Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:56:38.649Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

I. Speaking Out about Race: “The United States of Lyncherdom” Clemens Really Wrote1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

L. Terry Oggel
Get access

Extract

On June 21, 1901, Samuel and Olivia Clemens and their daughter Jean ensconced themselves for the summer at Kane Camp, a “little bijou of a dwelling-house,” Clemens called it, on the south end of Ampersand Bay on Lower Saranac Lake in upstate New York. The family nicknamed the cottage The Lair. “Everyone knows what a lair is,” Clemens said; “lairs do generally contain dangerous animals, but I bring tame ones to this one.” As we shall see, danger did lurk in The Lair that summer, in the thought and writing of Clemens himself.

Type
“The United States of Lyncherdom”
Information
Prospects , Volume 25 , October 2000 , pp. 115 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

2. Clemens to Joseph Twichell, July 28, 1901, in Twain, Mark, Mark Twain's Letters, arranged with comment by Albert Bigelow Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1917), 2: 711Google Scholar.

3. Larom, Walter H., “Mark Twain in the Adirondacks,” Bookman 58 (01 1924): 538Google Scholar, quoted in Alexander, Charles, “Writer in Residence: Mark Twain's Saranac Summer,” Adirondack Life 24 (07/08 1998): 16Google Scholar.

4. Clemens to Twichell.

5. Hill, Hamlin, Mark Twain: God's Fool (New York: Harper, 1973), 29Google Scholar.

6. Clemens, Clara, My Father, Mark Twain (New York: Harper, 1931), 221Google Scholar.

7. Paine, Albert Bigelow, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1912), 1139Google Scholar.

8. In his Mark Twain's Last Years as a Writer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979)Google Scholar, Macnaughton, William R. refers to four pieces of writing during this period (163), and in his biography, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York: Murrow, 1997)Google Scholar, Andrew Hoffman identifies five “new essays and reworked stories” written during the summer (439). As I explain later, I am sure that in the late summer of 1901 Clemens thought he was putting aside the “Lyncherdom” essay only for a while, not burying it in his posthumous box.

9. I have tried to be clear and consistent in my use of “Samuel Clemens” and “Mark Twain,” and, in nearly every instance, I have been certain about which one to use. I have been scrupulous about this in part because at least with this essay he was himself careful to refer to himself as Clemens up to the point of publication and as Mark Twain in print. At the top of the first sheet of the revised typescript, he signed his instructions to the typesetter “SLC” whereas on the last sheet he signed the essay “Mark Twain,” intending his pen name to be printed as part of the essay. Thus, my title uses Clemens, since the essay he wrote didn't make it into print (till now). I realize that others writing about this author resolve this name dilemma differently and I concede that on some occasions man and writer seem identical. But I also know that in many circumstances, as with the present essay, the two are clearly distinct. I have tried to comply with the conscious separation of the two that the author himself made regarding this essay.

10. Paine's presentation of Mark Twain's writing on race seems to stem from his own sensitivity about the subject. From his perspective Mark Twain's reputation needed protecting, and his editing of the “Lyncherdom” essay is part of a pattern. In his biography of the writer, Paine wrote that Mark Twain “did not undertake any special pleading for the negro cause; he only prepared the way with cheerfulness” (1273). Paine's version of “Lyncherdom” seeks to conform to that depiction of Mark Twain.

11. This perfect term is Charles Alexander's (“Writer in Residence,” 20). Ferguson, DeLancey (Mark Twain: Man and Legend [1943; rept. New York: Russell, 1965], 286)Google Scholar and Kaplan, Justin (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain [New York: Simon, 1965], 365)Google Scholar call it “heavy-handed,” while Geismar, Maxwell (Mark Twain: An American Prophet [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970], 205)Google Scholar opts for “heavy-footed.”

12. Clemens to Twichell, August 29, 1901, quoted in Emerson, Everett, The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 239Google Scholar.

