CLEMENS

Samuel Langhorne Clemens
     (1835-1910)
THE "Maverick Mason "

by Thomas Rigas, MPS

The man who became Mark Twain
was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens. "I
was born the 30th of November, 1835, in
the almost invisible village of Florida,
Monroe County, Missouri," Mark Twain
noted in his autobiography.

He died at Redding, Connecticut, in
1910. During his brilliant, and unusual
career, he became one of America's
most important literary characters,
writing under the pen name of Mark
Twain.

In his person, and in his pursuits, he
was a man of extraordinary contrasts.
He left school at age twelve when his
father died, yet he was eventually
awarded honorary degrees from Oxford
University, Yale University, and the
University of Missouri.

His career encompassed such varied
occupations as printer, Mississippi river-
boat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and
publisher. He made fortunes from his
writing, but near the end of his life he
had to resort to lecture tours to pay his
debts.

He was hot-tempered, profane, and
sentimental. He was also pessimistic,
cynical, and tortured by self-doubt.
These characteristics and attitudes, no
doubt, were formed in his early child-
hood. Although his parents were well
matched in background, his father and
mother were, at best, not wholly com-
patible throughout their twenty-four
years together. In character and per-
sonality, they were antithetic.

Play, humor, laughter, tenderness--
was how Mark Twain saw his mother.
His father, however, he saw as "stern,
unsmiling, never demonstrating affec-
tion for wife or child...Silent, austere,
of perfect probity and high principle;
ungentle of manner toward his chil-
dren, but always a gentleman in his
phrasing...It was remembered that he
went to church--once; never again."

Like his father, the son was to become
an agnostic and an anticleric. It was his
"sunshiny" mother, at the same time an
enthusiastic and "abandoned" Presbyte-
rian, who subjected young Sam Clemens
to a religion of chronic anxiety and cer-
tain damnation which, although he later
rejected it, reinforced his lifelong sense
of wrongdoing, his obsession with con-
science, and his inability to disabuse
himself altogether of a belief in the
reality of hell and Satan. Sam Clemens
was to look back with "shuddering hor-
ror upon the days when I believed I
believed. "

From Mississippi riverboat pilot to
famous writer and humorist, Mark
Twain captured the heart of America.
His nostalgia for the past helped pro-
duce some of his best books, and a repu-
tation that continues on to this very day
in American letters as a great artist.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a
"Maverick Mason." He was a member of
the Craft for only a short period of his
young adult life. On the 100th anniver-
sary of his birth, in 1935, the Grand
Lodge of AF&AM of Missouri dedicated
a plaque to honor Sam Clemens, which
today graces the front elevation of the
old Masonic Temple at Hannibal, Mis-
souri. The plaque relates that "Samuel
Langhorne Clemens was a member of
Polar Star Lodge No. 79 AF&AM at St.
Louis, Missouri. Initiated May 22,
1861. Passed June 12, 1861. Raised July
10, 1861." What the plaque does not
say, however, is the unfortunate fact
that Sam Clemens demitted on October
8, 1868, and presumably never again af-
filiated with any other Masonic Lodge.

In April 1859, after two years of ap-
prenticeship, Sam Clemens received his
federal license as Pilot of Steam Boats.
He was a riverboat pilot on his beloved
Mississippi River until 1861, when the
outbreak of the Civil War closed down
the river to commerce. In April 1861,
he became a Southern loyalist, and gave
up his princely occupation on the river,
in part because he was afraid that he
might be forced at pistol point to serve
as pilot on a Union gunboat.

The following month, Sam Clemens
was initiated into the Masonic fraternity.

His brother, Orion, had been an abo-
litionist for years, and remained a loyal
Union man. A few days after President
Abraham Lincoln declared the exis-
tence of a state of insurrection, Orion
Clemens reached the pinnacle of his
career. On the recommendation of Lin-
coln's Attorney General, Edward Bates,
a past Grand Master of the Grand
Lodge of Freemasons of Missouri, Orion
was appointed Secretary of the Nevada
Territory. This was a position of con-
siderable grandeur, even though Orion
found himself hard-put to raise the
money to get to Carson City.

