Remembering Our Civil
War Heritage and Heroes:
1861-1865
Samuel Clemens Goes to War and Bails
on the Whole Affair
By Ken Robison
For The River Press
November 26-December 3, 2014
This is the thirty-second installment of a
monthly series commemorating Union and Confederate veterans of the Civil War
who came to Montana during or after the war. As a Christmas
treat this month features Mark Twain who’s time in the Confederate Army proved a
colossal failure. Descendants of Montana Civil War veterans are encouraged to
send their stories to mtcivilwar@yahoo.com.
If the
Confederate Army had fought, as did young Samuel Langhorne Clemens [aka Mark
Twain], the Civil War would have lasted but a matter of weeks. Clements was not
a disinterested soldier, in fact he was keenly interested, but unfortunately
for the Confederacy, his interest was how to save his skin and escape from
Confederate service. And this he did within weeks.
After growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, young Clemens
worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. The outbreak of the Civil
War in April 1861 brought a halt to steamboat traffic on the Mississippi. Without
a job, Clemens with friends joined a Confederate volunteer militia, the Marion
Rangers, intending to serve with General Sterling Price’s Missouri State Guard.
The Rangers would only drill for two weeks before Clemens
quit the group. Why he joined and why he quit remain somewhat of a mystery. He
defended his actions over the years by describing his confusion while enrolling
and explained he was ignorant of the politics behind the war. The best insight
into his thinking comes in his tantalizing fictionalized account of his wartime
experiences titled “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” True of
not, it is great fun and vintage Twain.
In Clemens own words, he
explained why he didn’t do anything in the war,
“You have heard
from a great many people who did something in the war, is it not fair and right
that you listen a little moment to one who started out to do something in it
but didn't? Thousands entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped
out again permanently. These, by their very numbers, are respectable and
therefore entitled to a sort of voice, not a loud one, but a modest one, not a
boastful one but an apologetic one. They ought not be allowed much space among
better people, people who did something. I grant that, but they ought at least
be allowed to state why they didn't do anything and also to explain the process
by which they didn't do anything. Surely this kind of light must have some sort
of value.
“Out west [in
Missouri] there was a good deal of confusion in men's minds during the first
months of the great trouble, a good deal of unsettledness, of leaning first
this way then that, and then the other way. It was hard for us to get our
bearings. I call to mind an example of this. I was piloting on the Mississippi
when the news came that South Carolina had gone out of the Union on the 20th of
December, 1860. My pilot mate was a New Yorker. He was strong for the Union; so
was I. But he would not listen to me with any patience, my loyalty was
smirched, to his eye, because my father had owned slaves. I said in palliation
of this dark fact that I had heard my father say, some years before he died,
that slavery was a great wrong and he would free the solitary Negro he then
owned if he could think it right to give away the property of the family when
he was so straitened in means. My mate retorted that a mere impulse was
nothing, anyone could pretend to a good impulse, and went on decrying my
Unionism and libeling my ancestry.
“A month later
the secession atmosphere had considerably thickened on the Lower Mississippi
and I became a rebel; so did he. We were together in New Orleans the 26th of
January, when Louisiana went out of the Union. He did his fair share of the
rebel shouting but was opposed to letting me do mine. He said I came of bad
stock, of a father who had been willing to set slaves free. In the following
summer he was piloting a Union gunboat and shouting for the Union again and I
was in the Confederate army. I held his note for some borrowed money. He was
one of the most upright men I ever knew but he repudiated that note without
hesitation because I was a rebel and the son of a man who owned slaves.
“In that summer
of 1861 the first wash of the wave of war broke upon the shores of Missouri.
Our state was invaded by the Union forces. They took possession of St. Louis,
Jefferson Barracks, and some other points. The governor, Calib [Claiborne F.]
Jackson) issued his proclamation calling out fifty thousand militia to repel
the invader.
“I was visiting
in the small town where my boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County.
Several of us got together in a secret place by night and formed ourselves into
a military company. One Tom Lyman, a young fellow of a good deal of spirit but
of no military experience, was made captain; I was made second lieutenant. We
had no first lieutenant, I do not know why, it was so long ago. There were
fifteen of us. By the advice of an innocent connected with the organization we
called ourselves the Marion Rangers. . .
