September 1877 • (Boston Advertiser, 29 September 1877, UCCL 13337)
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It is a little confusing to be invited by one man to take dinner in another man’s house; but no matter, I accept, &Ⓐemendation leave the consequences to God.1explanatory note
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This letter fragment survives only as quoted in the Boston Advertiser, in its announcement on 29 September that the Putnam Phalanx—a quasi-military unit organized in Hartford in 1858 as a ceremonial honor guard and incorporated in March 1877 as a social club—had invited the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston to visit Hartford for a reception, parade, and ball on 1 October. The following day, the Artillery Company gave a banquet in Allyn Hall to the Putnam Phalanx, to which Clemens was invited; the announcement in the Advertiser included this brief excerpt from Clemens’s “letter accepting an invitation to be present” (Boston Advertiser: “The Visit of the Ancients and Honorables to Hartford,” 29 Sept 1877, 4; “The Ancients,” 2 Oct 1877, 1; “Ancients’ Field Day: Their Banquet to the Putnam Phalanx at Hartford,” 3 Oct 1877, 1). Several prominent citizens spoke at the banquet, including Clemens, who gave his first public account of his military experience in the Civil War, which he later wrote about at length in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed,” published in the December 1885 issue of the Century Magazine (SLC 1885c). He began as follows:
I did not assemble at the hotel parlors to-day to be received by a committee as a mere civilian guest; no, I assembled at the headquarters of the Putnam Phalanx and insisted upon my right to be escorted to this place as one of the military guests. For I, too, am a soldier! I am inured to war. I have a military history. I have been through a stirring campaign, and there is not even a mention of it in any history of the United States or of the southern confederacy—to such lengths can the envy and the malignity of the historian go! I will unbosom myself here, where I cannot but find sympathy; I will tell you about it, and appeal through you to justice. (“Our Military Guests. The Ancients and Honorables,” Hartford Courant, 3 Oct 1877, 2; also in Fatout 1976, 106)
For Clemens’s service in the Ralls County Rangers, fighting unofficially for the Confederacy, and a text of his semi-fictional account of it in “The Private History,” see MTCW.
“The Visit of the Ancients and Honorables to Hartford,” Boston Advertiser, 29 September 1877, 4.