At this point, Sam Clemens seemed to
be floundering in direction, although in
June he was passed to the Second Degree
of Freemasonry. That same month, he
saw volunteer military service near
Florida, Missouri, as second lieutenant
in the Marion Rangers, a band of inept
Confederate militia. "I was a soldier two
weeks once in the beginning of the war,"
he recalled years later, "and was hunted
like a rat the whole time." His stint as a
Confederate volunteer was brief. After a
fortnight of rain, discomfort, boredom,
and, above all, growing apprehensions
about Union Forces led by an unknown
commander named Ulysses Grant, Sam
Clemens and other Marion Rangers said
goodbye for the duration of the Civil
War. In two weeks in the field, Sam
Clemens had learned more about re-
treating, he was to say "than the man
that invented retreating." He decided it
was time for him to "light out for the
Territory ahead of the rest."

Sam Clemens, however, did not
retreat from being raised a Master
Mason in July. No longer in the service
of the Confederacy, he now became,
nominally at least, a recipient of federal
patronage, and an instrument of federal
power, for in that same month in 1861,
he started out for Nevada as his brother
Orion's private secretary. In that capa-
city, he really had nothing to do, and
received no salary. With money saved
from his river pilot's earnings, he was
able to pay for Orion's stage fare west,
as well as his own.

The brothers were excited about go-
ing out West--America's last fron-
tier--and expected to find wealth. The
Nevada silver rush brought to the Terri-
tory a backwash of the 1849 gold wave
into California. Millions of dollars in
silver were being mined by 1862, and
feverish schemes of wealth--silver, gold,
lead, mercury, timber--were in every
man's head, and speculation was
epidemic.

Sam Clemens put aside his river clothes
in favor of "a damaged slouch hat, blue
woolen shirt, and pants crammed into
boot-tops," and was on his way toward
becoming something other than what he
had been. His change of occupation
from riverboat pilot to Nevada specu-
lator and miner, mirrored a shift in the
economic climate from the earning of a
livelihood, to the quest for enormou.
wealth--the prospect of boom or bust.

Soon after he arrived in the Nevada
Territory, Sam Clemens went to Lake
Tahoe to stake out timber claims. In
February and March of 1862, he found
time for the Craft, and was recorded as
having visited Carson City Lodge, U. D.,
at Carson City, Nevada.

His timber fever masked the silver
fever that really gripped him. While his
brother, Orion, tended to his official
duties at Carson City, Sam, acting for
both of them, prospected various allur-
ing ventures in the silver mining district.
In May 1862, he had acquired a one-
eighth interest in a "silver-mining" op-
eration, but by mid-summer they realiz-
ed that instead of a bonanza, their in-
vestment was "barren rock and hard
luck. "

Orion at least had a salary to fall back
on, but Sam was broke and in debt. He
was reduced to shoveling sand in a
quartz mine, and wondering how he was
going to survive the next few months. By
the end of July 1862, however, he receiv-
ed a job offer as local reporter for the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.

It was neither the first, nor the last
time, in his life that he had experienced
the bitter cycle of boom and bust--pro-
spective wealth, and present despera-
tion. Nor was it the last time that,
casually, passively, even reluctantly, he
allowed himself to be turned toward
authorship.

He became Mark Twain in 1862,
while working as a reporter at the
Virginia City Temtorial Enterprise, the
leading newspaper in the Nevada Terri-
tory at that time. The pen name came
from his steamboating days--it is a river
term meaning safe water ahead.

It was here, at the age of twenty-
seven, that the now writer, and former
printer, river pilot, speculator, and
prospector made a great personal dis-
covery--the end of a moratorium. "I
feel very much as if I had just awakened
from a long sleep," he said of his newly
discovered self.

With increasing freedom and confi-
dence, Mark Twain now wrote local
news, personal satire, journalistic horse-
play, comic libels, occasional editorials,
travel correspondence from Steamboat
Springs and from his frequent stage-
coach trips to San Francisco, and from
Carson City, legislative reports and re-
ports of the Constitutional Convention
of 1863. After less than a year on the
Enterprise, he wrote to his mother say-
ing, "I am prone to boast of having the
widest reputation, as a local editor, of
any man on the Pacific Coast." By now
he already felt a national ambition, and
the pulse and stirrings of a national
consciousness.

Emotionally, he was to some extent
still accountable to his mother and sister
back home in Hannibal, Missouri, where
admonitions of gentility and piety were
reaching him frequently. He did his best
to convince them that he moved only in
"the best Society" of Virginia City and
San Francisco, and that he actually had
"a reputation to preserve."

