Jenny, a slave, was a young girl when Jane’s grandmother gave her to Jane and John Marshall Clemens, possibly in the spring of 1825. She accompanied the Clemenses in their move that year from Columbia, Kentucky, to Gainesboro, Tennessee. When the family moved to Jamestown, Tennessee, in 1827, Jenny was hired out to Patsy and John Adams Quarles, Jane’s sister and brother-in-law in Overton County, Tennessee. By the spring of 1835, having rejoined the Clemenses, Jenny traveled with them to Florida, Missouri. Annie Moffett Webster recalled hearing Jane Clemens tell stories in a “soft drawling voice” about “the long ride” from Jamestown to Florida: Jane Clemens “could not be reconciled to the fact that Jenny always secured the pacing horse leaving the trotting horse for Orion.” Jane also “told many stories of Jenny who could only be managed by threats to ‘Rent her to the Yankees.’ The Northern people demanded so much more than Southerners did, that that was a threat that frightened her” (Webster 1918, 13, 14). Probably in late 1842 or early 1843 the Clemenses sold Jenny to William B. Beebe of Hannibal. Clemens recalled Jenny’s sale in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (89) and in “Villagers” (104), where he noted her subsequent employment as a steamboat chambermaid. In his 1905–8 notebook, Clemens wrote: “We sold slave to Beebe & he sold her down the river. We saw her several times afterward. She was the only slave we ever owned in my time” (NB 38, CU-MARK, TS p. 10; Marion Census 1840, 90; Varble, 99, 104, 115–16; Pamela A. Moffett to Orion Clemens, 27 Apr 80, CU-MARK; Wecter 1952, 72).
