Clemens family. Called the Carpenters in “Villagers,” the writer’s family provided models for several characters in his stories about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
John Marshall Clemens (1798–1847), born in Virginia, studied law in Columbia, Kentucky, and in 1822 was licensed to practice. After he married Jane Lampton [begin page 310] in 1823, they lived for approximately two years in Columbia before moving to Gainesboro, Tennessee, where their first child, Orion, was born. In 1827 the family settled in Jamestown, Tennessee, where John Clemens became a county commissioner, then a county court clerk, and opened a store. With an eye to the family’s future, he began his purchase of thousands of acres of land, most of it just south of Jamestown. His total acquisition—which Samuel Clemens estimated at “seventy-five thousand acres,” costing “somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred dollars” (SLC 1870, 3)—brought John Clemens’s heirs years of frustration, but none of the wealth he envisioned. In the spring of 1835, the family and their one slave, Jenny, moved to Florida, Missouri, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born. In Florida, John Clemens practiced law, kept store, and did some farming. He was appointed judge of Monroe County Court in 1837; it was this appointment that earned him the honorific “Judge,” which he bore the rest of his life. In November 1839 John Clemens moved his family to Hannibal, where he promoted the construction of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad and helped found and govern the Hannibal Library Institute. He kept a store on Main Street until the early 1840s, when he was forced into poverty by Ira Stout, a dishonest land speculator. It was probably in 1844 that John Clemens was elected justice of the peace; the earliest evidence placing him in that position is a court record dated 17 September 1844. Albert Bigelow Paine’s statement that he was elected in 1840 is disproved by newspaper accounts of the election, and Dixon Wecter’s conjecture that he was elected in 1842 is inconsistent with an 1843 court record showing the position was held by another man (Clemens v. Townsend; MTB, 1:41; Wecter 1952, 103, 291 nn. 5, 7). Samuel Clemens’s recollection that his father “was elected County Judge by a great majority in ’49” (“Villagers,” 104) also is incorrect. John Clemens declared his candidacy for clerk of the circuit court in November 1846 but died of pneumonia in March 1847, more than four months before the election. “My father may have hastened the ending of his life by the use of too much medicine,” Orion Clemens observed in 1880. “He doctored himself from my earliest remembrance. During the latter part of his life he bought Cook’s pills by the box and took one or more daily” (notes on SLC to Orion Clemens, 6 Feb 61, L1, 116 n. 11). Presbyterian pastor Joshua Thomas Tucker called John Clemens “a grave, taciturn man, a foremost citizen in intelligence and wholesome influence” (Wecter 1952, 86). He was more fully characterized in The History of Marion County, Missouri, in a biographical sketch prepared with Orion’s assistance:
He never laughed aloud, and seldom smiled. He was sternly and irreproachably moral. He had a gray eye of wonderful keenness, that seemed to pierce through you. He wore his hair short and combed back. He could wield a vigorous and scathing pen, reminding one of the style of “Junius,” when he chose to write for the papers. He never joined any church, though he inclined to the Campbellites. His shattered nerves made him irritable, but he never swore except once, and then he was very, very angry. His honesty no man questioned, and he carried scruples further than common in that direction. . . . He was a Whig, believed strongly in Henry Clay, and took an interest in politics. He seldom indulged in joking. If he did, the subject was pure and clean, and accompanied with a little twinkle at the corner of the eye, and only a perceptible smile. (Holcombe, 915)
Samuel Clemens confirmed these descriptions, remembering his father as “exceedingly dignified in his carriage and speech” and “austere” in manner; “pleasant with [begin page 311] his friends, but never familiar” (AD, 29 Dec 1906, CU-MARK). John Clemens is mentioned in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (90); he is Judge Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 101, 103–5, 106), and James Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–19, 125) (Wecter 1952, 6–7, 14, 15, 28–57 passim, 69–70, 103, 110–11, 114–15; Tompkins and Eve; Gregory 1965, 30; Brashear 1934, 95; Pamela A. Moffett to Samuel E. Moffett, 15 Oct 99, CU-MARK; Return Ira Holcombe to SLC, 24 Sept 83, CU-MARK; SLC to Orion Clemens, 4 Sept 83, CU-MARK).
