New York,
Wednesday, August 24th, 1853.
Click to add citation to My Citations.
My Dear Mother: you will doubtless be a little surprised, and somewhat angry when you receive this, and find me so far from home; but you must bear a little with me, for you know I was always the best boy you had, and perhaps you remember the people used to say to their children—“Now don’t do like [Orion and Henry Clemens but take Sam] for your guide!”1
Well, I was out of work in St. Louis, and [didn’t] fancy loafing in such a dry place, where there is no pleasure to be seen without paying well for it, and so I thought I might as well go to New York. I packed up my “duds” and left for this village, where I arrived, all right, this morning.
It took a day, by steamboat and cars, to go from St. Louis to Bloomington, Ill; another day by railroad, from there to Chicago, where I laid over all day Sunday; from Chicago to Monroe, in Michigan, by railroad, another day; from Monroe, across Lake Erie, in the fine Lake palace, “Southern Michigan,” to Buffalo, another day; from Buffalo to Albany, by railroad, another day; and from Albany to New York, by Hudson river steamboat, another day—an [awful] trip, taking five days, where it should have been only three.2 I shall wait a day or so for my insides to get settled, after the jolting they received, when I shall look out for a sit;3 for they say there is plenty of work to be had for sober compositors.4
The trip, however, was a very pleasant one. Rochester, famous on account of the “Spirit Rappings” was of course interesting;5 and when I saw the Court House in Syracuse, it called to mind the time when it was surrounded with 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.6
I saw a curiosity to-day, but I don’t know what to call it. Two beings, about like common people, with the exception of their faces, which are more like the “phiz”7 of an orang-outang, than human. They are white, though, like other people. lmagine a person about the size of [Harvel Jordan’s] oldest boy,8 with small lips and full breast, with a constant uneasy, fidgety motion, bright, intelligent eyes, that [seems] as if they would look through you, and you have these things. They were found in the island of Borneo (the only ones of the species ever discovered,) about twenty years ago. One of them is twenty three, and the other twenty five years of age. They possess amazing strength; the smallest one would shoulder three hundred pounds as easily as I would a plug of tobacco; they are supposed to be a cross between man and orang-outang; one is the best natured being in the world, while the other would tear a stranger to pieces, if he did but touch him; they wear their hair “Samson” fashion, down to their waists. They have no apple in their throats, whatever, and can therefore scarcely make a sound; no memory either; what transpires to-day, they have forgotten before to-morrow; they look like one mass of muscle, and can walk either on all fours or upright; when let alone, they will walk to and fro across the room, thirteen hours out of the twenty-four; not a day passes but they walk twenty-five or thirty miles, without resting thirty minutes; I watched them about an hour and they were “tramping” the whole time. The little one bent his arm with the elbow in front, and the hand pointing upward, and no two strapping six footers in the room could pull it out straight. Their faces and eyes are those of the beast, and when they fix their glittering orbs on you with a steady, unflinching gaze, you instinctively draw back a step, and a very unpleasant sensation steals through your veins. They are both males and brothers, and very small, though I do not know their exact hight.9 I have given you a very lengthy description of the animals, but I have nothing else to write about, and nothing from here would be interesting anyhow. The Crystal Palace is a beautiful building10—so is the Marble Palace.11 If I can find nothing better to write about, I will say something about these in my next.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Click to add citation to My Citations. 1
To introduce this letter in the Hannibal Journal, Orion Clemens wrote: “The free and easy
impudence of the writer of the following letter will be appreciated by those who recognize him. We should be pleased to have
more of his letters.” As Orion implied, newspaper decorum required him to remove or disguise personal reference
when publishing a private letter. He therefore omitted the signature and modified several proper names that would have been
recognized in Hannibal. For instance, he printed “Now don’t do like O. and H. C—but take S.
for your guide!”—a cryptic form that Clemens would not have used in a letter to his own mother. In this
sentence and one other (see note 8), the likely readings of the original have been adopted instead of Orion’s
departures from it; the emendations are recorded in the textual apparatus.