13. Geismar, , Mark Twain, 205Google Scholar.

14. In a letter to Henry H. Rogers, dated August 29-September 6, 1901, Clemens states that he began to write the detective story on August 29 and completed it on September 6 (Twain, Mark, Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893–1909, ed. Leary, Lewis [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969], 469–70Google Scholar). This coincides well with Clemens's comment in a letter to Twichell, paraphrased by Paine, , that “the story had been a six-day tour de force” (Biography, 1139)Google Scholar. With the interweaving of the essay and the short story in Clemens's imagination within the same brief period, Sheriff Fairfax is a fictional embodiment of Sheriffs Merrill and Beloat, praised in “Lyncherdom.”

15. “Only a Nigger,” Buffalo Express, 08 26, 1869Google Scholar. That Mark Twain authored this editorial has been confirmed by Joseph B. McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg and reprinted by them (Twain, Mark, Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express, ed. McCullough, Joseph B. and McIntire-Strasburg, Janice [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999], 22–23Google Scholar). Philip Foner seems to have been the first to identify the editorial as Mark Twain's and to reprint it (Mark Twain Social Critic [1958; rept. New York: International, 1966], 283–84Google Scholar). A photographic facsimile is in Meltzer, Milton, Mark Tivain Himself (New York: Bonanza, 1960), 127Google Scholar.

16. “People and Things,” Buffalo Express, 09 17, 1869Google Scholar. This also seems to have been first attributed to Mark Twain by Foner, , who reprinted it (Mark Twain Social Critic, 284)Google Scholar. Meltzer, , following Foner's lead, presents a photographic facsimile of the piece (Mark Twain Himself, 127)Google Scholar. Early personal encounters with racial lynching came to mind while Clemens was writing “Lyncherdom.” In a letter to Frank Bliss, Clemens recalled two events that he had read or heard about as a child — a lynching of a black man in 1835 and a near-lynching of a black man in 1849 (Clemens to Bliss, August 26, 1901, in Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). Foner discusses lynching in the context of Clemens's early prejudices (238 ff.).

17. Mark Twain described it in language of transfixing detail. Though this was not a lawless lynching but an execution following a trial, the hanging itself obviously impressed him greatly. “I took exact note of every detail,” he wrote in the sketch, and indeed all aspects of the event are vividly depicted (“Letter from Mark Twain,” Chicago Republican, 05 31, 1868, 2)Google Scholar. Clemens arrived in Virginia City at 5 a.m. on April 24, 1868 (cf. Twain, Mark, Mark Twain's Letters, vol. 2: 1867–1868, ed. Smith, Harriet Elinor et al. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 211 n. 1)Google Scholar, and the hanging apparently took place later that morning. The dispatch, though not printed by the Republican until May 31, is datelined May 2. The portion of his letter describing the hanging, sarcastically subheaded Novel Entertainment, is transcribed as an appendix to this article. Its attitude toward hangings and those who attend them provides valuable context for his “Lyncherdom” essay, 33 years later. I am indebted to Barbara Schmidt for bringing this sketch to my attention.

18. Notebook 32a (1897), TS p. 57, in Mark Twain Papers.

† Mark Twain's previously unpublished words are © 2000 by Richard A. Watson and Chemical Bank as Trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium. Quotation is made with the permission of the University of California Press and Robert H. Hirst, General Editor of the Mark Twain Project. Each subsequent quotation of previously unpublished words by Mark Twain is also © 2000 and is here identified by a dagger in its citation.

19. Blair, Walter (Mark Twain and Huck Finn [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960])Google Scholar details some possible literary influences on Mark Twain's portrayal of the Bricksville mob, especially Dickens and Carlyle (312–14). A later model would be Émile Zola, whose mobs show humans at their regressive worst. In his 1887 essay on La Terre (unpublished), Clemens finally had to conclude that much of the sordid human behavior in Zola's France was to be found in America, too. A lengthy passage omitted from Life on the Mississippi (1883), which anticipates Clemens's attitude toward many of the elements in the “Lyncherdom” essay including human moral cowardice and the differences between Northern and Southern application and enforcement of the law, focuses on the timidity of lynch mobs (see Willis Wager's Heritage Edition [New York, 1944], 412–16, reprinted in the Penguin Edition [New York, 1984], 332–36).