Jane Lampton Clemens (1803–90), born in Adair County, Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens in part to spite a former suitor, Richard F. Barret (Wecter 1952, 17–18, 23). Mark Twain characterized his mother in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (82–92). In an autobiographical sketch he commented that she had “come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer’s ‘Aunt Polly.’ I fitted her out with a dialect, & tried to think up other improvements for her, but did not find any” (SLC 1897–98, 49, in MTA, 1:102). Jane Clemens’s Hannibal pastor, Joshua Thomas Tucker, called her “a woman of the sunniest temperament, lively, affable, a general favorite” (Wecter 1952, 86). She is Joanna Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 103–4, 105–8) and Sarah Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–19). She is Aunt Polly in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–209 passim), as she had previously been in Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1885), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896).
Orion Clemens (1825–97), pronounced O´-ree-ən, clerked in a store after the family moved to Hannibal in 1839. When he reported that he was taught to “adjust the scales one way for buying and another way for selling,” his father placed him in the Hannibal Journal office, where he began his printer’s apprenticeship under Robert and Joseph Sylvester Buchanan (Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK). About 1842 he moved to St. Louis to work in the printing house of Thomas Watt Ustick, returning to Hannibal in mid-1850 to start a weekly called the Western Union. Within a year he purchased the Hannibal Journal and on 4 September 1851 published the first issue of the consolidated Hannibal Journal and Western Union, shortening the name to Hannibal Journal after six months. He sold the paper and its printing establishment to William T. League in September 1853 and moved with his mother and brother Henry to Muscatine Iowa, where he bought an interest in the Muscatine Journal. On 19 December 1854 he married Mary Eleanor (Mollie) Stotts (1834–1904), with whom he had one child, Jennie (1855–64). The following June, Orion sold the Muscatine Journal and moved to Keokuk, Iowa, his wife’s home town, purchasing the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. In June of 1857 he sold the unprofitable print shop and in the fall of the year moved to Jamestown, Tennessee, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. He returned to Keokuk in July 1858, evidently remaining until May 1860, when he moved to Memphis, Missouri, to attempt to set up a law practice. On 27 March 1861, Orion was appointed secretary of the newly formed Nevada Territory, a position secured for him by Edward Bates, an old acquaintance from St. Louis, who was Lincoln’s first attorney general. Accompanied by Samuel Clemens, Orion arrived in Carson City on 14 August 1861. Until late 1864, when Nevada became a state, Orion was comparatively prosperous since, despite his failure to become wealthy by speculating in mining stock, he enjoyed a government salary. Unable to secure a state office [begin page 312] comparable to his territorial post, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to practice law in Carson City, then in California, where he also prospected and tried his hand at writing correspondence for the Meadow Lake Morning Sun and the San Francisco American Flag. Finally, however, Orion was forced to leave the West. He returned to St. Louis in September 1866, while his wife, Mollie, went to live with her parents in Keokuk. He was an occasional correspondent for the San Francisco Times in late 1866 through early 1867. He lived chiefly in St. Louis (Mollie joined him there in 1869) for about three years, supporting himself by working as a newspaper compositor. In late 1870 Orion and Mollie moved to Hartford, Connecticut. There, until 1872, Orion edited the American Publisher, the house paper of the American Publishing Company, Mark Twain’s publishers. In the fall of 1873, after trying unsuccessfully to find work elsewhere, Orion moved to New York City, where he worked as a newspaper proofreader. Mollie joined him a few months later, and they remained in New York until mid-1874, when, with Samuel Clemens’s help, they returned to Keokuk to purchase a chicken farm. Over the next two decades Orion tried, in vain, to earn a living as a chicken farmer, lawyer, lecturer, and author. From the mid-1870s until his death in 1897, Orion was dependent on quarterly checks sent him by his brother. Meanwhile he compiled, often in public, a record of spectacular vacillation on political and religious matters. In a letter of 9 February 1879, Mark Twain regaled William Dean Howells with some of Orion’s exploits:
He has belonged to as many as five different religious denominations; last March he withdrew from deaconship in a Congregational Church & the superintendency of its Sunday School, in a speech in which he said that for many months (it runs in my mind that he said 13 years,) he had been a confirmed infidel, & so felt it to be his duty to retire from the flock.
. . . After being a republican for years, he wanted me to buy him a democratic newspaper merely because his prophetic mind told him Tilden would be President—in which case he would be able to get an office for his services.
A few days before the Presidential election, he came out in a speech & publicly went over to the democrats; but at the last moment, while voting for Tilden & 6 State democrats, he prudently “hedged” by voting for 6 State republicans, also. He said it might make him safe, no matter who won.
The new convert was made one of the secretaries of a democratic meeting, & placed in the list of speakers. He wrote me jubilantly of what a ten-strike he was going to make with that speech. All right—but think of his innocent & pathetic candor in writing me something like this, a week later: “I was more diffident than I had expected to be, & this was increased by the silence with which I was received when I came forward; so I seemed unable to get the fire into my speech which I had calculated upon, & presently they began to get up & go out; & in a few minutes they all rose up & went away.”
