Tribune 224 F street
Washington J Feb.
1.
Click to add citation to My Citations.
Jno. Russell Young Esq
Dear Sir= I smouched those 3 Holy Land letters from the Alta & added 3 in at the end of the list to make up the deficiency, but the as you will see by the inclosed telegram, they don’t seem to understand it.1 So I wish you would tell Mr Hazard to forward them to me, & I will ship them out.2
Yrs Truly
Sam L. Clemens
P.S. I told Jim Young all you said. You said you didn’t write that Washington letter & I had to believe it, though t but by George, Horace himself says you wrote it! And besides, they papers here call it the Occasional Editorial.3 Mrs. Wright told me what Mr Greeley said. His family has been stopping with the Wrights. I don’t say that these things look suspicious—I [only ]insinuate that Horace when Horace comes down here to look over his spectacles & beam on Congress, he has no business to circulate canards, you know!4
There is nothing here of an exciting nature, except that the Intelligencer woke up in the most astonishing way this morning & told the world that there had been an eruption at Vesuvius. It is a wonderful paper.5
[letter docketed:] File. JRY | Mr. Hassard | File.
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
[Note by the Editors.—We have received a private letter
from our correspondent, in which we expected some explanation of
his strange conduct in presenting the above information to the
public with such a confident air of furnishing news, but he
offers none. He does not refer to the subject of the letter at
all, except in the postscript, and then only to mention casually
that he has inserted noth[ing] in it but what can be
substantiated.] (SLC 1868 [MT00613]) And on 21 January they published an emphatic claim to ownership of the
Holy Land letters which went much beyond the simple copyright notice
published at the top of each letter. The most immediate cause of their
assertion was the Sacramento Union’s
recent reprinting of a Mark Twain letter without a credit to the Alta:
As this series of letters were paid for in advance of the departure
of “Mark Twain” on the expedition and are the
exclusive property of the Alta, as well by
purchase as copyright, neither the Union nor
any other paper has the legal or moral right to publish them. To say
the least, if the Sacramento Union needed the
humorous letter of our correspondent to brighten up its heavy, dull
columns, they could have partially atoned for the act of piracy by
stating that they had copied the letter in question from the Alta California.
If the Union is altogether destitute of that
courtesy which generally obtains among journalists, and cannot
afford to credit its contemporaries with matter which their own
enterprise has procured for them, it might, at least, have a
wholesome respect for the law of copyright, which protects us in
this particular instance. (“The Sacramento Union ...,” San Francisco Alta California, 21 Jan 68, 2) The Union replied by claiming that the omission of
credit was unintentional (“credit was marked in the copy, but
omitted by mistake in the setting up”) (“A Small
Matter,” Sacramento Union, 23 Jan 68,
2). But the Alta editors rejoined even more
aggressively, saying in part: This is a small matter, to be sure, and the Union is welcome to continue its depredations, but it must not
feel hurt if we speak out when its thefts are specially flagrant. It
is the only paper in the State that has failed to recognize the
legal protection of the law of copyright. It has no right to copy
Mark Twain’s letters to the Alta, with or without credit. (“The Sacramento Union ... ,” San Francisco Alta California, 24 Jan 68, 2)
Click to add citation to My Citations. 1
The enclosure has not been found, but it was doubtless a recent telegram
to Clemens from the editors or proprietors of the Alta
California, pointing out that among his still unpublished Holy
Land letters, numbers 40, 41, and 42 were missing (see 24 Nov
67 to Young, n. 1). The Alta people
had, in fact, grown suddenly touchy, probably—as Clemens
himself predicted on 24 January—because of his plan to reuse
the letters without permission (see 24 Jan 68 to SLC and
PAM, n. 12). On 19 January, for instance, when the Alta published letter number 35 (which describes
famous places in the Holy Land and briefly recounts several Bible
stories), they added an uncharacteristically testy remark:
a tall, straight gentleman, with a light complexion, blue eyes,
regular features, sandy mustache and side whiskers, and legs like
those of President Lincoln.... Mr. Hassard writes English as smooth
