12 March 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (London Standard, 26 Mar 74, UCCL 11880)
TO THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD.
Sir,—The women’s crusade against the rumsellersⒶemendation continues. It began in an Ohio village early in the new year, &Ⓐemendation has now extended itself eastwardly to the Atlantic seaboard, 600 miles, & westwardly (at a bound, without stopping by the way), to San Francisco, about 2500 miles.1explanatory note It has also scattered itself along down the Ohio & Mississippi rivers southwardly some ten or twelve hundred miles. Indeed, it promises to sweep, eventually, the whole United States, with the exception of the little cluster of commonwealths which we call New England. Puritan New England is sedate, reflective, conservative, & very hard to inflame.2explanatory note
The method of the crusaders is singular. They contemn the use of force in the breaking up of the whisky traffic. They only assemble before a drinking shop, or within it, & sing hymns & pray, hour after hour—& day after day, if necessary—until the publican’s business is broken up & he surrenders. This is not force, at least they do not consider it so. After the surrender the crusaders march back to head-quarters & proclaim the victory, & ascribe it to the powers above. They rejoice together awhile, & then go forth again in their strength & conquer another whisky shop with their prayers & hymns & their staying capacity (pardon the rudeness), & spread that victory upon the battle-flag of the powers above. In this generous way the crusaders have parted with the credit of not less than three thousand splendid triumphs, which some carping people say they gained their ownselves, without assistance from any quarter. If I am one of these, I am the humblest. If I seem to doubt that prayer is the agent that conquers these rumsellers, I do it honestly, & not in a flippant spirit. If the crusaders were to stay at home & pray for the rumseller & for his adoption of a better way of life, or if the crusaders even assembled together in a church & offered up such a prayer with a united voice, & it accomplished a victory, I would then feel that it was the praying that moved Heaven to do the miracle; for I believe that if the prayer is the agent that brings about the desired result, it cannot be necessary to pray the prayer in any particular place in order to get the ear, or move the grace, of the Deity. When the crusaders go & invest a whisky shop & fall to praying, one suspects that they are praying rather less to the Deity than at the rum-man. So I cannot help feeling (after carefully reading the details of the rum sieges) that as much as nine-tenths of the credit of each of the 3000 victories achieved thus far belongs of right to the crusaders themselves, & it grieves me to see them give it away with such spendthrift generosity.3explanatory note
I will not afflict you with statistics, but I desire to say just a word or two about the character of this crusade. The crusaders are young girls & women—not the inferior sort, but the very best in the village communities.4explanatory note The telegraph keeps the newspapers supplied with the progress of the war, & thus the praying infection spreads from town to town, day after day, week after week. When it attacks a community it seems to seize upon almost everybody in it at once. There is a meeting in a church, speeches are made, resolutions are passed, a purse for expenses is made up, a “praying band” is appointed; if it be a large town, half a dozen praying bands, each numbering as many as a hundred women, are appointed, & the working district of each band marked out. Then comes a grand assault in force, all along the line. Every stronghold of rum is invested; first one & then another champion ranges up before the proprietor, & offers up a special petition for him; he has to stand meekly there behind his bar, under the eyes of a great concourse of ladies who are better than he is & are aware of it, & hear all the secret iniquities of his business divulged to the angels above, accompanied by the sharp sting of wishes for his regeneration, which imply an amount of need for it which is in the last degree uncomfortable to him. If he holds out bravely, the crusaders hold out more bravely still—or at least more persistently; though I doubt if the grandeur of the performance would not be considerably heightened if one solitary crusader were to try praying at a hundred rumsellers in a body for a while, & see how it felt to have everybody against her instead of for her. If the man holds out the crusaders camp before his place & keep up the siege till they wear him out. In one case they besieged a rum shop two whole weeks. They built a shed before it & kept up the praying all night & all day long every day of the fortnight, & this in the bitterest winter weather too. They conquered.
You may ask if such an investment & such interference with a man’s business (in cases where he is “protected” by a licence) is lawful? By no means. But the whole community being with the crusaders, the authorities have usually been overawed Ⓐemendation & afraid to execute the laws, the authorities being, in too many cases, mere little politicians, & more given to looking to chances of re-election than fearlessly discharging their duty according to the terms of their official oaths.
