Mark Twain Project :: Letters :: : an electronic text

To Jesse M. Leathers
5 October 1875 • Hartford, Conn.
(Unidentified Hartford newspaper, CU-MARK,
reprinting the Louisville Ledger, UCCL 01267)

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[Hartford], October 5.

[Dear Sir]:1—

I have heard cousin James Lampton speak of his Earldom a good while ago, but I have never felt much interest in the matter, I not being heir to the title. But if I were heir to the title [&] thought I had a reasonable chance to win it I would not cast away my right without at least making enough of a struggle to satisfy my self-respect.

You ask me what I think of the chances of the American heirs.2 I answer frankly that I [think] them inconceivably slender. The present earl of Durham has been in undisputed possession thirty-five years; his father, the first earl, held possession forty-three years. Seventy-eight years’ peaceable possession is a pretty solid wall to buck against before a court composed of the House of Lords of England—backed, as it seems to be, by a limitless bank account. It cost the Tichborne claimant upwards of $400,000 to get as far as he did with his claim. Unless the American Lamptons can begin their fight with a still greater sum, I think it would be hardly worth while for them to go into the contest at all. If the title & estates were in abeyance for lack of an heir you might stand some chance, but as things now are I cannot doubt that the present Viscount of Lampton (lucky youth!), son of the reigning Earl, will succeed to the honors & the money, all in due time. That lad was born lucky, anyhow—for he was a twin & beat his brother into the world only five minutes—& a wonderfully valuable five minutes it was, too, as that other twin feels every day, of his life, I suspect.3

No, indeed. The present possessors are [too] well fortified. They have held their lands in peace for over six hundred years; the blood of Edward III. & [Edward IV.] flows in their veins; they are up in the bluest-blooded aristocracy of England. The [court that] would try the case is made up, in a large measure, of their own relatives; they have plenty of money to fight with. Tackle them? It would be too much like taking Gibraltar with blank cartridges.

I heartily wish you might succeed, but I feel sure that you cannot.

Truly yours.

[Samuel L. Clemens].

Jesse M. Leathers, Esq., Louisville, Ky.

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

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1 Jesse Madison Leathers (1846–87) was a distant kinsman of Clemens’s. He was born in Mercer County, Kentucky, and at the age of three went with his widowed mother to live in a Shaker community. At fifteen he enlisted in the Union army. He was wounded at Chickamauga, and honorably discharged in 1864. Since the war he had been employed in the insurance business in Lexington. He was married, and by 1875 had two daughters. He had recently used the business stationery of John Hess Leathers, a cousin, for a letter to Clemens (CU-MARK):

UCLC32213

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Caroline Clemens Settle (1806–53) was the sister of Clemens’s father. None of her ten known children was named “Jerome.” President James Monroe (1758–1831) was the nephew of Leathers’s great-great-grandfather. No Lampton family connection has been established for Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. For Henry Watterson’s Lampton connection, see 8? Nov 74 to Watterson, n. 1. The article in the Owensboro Monitor has not been found. The Louisville Ledger, in first printing the present letter, drew on that article for an explanation of the Lampton family legend (see the next note). The Ledger presumably got the letter, which Clemens did not write for publication, directly from Jesse Leathers. No form of the newspaper is known to be extant (Lampton 1990, 3–4, 7, 11, 88, 175–81, 212–13; Selby, 11).

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2 According to family legend (mentioned in Leathers’s last “P. S.”), Leathers’s great grandfather, Samuel Lampton (1750–1835), was the brother of William Lampton (1724–90), Clemens’s great grandfather. The two brothers supposedly emigrated to Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century, relinquishing any claim to the ancient Lambton family estate in Durham, England. Leathers believed that Samuel, as the oldest son, might have been the rightful heir. The actual Lampton genealogy is more complicated: Samuel and William were actually first cousins, descending from their grandfather, William Lampton (1682–1722) of Virginia, through two different wives. (William was therefore the great-great-great grandfather of both Clemens and Leathers.) William was born in America; his father, Mark Lampton, had emigrated from Durham, England, in 1664. There is no evidence, however, that Mark Lampton was related to the Lambtons of Durham (Lampton 1990, 3–5, 7, 23, 30, 212; Inds, 331; Leathers to SLC, 21 Oct 75, CU-MARK). In about 1890, in “Jane Lampton Clemens,” Clemens gave his version:

My mother, with her large nature and liberal sympathies, was not intended for an aristocrat, yet through her breeding she was one. . . . I knew that privately she was proud that the Lambtons, now Earls of Durham, had occupied the family lands for nine hundred years; that they were feudal lords of Lambton Castle and holding the high position of ancestors of hers when the Norman Conqueror came over to divert the Englishry. . . . “Col. Sellers” was a Lampton, and a tolerably near relative of my mother’s; and when he was alive, poor old airy soul, one of the earliest things a stranger was likely to hear from his lips was some reference to the “head of our line,” flung off with a painful casualness that was wholly beneath criticism as a work of art. It compelled inquiry, of course; it was intended to compel it. Then followed the whole disastrous history of how the Lambton heir came to this country a hundred and fifty years or so ago, disgusted with that foolish fraud, hereditary aristocracy; and married, and shut himself away from the world in the remotenesses of the wilderness, and went to breeding ancestors of future American Claimants, while at home in England he was given up as dead and his titles and estates turned over to his younger brother, usurper and personally responsible for the perverse and unseatable usurpers of our day. And the Colonel always spoke with studied and courtly deference of the Claimant of his day,—a second cousin of his,—and referred to him with entire seriousness as “the Earl.” “The Earl” was a man of parts, and might have accomplished something for himself but for the calamitous accident of his birth. He was a Kentuckian, and a well meaning man; but he had no money, and no time to earn any; for all his time was taken up in trying to get me, and others of the tribe, to furnish him a capital to fight his claim through the House of Lords with. (Inds, 86–87)

“Col. Sellers” was James J. Lampton; “the Earl” was Jesse Leathers.

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3 The first Earl of Durham, John George Lambton (b. 1792), inherited the family estate in 1797, but was not made an earl until 1833. Upon his death in 1840, his son George Frederick d’Arcy Lambton (1828–79) became the second earl, and had twin sons, born in 1855: John George (d. 1928), who became the third earl, and Frederick William. Henry Watterson recalled hearing the “old wives’ tales of estates and titles” as a boy, and—like Clemens—treated them with “shocking irreverence.” When Clemens was in London in 1873, during the Tichborne trial, he told Watterson that he had

investigated this Durham business down at the Herald’s office. There’s nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out of the Earldom of Durham a hundred years ago. There were never any estates. The title lapsed. The present earldom is a new creation—not the same family at all. (Watterson 1910, 373)

(Many years later Clemens admitted to Watterson that he had fabricated the information about the lapsed earldom to improve the story.) Clemens’s research probably stimulated his interest in the literary potential of Leathers and his aspirations to the earldom. In 1881 he encouraged Leathers to write his autobiography. Subsequently he twice drew on the story himself—in 1883 for a play he wrote in collaboration with Howells, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, and in 1892 for The American Claimant, in which he gave the name “Lathers” to the claimant who preceded Mulberry Sellers (Lodge, 664–65; Lampton 1990, 187, 193–97, 210–11; MTHL, 2:869–71; SLC: 1883; 1892, 19–24).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

“Mark Twain’s Blue Blood,” clipping from an unidentified newspaper in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK), reprinting the Louisville Ledger of unknown date. The clipping, whose verso indicates that its source was the Hartford Evening Post, was not found in the daily issue of that newspaper, and therefore its source was probably the weekly edition, no copy of which has been located. The Ledger for 1875 is likewise not known to be extant.

glyph Previous publication: L6, 545–48.

glyph Emendations and textual notes:

Hartford • Hartford

Dear Sir • Dear Sir

& • and [here and hereafter]

think • thing

too • to

Edward IV. • Eward IV.

court that • court

Samuel L. Clemens • Samuel L. clemens