“We waited for
a dark night, for caution and secrecy were necessary, then toward midnight we
stole in couples and from various directions to the Griggith place beyond town.
From that place we set out together on foot. Hannibal lies at the extreme southeastern
corner of Marion County, on the Mississippi river. Our objective point was the
hamlet of New London, ten miles away in Ralls County.
“The first hour
was all fun, all idle nonsense and laughter. But that could not be kept up. The
steady drudging became like work, the play had somehow oozed out of it, the
stillness of the woods and the somberness of the night began to throw a
depressing influence over the spirits of the boys and presently the talking
died out and each person shut himself up in his own thoughts. During the last
half of the second hour nobody said a word.
“Now we
approached a log farmhouse where, according to reports, there was a guard of
five Union soldiers. Lyman called a halt, and there, in the deep gloom of the
overhanging branches, he began to whisper a plan of assault upon the house,
which made the gloom more depressing than it was before. We realized with a
cold suddenness that here was no jest--we were standing face to face with
actual war. We were equal to the occasion. In our response there was no
hesitation, no indecision. We said that if Lyman wanted to meddle with those
soldiers he could go ahead and do it, but if he waited for us to follow him he
would wait a long time.
“Lyman urged,
pleaded, tried to shame us into it, but it had no effect. Our course was plain
in our minds, our minds were made up. We would flank the farmhouse, go out
around. And that was what we did.
“We struck into
the woods and entered upon a rough time, stumbling over roots, getting tangled
in vines and torn by briers. At last we reached an open place in a safe region
and we sat down, blown and hot, to cool off and nurse our scratches and
bruises. Lyman was annoyed but the rest of us were cheerful. We had flanked the
farmhouse. We had made our first military movement and it was a success. We had
nothing to fret about, we were feeling just the other way. Horse play and
laughing began again. The expedition had become a holiday frolic once more.
“Then we had
two more hours of dull trudging and ultimate silence and depression. Then about
dawn, we straggled into New London, soiled, heel blistered, fagged with our
little march, and all of us, except Stevens, in a sour and raspy humor and
privately down on the war. We stacked our shabby old shotguns in Colonel
Ralls's barn and then went in a body and breakfasted with that veteran of the Mexican
war.
“Afterward he
took us to a distant meadow, and there, in the shade of a tree, we listened to
an old fashioned speech from him, full of gunpowder and glory, full of that
adjective piling, mixed metaphor and windy declamation which was regarded as
eloquence in that ancient time and region and then he swore on a bible to be
faithful to the State of Missouri and drive all invaders from her soil no
matter whence they may come or under what flag they might march. This mixed us
considerably and we could not just make out what service we were involved in,
but Colonel Ralls, the practiced politician and phrase juggler, was not
similarly in doubt. He knew quite clearly he had invested us in the cause of
the Southern Confederacy. He closed the solemnities by belting around me the
sword which his neighbor, Colonel Brown, had worn at Buena Vista and Molino del
Ray and he accompanied this act with another impressive blast.
“Then we formed
in line of battle and marched four hours to a shady and pleasant piece of woods
on the border of a far reaching expanse of a flowery prairie. It was an
enchanting region for war, our kind of war.
“We pierced the
forest about half a mile and took up a strong position with some low and rocky
hills behind us, and a purling limpid creek in front. Straightaway half the
command was in swimming and the other half fishing . . .
“We occupied an
old maple sugar camp whose half rotted troughs were still propped against the trees.
A long corn crib served for sleeping quarters for the battalion. On our left,
half a mile away, were Mason's farm and house, and he was a friend to the
cause. Shortly after noon the farmers began to arrive from several different
directions with mules and horses for our use, and these they lent us for as long
as the war might last, which, they judged, might be about three months. The animals
were of all sizes all colors and all breeds. They were mainly young and frisky
and nobody in the command could stay on them long at a time, for we were town
boys and ignorant of horsemanship.