20. The editorials appeared on June 8, 1901, in the New York Evening Post and on June 10, 1901, in the New York Tribune. Hamlin Hill provides these dates and states that “someone at The Century Magazine” sent Clemens these editorials along with other items related to lynchings in the United States (Mark Twain, 29). These materials are in an envelope dated June 19, 1901, in the Mark Twain Papers.

That Clemens seems to have asked for these materials at this time, while he was following the Keller trial, means that he began to contemplate an essay on lynching as early as mid-June and that this specific trial was the inspiration for the essay's argument and for its grounding in law.

21. New York Times, 06 18, 1901, 1Google Scholar.

22. The case was reported on and editorialized about in several newspapers in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. For my references, I will use the New York Times news articles, which appeared on February 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 27; May 22 and 23; June 6, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29; July 2, 3, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, and 17; August 11; November 27; and December 18, 1901; and editorials, which appeared on February 6, June 26 and 28, and July 17, 1901. Clemens would have read only those up to and including the one of June 21, the day he left for the mountains. The New York Weekly Post of June 26 and July 3, 1901, carried no news article or editorial related to the trial.

23. According to the New York Times reports, the term rape was not used until the very end of the trial, in the final argument and then only by the defense (June 21; reported in the New York Times, June 22, 1901, 2), perhaps as a sign of desperation. Rape was never suggested as a pretext for the lynchings in the Pierce City case, either in the Weekly Post editorial or in Clemens's essay, though that has been assumed by some commentators (see Woodard, Fredrick and MacCann, Donnarae, “Minstrel Shackles and Nineteenth Century ‘Liberality,’” in Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn [Durham: Duke University Press, 1992], 150)Google Scholar.

24. The idea that Barker's action was justifiable if his wife's story was credible was present from the beginning. Though the term unwritten law was not used in the New York Times coverage until February 6, it was used repeatedly after that. In the reports of the trial are numerous indications that Barker, his attorneys, and the public thought he had a right to kill Keller and would be acquitted. Evidence abounds from the amount of legal, journalistic, and popular interest in this case that not only in New Jersey but more generally across the country many thought that Barker had done the expected and dutiful deed in avenging his wife's dishonor. It is clear that in the early years of this century, at least in some strata of American society, Barker's action conformed to an unwritten but well-understood and still-respected model of behavior not unlike the chivalric code of romance. It was a time when popular reading was of novels like When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898) and To Have and To Hold (1900; see Hart, James D., The Popular Book [1950; rept. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963]Google Scholar, and Mott, Frank Luther, Golden Multitudes [New York: Macmillan, 1947])Google Scholar. The final sentence of Clemens's “Lyncherdom” essay, with its use of “chevaliers” and “knighthood,” effectively invokes such values. The court case with its debate between the statutes of New Jersey and the “unwritten law” thus provides an insight into the age from a fresh and unexpected angle.

Based on this, it seems that in 1901 a high degree of legal acumen was required to see a distinction between one act and the other. Clemens dissented from the old romantic justification of Barker's act. If Keller had committed an assault on Mrs. Barker, that allegation needed to have a trial of its own, one instigated by her, as he would be innocent till proven guilty. (The debate about Keller's guilt or innocence and how to prove it in this complicated case prompted discussion and newspaper coverage for weeks after the conclusion of the Barker trial. Mrs. Barker never sued Keller; the issue that caused all the furor was never resolved.) The distinction between these two acts — the alleged rape and the proven assault with intent to kill — is crucial for an understanding of Clemens's writing about the Negroes and the “white assassins” in the Pierce City case.

25. Albeit that Barker had waited overnight to attempt the homicide. Clemens's contempt for the temporary insanity plea went back at least as far as the early 1870s, as shown in “The New Crime” and “Our Precious Lunatic” (both 1870) and at greater length in The Gilded Age (1872), in which the plea is roundly satirized in the Laura Hawkins subplot.