Day 1: Friday, 19 August. 8:00 a.m., from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, by the steamer
Cornelia; 11:00 a.m., from Alton to Springfield on the partly completed
Chicago and Mississippi Railroad; by Frink’s stage to Bloomington. Day 2: Saturday, 20 August. From Bloomington to Chicago via La Salle on the Illinois Central and the Chicago and
Rock Island railroads, arriving at 7:00 p.m.
Day 3: Sunday, 21 August. 9:00 p.m., after a twenty-six hour layover, from Chicago to
Toledo, and from Toledo to Monroe, Michigan, on the Michigan Central and the Northern Indiana and Michigan Southern railroads. Day 4: Monday, 22 August. 8:00 a.m., from Monroe across Lake Erie to Buffalo, New York,
by the steamer Southern Michigan. Day 5: Tuesday, 23 August. 7:00 a.m., from Buffalo to Albany via Rochester and Syracuse
on the New York “Lightning Express”; 7:00 p.m., en route via the Hudson River
to New York City on the steamer Isaac Newton. Day 6: Wednesday, 24 August. 5:00 a.m., arrives in New York City aboard the steamer Isaac Newton.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
Clemens’s account, together with contemporary advertisements, suggests the following itinerary:
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
Short for “situation”: printers’ slang for “position” or
“post of employment” (Jacobi, 125).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 4
Clemens alludes to his promise not to drink while away from Hannibal (MTB, 1:93). Anthony Kennedy, who had set type with him in St. Louis during “the spring of 1853,”
recalled more than fifty years later: “The most remarkable thing I remember about Clemens
. . . is the fact that he was not ‘one of the boys.’ Then, more than now, it was
the proud prerogative of printers to be able to drink more red whisky than men of any other trade. But Clemens, so far as I
can remember, never took a drink” (Anthony Kennedy,
560).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 5
In 1848, Margaret and Kate Fox, sisters aged thirteen and twelve respectively, made Rochester famous by attributing to
“spirits” the inexplicable knocking sounds, or “rappings,” which they in fact
created by cracking the joints of their toes. Forty years later, Margaret confessed the ruse, long after it had precipitated
the American spiritualist craze, which peaked in the 1850s and again in the 1870s (Kerr, 3–9, 119).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 6
On 1 October 1851, Jerry McHenry, a slave owned by John McReynolds (a prosperous landowner just outside Hannibal), had been
arrested as a fugitive in Syracuse, New York, where he had been living for several years. An angry crowd twice stormed the
courthouse, ultimately freeing the victim when the militia refused to cooperate further with the police. Like other
controversial efforts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, this one received wide publicity in the newspapers (McDougall, 48–49; “Slave Catching in
Syracuse—Intense Excitement,” Liberator 21 [10 Oct 51]: 2).
The attitude Clemens exhibits here—hardly unusual for a seventeen-year-old white Southerner on his first visit to
the North—would change radically by 1861.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 7
Face or visage, used humorously or in contempt; an abbreviation of “physiognomy.”
Click to add citation to My Citations. 8
Harvel Jordan (b. 1814 or 1815) had been a livery keeper in Hannibal since 1846. Born in Virginia, he moved with his parents
to Missouri in 1831. In 1839 he married Lucy A. Dornes, with whom he had had five children by 1850, including two sons, Samuel
and Milton, who in 1853 would have been twelve and seven, respectively (Hannibal Census, 313; Holcombe, 960). Jordan had recently joined the partnership of Shoot, Jordan
and Davis, “the largest and most splendid Stable outside of St. Louis” (advertisement for Monroe House,
Hannibal Journal, 11 May 53, 2). Orion’s compositors appear to have misread
Clemens’s “H” as “F” and, in disguising Jordan’s name, set
“F.——J——’s” (emended; see the textual apparatus).
No one listed in the 1850 Hannibal census had these initials (F. J.) and two sons of appropriate age.
