“I heartily wish I could accept your very tempting invitation to Buffalo,” Reid replied on 3 January. “By the way every body speaks cordially of David Gray, and some time I hope to have the pleasure of meeting him” (DLC).

John Rose Greene Hassard planned to enter the priesthood, but instead became a journalist, biographer, and editor, spending the greatest part of his professional life at the New York Tribune, chiefly as music critic ( L2 , 175 n. 2).

John Milton Hay (1838–1905) spent most of the 1860s as, successively, assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, an army officer (colonel in 1865) on assignment to the White House, secretary to the American legation in Paris, the American chargé d’affaires at Vienna, and secretary to the American legation in Madrid. Since the fall of 1870 he had been employed as an editorial writer and night editor for the Tribune. Apparently Clemens had last talked with him, at the paper’s offices, on 11 or 12 December (see pp. 269–70), but it is not known exactly when they first met. In an Autobiographical Dictation of 31 January 1904, Clemens recalled a “Sunday morning, twenty-five years ago,” when “Hay and I had been chatting and laughing and carrying-on almost like our earlier selves of ’67” (CU-MARK; in MTA , 1:232–38, as “A Memory of John Hay”). And after Hay’s death on 1 July 1905, Clemens issued a statement in which he remarked that “My friendship with Mr. Hay & my admiration of him endured 38 years without impairment” ( MTB , 3:1249). An Autobiographical Dictation of 16 February 1906 lends indirect support to 1867 as the year of their meeting. There Clemens recalled that David Gray, of the Buffalo Courier, whom he had met in Buffalo in August or September 1869, became an “intimate friend, through his intimacy and mine with John Hay” (CU-MARK, in MTA , 2:118). In an Autobiographical Dictation of 27 August 1907, however, Clemens asserted that Hay and Whitelaw Reid “were salaried members of the New York Tribune staff when I first knew them” (CU-MARK). That was certainly true of Reid, who joined the paper in 1868, and was acquainted with Clemens by June 1869. But while Clemens and Hay might have met only after Hay became Reid’s Tribune subordinate in the fall of 1870, no convincing date between then and 11 December has been identified. Nor is there evidence of a meeting during one other possible period, October 1868–July 1869, while Hay was in the United States between European postings. In the absence of definitive information, then, 1–2 February 1867 and 23 February–3 March 1867, when Clemens and Hay were in New York City, and 4–8 June 1867, when Clemens and perhaps Hay were there, seem the most likely periods for their initial meeting (“Personal,” New York Tribune, 2 Feb 67, 2; Thayer, 1:245, 272–73, 278–80, 314–16, 335–36; Clara Louise Hay, 375; L2 , 1–2, 10–18, 49–62; L3 , 265 n. 1).

Both of Clemens’s allusions could be to Olive Logan, who was promoted relentlessly by means of “personal items” (8 Jan 70 to OLL [1st], n. 3click to open link) despite the embarrassing failure of her “Stage Struck” lecture in Boston’s Music Hall on 5 November 1868, when those of her audience “near the doors soon struck for home.” That fiasco was still drawing comment a year later (“Brief Jottings,” Boston Evening Transcript, 5 Nov 68, 2, 6 Nov 68, 2; “Miss Olive Logan. . .. ,” Washington Morning Chronicle, 25 Oct 69, 2). It is likely, however, that the second lecturer was Kate Field, who also was regularly followed in the press and whose current lecture, on Charles Dickens, was quite popular, although Clemens was unenthusiastic about it (30 Jan 71 to Redpath, n. 3click to open link). Long Branch, New Jersey, was a popular summer resort on the Atlantic (Hall, 130).

Joseph Holt (1807–94), actually judge-advocate general of the army, prosecuted the Lincoln assassins before a military commission. He was accused of suppressing the commission’s recommendation of clemency for Mary Surratt (see note 6). The “story” Clemens retells here apparently was apocryphal.

John H. Surratt (1844–1916) was tried in 1867 for participating in John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln, but was released after the jury was unable to reach a verdict. His mother, Mary (b. 1817), keeper of the boardinghouse where Booth planned the crime, was found guilty of the same charge and hanged in 1865, despite a lack of evidence, while Surratt himself was hiding in Canada. In December 1870 Surratt, managed by a Mr. Corbyn (or Crobyn), otherwise unidentified, had a brief season on the eastern lyceum circuit. Appearing before audiences of 100–300, he discussed his activities as a Confederate spy, defiantly admitted his part in Booth’s initial plan to abduct Lincoln but professed ignorance of any assassination scheme, and denied abandoning his mother, alleging that he had been assured she could not be convicted. Surratt lectured without incident in Rockville, Maryland, on 6 December, and at New York’s Cooper Institute, on 9 December, but was arrested after a 29 December lecture in Baltimore—for not having paid his license as a tobacco dealer there two years earlier. Friends claimed that the arrest was made to prevent his fourth appearance, scheduled for Washington, D.C., on 30 December. Washington Mayor Matthew G. Emery asked Surratt, free on bail, to cancel that lecture, for fear it might prompt a public disturbance. Surratt’s compliance was not entirely voluntary. He was forced to take in his sign, or at least alter it, when, in succession, several Washington halls were refused to him. Last-minute arrangements were made for him to speak in a saloon, and a small audience gathered there, but he failed to show up. Thus ended his platform career (Chamlee, 531–38; New York Tribune: “John H. Surratt on the Platform,” 8 Dec 70, 5; “Home News,” 10 Dec 70, 5; “Arrest of John H. Surratt,” 30 Dec 70, 1; “Washington,” 31 Dec 70, 3; “Surratt Once More,” 2 Jan 71, 5; New York Times: “John H. Surratt at the Cooper Institute,” 10 Dec 70, 5; “Washington,” 31 Dec 70, 1; Buffalo Express: “Washington,” 26 Dec 70, 1).