“The creature
that fell to my share was a very small mule, and yet so quick and active he
could throw me off without difficulty and it did this whenever I got on. Then
it would bray, stretching its neck out, laying its ears back and spreading its
jaws till you could see down to its works. If I took it by the bridle and tried
to lead it off the grounds it would sit down and brace back and no one could
ever budge it. However, I was not entirely destitute of military resources and I
did presently manage to spoil this game, for I had seen many a steamboat
aground in my time and knew a trick or two which even a grounded mule would be
obliged to respect. There was a well by the corncrib so I substituted thirty
fathom of rope for the bridle and fetched him home with the windlass.
“I will
anticipate here sufficiently to say that we did learn to ride after some days'
practice, but never well. We could not learn to like our animals. They were not
choice ones and most of them had annoying peculiarities of one kind or another .
. .
“However, I
will get back to where I was, our first afternoon in the sugar camp. The sugar
troughs came very handy as horse troughs and we had plenty of corn to fill them
with. I ordered Sergeant Bowers to feed my mule, but he said that if I reckoned
he went to war to be a dry nurse to a mule it wouldn't take me very long to
find out my mistake. I believed that this was insubordination but I was full of
uncertainties about everything military so I let the matter pass and went and
ordered Smith, the blacksmith's apprentice, to feed the mule, but he merely
gave me a large, cold, sarcastic grin, such as an ostensibly seven year old
horse gives you when you lift up his lip and find he is fourteen, and turned
his back on me. I then went to the captain and asked if it were not right and
proper and military for me to have an orderly. He said it was, but as there was
only one orderly in the corps, it was but right he himself should have Bowers
on his staff. Bowers said he wouldn't serve on anyone's staff and if anybody
thought he could make him, let him try. So, of course, the matter had to be
dropped, there was no other way.
“Next, nobody
would cook. It was considered a degradation so we had no dinner. We lazed the
rest of the pleasant afternoon away, some dozing under trees, some smoking cob
pipes and talking sweethearts and war, others playing games. By late supper
time all hands were famished and to meet the difficulty, all hands turned to on
an equal footing, and gathered wood, built fires, and cooked the evening meal.
“Afterward everything was smooth for a while
then trouble broke out between the corporal and the sergeant, each claiming to
rank the other. Nobody knew which was the higher office so Lyman had to settle
the matter by making the rank of both officers equal. The commander of an
ignorant crew like that has many troubles and vexations which probably do not
occur in the regular army at all.
“However, with
the song singing and yarn spinning around the campfire everything presently
became serene again, and by and by we raked the corn down one level in one end
of the crib and all went to bed on it, tying a horse to the door so he would neigh
if anyone tried to get in . . .
“We had some
horsemanship drill every forenoon, then, afternoons, we rode off here and there
in squads a few miles and visited the farmer's girls and had a youthful good
time and got an honest dinner or supper, and then home again to camp, happy and
content.
“For a time,
life was idly delicious. It was perfect. There was no war to mar it. Then came
some farmers with an alarm one day. They said it was rumored that the enemy
were advancing in our direction from over Hyde's prairie. The result was a
sharp stir among us and general consternation. It was a rude awakening from our
pleasant trance. The rumor was but a rumor, nothing definite about it, so in
the confusion we did not know which way to retreat.
“Lyman was not
for retreating at all in these uncertain circumstances but he found that if he
tried to maintain that attitude he would fare badly, for the command were in no
humor to put up with insubordination. So he yielded the point and called a
council of war, to consist of himself and three other officers, but the
privates made such a fuss about being left out we had to allow them to remain,
for they were already present and doing most of the talking too. The question
was, which way to retreat; but all were so flurried that nobody even seemed to
have even a guess to offer. Except Lyman. He explained in a few calm words,
that inasmuch as the enemy were approaching from over Hyde's prairie our course
was simple. All we had to do was not retreat toward him, another direction
would suit our purposes perfectly. Everybody saw in a moment how true this was
and how wise, so Lyman got a great many compliments. It was now decide that we
should fall back on Mason's farm.