as the music of a rippling brook, and frequently dashes off an
editorial article steeped in an original solution of humor and
sarcasm. (Cummings 1868, 107)
Click to add citation to My Citations. 2
John Rose Greene Hassard (1836–88) joined the Tribune staff in 1866. By December 1867 he had
“taken charge of the musical column,” while also
serving as managing editor when Young was absent
(“Personal,” New York World, 2 Dec 67, 4). According to his fellow Tribune employee Amos J. Cummings, Hassard was
Click to add citation to My Citations. 3
“The Political Situation. From an Occasional
Correspondent,” dated “Washington, Jan. 4,
1868,” appeared on page one of the 6 January New York
Tribune. The author of this bold
article was an advocate of military enforcement of all Radical
Reconstruction measures, and in favor of impeaching President
Johnson. He attacked his fellow Republicans for their
“halting, cowardly, and time-serving
policy” and accused them of “eating turkey
and plum pudding” while Johnson and his Southern
supporters ignored all the Reconstruction laws. The author also
seriously questioned the apparent choice of Grant as the 1868
Republican presidential candidate. He thought it was a sign of
weakness to run a victorious general with no political
experience, and further believed that Grant was controlled by a
wealthy class of Northern investors who were selfishly demanding
repayment of war bonds in gold from a financially vulnerable
federal government. John H. Riley, Clemens’s friend
and fellow Alta correspondent, was among
those who attributed the piece to John Russell Young, who was
responsible for many of the Tribune’s editorials at this time (Riley 1868). Its author,
however, remains unidentified: the Tribune had not yet come out in favor of impeaching
President Johnson. Young himself had been forced by Greeley in
September 1867 to quash a pro-impeachment editorial; not until
late February did he dare to defy his editor-in-chief and put
the paper “firmly into the impeachment
camp” (Broderick,
124–25).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 4
Greeley had married Mary Youngs Cheney (1814–72) of
Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1836. Mrs. Greeley was known as an
ill-tempered eccentric who adhered to rigid dietary practices
and dabbled in spiritualism. Only two of the seven children born
to the Greeleys were still alive: Ida (b. 1848) and Gabrielle
(b. 1857). George Washington Wright (1816–85) was a
merchant, banker, and former congressman from California
(1850–51), who had declined the post of secretary of
the interior under President Johnson. The Wrights’
daughter, Eunice, was a special friend of Ida
Greeley’s. Mrs. Wright has not been further
identified (Henry Luther Stoddard,
37–38, 106–7, 154, 319; Van Deusen,
148–53; Ida L. Greeley to Mrs. Wright, 3 Sept 67 and
5 Dec 67, George Washington Wright Papers, DLC).
Click to add citation to My Citations. 5
In late November, after a prolonged period of inactivity, Mount
Vesuvius began to erupt, remaining active for several months. On
29 January the New York Tribune mentioned
the continuing flow of lava, and on 30 January it reported that
a landslide from the volcano had buried several houses and
killed an unknown number of people. The Washington National Intelligencer failed to report
this “unusual and very fatal catastrophe”
until 31 January. On that date Clemens wrote the Chicago Republican that the Intelligencer “regularly comes out in the
most sensational and aggressive manner, every morning, with news
it ought to have printed the day before.” That same
afternoon, however, the Washington Evening
Star declared the landslide story a hoax, and on 1
February both the Tribune and the Intelligencer retracted their reports
(SLC 1868 [MT00624]; New York Tribune: “Eruption of
Vesuvius,” 9 Dec 67, 1; “The Eruption of
Mount Vesuvius,” 29 Jan 68, 1; “The
Eruption of Vesuvius,” 30 Jan 68, 1; “A
Hoax—No Caving in of Vesuvius,” 1 Feb 68,
1; Washington Evening Star:
“The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” 30 Jan
68, 1; “The Vesuvius Story a Hoax,” 31 Jan
68, 1; Washington National Intelligencer:
“Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” 31 Jan 68,
3; “The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius,” 1 Feb
68, 3).
Source text(s):MS, Papers of John Russell Young, Library of Congress (DLC)
Previous publication:
L2, 173–176.
Provenance:donated to DLC in 1924 by Mrs. John Russell Young
and Gordon R. Young.
Emendations and textual notes:
only • only only
S •
[possibly
‘◇S’;
‘
’ partly formed uppercase
character]
