Lighting Out for the Territory: Samuel Clemens...Mark Twain

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Biographies & Memoirs
Author:	Roy Morris, Jr.

“If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will *have* to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them - if the people you go among suffer by the operation.”
― Mark Twain, "Roughing It" (1872)

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Picture a twenty-six year old Mississippi riverboat pilot in 1861 who has just lost his livelihood with the coming of the American Civil War. First he is grabbed off the streets of his home town, Hannibal, Missouri, by a squad of Union troops. He and another pilot are dragooned down river to St. Louis to be interviewed by a major in the regular army about operating a steam boat up the Missouri. Luckily a few beautiful ladies come to visit the major and the young men, one known as Samuel L. Clemens, makes a hasty escape out the back way of the office and hides out with relatives in town unit he can get back home.

Next he joins up with a band of self-appointed Confederate guerrillas. After two or three weeks fighting a nasty horse and mosquito bites and foul weather young Sam and his "Marion's Rangers" decide this business of war is a damn sight over-rated.

Luckily, his older brother, Orion Clemens, has managed to use his links with the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party in Missouri to secure a position from the Lincoln Administration as Secretary to the Territorial Governor of Nevada (or Was-hoe, as some called it.) Orion, a bit of a dim bulb in political affairs, needs an sharp assistant. Would his savvy ex-riverboat pilot be in need a job "out in the territory" where the Civil War is no more than a distraction? Yes, Sam figures, there is a need there and so he obliges.

Mark Twain recounted his adventures in a book called "Roughing It" in 1872. The book was a best-seller at the time--the second best seller in a row for the newly married author, couple years after his sharp and satirical Americans-in-Europe travel book, "The Innocents Abroad, Volumes I and II".


Before he became what many critics later called "the first authentic American writer", Twain had a colorful career as a government secretary, silver prospector in boom-town in Nevada and California's Sierra Nevada. He also was a speculator in mines and lost a potential fortune from bad company and ill luck. Finally he took up journalism--something he had done a bit of already as a printer with his brother's newspaper in Hannibal and also in contribution to papers in New Orleans while a river boat pilot.
After his travels in and across half the Pacific, he became a full-time writer and lecturer--making a lot of enemies with his acid tongue and satirical pen of the anti-Chinese police forces and the political humbugs, roughneck miners and swindlers he dealt with. He was lucky frankly that he didn't gert shot in those days, as many a desperado who disliked nosy journalist might have put a hole through him. But Twain also made a lot of friends, including for a time another excellent Western writer, Bret Harte, who gave him a job on a magazine in San Francisco for twelve dollars a week at a time when Twain was at his lowest ebb, down to his last dime and considering suicide after a big silver deal he was counting on fell through.

Later, Twain had to beat it out of San Francisco, partly for writing a story about how the police mistreated Chinese crime victims and partly for being friends with a fellow named Bill Gaines who had a habit of skipping out of town after bail hearings. He later sailed off to the Hawaiian Islands and the lecture he gave to San Franciscans and other cities made him as more famous as a humorist for a time then a writer.

It was a story he leard from a bartender about a certain "Jumping Frog" in a mining town called "Jackass Hill" that later became the inspiration for his first famous story, 1865's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County".

This makes for a great read for those interested in Mark Twain's early career. Roy Morris--who had already written several books about the Civil War period from a military and cultural perspective--puts in all the best parts of Twain's travel book as well as clearing up the record of some of "the stretches" (exaggerations) Twain told his readers at the time. The book gives us both the real follies and fortunes of Young Sam and also his budding and ultimately successful career out West, where he emerged by 1867 as 'Mark Twain", the most famous young author on "the Pacific Slope" in America.

Morris book follows the Clemens' stagecoach adventures along the Oregon Trail to a side route to Nevada, and later his travels and writings on San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands. Twain was a natural traveller and "Roughing It" is a fine book. This book by Morris deepened even further my appreciation of the great author. Morris captures and picks out the best passages of Twain's narratives of his young life and adds dimension to his ability to wander and record the people and customs of a place--"with a few stretchers" by The Great Man for entertainment value.