“It was after
dark by this time and as we could not know how soon the enemy might arrive, it
did not seem best to try to take the horses and things with us, so we only took
the guns and ammunition, and started at once. The route was very rough and
hilly and rocky, and presently the night grew very black and rain began to
fall, so we had a troublesome time of it, struggling and stumbling along in the
dark and soon some person slipped and fell, and then the next person behind
stumbled over him and fell, and so did the rest, one after the other, and then
Bowers came along with the keg of powder in his arms, while the command were
all mixed together, arms and legs on the muddy slope, and so he fell, of
course, with the keg and this started the whole detachment down the hill in a
body and they landed in a brook at the bottom in a pile and each that was
undermost was pulling the hair, scratching and biting those that were on top of
him and those that were being scratched and bitten scratching and biting the
rest in their turn, and all saying they would die before they would ever go to
war again if they ever got out of this brook this time and the invader might
rot for all they cared, and the country along with him, and all such talk as
that which was dismal to hear and take part in, in such smothered, low voices,
and such a grisly dark place and so wet, and the enemy, maybe, coming along at
any moment.
“The keg of
powder was lost, and the guns too; so the growling and complaining continued
straight along while the brigade pawed around the pasty hill side and slopped
around in the brook hunting for these things; consequently we lost considerable
time at this, and then we heard a sound and held our breath and listened, and
it seemed to be the enemy coming, though it could have been a cow, for it had a
cough like a cow, but we did not wait but left a couple of guns behind and
struck out for Mason's again as briskly as we could scramble along in the dark.
But we got lost presently in among the rugged little ravines and wasted a deal
of time finding the way again so it was after nine when we reached Mason's
stile at last; and then before we could open our mouths to give the countersign
several dogs came bounding over the fence with a great riot and noise, and each
of them took a soldier by the slack of his trousers and began to back away with
him. We could not shoot the dogs without endangering the persons they were
attached to so we had to look on helpless at what was perhaps the most
mortifying spectacle of the Civil War.
“There was light enough and to spare, for the
Mason's had now run out on the porch with candles in their hands. The old man
and his son came and undid the dogs without difficulty, all but Bowers's; but
they couldn't undo his dog, they didn't know his combination, he was of the
bull kind and seemed to be set with a Yale time-lock, but they got him loose at
last with some scalding water, of which Bowers got his share and returned
thanks . . .
“We now went
into the house and they began to ask us a world of questions, whereby it
presently came out that we did not know anything concerning who or what we were
running from; so the old gentleman made himself very frank and said we were a
curious breed of soldiers and guessed we could be depended on to end up the war
in time, because no governor could afford the expense of the shoe leather we
should cost it trying to follow us around.
"’Marion
Rangers! Good name, b'gosh,’ said he. And wanted to know why we hadn't had a
picket guard at the place where the road entered the prairie, and why we hadn't
sent out a scouting party to spy out the enemy and bring us an account of his
strength, and so on, before jumping up and stampeding out of a strong position
upon a mere vague rumor, and so on and so forth, till he made us all feel
shabbier than the dogs had done, not so half enthusiastically welcome. So we
went to bed shamed and low spirited . . .
“Then we got a
little sleep. But after all we had gone through, our activities were not over
for the night, for about two o'clock in the morning we heard a shout of warning
from down the lane, accompanied by a chorus from all the dogs, and in a moment
everybody was up and flying around to find out what the alarm was about. The
alarmist was a horseman who gave notice that a detachment of Union soldiers was
on its way from Hannibal with orders to capture and hang any bands like ours which
it could find. Farmer Mason was in a flurry this time himself. He hurried us
out of the house with all haste, and sent one of his negroes with us to show us
where to hide ourselves and our telltale guns among the ravines half a mile
away. It was raining heavily.
“We struck down
the lane, then across some rocky pasture land which offered good advantages for
stumbling; consequently we were down in the mud most of the time, and every
time a man went down he black guarded the war and everybody connected with it,
and gave himself the master dose of all for being so foolish as to go into it.
At last we reached the wooded mouth of a ravine, and there we huddled ourselves
under the streaming trees and sent the negro back home. It was a dismal and
heart breaking time.
“We were like
to be drowned with the rain, deafened with the howling wind and the booming
thunder, and blinded by the lightning. It was indeed a wild night. The
drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still was the
reflection that the halter might end us before we were a day older. A death of
this shameful sort had not occurred to us as being among the possibilities of
war. It took the romance all out of the campaign and turned our dreams of glory
into a repulsive nightmare. As for doubting that so barbarous an order had been
given, not one of us did that.