26. New York Times, 06 19, 1901, 1Google Scholar; June 21, 1901, 1.

27. New York Times, 06 19, 1901, 1Google Scholar.

28. Only slightly daunted, Barker appealed to the state Supreme Court the following year claiming errors in the trial, most of all that the testimony of Mrs. Barker had been excluded. In a carefully researched decision, the high court reviewed New Jersey statutes going back through amendments in 1900, 1898, 1874, and 1846 to show that at least since that date more than a half a century earlier there had been no allowance within the law to permit a person to exact justice on his or her own. The court upheld Judge Blair's rulings by drawing a line between murder and manslaughter (what we would call justifiable homicide, the result of an act of passion and the closest thing to an unwritten law the law would allow). (Argued February 1902; decided June 1902; decision transcript online: http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/form/academic/univ_statecase.html. Though the appeal occurred well after Clemens wrote his essay, it is valuable to follow the case to its conclusion in order to better appreciate the clarity of Clemens's thinking a year before the final judgment was made. Early in the summer of 1901, in the throes of the trial, he opposed popular opinion, siding instead with the judge and the jury. Later in the summer, previsioning the high court's decision a year later, he applied the Keller trial's reasoning and result to the Pierce City lynching.

29. There is no reference to anything connected with the trial in Clemens's notebooks or letters that I have been able to discover.

30. The Weekly Post editorial appeared on page 6 of the August 21, 1901, issue. The Chicago Tribune editorial had originally appeared on page 12 of the August 3, 1901, issue, and the reprint of a portion of it in the New York Weekly Post occurred on page 7 of the August 21, 1901, issue. Clemens seems to have been aware of at least some public information about lynching in the United States. Though the first analytical study of lynching, Cutler, James Elbert's Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905; rept. New York: Negro University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, did not appear until 1905 (Grant, Donald L., The Anti-Lynching Movement: 1883–1932 [San Francisco: R and R Research, 1975], viiGoogle Scholar), the Chicago Tribune had been annually reporting national lynching statistics since 1882. Evidence from his “Lyncherdom” essay and from his letters at the time shows that Clemens knew of this annual record, which was reprinted in newspapers across the country and in other publications. It is likely, also, that he knew of the efforts of Ida B. Wells, one of the earliest nationally known anti-lynching activists and coeditor of Free Speech and Headlight, who had begun to write editorials and deliver speeches opposing lynching in 1889. In her Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900; reprinted in Wells-Barnett, Ida B., On Lynchings [New York: Arno, 1969]Google Scholar), she reprinted the Tribune's annual figures from 1882 (46–47).

Especially because of his recollection of lynching in the South when he was a boy (see note 16) and in the West when he was older, Clemens would have been aware of the changes regarding lynching that had occurred during the intervening years, both good and bad. Unquestionably the 1883 Supreme Court nullification of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 marked a turning point as regards lynching (which at that time and continuing well into the 20th century referred to burning as well as hanging, a point pertinent to Clemens's “Lyncherdom” essay), for Downey, Dennis B. and Hyser, Raymond M. point out that it was not until the 1880s that “lynchings assumed an overtly racial character” (No Crooked Death [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991], 3)Google Scholar. That is, before 1880, hangings were about as often of whites as of blacks, a fact that Clemens might have recalled from his younger years and that still informed his thinking about lynching in 1901. Moreover, as both Downey and Hyser and Grant emphasize, lynching was common on the frontier, too, another fact that Clemens knew firsthand and that shaped his attitude, as verified by, for example, the events in chapter 50 of Roughing It (1872) and more immediately by the several references to Western lynchings that occur in the other piece of writing we know that he completed during the summer of 1901, “A Double-Barreled Detective Story.” Finally, it is certain that the Pierce City lynching was not the first lynching in recent memory in Missouri (going back thirty years, for example, Cutler, relying on reports in the New York Times for 1871–73, includes this for Missouri: “5 horse thieves hung, 1 negro hung for outrage, 1 white hung for murder, 3 whites hung for murder and robbery, 3 whites shot for defending and being bondsmen of county officials accused of peculation” [Lynch Law, 151]). Nevertheless, it is not improbable that Clemens in the summer of 1901 plausibly believed the Pierce City incident to be the first lynching in his home state in recent years. For all we know, with such scant reliable information, he might have been correct. Such a view is all the more credible since data about lynchings in late-19th-century America often do not include information about Missouri, presumably because so few lynchings occurred there. For example, Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E. M., in A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)Google Scholar, omit from their study of the ten-state South any reference to Missouri, even in their list of border states (Appendix C). For further study of the practice of lynching during this period, see Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993)Google Scholar, particularly valuable for historical information (Brundage even cites “Lyncherdom” as part of the history of writing on lynching in America [3]).

