To the Editor of The Tribune.
Sir: John H. Surratt’s manager evidently understands his business, or else Surratt is fortunate above the average of snubbed &Ⓐemendation struggling would-be lecturers—for every day the newspapers reveal to the people that the gentleman is being persecuted. I am of the lecturing guild, Sir, & am aware that the cheapest & the surest way to get an undesired or unknown person splendidly before the public & crowd his houses, is to get somebody to persecute him. There are other ways, but this is the surest. One of the most courted lady-lecturers of the day owes by far the largest half of her profitable notoriety to a dreadful platform failure, which procured for her such an avalanche of newspaper scorn & rebuke that she became known (& sympathized with) all over the landⒶemendation in a single day. Another of the most courted lady-lecturers of the day is soaring along on a lucrative notoriety nine-tenths of which is the result of industriously-supplied two-line personal items telling how she wore her hair at Long Branch.4explanatory note So you see how easy it is to excite the public interest in an individual, & fill that individual’s lecture-halls for him. Do you not perceive that Mr. Surratt, who cannot at present induce more than a hundred people to listen to him, is on the high road to a notoriety which in a very little while will cram the largest halls in America with people eager to see the new wonder & hear him? Indeed he is on that very high road.
Mr. Surratt’s manager, I fancy, is deliberately procuring this persecution, & the deep old fox knows that it is exactly the sort of advertising he needs. It is a hundred thousand times more effective than commonplace commendation in the dramatic column, which makes not the least impression upon the reader. When the telegraph recently spread it over the country that Mr. Surratt had an audience of only a hundred & fifty to hear him at Cooper Institute it was a most damaging thing. Six more such announcements, unaccompanied by any saving persecution, would have hurried the lecturer Surratt beyond the hope of resurrection; but at a lucky moment there was talk of his arrest (incited by his manager, no doubt), & next there was a story that Attorney-General Holt once offered to save Mrs. Surratt, & set her free, if the son would take her place, & the son refused, (more, acute managerial invention, no doubt),5explanatory note & next came the announcement that Surratt’s Baltimore lecture was interfered with by his arrest on a charge of non-payment of a trifling tobacco tax years ago (this official persecutor being a guileless catspaw of that manager, without the shadow of a doubt); & now at last comes the announcement that the Mayor of Washington has warned Surratt against driving the people of the capital to extremities by attempting to lecture there, & immediately the meek & law-abiding Surratt takes in his sign & closes his hall (the entire thing a crowning triumph of that manager’s inventive genius, without question)!6explanatory note
If it is desired to make John H. Surratt a prodigious success as a lecturer & give him an income of $25,000 a year, it is only requisite that mayors, revenue officers, & hall proprietors continue to stand in front & persecute the lecturer while the ingenious manager stands behind & pulls their strings—& it is further only necessary that the telegraph people get knowledge of the said persecution (a thing which the said manager will attend to). But if it is desired that Mr. Surratt drop entirely out of the public notice in three short weeks, it is only necessary to let him alone & cease to make public mention of him. His little candle would straightway begin to burn weaker & weaker, & the “cabbage head” would begin to develop more & more prominently on its top, & presently the poor thing would flicker out & pass away in a film of smoke, leaving nothing behind but an evanescent stench.Ⓐemendation Am I not right?
Mark Twain.
Buffalo, Dec. 29, 1870.
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).