“The long night
wore itself out at last, and then the Negro came to us with the news that the
alarm had manifestly been a false one and that breakfast would soon be ready.
Straightaway we were light-hearted again and the world was bright and full of
life, as full of hope and promise as ever; for we were young then . . .
“The Masons
gave us a Missouri country breakfast in Missourian abundance, and we needed it.
Hot biscuits, hot wheat bread, prettily crossed in a lattice pattern on top,
hot corn pone, fried chicken, bacon, coffee, eggs, milk, buttermilk etc. and
the world may be confidently challenged to furnish the equal of such a
breakfast, as is cooked in the South.
“We stayed
several days at Mason's . . . Captain Lyman had taken a hint from Mason's talk,
and he now gave orders that our camp should be guarded from surprise by the
posting of pickets. I was ordered to place a picket at the forks of the road in
Hyde's prairie. Night shut down black and threatening. I told Sergeant Bowers
to go out to that place and stay till midnight, and, just as I was expecting,
he said he wouldn't do it. I tried to get others to go but all refused. Some
excused themselves on account of the weather, but the rest were frank enough to
say they wouldn't go in any kind of weather. This kind of thing sounds odd now,
and impossible, but there was no surprise in it at the time. On the contrary,
it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. There were scores of little camps
scattered over Missouri where the same thing was happening. These camps were
composed of young men who had been born and reared to a sturdy independence and
who did not know what it meant to be ordered around by Tom, Dick, and Harry,
who they had known familiarly all their lives in the village or the farm. It is
quite within the probabilities that this same thing was happening all over the
South . . .
“The camps in
our part of Missouri were under Brigadier-General Thomas A. Harris [Second
Division, Missouri State Guard]. He was a townsman of ours, a first rate fellow
and well liked, but we had all familiarly known him as the sole and
modest-salaried operator in the telegraph office, where he had to send about
one dispatch a week in ordinary times and two when there was a rush of
business. Consequently, when he appeared in our midst one day on the wing, and
delivered a military command of some sort in a large military fashion, nobody
was surprised at the response which he got from the assembled soldiery.
"’Oh, now
what'll you take to don't, Tom Harris?’
“It was quite
the natural thing. One might justly imagine that we were hopeless material for
the war. And so we seemed in our ignorant state, but there were those among us
who afterward learned the grim trade, learned to obey like machines, became
valuable soldiers, fought all through the war, and came out at the end with
excellent records. One of the very boys who refused to go out on picket duty
that night and called me an ass for thinking he would expose himself to danger
in such a foolhardy way, had become distinguished for intrepidity before he was
a year older.
“I did secure
my picket that night, not by authority but by diplomacy. I got Bowers to go by
agreeing to exchange ranks with him for the time being and go along and stand
the watch with him as his subordinate. We stayed out there a couple of dreary
hours in the pitchy darkness and the rain, with nothing to modify the
dreariness but Bower's monotonous growling at the war and the weather, then we
began to nod and presently found it next to impossible to stay in the saddle,
so we gave up the tedious job and went back to the camp without interruption or
objection from anybody and the enemy could have done the same, for there were
no sentries. Everybody was asleep, at midnight there was nobody to send out
another picket so none was sent. We never tried to establish a watch at night
again, as far as I remember, but we generally kept a picket out in the daytime
. . .
“Our scares were
frequent. Every few days rumors would come that the enemy were approaching. In
these cases we always fell back on some other camp of ours; we never stayed
where we were. But the rumors always turned out to be false, so at last we even
began to grow indifferent to them. One night a negro was sent to our corn crib
with the same old warning, the enemy was hovering in our neighbourhood. We all
said, “Let him hover.”
“We resolved to
stay still and be comfortable. It was a fine warlike resolution, and no doubt
we all felt the stir of it in our veins--for a moment. We had been having a
very jolly time, that was full of horseplay and schoolboy hilarity, but that
cooled down and presently the fast waning fire of forced jokes and forced
laughs died out altogether and the company became silent. Silent and nervous.
