The Spanish–American War (1898) in real time

SAMUEL CLEMENS CON ARTIST

By ROBERT SATTELMEYER9/18/2017

Twain tapped his inner Tom Sawyer to defraud abolitionists.

In 1885 Samuel Clemens was at the height of his meteoric career. He had just published his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, following a string of earlier bestsellers. His new publishing venture, Charles L. Webster & Co., had scored a major coup with the Civil War memoir everyone had been waiting for, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. He seemed a pillar of postwar political respectability, with a wife from a prominent Buffalo abolitionist family and a mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, where his neighbor was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the iconic Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The only problem with this picture was his own past. Clemens had come from a slaveholding family in Missouri and had served in a Confederate militia unit.

So when an editor of Century Magazine invited Clemens to contribute to a popular series it was currently running, “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” the author was in an awkward position. He had not been a leader and had never been in a battle. He had camped and marched around northeastern Missouri with the Marion Rangers for a few weeks in the summer of 1861 before deserting (or retiring, as he put it). Then, like Huck Finn, he lit out for the territory: the Territory of Nevada, where he spent the rest of the war serving as secretary to his brother Orion (who had a political appointment from the Lincoln administration), as a silver miner and prospector, and as a newspaper reporter who began publishing humorous sketches under the pen name Mark Twain.

Clemens finessed his problem for the series brilliantly, by writing Century Magazine a comic anti-version of the standard war memoir. “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” is a self-mocking account of his brief service that purports to speak for the multitudes who “started out to do something” in the war but didn’t. He and his Missouri militia mates are portrayed as a ragtag bunch of goof-offs who sponge off local farmers and resemble Tom Sawyer’s gang more than William C. Quantrill’s notorious raiders. The only violence they see is when, panic-stricken, they mistakenly shoot and kill a stranger who approaches their camp one night.

There is no evidence that this incident ever occurred, but in the memoir it gives young Sam a reason to retire from the senselessness of war. Employing his deft comedic touch, Clemens simultaneously confessed to and excused himself from his Southern and proslavery roots.

Earlier in life, however, young Sam Clemens, unknown and broke, had concocted an even more self-serving fiction— a falsehood that illustrates his unheralded participation in the abolitionist controversy during the years leading up to the Civil War. In the summer of 1854, the 18-year-old Clemens returned to Missouri from a two-year stay in the East, where he had tried without much success to support himself as a printer. He settled in St. Louis, where he found only intermittent work. Although not much is known about the next year in his life, the editors of his letters describe it as a time of “financial distress and bruised pride.” But events were then brewing on both the local and national stages that would provide Clemens an opportunity to alleviate both of those problems.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, authorizing popular sovereignty in the territories, passed Congress on May 25, setting off the rush to Kansas and Nebraska by both pro- and anti-slavery forces, and Missouri was in the eye of the storm. Meanwhile in the East, on May 26 abolitionists in Boston brought the furor over the Fugitive Slave Law to a new pitch by attempting to prevent the return of escaped slave Anthony Burns. Violence erupted, and eventually federal troops, a battalion of artillery and 22 companies of the state militia would be required to convey Burns to the ship that returned him to slavery.

That summer both the national press and the St. Louis newspapers where Clemens intermittently worked followed the Anthony Burns controversy. Missouri newspapers fanned the flames of anti-abolitionist feeling, even reprinting the inflammatory circulars of the most radical abolitionist group, the Boston Vigilance Committee. Clemens apparently shared the resulting outrage, since his recent stay in New York and Philadelphia had deepened his conventional pro-slavery and anti-abolitionist beliefs. On his way to New York City he had passed through Syracuse, which reminded him of a fugitive slave from Hannibal who had been held there. He wrote to his mother: “When I saw the Court House in Syracuse, it called to mind the time when it was surrounded by chains and companies of soldiers, to prevent the rescue of McReynolds’ nigger by the infernal abolitionists. I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.”

Sometime during the summer of 1854, in need of money and still outraged over the Burns case, Clemens concocted a way to scam the “infernal abolitionists” and relieve his own financial distress. About the beginning of September, Francis Jackson, the treasurer of the Boston Vigilance Committee, entered an unusual expense in his account book. Amid the committee’s typical disbursements—for helping slaves escape to Canada and other humanitarian donations—appeared an entry for $24.50 that had been paid to Samuel Clemens, with the notation “passage from Missouri penitentiary to Boston—he having been imprisoned there for aiding Fugitives to escape.”

