anson Burlingame, then U.S. minister to China (1861–67), befriended Clemens in Honolulu in June 1866 ( L1 , 345–46 n. 5, 347–48; see also L2 , 238 n. 1). In 1870 Clemens eulogized Burlingame as “a great man—a very, very great man” (SLC 1870).
The editorial page of the Tribune expressed approval of Clemens’s first article on the day it appeared:
Mr. Mark Twain, in a letter to The Tribune, gives some curious facts touching a subject which is just now attracting a great deal of notice. The humorous and grotesque features of life in the Sandwich Islands are naturally those which first caught his attention; but he might have made for this letter the same apology which he made for his latest book, that, in spite of all he could do, it contained a great deal of information. Mr. Clemens, as those who know him will testify, is not only a wit, but a shrewd and accurate observer; and so our readers will find, in the pithy communication published to-day, not merely food for laughter but subjects for reflection. (6 Jan 73, 4)
Reid must have requested “another column,” for Clemens soon wrote a second one. On 20 April he claimed that he had set aside The Gilded Age “in the midst of a chapter & put in two whole days in on the S. I. letters” (20 Apr 73 to Reidclick to open link).
MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC).
L5 , 264–265.
The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.