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“It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.”
― Mark Twain, on the first California Gold Rush a decade earlier than he arrived, "Roughing It"

Hate and Propaganda in Lightning: D.W. Griffith and "The Birth of a Nation" (1915)

 

One of the earliest American feature films (those with a story running in more than 6 reels of film, or about an hour in length) was David Wark Griffith's "The Birth of A Nation".  This film, three times the length of any other major American film of its time, was  a great technical and narrative achievement. It also sparked a firestorm, and did more than any other to show how the power of the new medium of film could be used to win more people over to a revisionist and one-sided view of history. 

Griffith was a Kentuckian, born in 1875, and from his family was taught the "Lost Cause" view of the Civil War, that the cause of the Confederacy had little to do with slavery and more a matter of pure honor.      He also learned that  the Reconstruction Era (1865-77) had been a disaster for the South, instead of a lost opportunity to lead blacks and white Americans into the beginning of an integrated society.

 

Instead of focusing on the failures of the Federal Government in not fully supporting educational and economic opportunities for free men and women, Griffith saw the period as one that led to subservience by blacks over whites in a way that was a grotesque distortion of the real suffering and continued oppression of "Aryans",  engendered by groups like the Klu Klux Klan. These terrorists were  the heroes of the second half of his film.    

This remarkable film was done by Charlotte Burger of Tufts University, New York. It is one of the best mini-documentaries I've found on the Internet lately. 

Reflections on The Civil War and "Dixie of the Pacific Northwest"

The American Civil War lasted four years, took an estimated 620,000 lived on both sides and crippled and maimed hundreds of thousands more. Although several southern states has already seceded by the time President Abraham Lincoln was sworn in on March 4, 1861, open hostilities did not commence until April 12 of that year.  The Federal brigade at Fort Sumter (in Charleston, South Carolina ) was bombed by rebel forces that morning as soon as there was light enough to see the place they were firing at.   The fort's island redoubts and walls were smashed to rubble by cannons.

(above, a Civil War Union Veterans Parade in Ashland, Oregon, approximately in the 1890's.)

 After thirty hours the Federal commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered.       

It began as a war devised in my opinion by a few southern politicians, the landed interests they represented, and the northern politicans and cohorts who either appeased or profited from slavery,  to leave the Union---and maintain the "peculiar institution" of slavery in the bargain. It only ended when it had been made clear by Mr. Lincoln that slavery could no longer exist as a protected economic vehicle inside the United States.

 Ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, ending slavery and giving citizenship rights to all citizens born in America, was the price the former rebel states paid after the war when they rejoined the Union.    

The price for the bondage of four million African souls and all those who came in chains to America prior to 1861, was borne by both sides in the conflict, North and South, white soldier and (in the Union forces) black soldiers as well.

As Abraham Lincoln put it in his great speech in his Second Inaugural Address four years after the first...

"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

 

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged..."

 

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

 

Lincoln himself was one of the last to pay with his life in that war for this cause.

 

That was not the end of the story of course and the conflict that is so long ago still instills bitterness and revisionism in some quarters. The great myth of "The Lost Cause" began shortly afterwards to console those who had loyalties to the Dixie States that thier fight was not about oppression but somehow about tariffs or states rights or whatever--anything but the prime motive, profitting from the labor of the uncompensated and unfree.

True, as I'm sure a friendd has told me quite a few times on this matter,  many young southern men who fought did not own slaves and many union men who fought for the Grand Old Republic hated blacks.  But there was a deeper truth to the conflict, sensed by Lincoln before the war started when he said: "a nation cannot exist half slave and half free, it must be either one or the other." 

The argument will go n in some quarters as long as the country lasts.  One thing is sure: many hundreds of thousands on both sides paid dearly in those four years.   And to be ignorant of this conflict is to be ignorant of many of the political  problems America faces even today, especially the attitudes toward government power.  

