To Whitelaw Reid
31 December 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y.
(MS and transcript: DLC and New York Tribune, 4 Jan 71,
UCCL 02793 and UCCL 10334)

Buf. [ 30 31st. ] Dec.

Friend Reid—

They are bound to make a flaming success of Surratt if these fool mayors & revenue officers do not stop making catspaws of themselfves for Surratt’s manager (for I am perfectly satisfied that his manager is at the bottom of the whole thing.)

I This article would place me under my own commendation but for the fact that a notoriety based on tranquil contempt with no p bitterness visible in it is about as damaging as telegraphic betrayals of empty lecture-halls.

We are all well at home, & beg that you will visit us & the Falls when you can, & let us entertain you a day or two & make you acquainted with David Gray.1 Please remember me to Mr. Hazard 2 & Col. Hay.3

In case you don’t want this article it will be not the slightest offense in the world to leave it out, but I would take it as a great favor if you will then return it to me (I enclose stamps) for I have written it on principle & have sacrificed to it half a day which I could not nearly as well spare as I could the best suit of clothes I have got in the world.

Ys faithfully

Clemens.

[enclosure:]

To the Editor of The Tribune.

Sir: John H. Surratt’s manager evidently understands his business, or else Surratt is fortunate above the average of snubbed [&] struggling would-be lecturers—for every day the newspapers reveal to the people that the gentleman is being persecuted. I am of the lecturing guild, Sir, & am aware that the cheapest & the surest way to get an undesired or unknown person splendidly before the public & crowd his houses, is to get somebody to persecute him. There are other ways, but this is the surest. One of the most courted lady-lecturers of the day owes by far the largest half of her profitable notoriety to a dreadful platform failure, which procured for her such an avalanche of newspaper scorn & rebuke that she became known (& sympathized with) all over [the land] in a single day. Another of the most courted lady-lecturers of the day is soaring along on a lucrative notoriety nine-tenths of which is the result of industriously-supplied two-line personal items telling how she wore her hair at Long Branch.4 So you see how easy it is to excite the public interest in an individual, & fill that individual’s lecture-halls for him. Do you not perceive that Mr. Surratt, who cannot at present induce more than a hundred people to listen to him, is on the high road to a notoriety which in a very little while will cram the largest halls in America with people eager to see the new wonder & hear him? Indeed he is on that very high road.

Mr. Surratt’s manager, I fancy, is deliberately procuring this persecution, & the deep old fox knows that it is exactly the sort of advertising he needs. It is a hundred thousand times more effective than commonplace commendation in the dramatic column, which makes not the least impression upon the reader. When the telegraph recently spread it over the country that Mr. Surratt had an audience of only a hundred & fifty to hear him at Cooper Institute it was a most damaging thing. Six more such announcements, unaccompanied by any saving persecution, would have hurried the lecturer Surratt beyond the hope of resurrection; but at a lucky moment there was talk of his arrest (incited by his manager, no doubt), & next there was a story that Attorney-General Holt once offered to save Mrs. Surratt, & set her free, if the son would take her place, & the son refused, (more, acute managerial invention, no doubt),5 & next came the announcement that Surratt’s Baltimore lecture was interfered with by his arrest on a charge of non-payment of a trifling tobacco tax years ago (this official persecutor being a guileless catspaw of that manager, without the shadow of a doubt); & now at last comes the announcement that the Mayor of Washington has warned Surratt against driving the people of the capital to extremities by attempting to lecture there, & immediately the meek & law-abiding Surratt takes in his sign & closes his hall (the entire thing a crowning triumph of that manager’s inventive genius, without question)!6

If it is desired to make John H. Surratt a prodigious success as a lecturer & give him an income of $25,000 a year, it is only requisite that mayors, revenue officers, & hall proprietors continue to stand in front & persecute the lecturer while the ingenious manager stands behind & pulls their strings—& it is further only necessary that the telegraph people get knowledge of the said persecution (a thing which the said manager will attend to). But if it is desired that Mr. Surratt drop entirely out of the public notice in three short weeks, it is only necessary to let him alone & cease to make public mention of him. His little candle would straightway begin to burn weaker & weaker, & the “cabbage head” would begin to develop more & more prominently on its top, & presently the poor thing would flicker out & pass away in a film of smoke, leaving nothing behind but an evanescent [stench.] Am I not right?

Mark Twain.

Buffalo, Dec. 29, 1870.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 “I heartily wish I could accept your very tempting invitation to Buffalo,” Reid replied on 3 January. “By the way every body speaks cordially of David Gray, and some time I hope to have the pleasure of meeting him” (DLC).

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2 John Rose Greene Hassard planned to enter the priesthood, but instead became a journalist, biographer, and editor, spending the greatest part of his professional life at the New York Tribune, chiefly as music critic (L2, 175 n. 2).

