In the summer of 1861, in northeast Missouri, Sam Clemens went to war on a small yellow mule carrying a valise, a carpetbag, two gray blankets, a homemade quilt, a squirrel rifle, 20 yards of rope, a frying pan, and an umbrella.
Clemens had banded together with 14 other young men to answer Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson’s call to defend Missouri. They’d repel the damned invader, like heroes from the age of chivalry. They were long on Sir Walter Scott and short on tactics. They cut their hair with sheep shears, reasoning that they might be fighting in close quarters and shouldn’t give the enemy anything extra to grab.
They elected a captain from their ranks, made Clemens their second lieutenant, and wandered south of Hannibal. They seemed to have no idea what they were doing other than to lurk in the woods and wait for the Union to sue for peace.
This wasn’t peculiar to Clemens and his friends. For many soldiers, including some generals, the Civil War began with posturing and ended in gore. Wars have a way of doing that. The only difference is that the beginning of this war was all that the man who became better known as Mark Twain saw firsthand, and he probably only saw that much because he just wanted to be left alone.
Clemens’ war began innocently enough. As the Southern states seceded, Union forces closed part of the Mississippi River to commercial traffic. Clemens, a riverboat pilot, was forced out of the only job he’d ever loved. So he went home to Hannibal.
Many, if not most, Missourians seemed to favor any arrangement that would let them stay in the Union and retain slavery. They hoped they could be neutral in the dilemma of their times, like the Geneva of the West. In the 1860 presidential election, only St. Louis and Gasconade counties in Missouri had chosen Abraham Lincoln. Statewide, voters preferred Stephen Douglas, the Democrat who supported some slavery and the Union, followed by John Bell, a Tennessee slaveholder who opposed secession.
Clemens had voted for Bell. Hannibal had about 3,000 residents in 1860, with about one in four listed as a slave. Clemens had grown up amid the slaves his family and neighbors owned and rented. A vote for Bell was a vote for the world he’d known, one of the northernmost outposts of slavery on the continent. The federal government had been its guarantor.
Gov. Jackson had other ideas. Elected in 1860 as a Douglas Democrat, he presumably opposed secession before he got a hankering to follow the Southern states out of the Union. In June 1861, Jackson fled up the Missouri River, pursued by federal troops under the command of Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, a professional soldier and Radical Republican from Connecticut.
The blue-clad Union troops came to Hannibal, too, disembarking from the river and causing a stir. It wasn’t every day that someone in northeast Missouri saw government soldiers, or almost anyone else from the federal government, which was a small and distant entity then.
That summer, Clemens was 25 years old. He’d been east, working as a printer in New York and Cincinnati, and south through the heart of Dixie, piloting on the river all the way to New Orleans. He was already a curious combination of traits—willful and impulsive, but with a tendency to be a detached observer of doctrines and movements. He was an individualist: His destiny was his doctrine. So it must have been a blow when Union soldiers forced him off the river at gunpoint in the name of someone else’s cause.
And then it happened again. He was lazing by the Hannibal levee with friends Ab Grimes—a fellow riverboat pilot—and Sam Bowen when Union soldiers came off a steamship and told the three men they were drafted. They were taken downriver to St. Louis, to a building at Fourth Street and Washington Avenue, where Brig. Gen. John B. Grey, commander of the District of St. Louis, asked whether they could pilot boats up the Missouri River.
They must have suspected they were being sent to apprehend their governor. When Grey momentarily stepped out of the room to attend to two stylish young ladies waiting for him across the hall, the trio took off through a side door and didn’t stop until they were back in Hannibal.
There, any of the town’s newspapers would have told them that Jackson was calling for volunteers to defend Missouri from interlopers. They were the same booted troopers who’d taken Clemens’ vocation and tried to drag him into their movement.
He decided to go soldiering after all.
Clemens might still recognize New London, the seat of Ralls County. It’s set amid gently rolling hills about 10 miles west of the Mississippi River. The county courthouse, with its neoclassical façade, which was new when Clemens saw it, still dwarfs everything else. Clemens and his band of Missouri defenders went there to meet with Col. John Ralls, who had commanded a regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers in the Mexican-American War.
“He took us to a distant meadow,” Twain wrote, “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 we swore us 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.”