How could a man uncover such a sore as that & show it to another? Not a word of complaint, you see—only a patient, sad surprise.
. . . His next project was to write a burlesque upon Paradise Lost. . . .
. . . Afterward he took a rabid part in a prayer meeting epidemic; dropped that to travesty Jules Verne; dropped that, in the middle of the last chapter, last March, to digest the matter of an infidel book which he proposed to write; & now he comes to the surface to rescue our “noble & beautiful religion” from the sacrilegious talons of Bob Ingersoll [the prominent agnostic lecturer and writer]. (NN-B, in MTHL, 1:253–55)
Orion’s impulsive, impractical nature proved a source of anxiety and exasperation to the entire family, as did his sudden and severe shifts in mood. As Mark Twain recalled in his autobiography, Orion’s “day was divided—no, not divided, mottled—from [begin page 313] sunrise to midnight with alternating brilliant sunshine and black cloud. Every day he was the most joyous and hopeful man that ever was, I think, and also every day he was the most miserable man that ever was. . . . He was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable,” but “he was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth” (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:269, 272). Mark Twain considered Orion an author’s “treasure” and urged Howells to “put him in a book or a play right away. . . . One can let his imagination run riot in portraying Orion, for there is nothing so extravagant as to be out of character with him” (SLC to Howells, 9 Feb 79, NN-B, in MTHL, 1:253, 256). Orion influenced the characterization of Washington Hawkins in The Gilded Age (1874). He appears as Oscar Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 105–8) and “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (109–24). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 384; MSM, 432) reveal that Plunket the editor and Oliver Hotchkiss (166, 167, 224, 229–59) were based on Orion (Wecter 1952, 78, 225, 239; MTB, 1:27, 100; MTA, 2:268–74; Bible 1862; Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 3, 5–11, 15, 21; Orion Clemens to SLC, 7 Jan 61, CU-MARK; Lorch 1929 [bib00642]; L1, 58, 79 n. 11, 114 n. 9, 115, 121, 325 n. 5, 342 n. 1, 375 n. 5; correspondence between Orion Clemens, Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, and other family members, 1867–74, CU-MARK; Pamela A. Moffett to Samuel E. Moffett, 23 Feb 80, CU-MARK).
Pamela Ann (also Pamelia or Mela) Clemens (1827–1904), pronounced Pə-mee´-la, was born in Jamestown, Tennessee. She attended Elizabeth Horr’s Hannibal school and in November 1840 was commended by her teacher for her “amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies” (Horr 1840). In 1839 she joined the Campbellites after having been introduced to the movement by the daughters of its founder, Alexander Campbell (see the note at 112.3). In February 1841 she and her mother joined the Presbyterian Church. Pamela played piano and guitar and helped to support the family by giving music lessons. In September 1851, she married William Anderson Moffett and moved to St. Louis. “Her character was without blemish, & she was of a most kindly & gentle disposition,” Samuel Clemens wrote after her death (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK). Pamela is Priscella Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 105) and—as Mark Twain’s working notes indicate (MSM, 432)—Hannah Hotchkiss in “Schoolhouse Hill” (224, 229–38, 244). She was probably the model for Tom’s cousin Mary in Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33), and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (150, 155, 156, 162, 168) (Bible 1817; Moffett 1881; MTBus, 5, 19, 24; Sweets 1984, 17; Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 109).
Pleasant Hannibal Clemens lived for only three months after his birth in 1828 or 1829. In “Villagers” (104) he is Han Carpenter (Orion Clemens to SLC, 18 May 85, CU-MARK; MTBus, 44).
Margaret L. Clemens (1830–39) was born in Jamestown, Tennessee, and died in Florida, Missouri. “Margaret was in disposition & manner like Sam full of life,” Jane Clemens later wrote, recalling the morning that Margaret left for school with Pamela, reciting lines from her lesson: “God is a spirit & they that worship him must worship him in spirit & in truth. When they came from school M. was sick & never was in her right mind 3 minuts at a time. She died in about a week” (Jane Lampton [begin page 314] Clemens to Orion Clemens, 25 Apr 80?, CU-MARK). In “Villagers” (104) she is M. Carpenter (Bible 1817).
