To Whitelaw Reid
7 March 1873 • 2nd of 2 • Hartford, Conn.
(MS: DLC and NN, UCCL 00883)

7th Mch

My Dear Reid—

Hang it, I fooled away a good deal of valuable time over the enclosed, & then, just as I was sending it off to the telegraph office it occurred to me that in confessing that imprisonment for life was a heavier [penalty] after all than that mush-&-milk jury really wanted to inflict, I had knocked the bottom out of my article & was whooping for the enemy. So of course I crossed it all out & sent the brief dispatch which you doubtless got.1

Tear up this stuff—but read it first—it isn’t bad. Read the last page, anyway. God knows I was intended for a statesman. I can solve any political problem that ever was started.

Love to Hay & Brooks2 & Hazzard.

Ys

Clemens

[enclosure, page 1:]

‸66‸

‸173‸ 3

{graphic group: 2 diagonal x inline overlay}

‸Telegram. Send it at once.‸

Hartford Feb Mch. 7

Whitelaw Reid

Editor Tribune

New York.

Leave out the girl and add this as a postscript:

Since writing that, I have [ read Foster’s Plea in T ] read the Foster petitions in Thursday’s Tribune.4 The lawyers’ opinions do not disturb me, because I know that those same gentlemen could make as far stronger far abler ‸an‸ argument in favor of Judas Iscariot; which is a great deal for me to say, for I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing [page 2] my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman. The attitude ‸of the jury‸ does unsettle a body, I must admit; and it seems plain that they would have modified their verdict to murder in the first second degree if the judge’s charge had permitted [ c ] it.5 But when I come to the petitions of Foster’s friends & find out Foster’s true character, the generous tears will flow, I cannot help it. How easy it is to get a wrong impression of a man. I perceive that from childhood up, this one has been a sweet, docile thing, full of pretty ways & [top of page 3 ‸284‸] gentle impulses, the charm of the fireside, the admiration of society, the idol of the s Sunday-school. I recognize in him the divinest nature that has ever glorified any mere human being. I perceive that the sentiment with which he regarded temperance was a thing that amounted to frantic adoration. I ‸freely‸ confess that it was the most natural thing in the world for such an organism as this to get drunk & insult a stranger & then beat his brains out with a car hook because he did not [seem] to admire it. Such is Foster. And to think that we came so near losing him!6 How do we know that [page 4] but that he is the Second Advent? And yet, after all, if the jury had not been hampered in their choice of a verdict I ‸think I‸ could consent to lose him.

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try to believe respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum attached to a melting heart & perfectly [maccaronian] bowels of compassion. [page 5]

I have had no experience in making laws or amending them, but still I cannot understand [ whe why], when it takes twelve men to inflict the death penalty upon a man, it ‸person, it‸ should take any less than twelve more to undo their work. If I were a legislature, & had just been elected & had not had time to sell out, I would put the pardoning & commuting power [ ut ] into the hands of twelve able men instead of dumping so huge a burden upon the shoulders of one poor petition-persecuted individual.

S. L. C.

Hartf Paid—472—$9.49.

[letter docketed:]

Col Hay:

I haven’t read this. Please look through it & tell me whether you think it would do to publish together with his letter and dispatch.

WR

I think it will do to publish alone.

H7

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

Click to add citation to My Citations.

1 The previous letter.

Click to add citation to My Citations.

2 Noah Brooks (1830–1903) joined the Tribune in 1871, but Clemens had known him in California. He began his newspaper career in Boston at the age of eighteen; six years later he went west, eventually settling in California, where he founded the Marysville Appeal. During the Civil War he served as Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Union, and after the war he became managing editor of the San Francisco Alta California. It was during this time (1865–66) that he and Clemens became acquainted, initially through their mutual friend Bret Harte. Brooks was still an editor on the Alta when Mark Twain’s letters from the Quaker City appeared there in 1867 and 1868 (L2, 17 n. 1; “Noah Brooks Dead,” New York Times, 18 Aug 1903, 7; Brooks, 98).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

3 These numbers were Clemens’s word count for the first page of the suppressed telegram he enclosed (66), followed by a total for the first two pages (173). He did not count the dateline and address (or the signature on the fifth page) because the telegraph company did not charge for these essential elements. The “284” at the top of the third page is an accurate word count up through that page, and the last line on the fifth page gives an accurate total for the whole (472 words, costing $9.49: that is, $.25 for the first ten words, plus $.02 per word for the rest).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

4 The Tribune for Thursday, 6 March, contained more than a page of petitions and testimonials from prominent lawyers and clergymen, as well as family, friends, and other supporters of convicted murderer William Foster, all attesting to his upright character and calling upon Governor John A. Dix to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. In May 1871 Foster had been found guilty of the first-degree murder of merchant Avery D. Putnam. Foster had insulted a female streetcar passenger (presumably the “girl” of Clemens’s original article). When Putnam came to her defense, the men exchanged angry words, and Foster struck Putnam in the head with an iron bar, or “car hook,” which resulted in his death several days later (Wilson 1870, 983; New York Tribune: “Foster’s Plea,” 6 Mar 73, 3–4; “The Moral of the Foster Case,” 22 Mar 73, 6; see also Willson).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

5 Among the petitions in the 6 March Tribune were several from jurors who believed Foster’s crime had not been premeditated, but, as a result of the judge’s instructions, were under the impression that the law did not permit them to convict him of second-degree murder. They had therefore accompanied their verdict with a plea for mercy, assuming that it would dissuade the judge from imposing the death penalty (“Foster’s Plea,” New York Tribune, 6 Mar 73, 3).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

6 Clemens assumed (as did the Tribune) that Governor Dix would commute Foster’s sentence. But Dix denied the petition on 14 March, and Foster was hanged a week later (New York Tribune: “Foster’s Case,” 6 Mar 73, 6; “The End of the Foster Case,” 15 Mar 73, 6; “The Moral of the Foster Case,” 22 Mar 73, 6).

Click to add citation to My Citations.

7Reid’s private secretary, Donald Nicholson, first recorded Reid’s instructions using an abbreviated reporter’s shorthand (a modified form of the system devised by Isaac Pitman), then translated those notes into longhand (probably signing Reid’s initials) so that John Hay could read them and reply (Baehr, 220). Hay’s recommendation was followed: under the title “Foster’s Case,” the enclosure (beginning “I have read”) was published facing the editorial page for 10 March (5). Neither Clemens’s covering letter nor the previous dispatch was included. A Tribune editor marked the manuscript with instructions to the typesetters: he altered the salutation to read “To the Editor of the Tribune”; crossed out Clemens’s opening thirteen words (“Leave out ... that,”); wrote “stet” at the top of each sheet (pages 1, 3, and 5) to nullify Clemens’s cancel marks; altered the signature to “Mark Twain”; and added “Hartford, March 7, 1873.” beneath it.

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC), is copy-text for the letter and the dockets. MS, Ford Collection, Personal (Miscellaneous) Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN), is copy-text for the enclosure.

Previous publication: L5, 311–314; “Foster’s Case,” New York Tribune, 10 Mar 73, 5; Willson, 3; Neider 1961, 166–67; Budd 1992, 549–50, all enclosure only.

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). The enclosure belonged to journalist and businessman Gordon Lester Ford (1823–91), and was probably donated to NN in 1899.

Emendations and textual notes:

penalty • penaltly

read Foster’s Plea in T • [‘T’ partly formed]

c • [partly formed]

seem • seem ‸seem‸ [obscured by inkblot and rewritten for clarity]

maccaronian • [sic]

whe why • whey

ut • [‘t’ partly formed]