“Then,” wrote Grimes, “for the first time we realized that someone was going to get into trouble.”
What actually happened, by all accounts, was that these fierce guerillas fell to squabbling. No one wanted to take orders. And it rained copiously. They were wet and hungry and arguing about whose job it was to cook. They located an abandoned maple sugar camp outside of New London and slept in its corncribs, wary of rats. Now and then, they’d hear that Union troops had been sighted nearby, and abandon their camp and hide.
Then, one night, according to Mark Twain’s account “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” published in The Century magazine in 1885, a rider approached their camp. He was a dim figure veiled in moonlight. Clemens shot him; so did his companions.
“When we got to him, the moon revealed him distinctly,” Twain wrote. “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.”
It’s all fun and games until someone loses a Yankee.
Or not: “The man was not in uniform and was not armed,” Twain wrote. “He was a stranger in the country; that was all we ever found out about him.”
There was more stumbling in the woods and rain before Clemens and his companions said the hell with it. Clemens went to his sister Pam’s house in St. Louis. Within weeks he was in a stagecoach heading west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed by Lincoln to serve as secretary to the governor of the new Nevada Territory. The Civil War was over before Clemens came back east—and by then, he was Mark Twain.
There’s just one catch to this tale: Clemens didn’t shoot anyone in those woods—or if he did, no one has been able to document it. Terrell Dempsey, a Hannibal historian, has scoured area newspapers. “I’ve never been able to find anything that coincides with that,” he says, and “any guy getting killed like that in Ralls County at that time would have been big local news.”
It’s telling that 150 years later, we’re still debating why the Civil War began. No one seriously denies that slavery was at least part of the cause, and it’s hard to deny there are a few other reasons mixed in. But then, wars are seldom either-or propositions. Perhaps that’s why we like to say that World War I was precipitated by the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, which explains little about its cause, and maintain that “the greatest generation” fought World War II against fascism, which obscures the Allies’ defense of colonialism. In 1969, after El Salvador beat Honduras in two out of three soccer matches, those countries had what was called the Soccer War, La Guerra del Fútbol. Several thousand died. We might suppose this was the single dumbest war—but of course, there was more to it than soccer.
In 1861, American defenders of slavery were moving toward a showdown with a president who maintained that if he could save the Union and free none of the slaves, he would do it. They were complicated times that seemed to have great moral clarity only generations after the fact. That summer near Hannibal, as young men hid in the wet green fields, they might no more have grasped the broad themes of the Civil War than a Missouri National Guard soldier in Afghanistan tonight understands why Afghans are shooting at her or what they have to do with al-Qaida and 9/11. To say that Clemens fought for slavery or for the South or the Confederacy, however briefly, probably would be wrong in spirit if not in fact. He fought for Hannibal and Missouri, apparently—and he scarcely did that.
We’ll never know why, two decades after the fact, Twain apparently invented a death to add to the bloodiest war in American history. Perhaps he was trying to make the point that all wars are an uneasy combination of impersonal grandiloquence and intimate violence; that soldiers often quickly discover, to their dismay, that “freedom” and “justice” might endure as ideas, like hot-air balloons on the horizon, but a life is a surprisingly fragile, earthbound thing.
Any death can be sobering that way.
In their few weeks of soldiering together, Grimes wrote, there was a death that Twain overlooked. This is odd, because if one death were to stand for many in a war that pitted friends against one another, this one might have served Twain’s purposes better than that phantom rider who dies so picturesquely, arms flung out, a telltale spot of scarlet on his breast.
It was a dark and rainy night, Grimes wrote in his posthumously published memoir, when “a good-natured fellow by the name of Dave Young, who was usually about two-thirds full of whiskey,” was on guard duty.
“During the night we were awakened by heavy tramping and we heard the guard cry out, ‘Halt you! Are you going to halt and give the pass word?’
“The tramping continued and that, with the guard’s order to halt, roused many of the boys.
“‘Halt, or I will fire!’” Young cried—“and bang! Bang! Went both barrels of his gun.
“A heavy fall and a groan were heard, and out into the darkness the men rushed to the place…
“There in the agony of death lay an old gray horse.”
It was Young’s own horse. It had been shot because it couldn’t speak—and so they found Young “standing over the animal looking quite sad.”
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