Benjamin L. (Ben) Clemens (1832–42) was born in Three Forks of Wolf, Fentress County, Tennessee. One of Clemens’s early memories was of kneeling with his mother at Benjamin’s deathbed. He recalls this incident in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (82–83) and alludes to it and to his unexplained “case of memorable treachery” toward Benjamin in “Villagers” (93, 104), where his brother figures as Burton and B. Carpenter. Among some fragmentary autobiographical notes probably made within a year of writing “Villagers,” Clemens commented: “Dead brother Ben. My treachery to him” (SLC 1898 [bib21479], 7). And in his 1902 notebook he noted: “I saw Ben in shroud” (NB 45, CU-MARK, TS p. 21; Bible 1817; Wecter 1952, 33–34).
Samuel Langhorne (Sam) Clemens (1835–1910) was born in Florida, Missouri, on 30 November 1835, six months after his family settled there. He calls himself Simon Carpenter in “Villagers” (93, 99, 101). In his autobiography he claimed that after his father’s death in March 1847 he was taken from school “at once” and made a printer’s devil in Joseph P. Ament’s Missouri Courier newspaper office (AD, 29 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:276). Apparently, though, he was a part-time assistant to Henry La Cossitt of the Hannibal Gazette for one year before he began his apprenticeship to Ament in the spring of 1848. And he received at least some schooling after his father’s death, since the 1850 Hannibal census (compiled in October) reports his attendance “within the year” (Marion Census 1850, 307). By January 1851 Clemens had left Ament’s newspaper office and was setting type for Orion on the Hannibal Western Union. On 16 January 1851 the paper printed a sketch by him, “A Gallant Fireman,” his earliest known publication (see ET&S1, 62). He remained with Orion on the Hannibal Journal, contributing several sketches, until he moved to St. Louis in 1853, probably in the first two weeks of June. Although Mark Twain gave to Tom Sawyer many of his own Hannibal experiences, he acknowledged that Tom was “a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture” (“Preface,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). According to Albert Bigelow Paine the three boys were Clemens himself, “chiefly, and in a lesser degree John Briggs and Will Bowen” (MTB, 1:54). During his 1902 visit to Hannibal, Clemens commented: “Sometimes it was Will Bowen, John Garth, Ed Stevens, Jim Holmes, Meredith, or myself, just as the occasion was fit” (“Good-bye to Mark Twain,” Hannibal Courier-Post, 3 June 1902, 1; Wecter 1952, 131, 200–202, 236, 263; L1, 1; Marion Census 1850, 307, 318).
Henry Clemens (1838–58) was a family favorite. “Do you remember Henry’s studious habits when he was only three years old? His bright face & lovable ways?” Pamela reminisced in a letter to Orion (Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK). Like his brother Samuel, Henry belonged to the Cadets of Temperance and worked on the Hannibal Journal. After Samuel left for St. Louis, Henry continued to assist Orion on the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal and in the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. In the spring of 1858, he became a “mud clerk” (purser’s assistant) on the steamer Pennsylvania, employment which Samuel Clemens, then a cub pilot, helped him to obtain. Henry died on 20 June 1858 from injuries suffered in the explosion of the Pennsylvania, as Mark Twain recounted in a moving letter [begin page 315] written at the time (see L1, 80–82) and in 1883 in chapter 20 of Life on the Mississippi. Shortly after Henry’s death, Orion contrasted his brothers: “Sam a rugged, brave, quick tempered, generous hearted fellow—Henry quiet, observing, thoughtful, leaning on Sam for protection,—Sam & I too leaning on him for knowledge picked up from conversation or books, for Henry seemed never to forget any thing, and devoted much of his leisure hours to reading” (Orion Clemens to Miss Wood, 3 Oct 58, NPV, in MTB, 3:1591–92). In his autobiography, Mark Twain recalled:
My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. She had none at all with my brother Henry, who was two years younger than I, and I think that the unbroken monotony of his goodness and truthfulness and obedience would have been a burden to her but for the relief and variety which I furnished in the other direction. . . . I never knew Henry to do a vicious thing toward me, or toward anyone else—but he frequently did righteous ones that cost me as heavily. It was his duty to report me, when I needed reporting and neglected to do it myself, and he was very faithful in discharging that duty. He is Sid in Tom Sawyer. But Sid was not Henry. Henry was a very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was. (AD, 12 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:92–93)
Sid Sawyer (Tom’s half-brother) is mentioned in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33) and appears in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (150, 153–56, 162, 168) and “Schoolhouse Hill” (214), as he had in both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In “Villagers” (93, 99) Henry Clemens is Hartley Carpenter (Cadets of Temperance 1850; MTB, 1:85, 100; Lorch 1929 [bib10218], 418).
