Autobiography of Mark Twain (16 page)

At first my father owned slaves, but by and by he sold them, and hired others by the year from the farmers. For a girl of fifteen he paid twelve dollars a year and gave her two linsey-wolsey frocks and a pair of “stogy” shoes—cost, a modification of nothing; for a negro woman of twenty-five, as general house servant, he paid twenty-five dollars a year and gave her shoes and the aforementioned linsey-wolsey frocks; for a strong negro woman of forty, as cook, washer, etc., he paid forty dollars a year and the customary two suits of clothes; and for an able bodied man he paid from seventy-five to a hundred dollars a year and gave him two suits of jeans and two pairs of “stogy” shoes—an outfit that cost about three dollars. But times have changed. We pay our German nursemaid $155 a year; Irish housemaid, $150; Irish laundress, $150; negro woman, as cook, $240; young negro man, to wait on door and table, $360; Irish coachman, $600 a year, with gas, hot and cold water, and dwelling consisting of parlor, kitchen and two bed-rooms, connected with the stable, free.

The following six typed dictations, known ever since Paine published them (out of order) in 1924 as “The Grant Dictations”
(MTA
, 1:13–70), are now in the Mark Twain Papers. They were all created in May and June 1885; Clemens dictated to his friend and colleague James Redpath, who transcribed his shorthand notes on an all-capitals typewriter (for Redpath see “Lecture-Times,” note at 148.8). Redpath then reviewed the typescripts, adding punctuation but overlooking many errors, and passed them on to Clemens, who lightly revised and corrected them. They make up the earliest known substantial body of texts that Clemens said were intended for his autobiography. The subjects he covered were all of recent date, and all touch on one aspect or another of his relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, who was by then dying of throat cancer. The six dictations are here printed for the first time in the order they were created.

• “The Chicago G.A.R. Festival” is about Clemens’s experience, including his toast to “The Babies,” when Grant was honored at the convention of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1879. This is the only one of the six Grant dictations that Neider chose to reprint, and he followed Paine’s text in all of its details
(AMT
, 241–45).

• “A Call with W.D. Howells on General Grant” treats three seemingly unrelated topics: Grant’s help for the father of William Dean Howells, Grant’s appreciation of George Horatio Derby (John Phoenix), and Clemens’s own efforts to persuade Grant to write his memoirs. The title adopted here was supplied by Paine.

• “Grant and the Chinese” describes Grant’s efforts to preserve a program for educating Chinese students in the United States.

• “Gerhardt” (previously unpublished) is about the frustration that Clemens’s protégé, the sculptor Karl Gerhardt, experienced in competing to make a statue of Nathan Hale. Gerhardt also made a commercially successful bust of Grant, discussed in the fifth dictation, “About General Grant’s Memoirs.”

• “About General Grant’s Memoirs,” a long and detailed account of how Clemens secured the contract for Grant’s
Personal Memoirs
, was written to some extent in response to newspaper comments insinuating that he had done so unethically. Paine published the first section and part of the third as continuous text, and made the middle section into a separate dictation, which he titled “Gerhardt and the Grant Bust”; he also omitted the newspaper clippings at the end of this section.

• “The Rev. Dr. Newman” is about Grant’s spiritual adviser during the days approaching his death on 23 July 1885. Paine suppressed the identity of the Reverend John Philip Newman, altering every mention of his name to “N——.” He also provided the title adopted here.

Clemens was not pleased with the text that Redpath prepared. As he explained to Henry Ward Beecher after he had called a halt to his dictation, this part of the autobiography was “pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to jack-plane it a little before I die, some day or other; I mean the rude construction & rotten grammar. It is the only dictating I ever did, & it was most troublesome & awkward work” (11 Sept 1885, CU-MARK). Clemens never did polish the texts or prepare them for publication. In fact, many years after his death his former secretary, Isabel Lyon, annotated a copy of Paine’s edition, saying in part that “Mr Clemens would not have allowed” the Grant dictations “to be included in the autobiography without serious editing. . . . These Redpath notes were
notes
only, & held for drastic revision”
(page 13, quoted courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell). Clemens did go on to retell the story of his involvement with Grant’s memoirs in his 1906 Autobiographical Dictations (see “About General Grant’s Memoirs,” note at 75.28).

The Chicago G.A.R. Festival

1866.

The first time I ever saw General Grant was in the fall or winter of 1866 at one of the receptions at Washington, when he was General of the Army. I merely saw and shook hands with him along with a general crowd but had no conversation. It was there also that I first saw General Sheridan.

I next saw General Grant during his first term as President.

Senator Bill Stewart of Nevada proposed to take me in and see the President. We found him in his working costume with an old short linen duster on and it was well spattered with ink. I had acquired some trifle of notoriety through some letters which I had written in the New York Tribune during my trip round about the world in the
Quaker City
expedition. I shook hands and then there was a pause and silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I merely looked into the General’s grim, immovable countenance a moment or two in silence and then I said: “Mr. President, I am embarrassed—are you?” He smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image, and I got away under the smoke of my volley.

I did not see him again for some ten years. In the meantime I had become very thoroughly notorious.

