To Jane Lampton Clemens and Family
1 June 1867 • New York, N.Y.
(MS: NPV, UCCL 00132)

Westminster Hotel,
New York, June 1.

Dear Folks—

I know I ought to write oftener (just got your last,) & more fully, but I can not overcome my repugnance to telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do. Then, what have I left to write about? Manifestly nothing.

It isn’t any use for me to talk about the voyage, because I can have no faith in that voyage or any other voyage till the ship [ un ]is under way. How do I know she will ever sail? I My passage is paid, & if the ship sails, I sail in her—but I make no calculations, have bought no cigars, no sea-going clothing,—have made no preparation whatever—shall not pack my trunk till the morning we sail. Yet my hands are full of what I am going to do the day before we sail—& what isn’t done that day will go undone.1

All I do know or feel, is, that I am wild with impatience to move—move—Move! Half a dozen times I have wished I had sailed long ago in some ship that wasn’t going to keep me chained here to chafe for lagging ages while she got ready to go. Curse the endless delays! They always kill me—they make me neglect every duty & then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month. I do more mean things, the moment I get a chance to fold my hands & sit down than ever I can get forgiveness for.

Yes, we are to meet at Mr Beach’s next Thursday night, & I suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in swallow-tails, white kids & everything en régle.2

I am resigned to Rev. Mr. Hutchinson’s or anybody’s else’s supervision. I don’t mind it.3 I am fixed. I have got a splendid, immoral, tobacco-smoking, wine-drinking, godless room-mate who is as good & true & right-minded a man as ever lived—a man [ whole whose ]blameless conduct & example will always be an eloquent sermon to all who shall come within their influence.4 But send on the professional preachers—there are none I like better to converse with—if they ain’t narrow minded & bigoted they make good companions.

I asked them to send the N.Y. Weekly to you—no charge. I am not going to write for it—like all other papers that pay one splendidly, it circulates among stupid people & the canaille. I have made no arrangement with any New York paper—I will see about that Monday or Tuesday.5

Love to all.

Good bye

Yrs affy

Sam

Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary

Editorial Signs

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1 Clemens’s doubt whether the Quaker City would ever sail was prompted at least in part by General Sherman’s decision to withdraw. On 27 May, the Brooklyn Eagle reminded readers of Captain Duncan’s recent difficulties over Beecher’s withdrawal in April, and pointed out that Duncan had resolved this earlier problem

by securing another lion,—General Sherman.... The advantage[s] of having the great military hero with the party were duly expatiated upon; the honors and attention he would receive at every place the party visited, and which of course the company at large would come in for a share of, were set forth, and the tickets began to go off again. Now comes a rumor that General Sherman is going to desert—that he cannot arrange his private affairs so as to leave the country for so long a time as the trip will take. Here is a bombshell on Captain Duncan’s quarter-deck? Can the rumor be true? We must demand of the General, as we did of Mr. Beecher, a categorical answer forthwith, whether or not he goes to Jerusalem with the Duncan party. Meantime we are assured that Mark Twain will not back out, and that Maggie Mitchell is going along, so that if the party loses in clerical and military distinction it will make up in the material for social enjoyment. (“Is General Sherman Going to Palestine?” 27 May 67, 2)

In a letter dated 25 May and published in the principal New York newspapers on 31 May, Sherman made it clear that “circumstances have occurred to prevent the fulfillment” of his intention to go to Europe with the Duncan party. Sherman’s command covered vast areas of Indian territory, and because “various tribes of Indians ... being pressed from every quarter, have become nervous, excited, and, in some cases, positively hostile,” he could not leave his post for so long a period (“Major-General Sherman,” New York Tribune, 31 May 67, 5). Shortly after the Quaker City departed in June, the Times described the effect that the withdrawals of Beecher and Sherman seemed to have had on the passenger list:

This excursion was set on foot some four months ago by Capt. Duncan, and was originally designed to embrace a select and somewhat exclusive party, but before the steamer sailed it was found necessary to lower the standard a little, and ordinary persons with $1,200 to spend were enabled to purchase tickets. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who was early announced to be of the party, found it inconvenient to make the trip, and more recently Gen. Sherman was compelled to forego the pleasure; so that after the withdrawal of these two leading names from the bill of attractions, the passenger list gradually diminished until the steamer was obliged to sail with about half the complement of names provided for in the original programme [i.e., half of 110]. Nevertheless the party will doubtless be equally jolly, if not quite so select as at first contemplated. (“The Pleasure Excursion to Europe and Palestine—Sailing of the Quaker City,” 9 June 67, 8)

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2 Moses Beach had postponed his own decision to go until mid-May, when he finally wrote Duncan a letter (widely reprinted) in which he praised the plans for the excursion and promised to be on board when “the Quaker City parts Company with that Steamboat escort down the bay, which you propose to provide for the friends of her passengers” (“The Mediterranean Excursion,” Brooklyn Eagle, 18 May 67, 2). Beach was accompanied by his seventeen-year-old daughter, Emeline (Emma), and in Paris they would meet his son Charles, who took another ship to Europe. A member of Plymouth Church since 1854, Beach lived next door to Beecher on Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, and seems to have assumed something of Beecher’s role when Beecher himself could not go. He wrote a series of letters to the Sun about the excursion, and before departure he provided passage money for the unofficial photographer of the trip, William E. James (Hirst and Rowles, 15–17). On 6 June the passengers were to convene at his home “to consult concerning the voyage, and to get acquainted.” The Sun reported that the seventy guests present enjoyed an “excellent repast,” and that “Mark Twain ... enlivened the company with ebul[l]itions of wit” (SLC 1867 [MT00552]; “Brooklyn,” New York Sun, 7 June 67, 4).

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3 The Reverend Eleazer Carter Hutchinson (1804–76), a fellow excursionist and evidently an acquaintance of Jane Clemens’s, in 1855 founded the Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church in St. Louis, where he was currently rector. Educated at Brown University and Princeton Theological Seminary, he served as president of Kemper College in 1840–45, and in 1845–52 as pastor of St. George’s Church, both in St. Louis (Conard, 3:337, 523; Scharf, 2:1724–26).

Carte de visite of the Reverend E. Carter Hutchinson, preserved and identified by Colonel William R. Denny. Collection of Mrs. Theodore Whitfield. See p. 51 n. 3.

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4 Clemens described Daniel Slote (1828?–82) in an Alta letter written on 28 May as “a nice moral room-mate” who “has got many shirts, and a History of the Holy Land, a cribbage-board and three thousand cigars. I will not have to carry any baggage at all.” Fellow passenger (Confederate) Colonel William Ritenour Denny recorded in his journal that Slote was “a short, fat chubby fellow that has a portly face, a clean black eye, an open countenance, that loves good living and laughf’s and grows fat over it, clever to a fault.” Slote—who, like Clemens, was a Mason—was co-owner of Slote and Woodman, a blank-book and stationery manufacturer in New York (SLC 1867; Denny, entry for 11 Sept; “Daniel Slote,” New York Herald, 14 Feb 82, 5; Wilson 1867, 957; “Business Notes,” Publishers’ Weekly 14 [27 July 78]: 124).

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5 Street and Smith’s New York Weekly had been courting Clemens as a contributor since early 1867 and by 27 June had reprinted five of his Sandwich Islands letters. Within a week, Clemens arranged to write letters during the trip for two other New York newspapers (see 2? Feb 67 to MEC, n. 3, and 7 June 67 to Bowen, n. 3).

Description of Texts and Provenance

Source text(s):

MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).

Previous publication: L2, 49–53; MTB, 1:321–22, excerpts; MTL, 1:125–26.

Provenance:see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.

Emendations and textual notes:

un • [‘n’ partly formed]

whole whose • whol se