The 1850 census for Missouri lists only one Samuel Clemens— still living in his hometown of Hannibal—and state archives record no one by that name having been incarcerated in the state penitentiary. So there seems little doubt that this episode was a hoax. If so, it was a neat trick. Having just spent two years unsuccessfully in the East, and probably owing money for the railroad ticket that brought him back to Missouri, young Clemens had secured the price of his fare by appealing to the Boston Vigilance Committee, representing himself as a fellow abolitionist who had suffered through two years’ imprisonment. His story was probably inspired by an incident that happened during his boyhood, when abolitionists from Quincy, Ill., across the river from Hannibal, were caught in Missouri and sentenced to terms in the state penitentiary for just such activities.

Many years later the tensions along this same boundary between free and slave states would surface in Huck Finn’s moral dilemma over helping the runaway slave Jim. Young Sam Clemens had apparently suffered no moral qualms over taking the abolitionists for a ride. But in later life the writer came to believe that white Americans owed African Americans an enormous debt, and he frequently wrote about the corrosive effects of racism. Clemens helped pay for the education of black students and artists, and supported his friend Frederick Douglass when he was about to be dismissed from his government job. Not surprisingly, however, Clemens never referred to his own brief connection with the men and women who had been helping runaway slaves in 1854.

Robert Sattelmeyer is Regents’ Professor Emeritus at Georgia State University in Atlanta and the author of American History Through Literature (2006).

Originally published in the December 2011 issue of Civil War Times.

“To avoid manifestly unfavorable encounters, considering as an essential point to avoid the useless sacrifice of the squadron and always to leave the honor of the troops without injury.”

Spanish Coast Defenses of Guantanamo Bay in 1898 included Fort Toro on Cayo del Toro (North Toro Cay) at the entrance to the inner harbor (just north of the present Naval Station boundary), armed with three old 6.4-inch bronze ML guns and one modern 3.5-inch Krupp BL gun; a three-gun battery (6.4-inch bronze ML guns) at Caimanera; and Rowell Barracks (7000-man garrison) at Guantánamo City. The harbor was also mined.

National Advocate (Bathurst, NSW : 1889 - 1954) View title info Fri 17 Jun 1898

(Page 3_
ANOTHER EXPEDITION   ANOTHER EXPEDITION TO THE PHILIPPINES. '

London, Thursday.


The second expedition, conveying troops and supplies to the Philippines, has. sailed from San Francisco. Telegrams from Manilla state that the situation is very critical

Second Expedition, 158 officers and 3,428 men, commanded by Brig. Gen. Felix V. Greene:



1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry Regiment; 1st Nebraska Volunteer Infantry Regiment; 10th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment; 18th United States Infantry Regiment (4 companies); 23rd United States Infantry Regiment (4 companies); Utah Volunteer Artillery (2 batteries); United States Engineers (detachment).



Steamships: China, Colon, Senator, and Zealandia.



Sailed June 15, arrived Manila July 17.

USS Charleston, at Hong Kong Harbor, 1898. The protected cruiser convoyed the First Expedition from Hawaii to Manila, June 4-30, 1898. In 1899, during the Philippine-American War, she bombarded Filipino positions to aid Army forces advancing ashore, and took part in the capture of Subic Bay in September 1899. Charleston grounded and was wrecked beyond salvage near Camiguin Island north of Luzon on Nov. 2, 1899.

The USS Monterey is seen off Mare Island Naval Yard, Vallejo, California, 23 miles (37 km) northeast of San Francisco. The monitor sailed for Manila Bay on June 11 and arrived there on August 13. Photo was taken in June 1898.

San Francisco Call, Volume 83, Number 86, 24 February 1898

ADMIRAL SICARD TOO ILL TO LEAVE KEY WEST.

Text

Why may this text contain mistakes?

Correct this text

ADMIRAL SICARD TOO ILL TO LEAVE KEY WEST.



Captain Taylor of the Massachusetts May Take Command of the Squadron. WASHINGTON, Feb. 23.— The noon mail brought to Secretary Long a letter from Admiral Sicard at Key West. The admiral wrote that he had not yet recovered his health, and would be unable to go to sea with the squadron. He will remain on shore at his hotel in Key West to retain command of the squadron from that place so long as !t remains in harbor there, relinquishing it only when it becomes necessary for the vessels to go to sea. It will be remembered that the admiral has suffered an attack of malarial fever, and had procured leave of absence of two weeks just before the explosion on the Maine. He got as far as Tampa, but returned immediately to his command, which for only one day he had left in the hands of Captain Sampson. Should the squadron be obliged to go to sea with the admiral ill at Key West, and the senior officer of his fleet, Captain Sampson, engaged in the investigation at Havana, probably the command of the squadron would devolve upon Captain Taylor, now commanding the battleship Massachusetts, and commonly regarded as one of the brightest officers in the service.