Would you consider the conduct of these crusaders justifiable? I do—thoroughly justifiable. They find themselves voiceless in the making of laws & the election of officers to execute them. Born with brains, born in the country, educated, having large interests at stake, they find their tongues tied & their hands fettered, while every ignorant whisky‐drinking foreign-born savage in the land may hold office, help to make the laws, degrade the dignity of the former & break the latter at his own sweet will. They see their fathers, husbands, & brothers sit inanely at home & allow the scum of the country to assemble at the “primaries,” name the candidates for office from their own vile ranks, &, unrebuked, elect them. They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws & no beginning to the execution of them. And when the laws intended to protect their sons from destruction by intemperance lie torpid & without sign of life year after year, they recognise that here is a matter which interests them personally—a matter which comes straight home to them. And since they are allowed to lift no legal voice against the outrageous state of things they suffer under in this regard, I think it is no wonder that their patience has broken down at last, & they have contrived to persuade themselves that they are justifiable in breaking the law of trespass when the laws that should make the trespass needless are allowed by the voters to lie dead & inoperative.
I cannot help glorying in the pluck of these women, sad as it is to see them displaying themselves in these unwomanly ways; sad as it is to see them carrying their grace & their purity into places which should never know their presence; & sadder still as it is to see them trying to save a set of men who, it seems to me, there can be no reasonable object in saving. It does not become us to scoff at the crusaders, remembering what it is they have borne all these years, but it does become us to admire their heroism—a heroism that boldly faces jeers, curses, ribald language, obloquy of every kind & degree—in a word, every manner of thing that pure-hearted, pure-minded women such as these are naturally dread & shrink from, & remains steadfast through it all, undismayed, patient, hopeful, giving no quarter, asking none, determined to conquer, & succeeding.5explanatory note It is the same old superb spirit that animated that other devoted, magnificent, mistaken crusade of six hundred years ago. The sons of such women as these must surely be worth saving from the destroying power of rum.6explanatory note
The present crusade will doubtless do but little work against intemperance that will be really permanent, but it will do what is as much, or even more, to the purpose, I think. I think it will suggest to more than one man that if women could vote they would vote on the side of morality, even if they did vote & speak rather frantically & furiously; & it will also suggest that when the women once made up their minds that it was not good to leave the all-powerful “primaries” in the hands of loafers, thieves, & pernicious little politicians, they would not sit indolently at home as their husbands & brothers do now, but would hoist their praying banners, take the field in force, pray the assembled political scum back to the holes & slums where they belong, & set up some candidates fit for decent human beings to vote for.7explanatory note
I dearly want the women to be raised to the political altitude of the negro, the imported savage, & the pardoned thief, & allowed to vote. It is our last chance, I think. The women will be voting before long, & then if a B. F. Butler can still continue to lord it in Congress;8explanatory note if the highest offices in the land can still continue to be occupied by perjurers & robbers; if another Congress (like the forty-second) consisting of 15 honest men & 296 of the other kind can once more be created, it will at last be time, I fear, to give over trying to save the country by human means, & appeal to Providence.9explanatory note Both the great parties have failed. I wish we might have a woman’s party now, & see how that would work. I feel persuaded that in extending the suffrage to women this country could lose absolutely nothing & might gain a great deal.10explanatory note For thirty centuries history has been iterating & reiterating that in a moral fight woman is simply dauntless, & we all know, even with our eyes shut upon Congress & our voters, that from the day that Adam ate of the apple & told on Eve down to the present day, man, in a moral fight, has pretty uniformly shown himself to be an arrant coward.
I will mention casually that while I cannot bring myself to find fault with the women whom we call the crusaders, since I feel that they, being politically fettered, have the natural right of the oppressed to rebel, I have a very different opinion about the clergymen who have in a multitude of instances attached themselves to the movement, & by voice & act have countenanced & upheld the women in unlawfully trespassing upon whisky mills & interrupting the rum-sellers’ business. It seems to me that it would better become clergymen to teach their flocks to respect the laws of the land, & urge them to refrain from breaking them. But it is not a new thing for a thoroughly good & well-meaning preacher’s soft heart to run away with his soft head.
Hartford, U.S., March 12.