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3 John Milton Hay (1838–1905) spent most of the 1860s as, successively, assistant private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, an army officer (colonel in 1865) on assignment to the White House, secretary to the American legation in Paris, the American chargé d’affaires at Vienna, and secretary to the American legation in Madrid. Since the fall of 1870 he had been employed as an editorial writer and night editor for the Tribune. Apparently Clemens had last talked with him, at the paper’s offices, on 11 or 12 December (see pp. 269–70), but it is not known exactly when they first met. In an Autobiographical Dictation of 31 January 1904, Clemens recalled a “Sunday morning, twenty-five years ago,” when “Hay and I had been chatting and laughing and carrying-on almost like our earlier selves of ’67” (CU-MARK; in MTA, 1:232–38, as “A Memory of John Hay”). And after Hay’s death on 1 July 1905, Clemens issued a statement in which he remarked that “My friendship with Mr. Hay & my admiration of him endured 38 years without impairment” (MTB, 3:1249). An Autobiographical Dictation of 16 February 1906 lends indirect support to 1867 as the year of their meeting. There Clemens recalled that David Gray, of the Buffalo Courier, whom he had met in Buffalo in August or September 1869, became an “intimate friend, through his intimacy and mine with John Hay” (CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:118). In an Autobiographical Dictation of 27 August 1907, however, Clemens asserted that Hay and Whitelaw Reid “were salaried members of the New York Tribune staff when I first knew them” (CU-MARK). That was certainly true of Reid, who joined the paper in 1868, and was acquainted with Clemens by June 1869. But while Clemens and Hay might have met only after Hay became Reid’s Tribune subordinate in the fall of 1870, no convincing date between then and 11 December has been identified. Nor is there evidence of a meeting during one other possible period, October 1868–July 1869, while Hay was in the United States between European postings. In the absence of definitive information, then, 1–2 February 1867 and 23 February–3 March 1867, when Clemens and Hay were in New York City, and 4–8 June 1867, when Clemens and perhaps Hay were there, seem the most likely periods for their initial meeting (“Personal,” New York Tribune, 2 Feb 67, 2; Thayer, 1:245, 272–73, 278–80, 314–16, 335–36; Clara Louise Hay, 375; L2, 1–2, 10–18, 49–62; L3, 265 n. 1).

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4 Both of Clemens’s allusions could be to Olive Logan, who was promoted relentlessly by means of “personal items” (8 Jan 70 to OLL [1st], n. 3) despite the embarrassing failure of her “Stage Struck” lecture in Boston’s Music Hall on 5 November 1868, when those of her audience “near the doors soon struck for home.” That fiasco was still drawing comment a year later (“Brief Jottings,” Boston Evening Transcript, 5 Nov 68, 2, 6 Nov 68, 2; “Miss Olive Logan. . .. ,” Washington Morning Chronicle, 25 Oct 69, 2). It is likely, however, that the second lecturer was Kate Field, who also was regularly followed in the press and whose current lecture, on Charles Dickens, was quite popular, although Clemens was unenthusiastic about it (30 Jan 71 to Redpath, n. 3). Long Branch, New Jersey, was a popular summer resort on the Atlantic (Hall, 130).

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5 Joseph Holt (1807–94), actually judge-advocate general of the army, prosecuted the Lincoln assassins before a military commission. He was accused of suppressing the commission’s recommendation of clemency for Mary Surratt (see note 6). The “story” Clemens retells here apparently was apocryphal.

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6 John H. Surratt (1844–1916) was tried in 1867 for participating in John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln, but was released after the jury was unable to reach a verdict. His mother, Mary (b. 1817), keeper of the boardinghouse where Booth planned the crime, was found guilty of the same charge and hanged in 1865, despite a lack of evidence, while Surratt himself was hiding in Canada. In December 1870 Surratt, managed by a Mr. Corbyn (or Crobyn), otherwise unidentified, had a brief season on the eastern lyceum circuit. Appearing before audiences of 100–300, he discussed his activities as a Confederate spy, defiantly admitted his part in Booth’s initial plan to abduct Lincoln but professed ignorance of any assassination scheme, and denied abandoning his mother, alleging that he had been assured she could not be convicted. Surratt lectured without incident in Rockville, Maryland, on 6 December, and at New York’s Cooper Institute, on 9 December, but was arrested after a 29 December lecture in Baltimore—for not having paid his license as a tobacco dealer there two years earlier. Friends claimed that the arrest was made to prevent his fourth appearance, scheduled for Washington, D.C., on 30 December. Washington Mayor Matthew G. Emery asked Surratt, free on bail, to cancel that lecture, for fear it might prompt a public disturbance. Surratt’s compliance was not entirely voluntary. He was forced to take in his sign, or at least alter it, when, in succession, several Washington halls were refused to him. Last-minute arrangements were made for him to speak in a saloon, and a small audience gathered there, but he failed to show up. Thus ended his platform career (Chamlee, 531–38; New York Tribune: “John H. Surratt on the Platform,” 8 Dec 70, 5; “Home News,” 10 Dec 70, 5; “Arrest of John H. Surratt,” 30 Dec 70, 1; “Washington,” 31 Dec 70, 3; “Surratt Once More,” 2 Jan 71, 5; New York Times: “John H. Surratt at the Cooper Institute,” 10 Dec 70, 5; “Washington,” 31 Dec 70, 1; Buffalo Express: “Washington,” 26 Dec 70, 1).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC), is copy-text for the letter; transcript, “John H. Surratt,” New York Tribune, 4 Jan 71, 5, is copy-text for the enclosure.

Previous publication: L4, 290–93.

Provenance:The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).

Emendations and textual notes: MS is copy-text for ‘Buf . . . Clemens.’ (290.1–20) Tribune is copy-text for ‘To . . . 1870.’ (290.22–292.10)

30 31st. • 301st.

& • and [also at 290.27 (twice), 28, 32; 291.1, 6, 10, 13, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31 (twice), 32, 35, 36 (twice), 37, 38; 292.4, 5 (twice), 6 (twice), 7]

the land • t[he] land [badly inked]

stench. • stench[.] [badly inked]