Then, in 1879 the General had just returned from his journey through the European and Asiatic world and his progress from San Francisco eastward had been one continuous ovation and now he was to be feasted in Chicago by the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee—the first army over which he had had command. The preparations for this occasion were in keeping with the importance of it. The toast committee telegraphed me and asked me if I would be present and respond at the grand banquet to the toast to the ladies. I telegraphed back that the toast was worn out. Everything had been said about the ladies that could be said at a banquet, but there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon such occasions and if they would allow me I would take that class for a toast: “The Babies.” They were willing—so I prepared my toast and went out to Chicago.

There was to be a prodigious procession. General Grant was to review it from a rostrum which had been built out for the purpose from the second story window of the Palmer House. The rostrum was carpeted and otherwise glorified with flags and so on.

The best place of all to see the procession was of course from this rostrum. So I sauntered upon that rostrum while as yet it was empty in the hope that I might be permitted to sit there. It was rather a conspicuous place, since upon it the public gaze was fixed, and there was a countless multitude below. Presently two gentlemen came upon that platform from the window of the hotel and stepped forward to the front. A prodigious shout went up from the vast multitude below, and I recognized in one of these two gentlemen General Grant.
The other was Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, with whom I was acquainted. He saw me, stepped over to me and said wouldn’t I like to be introduced to the General? I said, I should. So he walked over with me and said, “General, let me introduce Mr. Clemens,” and we shook hands. There was the usual momentary pause and then the General said: “I am not embarrassed—are you?”

It showed that he had a good memory for trifles as well as for serious things.

That banquet was by all odds the most notable one I was ever present at. There were six hundred persons present, mainly veterans of the Army of the Tennessee, and that in itself would have made it a most notable occasion of the kind in my experience but there were other things which contributed. General Sherman and in fact nearly all of the surviving great Generals of the war sat in a body on a dais round about General Grant.

The speakers were of a rare celebrity and ability.

That night I heard for the first time a slang expression which had already come into considerable vogue but I had not myself heard it before.

When the speaking began about ten o’clock I left my place at the table and went away over to the front side of the great dining room where I could take in the whole spectacle at one glance. Among others, Colonel Vilas was to respond to a toast and also Colonel Ingersoll, the silver-tongued infidel, who had begun life in Illinois, and was exceedingly popular there. Vilas was from Wisconsin and was very famous as an orator. He had prepared himself superbly for this occasion.

He was about the first speaker on the list of fifteen toasts and Bob Ingersoll was the ninth.

I had taken a position upon the steps in front of the brass band, which lifted me up and gave me a good general view. Presently I noticed, leaning against the wall near me, a simple-looking young man wearing the uniform of a private and the badge of the Army of the Tennessee. He seemed to be nervous and ill at ease about something. Presently, while the second speaker was talking, this young man said: “Do you know Colonel Vilas?” I said I had been introduced to him. He sat silent a while and then said: “They say he is hell when he gets started!”

I said: “In what way? What do you mean?”

“Speaking! Speaking! They say he is lightning!”

“Yes,” I said, “I have heard that he is a great speaker.”

The young man shifted about uneasily for a while and then he said: “Do you reckon he can get away with Bob Ingersoll?”

I said: “I don’t know.”

Another pause. Occasionally he and I would join in the applause when a speaker was on his legs, but this young man seemed to applaud unconsciously.

Presently he said, “Here in Illinois we think there can’t nobody get away with Bob Ingersoll.”

I said: “Is that so?”

He said, “Yes: we don’t think anybody can lay over Bob Ingersoll.”

Then he added sadly, “But they do say that Vilas is pretty nearly hell.”

At last Vilas rose to speak, and this young man pulled himself together and put on all his anxiety. Vilas began to warm up and the people began to applaud. He delivered himself of one especially fine passage and there was a general shout: “Get up on the table! Get up on the table! Stand up on the table! We can’t see you!” So a lot of men standing there picked Vilas up and stood him on the table in full view of the whole great audience and he went on with his speech. The young man applauded with the rest, and I could hear the young fellow mutter without being able to make out what he said. But presently when Vilas thundered out something especially fine, there was a tremendous outburst from the whole house and then this young man said in a sort of despairing way:

“It ain’t no use: Bob can’t climb up to that!”

During the next hour he held his position against the wall in a sort of dazed abstraction, apparently unconscious of place or of anything else, and at last when Ingersoll mounted the supper table his worshipper merely straightened up to an attitude of attention but without manifesting any hope.

Ingersoll with his fair and fresh complexion, handsome figure and graceful carriage was beautiful to look at.

He was to respond to the toast of “The Volunteers,” and his first sentence or two showed his quality. As his third sentence fell from his lips the house let go with a crash, and my private looked pleased and for the first time hopeful but he had been too much frightened to join in the applause. Presently, when Ingersoll came to the passage in which he said that these volunteers had shed their blood and perilled their lives in order that a mother might own her own child, the language was so fine, whatever it was, for I have forgotten, and the delivery was so superb that the vast multitude rose as one man and stood on their feet, shouting, stamping, and filling all the place with such a waving of napkins that it was like a snow storm. This prodigious outburst continued for a minute or two, Ingersoll standing and waiting. And now I happened to notice my private. He was stamping, clapping, shouting, gesticulating like a man who had gone truly mad. At last when quiet was restored once more, he glanced up to me with the tears in his eyes and said:

“Egod! He
didn’t
get left!”