25 April 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 01224)
We want to congratulate Annie—& we think you should be congratulated, too, upon having such a cargo of care & worry lifted from you. We got Annie’s letter, but I did not know it until just after mailing mine.2explanatory note I was afraid the general snow storm would delay her train, & am glad to hear it did not. I saw Gov. Jewell today & he said he was still moving in the matter of Sammy’s appointment & would stick to it till he got a result of a positive nature one way or the other, but thus far he could did not know whether to expect success or defeat. I confess that I fear it will turn out that only soldiers’ & sailors’ sons can get these special appointments, u but we won’t give it up until we know. I wonder if Mr. Moffett wasn’t in the Home Guard some time or other?3explanatory note
Ma, whenever you need money I hope you won’t be backward about saying so—you can always have it. We stint r ourselves in some ways, but we have no desire to sl tint you. And we don’t intend to, either.
I can’t “encourage” Orion. Nobody can do that, conscientiously, for the reason that before one’s letter has time to reach him he iss off on some new wild-goose chase. WouldⒶemendation you encourage in literature a man who, the older he grows the worse he writes? Would you encourage Orion in the glaring insanity of studying I law? If he were packed & crammed full of law, it would be worthless lumber to him, for his is such a capricious & ill-regulated mind el that he would apply the principles of the law with no more judgment than a child of ten years. I know what I am saying. I laid one of the plainest & simplest of legal questions before Orion once, & the helpless & hopeless mess he made of it was absolutely astonishing.4explanatory note Nothing aggravates me so much as to have Orion mention law or literature to me.
Well, I cannot encourage him to try the ministry, because he would change his religions so fast that he would have to keep a traveling agent under wages to go ahead of him to engage pulpits & board for him.5explanatory note
I cannot conscientiously encourage him to do anything but potter around his little farm & put in his odd hours contriving new & impossible projects at the rate of 365 a year—which is his customary average. He says he did well in Hannibal! Now there is a man who ought to be entirely satisfied with the grandeurs, emoluments & activities of a hen farm.6explanatory note
IfⒶemendation you ask me to pity Orion, I can do that. I can do it every day & all day long. But one can’t “encourage” quicksilverⒶemendation, because it the instant you put your finger on it it isn’t there. No, I am saying too much—he does stick to his literary & legal aspirations; , & sorry & he naturally would select the very two things which he is wholly & preposterously unfitted for. If I ever become able, I mean to put Orion i on a regular pension without revealing the fact that it is a pension. That is best for him. Let him consider it a periodical loan., & pay interest out of the principal.7explanatory note Within a year’s time he would be looking upon himself as a benefactor of mine, in the way of furnishing me a good permanent investment for money, & that would make him happy & satisfied with himself. If he had money he would share with me in a moment, & I have no disposition to be stingy with him. But I do hate to spend a cent on Mollie—I always grudge it. I like her father, but do not want his farm.8explanatory note The old man has mighty good points about him—along with some bad ones. He is the best of that gang.9explanatory note
Livy I don’t want any recipe for sleeplessness except a couple of bottles of lager-beer, but I’m willing Livy should try the rubbing. No doubt it is good., though I wish she would learn to drink the beer. Susie & the Bay are fond of it—& of brandy, whisky & wine. It is a great satisfaction to me.
Livy has had the dipththeriaⒶemendation, but is well again. The Bay has a tooth, but has made no disturbance about it. Susie is hoarse a good part of the time—but the sooner she gets used to it the sooner she will like it.
Livy sends love.
The date assigned to this letter is based on the following circumstantial evidence. Annie Moffett began her visit to Hartford on 25 December 1874 and was still there on 19 March 1875. Clemens’s first paragraph shows that she had only recently returned to Fredonia. The “general snow storm” that he feared would delay her train occurred on 13 April. Clemens was not in Hartford on the first Sunday after that storm (18 April), so the next Sunday, 25 April, seems the most likely date for this letter. The date is consistent with what Clemens wrote in the last paragraph about Olivia, who contracted diphtheria sometime between 29 March and 4 April, but was now “well again,” echoing his report to Fairbanks on 23 April that she was “in mighty good health” (“Winter’s Supplement,” New York Times, 14 Apr 75, 7).
Neither Annie’s letter, evidently announcing her engagement to Charles Webster, nor Clemens’s nearly simultaneous letter has been found.
Clemens had enlisted the support of Postmaster General Marshall Jewell, a Hartford friend and the former governor of Connecticut, in the effort to secure a naval academy appointment for Samuel Moffett. The nominating procedure did not explicitly provide for “special appointments” (see 23 Aug 74 to PAM, n. 2click to open link). Samuel’s father, William A. Moffett, a merchant, had died in 1865; he is not known to have performed any military service ( L1 , 2, 382).