Click to add citation to My Citations. 9
Some thirty years later, P. T. Barnum was to exhibit the “Wild Men of Borneo,” supposedly captured in
1848. Known as Plutano and Waino, Hiram and Barney Davis were born in 1825 and 1827, respectively, and may be the
“things” Clemens describes here. On 22 September 1853, Horace
Greeley’s New York Tribune inveighed against the custom whereby “Broadway is
never without one or more damnable monsters on exhibition” (“Disgusting Exhibitions,” 4).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 10
This was the main hall of the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, New York’s first world’s fair,
which had opened on 14 July while Clemens was still in St. Louis. A large, domed building of glass and cast iron, it enclosed
nearly six acres of exhibition space on two floors and stood at what was then the northern end of the city in Reservoir
Square, facing Sixth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-second streets (Greeley, 13–16; Exhibition Catalogue, 7–10). The Crystal Palace and its
exhibits had been widely publicized in American newspapers, including those Clemens read in Hannibal and St. Louis. Probably
he himself had remarked in the Hannibal Journal of 26 May: “From fifteen to twenty thousand
persons are continually congregated around the new Crystal Palace in New York city, and drunkenness and debauchery are carried
on to their fullest extent” (SLC 1853, 3).
New York’s Crystal Palace with Latting Observatory at left, 1853. Original lithograph by N. Currier in
the J. Clarence Davies Collection, Museum of the City of New York. Interior of the Crystal Palace, 1853 (Joseph M. Wilson,
xxix).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 11
The grandiose dry-goods store built by multimillionaire Alexander T. Stewart (1803–76) in 1846, and enlarged in
1850, stood at Broadway and Chambers Street. Faced entirely with white marble, it was advertised as the most costly building
ever occupied by an individual merchant. On 28 May 1867, having returned to New York as a reporter for the San Francisco Alta California, Clemens criticized Stewart’s similarly ostentatious home on Fifth Avenue at
Thirty-fourth Street, saying that it looked “like a mausoleum”: “Verily it is one thing to
have cash and another to know how to spend it” (SLC 1867,
1).
Source text(s):“Letter from New York,” Hannibal Journal, 5 Sept 53, 2, at the State
Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia (MoHi). “Letter from
New York,” Hannibal Journal (weekly), 8 Sept 53, 2 (MoHi) is a reimpression from the same type and is textually identical.
Previous publication:
L1, 3–9; Ridings, 183–84; Brashear 1934, 153–55. A partial facsimile of the first Journal printing appears in Brashear facing 154 (misdated 8, instead of 5, September 1853).
Provenance:This letter was unknown to Paine as late as 1917: “It is not believed that a single number of Orion
Clemens’s paper, the Hannibal Journal, exists to-day” (MTL, 1:20). In 1926, however, a file of the Journal kept by William T. League (to whom Orion had sold
the paper in September 1853) came to light and was given by the League family to the State Historical Society of Missouri (Armstrong, 485). This letter and the next one were republished shortly
thereafter.
Emendations and textual notes:
Orion . . . Sam • O. and H. C— | but take S. [Collation of the parts of Clemens’s 26–?28 Oct 53 letter to OC and HC that survive both in MS and in a Muscatine Journal printing (see below in the apparatus to that letter) shows the degree of freedom Orion assumed in revising his brother’s private letters for publication. In this letter, there can be little doubt that the names elided in the Hannibal Journal were given in full in Clemens’s MS, nor that ‘Orion’, ‘Henry’, and ‘Clemens’ were the MS forms of those names; neither of the brothers seems to have had a nickname. The form ‘Sam’ is almost as certain. Clemens was always referred to as ‘Sam’ in his family’s early letters, and he evidently thought of himself by that name, for he almost invariably signed himself ‘Sam’ in personal letters, using ‘Samℓ’ or ‘Saml.’ only for more formal communications.]
didn’t • did’nt
awful • awlul
Harvel Jordan’s • F.———J———’s [As at 3.7, the Journal disguised a name, but this time the compositor apparently misread the name when eliding it. Clemens’s ‘H’ and ‘F’ were sometimes similar in form, as the following examples, isolated from the MS of his 8 Oct 53 letter to his sister, illustrate:]
seems • [sic]
[closing and signature missing] • [Even though Clemens probably signed this letter ‘Sam’, the exact form of his closing and signature in what may well be his first letter to his mother cannot be reliably conjectured, especially since only one other original letter to her (p. 63) has survived for the eight years following this one.]
