Becoming Mark Twain

A few months ago, I published the essay below in the New York Times. I’m reprinting it here with hypertext links to provide some illustrations and context. The Times will publish another of my essays about authors in the Civil War next month.

By early February 1863, Samuel Langhorne Clemens must have felt glad that he was more than 18 months removed from any direct participation in the Civil War. No longer risking his life in a guerrilla war in northern Missouri, he was a newspaper editor in the Nevada Territory, causing some local scandals with his acerbic political commentary and tall tales. Although he occasionally wrote about the war raging back East, Clemens mainly focused his columns on mocking the territorial legislature or relating humorous anecdotes about the citizens of Nevada. Surely, though, he must have sometimes thought about his own war experiences in the summer of 1861.

Commercial traffic on the Mississippi River had ceased soon after war broke out, and Clemens, then 25 years old and a steamboat pilot for two years, decided in early June 1861 to join with some friends in enlisting in the Marion Rangers, a unit of the Missouri State Guard from the Hannibal area. While his father had once owned a slave, and while he had spent many boyhood summer days surrounded by slaves on his uncle’s farm, Clemens seemed to enlist more as a lark than for any political or ideological reasons. Indeed, in the months prior to joining the Rangers, Clemens had expressed both pro-Union and anti-Union views as the states seceded and war approached. His rather flippant attitude toward the war would change, however, as the realities of army life in the field set in.

Clemens, according to a fellow recruit, showed up for the Marion Rangers riding a mule and carrying a squirrel rifle and an umbrella. Disregarding his complete lack of military experience, his comrades elected him lieutenant, which made him second in command of the dozen or so men. According to Clemens’s 1885 short memoir of his war experiences, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” the Rangers would occasionally attempt a military drill, but they soon collapsed into horseplay and then forget what little they had learned. Moreover, Clemens discovered that his friends would refuse any orders that he gave, arguing that he was certainly not their superior.

Clemens also wrote in his memoir that it rained almost constantly, and that he and the men lacked any uniforms or arms and relied on local farmers for food and shelter. Every few nights, he noted, a rumor of approaching Union troops would send the Rangers, at top speed, in the direction opposite of the supposed Yankees. Those enemies never materialized, and the Rangers were soon filthy and hungry. Clemens also related one particularly tragic night-time incident when the terrified Rangers shot and killed an approaching figure on a horse they assumed to be a Union advance scout, but who turned out to be a passing stranger. (The incident is probably fictional, as no record, aside from Clemens’s own memoir, exists.)

After two weeks in the field, the Rangers heard a convincing rumor that a Union colonel, leading an entire regiment determined to destroy any Confederate irregulars in northeast Missouri, was heading toward Marion County. The Rangers quickly disbanded, with most of the men slipping back into civilian life but a few joining the regular Confederate Army. Clemens returned to relatives in St. Louis and tried to keep out of sight, since Union General John C. Frémont governed the city under martial law that threatened insurrectionists with hanging.

On July 18, 1861, about a month after the Rangers had disbanded, Clemens started west with his older brother, Orion Clemens, who had just been appointed the territorial secretary of Nevada. Clemens intended to make his fortune by mining silver, but he soon discovered that journalism was not only easier physically but also paid more regularly. By late 1862, he was a full-time newspaperman in Virginia City, and on Feb. 3, 1863, he decided to sign an article with the name “Mark Twain,” an old river expression that meant “two fathoms.” Within two years, his new name would be famous across the country, and from then on, Samuel Clemens, the erstwhile Confederate, would be known as Mark Twain.

Coincidentally, some years later, Twain discovered that the commanding officer of that regiment ordered to destroy Confederate irregulars was none other than Col. Ulysses S. Grant, an ex-Army officer who had recently resumed his military career after being cashiered for drunkenness in 1854. Grant had spent the years immediately before the war in the St. Louis area, where he and his wife had reportedly socialized with William and Pamela Moffett, Twain’s brother-in-law and sister. Many years after the war, and following his presidency, Grant would begin a friendship with Twain, who would later offer his own company to publish the ex-president’s memoirs. The collaboration was a success, and “The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant” became a bestseller in late 1885, although Grant himself died in July 1885 shortly, after completing his final draft.

In “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” Twain summed up his war-time experiences by writing, “And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just be just that — the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled … I could have become a soldier myself if I had waited. I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.”

Sources: Joe B. Fulton, “The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature”; Jim McWilliams, “Mark Twain in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch”; Ron Powers, “Mark Twain: A Life”; R. Kent Rasmussen, “Mark Twain A-Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings”; Mark Twain, “Great Short Works of Mark Twain.”