Orion had offered legal advice to Clemens in 1872 during his dispute with Elisha Bliss about his royalty on Roughing It (see 8 Apr 75 to Webb, n. 3click to open link, and L5 , 88–89 n. 6). Clemens did not follow this advice, but after Bliss’s death in 1880, he examined the “balance-sheet” and satisfied himself that Orion had been correct, and decided to compensate him (24 Oct 80 to OC, CU-MARK, in MTLP , 125–26). It is possible, however, that Clemens had in mind another, unidentified, legal question. The letter from Jane Clemens requesting encouragement for Orion is not known to survive.
For Clemens’s 1865 exhortation to Orion to try the ministry, and for Orion’s religious caprices, see L1 , 322–24; Inds , 312; and N&J2 , 209 n. 95.
In 1906 Clemens recalled that “about 1849 or 1850” Orion
bought a weekly newspaper called the Hannibal Journal, together with its plant and its good-will, for the sum of five hundred dollars cash. He borrowed the cash at ten per cent. interest, which was an illegal rate, from an old farmer named Johnson who lived five miles out of town. Then he reduced the subscription price of the paper from two dollars to one dollar. He reduced the rates for advertising in about the same proportion, and thus he created one absolute and unassailable certainty—to wit: that the business would never pay him a single cent of profit. He took me out of the Courier office and engaged my services in his own at three dollars and a half a week, which was an extravagant wage, but Orion was always generous, always liberal with everybody except himself. It cost him nothing in my case, for he never was able to pay me a single penny as long as I was with him. By the end of the first year he found he must make some economies. The office rent was cheap, but it was not cheap enough. He could not afford to pay rent of any kind, so he moved the whole plant into the house we lived in, and it cramped the dwelling-place cruelly. He kept that paper alive during four years, but I have at this time no idea how he accomplished it. Toward the end of each year he had to turn out and scrape and scratch for the fifty dollars of interest due Mr. Johnson, and that fifty dollars was about the only cash he ever received or paid out, I suppose, while he was proprietor of that newspaper, except for ink and printing-paper. The paper was a dead failure. It had to be that from the start. (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:285–86)
For more of Orion’s vicissitudes as the Journal’s proprietor and correction of Clemens’s factual errors here, see Wecter 1952, 239–44, 256–64.
Orion had turned down a pension in the spring of 1874, but soon, and until his death in 1897, was dependent on regular checks from Clemens, for a time promptly paying interest on these “loans” (23 Apr 74 to OC, n. 1click to open link; 26 July 75 to OC, n. 2click to open link; Inds , 312; N&J3 , 331 n. 90, 597 n. 84).
See 27 Mar 75 to OC.click to open link Jane was as opposed as Clemens himself to the purchase of the Stotts farm, which Orion and Mollie were presently renting. On 12 May she wrote Mollie (CU-MARK):
We have just received a letter from Orion after Mela and Annie mailed theirs to you. Orion said he made your father an offer to buy the farm you are on, your father declined to accept his offer, but he left you empowered to sign the papers if your father should change his mind. Now Mary that looks very strange, if you and Orion are dissatisfied to live there and the place is unhealthy then why will you try to ruin yourselves in debt and have to stay. Mary any way Mela and me can’t fix the matter, we think it would be very wrong for Orion to buy the farm and have a debt hanging over him, even then you don’t get the house you are in. If Orion should get a situation in the Gate City and you have the farm rented the chickens will help to pay expenses until you are independent & buy a pony to go to town & hire help out there. But I repeat don’t buy, don’t get in debt, don’t you sign any papers. My head is feeling Very bad I can’t write much I wish you were in town in society & Orion in the G City and making a easy living
On Jane’s letter, Mollie wrote: “Ma seems to think a night situation in the Gate City office would be easier than out here. It is a great mistake.” Orion, however, seemed ready to leave the farm. By 11 May he was on a trip through Missouri and Kentucky to Jamestown, Tennessee. While traveling he visited relatives and inquired about openings on a number of newspapers and also about work as a railroad attorney. In Jamestown, he made still another fruitless effort to exploit the Clemens family’s troublesome Tennessee land. He returned to the Keokuk farm around 11 June, determined, he hoped with Clemens’s help, “to endeavor to push myself into the practice of law in Keokuk” (OC to SLC, 9 June 75, CU-MARK). Sometime in 1876, evidently, he and Mollie abandoned the farm and moved to Keokuk proper, where Clemens supported them while Orion attempted, with little success, to practice law (OC to MEC, 11 May 75, 14–15 May 75, 20 May 75, 23 May 75, 5 June 75 (2 letters), 9 June 75, and OC to SLC, 21 Jan 76, all in CU-MARK).
In the mid 1880s Clemens gave expression to his affection for William Stotts by helping to pay his medical bills ( N&J3 , 254 n. 88).
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L6 , 459–463; MTB , 1:506–7, excerpt; MTL , 1:245, with omissions.
see Mark Twain Papers in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.