Some states and their citizens were luckier than those in others. In the far Northwest, the state of Oregon had only been admitted to the Union in 1859. Its state constitution forbade slavery but also made it a criminal offense for black men and women to emigrate to the new state. This is more measure of the hatred and bigotry that some legislators of  "free soil"   states, including Lincoln's home state of Illinois, had for those who were liberated from un-remitted toil and status as little more  than chattel property.        

The article below is from "The Ashland (Oregon) Daily Tidings", published on April 8 of this year and refers to a talk given by local historian Jeff  Lalande about the effect the war had on a distant Pacific-shored state.   

No battle of the Civil War was fought in Southern Oregon, but feelings on both sides ran high. Backers of the secessionist South, who concentrated in the Jacksonville-Gold Hill area, nearly came to blows many times with abolitionist Union immigrants, clustered in Ashland, Talent and Phoenix, historians say.

 Ashland tended to be the settling place of "kindred spirits" from the Oregon Trail who knew a lot of the same people back home in the Midwest, says LaLande, ticking off the family names of Beeson, Helman and Applegate, "the movers and shakers" of Ashland.

Museum director Victoria Law says immigrants from the South were engaged prosperously in gold mining here, while immigrants from the upper Midwest settled into the farming life.

"The war was far away," says Law, "but the feelings were intense and often pitted neighbor against neighbor and community against community. A lot of immigrants came from the South, including a lot of the gold miners in Jacksonville — and they were pro-slavery and pro-secessionist."

One "very ardent secessionist" was William T'Vault of Gold Hill, the first newspaper editor in Oregon and the first speaker of the Oregon House, she says.

"Northern Oregon people called Southern Oregon 'Little Dixie,' " says Law, adding that there was a riot in Roseburg in which secessionists killed nine Union sympathizers.

"There was a lot of speech-making here and threats to tear down each other's flags."

The political parties in 1861, says Law, "were the reverse of now, with the Republicans being the progressive party."

The pro-slavery South was Democratic and the abolitionist Union, home of Abraham Lincoln, was Republican.

Most of the men in Ashland were involved in the war in some way, with many joining the Ashland Mountain Rangers, "the first militia here, formed to protect Southern Oregon from secessionists," says Law.

The Union built Camp Baker in Phoenix so the militia could drill and be prepared for battle, says Law, who has located 59 Civil War burials in Jackson County — only three of them veterans of the Confederacy.

Camp Baker, says LaLande, was a small post, not a fort, and served as a military presence of volunteer cavalry and infantry after the regular army went off to war.

They protected settlers from "depredations" of the Klamath Indians, who began coming over the Cascades after original American Indians here were shipped off to the Siletz and Grande Ronde reservations on the Oregon Coast, LaLande says. A bronze plaque marks the site of the camp today.

"There was fear some locals might prove disloyal (to the Union)," he says.

John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.

A song from the period, performed by the popular and controversial 1950's and 60s folk group The Weavers.

"Gettysburg" : Two Views of Humanity in the Heat of Battle

Tomorrow, July 1st, began a battle which decided the fate of American history. On that day in 1863, 74,000 Confederates forces under the command of General Robert E. Lee, General James Longstreet, et al, advanced from the northeast into a small town in southern Pennsylvania, Gettysburg. If successful, Lee's battled hardened and largely successful corps of men could have threatened major northern cities and likely ended the Civil War in a forced truce that would have left slavery intact in the United States and divided the Republic-- perhaps forever.

The Union, led by a newly-appointed Commander, General Meade, pushed quickly up the Baltimore Pike road from the southwest to meet the invader with slightly larger forces (90,000). Three days later, after 50,000 men had been killed or badly wounded in a horrific series of skirmishes and mass charges, the biggest battle in the Western Hemisphere ended with a narrow Union victory and a renewed hope for an end to slavery and the joining of Americans as a single nation on a path of progress in human equality.

Here's a portion of the 1993 film, with no shots fired or bombs exploding. It is a scene taken from Michael Shaara's award winning novel, "The Killer Angels," and serves as a reflection of what vast differences there were--perhaps always are--in how experience shapes how we perceive our fellow beings.