31. Clemens signed and dated his manuscript “August 21”†; the typescript is also dated “August 21.”† In a letter to his publisher Frank Bliss dated August 26, he said that he had written the “acid article”† “yesterday”† (Clemens to Bliss, August 26, 1901, in Mark Twain Papers). Both dates are correct — August 21 for the manuscript, and August 25 for the corrected typescript. Jean Clemens had learned to type and to prepare typescripts for her father, as noted by Clemens himself a numbers of times. See, for example, a note he wrote to her on the first page of the “Eddypus” manuscript, written six months before “Lyncherdom” (Twain, Mark, Mark Twain's Fables of Man, ed. Tuckey, John S. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972], 481Google Scholar). Presumably Jean prepared the “Lyncherdom” typescript for her father.

32. For instance, when calculating the number of Chinese converted to Christianity, Clemens reduced the numbers by changing 3,000 (per year) to 9 (per day). Also, throughout the essay, Clemens relied on published sources such as Morrison, George Ernest's An Australian in China (1895)Google Scholar and the Chicago Tribune for his statistical information rather than allowing himself the luxury of making up numbers and running the risk of exaggeration and inaccuracy.

33. Harris, Susan K., Mark Twain's Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 3Google Scholar.

34. See my “Zola and Mark Twain's Public Writing,” Excavatio 10 (1997): 34–39Google Scholar. The “Lyncherdom” essay is included among these essays by way of its citation to Felix Jules Méline, Prime Minister of France, who refused to approve a rehearing of the Dreyfus case in 1897.

35. Twain, Mark, Europe and Elsewhere (New York: Harper, 1923)Google Scholar. Paine carefully does not refer to himself as the editor of this volume (as he did not in such of his other collections of Twain, Mark's writing, as the 1917 Mark Twain's Letters, Mark Twain's Autobiography [1924]Google Scholar, and Mark Twain's Notebook [1935]). Instead, on the title page of Europe and Elsewhere he credits himself only with having written the introduction. For Paine, the consistent avoidance of the term editor was undoubtedly significant.

36. Subsequent reprintings of the Paine “Lyncherdom” text include Twain, Mark, Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race, ed. Smith, Janet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962)Google Scholar; Twain, Mark, The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Neider, Charles (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963)Google Scholar; Twain, Mark, A Pen Warmed-Up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest, ed. Anderson, Frederick (New York: Harper, 1972)Google Scholar; and Twain, Mark, Mark Twain: Collected Tales … (New York: Library of America, 1992)Google Scholar. Though I have not included in this list printings of “The United States of Lyncherdom” in reissues of Europe and Elsewhere, either as single volumes or as volumes in collected/selected editions of Mark Twain's works, all of these I know of reprint Paine's text.

37. John Tuckey told the story of the debacle perpetrated by Paine, when Paine published The Mysterious Stranger in 1916Google Scholar (cf. Tuckey, John S., Mark Twain and Little Satan: The Writing of The Mysterious Stranger [West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Studies, 1963]Google Scholar). William S. Gibson later called Paine's Mysterious Stranger an “editorial fraud” (Twain, Mark, Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. Gibson, William M. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969], 1Google Scholar).

38. Scott, Arthur L., “The Innocents Adrift Edited by Mark Twain's Official Biographer,” PMLA 78 (06 1963): 230–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. To my knowledge, the text of only one additional piece from Europe and Elsewhere has been examined carefully. Paul Baender has found that Paine canceled some words by Clemens and substituted an “invention” of his own in the brief 1890 sketch “Bible Teaching and Religious Practice” (see Twain, Mark, What Is Man and Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Baender, Paul [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], 591)Google Scholar. Unauthoritative texts of “Bible Teaching” have been printed by Neider, Smith, and Anderson.