And soon uneasy—worried and apprehensive. We had said we would stay and we were
committed. We could have been persuaded to go but there was nobody brave enough
to suggest it.
“An
almost noiseless movement began in the dark by a general but unvoiced impulse.
When the movement was completed, each man knew that he was not the only person
who had crept to the front wall and had his eye at a crack between the logs.
No, we were all there, all there with our hearts in our throats and staring out
towards the sugar-troughs where the forest footpath came through. It was late
and there was a deep woodsy stillness everywhere. There was a veiled moonlight
which was only just strong enough to enable us to mark the general shapes of
objects.
“Presently a muffled sound caught our ears
and we recognized the hoof-beats of a horse or horses. And right away, a figure
appeared in the forest path; it could have been made of smoke, its mass had such
little sharpness of outline. It was a man on horseback, and it seemed to me
that there were others behind him. I got a hold of a gun in the dark, and
pushed it through a crack between the logs, hardly knowing what I was doing, I
was so dazed with fright. Somebody said "Fire!" I pulled the trigger,
I seemed to see a hundred flashes and a hundred reports, then I saw the man
fall down out of the saddle. My first feeling was of surprised gratification;
my first impulse was an apprentice-sportsman's impulse to run and pick up his
game.
“Somebody said,
hardly audibly, "Good, we've got him. Wait for the rest!" But the
rest did not come. There was not a sound, not the whisper of a leaf; just the
perfect stillness, an uncanny kind of stillness which was all the more uncanny
on account of the damp, earthy, late night smells now rising and pervading it.
Then, wondering, we crept out stealthily and approached the man. When we got to
him, the moon revealed him distinctly. He was laying on his back with his arms
abroad, his mouth was open and his chest was heaving with long gasps, and his
white shirt front was splashed with blood. The thought shot through me that I
was a murderer, that I had killed a man, a man who had never done me any harm.
That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow. I was down by
him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead, and I would have given
anything then, my own life freely, to make him again what he had been five
minutes before. And all the boys seemed to be feeling the same way; they hung
over him, full of pitying interest, and tried all they could to help him, and
said all sorts of regretful things. They had forgotten all about the enemy,
they thought only of this one forlorn unit of the foe.
“Once my imagination persuaded me that the
dying man gave me a reproachful look out of the shadow of his eyes, and it
seemed to me that I could rather that he had stabbed me than he had done that.
He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep about his wife and his child,
and, I thought with a new despair, "This thing that I have done does not
end with him; it falls upon them too, and they never did me any harm, any more
than he."
“In a little
while the man was dead. He was killed in war, killed in fair and legitimate
war, killed in battles as you may say, and yet he was as sincerely mourned by
the opposing force as if he had been their brother. The boys stood there a
half-hour sorrowing over him and recalling the details of the tragedy, and
wondering who he might be and if he was a spy, and saying if they had it to do
over again, they would not hurt him unless he attacked them first. It soon
turned out that mine was not the only shot fired; there were five others, a
division of the guilt which was a great relief to me since it in some degree
lightened and diminished the burden I was carrying. There were six shots fired
at once but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heated imagination
had magnified my one shot into a volley.
“The man was
not in uniform and was not armed. He was a stranger in the country, that was
all we ever found out about him. The thought of him got to preying on me every
night, I could not get rid of it. I could not drive it away, the taking of that
unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war,
that all war must just be the killing of strangers against whom you feel no
personal animosity, strangers who in other circumstances you would help if you
found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was
spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful
business, that war was intended for men and I for a child's nurse. I resolved
to retire from this avocation of sham soldier-ship while I could retain some
remnant of my self-respect. These morbid thoughts clung to me against reason,
for at the bottom I did not believe I had touched this man. The law of
probabilities decreed me guiltless of his blood for in all my small experiences
with guns, I had not hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my
best to hit him. Yet there was no solace in the thought. Against a diseased
imagination, demonstration goes for nothing.
“The rest of my
war experience was of a piece with what I have already told of it. We kept
monotonously falling back upon one camp or another and eating up the farmers
and their families. They ought to have shot us; on the contrary they were as
hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it . . .
