27 March 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01216)
No, I must not invest in that property. You have been contented there only a little part of your time, & your life-history is ample evidence that you may tire of it completely at any moment & want to be moving. I hardly know whether I would rather own the mortgage that is on the place or the place itself. They seem to be of about equal value—as investments.
Why not have Mr. Stotts sell Mollie a life interest in the place for an annual sum—say your present rental. If your house-renters are going to quit, the property will not be worth a cent more than the interest on a thousand dollars.1explanatory note
Would not that arrangement shield you & Mr. Stotts from the government? You are perfectly safe from government prosecution, as it stands; & I should suppose his homestead would be exempt, but don’t know.2explanatory note
We are under too heavy an expense to be venturing upon outlays that amount to much. I must send Ma $200 today, & as much more, presently, for I am a good deal behindhand with her, I think.3explanatory note We look for the bills, tomorrow, for the furniture of a guest room, our bedroom, & the study, & odds & ends in other rooms. These cannot fall short of $5000; & we are purposing to pay off the $16000 which we still owe on our ground, & thus free ourselves of debt.4explanatory note I say these things to show you why it is that we seem to be considering pennies & respecting nickels. One don’t get out of debt without doing just that sort of thing, disagreeable as it is.
If you like the idea of changing dem republican rule into democratic rule, go it! There is something enormously ludicrous about it—to me. Even colossal. To speak of going to hell to avoid our August heats, sounds feeble in its presence. If you will let me make a suggestion, it is this: the present era of incredible rottenness is not democratic, it is not republican, it is national. This nation is not reflected in Charles Sumner, but in Henry Ward Beecher, Benjamin Butler, Whitelaw Reid, Wm. M. Tweed. Politics Ⓐemendation are not going to cure moral uclcers like these, nor the decaying body they fester upon.5explanatory note
P. S. I will help you with money from time to time as necessity requires. Enclosed is $100.
The letter (now lost) from Orion which Clemens answered must have renewed an 1874 request that Clemens buy the farm near Keokuk owned by William Stotts, Mollie Clemens’s father. Orion and Mollie had been raising chickens there since the spring of that year, paying rent to Stotts because Clemens had refused then to purchase it. In an Autobiographical Dictation of 5 April 1906 Clemens claimed that he had sent Orion “three thousand dollars cash” to buy the farm, implying that he had done so when first asked (CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:324). This claim is not supported by Clemens’s 1874–75 letters or by any other presently available documents (see 23 Apr 74 to OC, n. 1click to open link, and 10 June 74 to OC and MEC, n. 3click to open link).
Possibly a reference to a tax liability on the Stotts farm.
These are the only specific support payments to Jane Clemens mentioned in Clemens’s extant letters for 1874–75. How much additional money he provided is not known, at least in part because hundreds of his letters to his mother were burned, at his direction, after Mollie’s death in 1904 (see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance).
The Clemenses had probably ordered their guest room furniture in New York in September 1874; it had arrived in January 1875. The $16,000 they allegedly still owed on their “ground” cannot be explained: surviving records indicate that they had paid a total of $13,000 for the lot on which they built their house and had no remaining debt. See Clemens’s claim in the next letter that he had not been in debt for ten years (3 July 74 to OLC, n. 3click to open link; 20 Sept 74 to Parishclick to open link; 12 Jan 75 to Howellsclick to open link; L5 , 270–71).
Charles Sumner (1811–74), a senator from Massachusetts from 1851 until his death, used his considerable gift for oratory in a tireless crusade against slavery and injustice, becoming one of the most revered statesmen of his day. Henry Ward Beecher was on trial for adultery in a civil suit brought by the husband of his alleged paramour (see 29? July 74 to Twichell, n. 2click to open link). Benjamin Butler’s honesty had been questioned throughout his career (see 12 Mar 74 to the editor of the London Standard, n. 8click to open link). William M. Tweed was head of the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine in New York City, infamous for committing flagrant graft and fraud during the early 1870s. Clemens’s inclusion here of Whitelaw Reid, the zealously pro-reform editor of the New York Tribune, was clearly the result of personal animus: in the spring of 1873 Clemens had decided Reid was “a contemptible cur” for objecting to his request that Edward House review The Gilded Age for the Tribune. Only a few months before that offense, Clemens had praised Reid for his opposition to the Tweed Ring and the Grant administration ( L5 , 262, 367–69, 573 n. 17; Duncan, 65).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California (CU-MARK).
L6 , 427–428.
see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.