40. Another example is Twain, Mark, Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Zwick, Jim (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

41. Emerson, , Authentic Mark Twain, 238Google Scholar. Not everyone has had reservations about what they have read in Paine's version of the essay, though. Philip Foner and Louis Budd, the pioneer scholars of Mark Twain's social and political criticism, did not raise questions about it (Foner, , Mark Twain Social Critic, 285–87Google Scholar; Budd, Louis, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher [1962; rept. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1973], 201Google Scholar). The same is true of Pettit, Arthur G., Mark Twain & the South [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974], 135–36Google Scholar). Indeed, one recent writer on Mark Twain and race has gone so far as to refer to the essay as a benchmark of the writer's advanced attitude about race (Lott, Eric, “Mr. Clemens and Jim Crow: Twain, Race and Blackface,” in Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Robinson, Forrest G. [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 142Google Scholar).

42. Kaplan, Justin, Mark Twain and His World (New York: Simon, 1974)Google Scholar; Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain; and Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Lighting Out for the Thrritory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

43. All three prepublication states of the “Lyncherdom” text are found in the Mark Twain Papers in Box 27, nos. 15a–c. All three are marked as having been part of Paine's classification system. For the authority of the c-text, the Paine number is important for it provides assurance that this state dates from Paine and not from a later (DeVoto) period of classifying Mark Twain's manuscripts.

44. In the typographical facsimile edition that follows, the a-text is the copy text, emended using the b-text to bring it into accord with the author's inscriptions. It adopts Clemens's British and 19th-century spellings and includes Notes to the Text. I thank Robert Hirst, General Editor of the Mark Twain Project, for collaborating with me on this collation.

45. I thank Victor Fischer, editor at the Mark Twain Project, who helped establish authority for the markings on the b-text.

46. The rest of Clemens's sentence makes clear that at the turn of the century nationality was equivalent to race as a marker of identity by drawing an analogy between Negroes in America, “the Chinaman in America[,] and the [American] missionary in China.”

47. Clemens to Frank Bliss, August 26, 1901, in Mark Twain Papers.

48. Clemens to Twichell, September 10, 1901 (Mark Twain's Letters, 2: 715).

49. Fredrickson, George M., Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper, 1971)Google Scholar and Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race (New York: Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar. These classic studies, building on Vann Woodward, C.'s Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951)Google Scholar, employ somewhat different terms but identify similar characteristics for the primary attitudes toward race in the postbellum South. Curiously, none of these works mentions Mark Twain in this connection though both Fredrickson and Williamson examine the racial attitudes of a number of his literary contemporaries, in particular George Washington Cable and George Washington Harris.

To understand Clemens's views on race from another perspective in his own time, consider other contemporaries like Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Henry Adams, and Henry James. For them, all non–Anglo-Saxons were “they” with whom “we have nothing ‘in common’” (James, Henry, in The American Scene [1907]Google Scholar, quoted in Zwerdling, Alex, Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London [New York: Basic, 1998], 45Google Scholar). Zwerdling's chapter on Anglo-Saxon Panic serves to set Clemens off in stark contrast.

50. The Supreme Court Reporter, Permanent Edition (St. Paul, Minn.: West, 1896), 16: 1146Google Scholar. It cannot escape notice that the heritage of the lone dissenter on a Supreme Court dominated by Northerners was strikingly similar to Clemens's, for Justice John Marshall Harlan also came from a border state, Kentucky, just across the Mississippi River from Missouri.

51. Clemens to Bliss, August 26, 1901, in Mark Twain Papers.

52. Clemens to Bliss, August 29, 1901, in Mark Twain Papers.

53. For example, see Tolnay, and Beck, (Festival of Violence, 29)Google Scholar and Lynchings and What They Mean: General Findings of the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching (Atlanta: Commission, [1931]), 8Google Scholar.