On 22 December 1873, Diocletian (Dio) Lewis (1823–86), a physical education teacher, homeopathic physician, and temperance and women’s rights advocate—who, like Clemens, had joined the Boston Lyceum Bureau’s roster in 1869—delivered his scheduled lecture, “Our Girls,” in Hillsboro, Ohio. Following his customary practice, he then offered Hillsboro an additional lecture, “The Duty of Christian Women in the Cause of Temperance” (also called “The Power of Woman’s Prayer in Grog-shops”), which he delivered the next day. In it he exhorted the women of the community to take direct action to stop the sale of liquor, using the nonviolent confrontational tactics Clemens goes on to describe in this letter. Lewis had given this lecture nearly three hundred times since 1854, but with little lasting effect. The women of Hillsboro responded with alacrity, however, immediately organizing a campaign of prayer meetings, marches, and saloon occupations that within a few weeks reduced the local liquor trade from thirteen establishments to four. According to one recent account,
The idea of the temperance Crusade spread, and within three months of the Hillsboro march, women had driven the liquor business out of 250 villages and cities. In Ohio 130 towns had experienced Crusades; Michigan had 36, Indiana 34, Pennsylvania 26, and New Jersey 17. By the time the marches ended, at least 912 communities in 31 states and territories had experienced crusades. (Bordin, 21–22)
Another study estimated the number of women involved to be “between approximately 57,000 and 143,000,” and called their effort “one of the major social movements of the nineteenth century” (Blocker, 24). Throughout it, Lewis continued to spread his temperance message. On 11 and 12 March 1874, for instance, he addressed large audiences at churches in New York City. A direct result of his efforts and the women’s crusade of 1873–74 was the formation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which held its first national convention in Cleveland on 18 November 1874. On 4 June 1885 the Union Signal, the WCTU newspaper, reprinted Clemens’s letter to the London Standard (Fredonia Censor: “How Dio Lewis Began,” 11 Mar 74, 1; Lyceum: 1869, 2, 3; 1870, 3; 1872, 3; 1873, 5; Blocker, 7–26; Bordin, 15–26, 30–31, 36, 90; New York Tribune: “Views of Dio Lewis,” 12 Mar 74, 8; “Brooklyn Fired with Enthusiasm,” 13 Mar 74, 1).
The 1873–74 temperance movement had relatively little impact in the New England states. Only eight crusades each were reported in Connecticut and Maine, with eleven in Massachusetts, two in Vermont, one in Rhode Island, and none in New Hampshire (Blocker, 25).
Clemens’s exact sources for “the details of the rum sieges” and the “3000 victories achieved thus far” have not been identified. Clearly he was following the regular newspaper reports of the temperance campaign, which were primarily responsible for
its growth from a local incident to a national movement. . . . Local newspapers in the first Crusade towns spread word of the movement through their exchanges and out-of-town subscribers. Subscribers to the Fredonia Censor, for example, seem to have been the first persons . . . to learn of the new movement. (Blocker, 12)
In fact, Fredonia, where the Moffett household had lived since 1870, was the first town galvanized by Dio Lewis, who lectured there on 14 December 1873, eight days before his appearance in Hillsboro. Jane Clemens, Annie Moffett, and Mollie Clemens were among the crusaders who took to the streets the following day (Pamela Moffett apparently had not yet returned from her travels in the Midwest), though with less result than in Hillsboro. Annie, and presumably her grandmother and her mother as well, joined the Fredonia temperance society, which on 22 December 1873 became the first local group to call itself the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. They evidently kept Clemens apprised of local temperance activities, for later in 1874, in response to an 11 April request from his mother and after an August visit to Fredonia, Clemens donated sixteen volumes (comprising fifteen titles), including his own works, to the Fredonia organization’s reading room. Bliss arranged for fourteen of these books to be sent to Pamela Moffett on 19 October (Blocker, 9–11; “Crusaders,” 1–2; Skandera-Trombley, 110–11 [misreporting Pamela Moffett among the temperance crusaders], 114–15; Fredonia Censor: “Women’s Temperance Union,” 25 Feb 74, 3; “The Reading Room,” 9 Dec 74, 3; WCTU 2001a–b; JLC to OLC and SLC, 11 Apr 74, CU-MARK; Gribben, 2:576; APC 1876; Shepard).
Many Crusaders were “from the upper ranks of society”:
Over 90 percent of Crusader households were native white Americans of two generations’ standing or more. . . . Undoubtedly this high social standing, coupled with a sense of righteous womanhood, permitted the Crusaders to feel a keen sense of the justice of their cause and their own moral superiority. They believed their work was in the best interests of society. Certainly this helps to explain their self-confidence and tactical militance. (Bordin, 31–32)
In some places Crusaders had to contend with crowds that “harassed them with ‘lecherous comments and indecent proposals,’ hurled various objects at them, and occasionally attacked them in force. . . . Unknown assailants attacked the homes of Crusaders and the homes, businesses, and persons of Crusade supporters.” A few husbands “forcibly removed their wives from praying bands on the street” (Blocker, 76).
Clemens later condemned the crusade against rum (see 23 July 75 to PAMclick to open link).