“The last camp
which we fell back on was in a hollow near the village of Florida where I was
born, in Monroe County. Here we were warned one day that a Union Colonel was
sweeping down on us with a whole regiment at his heels. This looked decidedly
serious. Our boys went apart and consulted; then we went back and told the
other companies present that the war was a disappointment to us and we were
going to disband. They were getting ready themselves to fall back on some place
or another, and we were only waiting for General Tom Harris, who was expected
to arrive at any moment, so they tried to persuade us to wait a little while
but the majority of us said no, we were accustomed to falling back and didn't
need any of Harris's help, we could get along perfectly without him and save
time too. So, about half of our fifteen men, including myself, mounted, and
left on the instant; the others yielded to persuasion, and stayed--stayed
through the war.
“An hour later
we met General Harris on the road, with two or three people in his company, his
staff probably, but we could not tell; none of them were in uniform; uniforms
had not come into vogue among us yet. Harris ordered us back, but we told him
there was a Union colonel coming with a whole regiment in his wake and it
looked as if there was going to be a disturbance, so we had concluded to go
home. He raged a little bit, but it was of no use, our minds were made up. We
had done our share, killed one man, exterminated one army, such as it was; let
him go and kill the rest and that would end the war. I did not see that brisk
young general again until last year; he was wearing white hair and whiskers.
“In time I came
to learn that the Union colonel whose coming frightened me out of the war and
crippled the Southern cause to that extent [was] General [Ulysses S.] Grant. I
came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was myself;
at a time when anybody could have said, ‘Grant--Ulysses S Grant? I do not remember
hearing the name before.’ It seems difficult to realize there was once a time
when such a remark could be rationally made, but there was, I was within a few
miles of the place and the occasion too, though proceeding in the other
direction.
“The thoughtful will not throw this war
paper of mine lightly aside as being valueless. It has this value; it is not an
unfair picture of what went on in many a militia camp in the first months of
the rebellion, when the green recruits were without discipline, without the
steadying and heartening influence of trained leaders, when all their
circumstances were new and strange and charged with exaggerated terrors, and
before the invaluable experience of actual collision in the field had turned
them from rabbits into soldiers. If this side of the picture of that early day
has not before been put into history, then history has been, to that degree
incomplete, for it had and has its rightful place there. There was more Bull
Run material scattered through the early camps of this country than exhibited
itself at Bull Run. And yet, it learned it's trade presently and helped to
fight the great battles later. I could have become a soldier myself if I had
waited. I had got part of it learned, I knew more about retreating than the man
that invented retreating.”
While Mark Twain’s humorous story of young Samuel
Clemens’ experience in the Civil War is fictionalized, it likely hits close to
the truth. For whatever the reason, Clemens left the military and never looked
back. He later described the Civil War in general as: “A blot on our
history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.”
In the summer of 1861,
President Abraham Lincoln appointed Orion Clemens secretary of Nevada
Territory. Orion appointed Sam, his younger brother, as his secretary. Sam
tried prospecting but failed to strike it rich, so he became a reporter for the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
By 1863 he began signing his articles “Mark Twain,” and the rest is history.
By now,
after reading Mark Twain’s musings about the war, you are surely asking, “What
does this have to do with Montana?” To which I answer, “Mark Twain, the woeful
Confederate soldier, barnstormed through Montana in 1895 performing his, by
then famous evening lectures. Evening performances in Great Falls, Butte,
Anaconda, Missoula, and Helena brought smiles to the faces and cheers to the
lips of many Montanans.
Only in
Great Falls did Twain falter and harshly judge his own performance to be
subpar. The audience that evening in the Great Falls Opera House didn’t know
any better, but Twain did. In short, he was worn out by a hard day of sightseeing
around the bustling Electric City including a carriage ride to Giant Springs.
This, coupled with the disruption in the theatre caused by a steady stream of
late arriving noisy patrons drove Twain to distraction.
So, as a bit
of Christmas cheer I share with you Mark Twain’s account of his Civil War
service for General Sterling Price’s Missouri State Guard—after all he was in
Montana almost as long as he was in the Confederate Army.
Ken Robison is a local historian and
author of Confederates in Montana Territory: In the Shadow of Price’s Army and
Montana
Territory and the Civil War: A Frontier Forged on the Battlefield.
