1This carte-de-visite photograph was one of two poses of the three humorists taken at the same sitting during the second week of November (see the enclosures to 24 and 25 November 1869 and 27 November 1869 to Olivia Langdon). Clemens knew John A. Lant (1840–1913) since the 1850s when they were both journeymen printers and possibly worked together in Cincinnati. After serving in the Pennsylvania Infantry as a private soldier in the Civil War, Lant went on to the editorship of several newspapers, including the Sharon (Pa.)‘Times in 1868, the Toledo Democrat in 1870, and the Toledo Sun, 1871–75, where he was both editor and publisher. The Sun, which was "devoted to free speech and radical sentiments," such as its advocacy of the Free Land League, also published the letters and other works of George Francis Train, the controversial political agitator and promoter. The paper was deemed blasphemous and obscene by Anthony Comstock of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, who had Lant arrested in 1875. Lant was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months at hard labor in the Albany Penitentiary. He was pardoned in 1877 as one of President Grant’s last official acts. Lant, after more than two decades of editing other newspapers and reformist writing, retired to a national home for disabled soldiers in 1906 and died at Florissant, Mo., in 1913 (see 28 Sept 1871 to Lant; Lant to SLC, 25 Dec 1909, CU-MARK; Missouri State Board of Health death certificate, 17 Jan 1913; Bennett 1876, 1030–31; Wilbur 2006, 1; "New Papers," Blairsville [Pa.] Press, 26 June 1868, 3; "Our Young Friend," Indiana Progress, 21 Apr 1870, 3; Rowell 1872, 147; “Journalistic,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, 11 May 1874, 1; “Obscene Literature Arrest,” New York Herald, 27 July 1875, 13; "Two Extraordinary Pardons," New York Herald-Tribune, 21 Mar 1877, 2; “Editor John A. Lant Dead,” Dobbs Ferry [N.Y.] Register, 24 Jan 1913, 11).