The “thrust and real importance” of the Crusade resulted from the fact that
these women were experiencing power. . . . Their work was that of an effective pressure group, and in many instances they succeeded in forcing a male-dominated society to do what they wanted, at least temporarily. . . . The women themselves, the participants in the Crusade, saw it as a watershed, an experience that had changed their concept of themselves. . . . The Crusade was a liberating force for a group of church-oriented women who could not have associated themselves directly with the equal rights or suffrage movements. Talented and ambitious women began to break through the social constraints imposed by widely held notions of women’s role in the first decades of the nineteenth century and began to build organizations that they themselves controlled. (Bordin, 32–33)
Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818–93), suspected of corruption during his controversial tenure as a Union general (1861–65), was equally suspect and controversial as a Republican representative from Massachusetts in the Fortieth through Forty-third congresses (1867–75). On 11 March the Hartford Courant had reprinted a New York Times editorial of the previous day protesting the “strong disposition at the national capital to award to that gentleman a remarkable degree of influence and prominence in matters for which nature and training have not conspicuously fitted him.” The Times observed that “the country at large . . . is a trifle sick of Mr. Butler,” who “is not a fit man to be a party leader,” inasmuch as he
violates its pledges, breeds faction and division in its ranks, maligns its trusted men, loads it with detestable measures, and subordinates all its interests to an insane ambition. . . . We take the liberty of suggesting that the party and the country have had about enough of him, and of the self-seeking, the arrogance, the want of principle, and the generally low standard of political life which he represents. (“Butlerism,” Hartford Courant, 11 Mar 74, 1, reprinting the New York Times of 10 Mar 74)
A total of 329 senators and representatives, including replacements, served in the notoriously corrupt Forty-second Congress (the Crédit Mobilier Congress), which adjourned on 3 March 1873. Fourteen of the “15 honest men” were the Liberal Republicans who opposed the corruption of the Grant administration: senators Lyman Trumbull (1813–96) from Illinois, Benjamin F. Rice (1828–1905) from Arkansas, Charles Sumner (1811–74) from Massachusetts, William Sprague (1830–1915) from Rhode Island, Reuben E. Fenton (1819–85) from New York, Carl Schurz (1829–1906) from Missouri, Thomas W. Tipton (1817–99) from Nebraska, Joseph R. West (1822–98) from Louisiana, and Morgan C. Hamilton (1809–93) from Texas; representatives Nathaniel P. Banks (1816–94) from Massachusetts, Austin Blair (1818–94) from Michigan, John F. Farnsworth (1820–97) from Illinois, Milo Goodrich (1814–81) from New York, and Joseph L. Morphis (1831–1913) from Mississippi. The fifteenth was Ozro J. Dodds (1840–82), Democratic representative from Ohio (Ross, 192–93; information courtesy of Louis J. Budd; Budd 1992, 1059).
This was Clemens’s most unequivocal endorsement to date of women’s suffrage. In mid-March 1867 he had addressed the issue in three articles in the St. Louis Missouri Democrat, satirizing opponents as well as proponents of female voting, but finally joining the opposition (SLC 1867e–g). In the last article, he conceded that
no one will say that it is not just and right that women should vote; no one will say that an educated American woman would not vote with fifty times the judgment and independence exercised by stupid, illiterate newcomers from foreign lands; I will even go so far myself as to say that in my experience only third-rate intelligence is sent to Legislatures to make laws.
Nevertheless, he judged that
the ignorant foreign women would vote with the ignorant foreign men—the bad women would vote with the bad men—the good women would vote with the good men. The same candidate who would be elected now would be elected then, the only difference being that there might be twice as many votes polled then as now.
And he concluded:
I never want to see women voting, and gabbling about politics, and electioneering. There is something revolting in the thought. It would shock me inexpressibly for an angel to come down from above and ask me to take a drink with him (though I should doubtless consent); but it would shock me still more to see one of our blessed earthly angels peddling election tickets among a mob of shabby scoundrels she never saw before. (SLC 1867 [MT00516])
Then, in a letter of 25 March 1867 to the San Francisco Alta California, he remarked that his Missouri Democrat articles had “raised a small female storm, but it occurred to me that it might get uncommon warm for one poor devil against all the crinoline in the camp, and so I antied up and passed out, as the Sabbath School children say” (SLC 1867 [MT00534]). Since 1867, and prior to the present letter to the London Standard, he had been merely tolerant of the suffrage movement, at best (see L4 , 402, 410, 418 n. 1, and L5 , 79–81).
“American Notes. By Mark Twain. The Temperance Insurrection,” London Standard, 26 Mar 74, 5–6. Copy-text is a photocopy of the original newspaper in the Library of Congress (DLC).
L6 , 66–73; “Foreign Mail News,” Boston Globe, 14 Apr 74, 2; “Women Crusaders and Women Suffragists: Mark Twain’s Opinions,” Hartford Courant, 17 Apr 74, 2; “Mark Twain. His Opinion of the Prayer Crusade, and His Views about Woman Suffrage,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 24 Apr 74, 1; “Mark Twain on the Woman’s Crusade,” Union Signal 11 (4 June 85): 5; “The Temperance Insurrection,” Budd 1992, 563–67.