In actual truth, however, he had be-
come somewhat of a celebrity of Bohe-
mianism, and a prominent part of San
Francisco's gaudy subculture of writers,
reporters, entertainers, traveling actors,
and short-term promoters of the day. As
he later confessed to his prospective
mother-in-law, he had been "a man of
convivial ways and not adverse to social
drinking." Christmas Eve, of 1863, he
spent in a marathon drinking celebra-
tion at Barnum's Restaurant in Virginia
City, together with many of his writer
friends, including the premier humorist
of the day, Artemus Ward (a pseud-
onym used by Bro. Charles F. Browne
[1834-1867], who was a member of
Manhattan Lodge No. 62 F&AM at
New York City).

In May 1864, his career at the Enter-
prise came to an abrupt end, when he
perpetrated a hoax in the form of an
editorial, which was described as a
"blunder in taste and tact." It so infuri-
ated everyone, especially the ladies of
Carson City, that Sam Clemens decided
that he had worn out his welcome as a
humorist in that community. In the vein
of his other hoaxes, and in the free-
wheeling character of Nevada journal-
ism of the day, Sam Clemens claimed
that he had written the editorial as a
private joke, when he was not quite
sober, laid it before an editor, neither of
them intending it for print, and left the
manuscript on the table. "I suppose the
foreman, prospecting for copy, found
it, and seeing that it was in my hand-
writing, thought it was to be published,
and carried it off," is the way he ex-
plained this editorial fiasco.

Unable to exonarate himself "by say-
ing the affair was a silly joke, and that I
and all concerned were drunk," Sam
Clemens left Nevada, because it was
suicide for a humorist to make a public
fool of himself.

From Virginia City, Sam Clemens
went by stagecoach to San Francisco in
May 1864, where he alternated between
newspaper work, and gold mining, until
he eventually gained some fame as a hu-
morist, and began lecturing and writing
books. Arriving at San Francisco, he
worked, unhappily, as a reporter on the
Morntng Call. Then, in December, he
went to the Mother Lode hills of Cali-
fornia in Tuolumme and Calavera
Counties. For a while, he tried to
scratch out a living as a pocket miner,
but it turned out to be a dismal and de-
feated winter of mud, rain, and meals
of dishwater and beans.

There was one bright side, however,
to this otherwise dismal experience, that
eventually launched him to fame and
secured for him the recognition he
needed to, eventually, become a noted
humorist and literary figure.

While sitting around a potbelly heat-
ing stove in an Angel's Camp saloon, he
heard, for the first time, a Western
analogue of an incient tale about a frog,
which he summarized in his notebook
thusly:

Coleman with his jumping frog--
bet a stranger $50.--Stranger
had no frog and C. got him
one:--In the meanwhile stranger
filled C's frog full of shot and he
couldn't jump. The stranger's
frog won.

From this simple, villainous back-
woods tale, Sam Clemens was able to
ride the jumping frog to fame. As he,
himself, said, it was "the germ of my
coming fortune," for it was the germ of
the story he wrote and sent East, on the
advice of his Freemason friend, Bro.
Artemus Ward, as "Jim Smiley and His
Jumping Frog." It was published in the
New York Saturday Press, in November
1865, and soon after, through the then
established newspaper exchanges. The
frog, if not yet its author, became na-
tionally celebrated.

The age of thirty, I am told, seems to
be a familiar watershed time for self-re-
definition. In their early thirties, Jesus
set out on his ministry, and Luther nail-
ed his thesis to the church door. Like-
wise, nearing the age of thirty, Samuel
Clemens made his own significant de-
partures. He began to explore the liter-
ary and psychological options of Mark
Twain, the identity he created as a
means of liberating and extending him-
self. Already savoring the praise of "edi-
tors of standard literary papers in the
distant east," but nontheless harried, in
debt, and working desperately hard to
get out of debt, he sent his brother,
Orion, in October 1865 from San Fran-
cisco, a remarkable letter of purpose,
summing-up, and apology.

In this unusual letter, which was
published in The Berkeley Albion in
1961, Sam Clemens relates that he had
but two powerful ambitions in his life.
One was to be a river pilot, and the
other a preacher of the gospel. He was
to say:

"I accomplished one and failed
in the other, because I could not
supply myself with the necessary
stock in trade--i.e., religion. I
have given it up forever...But I
have had a 'call' to literature, of
a low order--i.e., humorous. It
is nothing to be proud of, but it
is my strongest suit, & if I were
to listen to that maxim of stern
duty which says that to do right
you must multiply the one or two
or three talents which the Al-
mighty trusts to your keeping, I
would long ago have ceased to
meddle with the things for which
I was by nature unfitted & turned
my attention to seriously scrib-
bling to excite the laughter of
God's creatures. Poor, pitiful
business!. . ."

At some time during this period, this
person of great contrasts, for some unre-
corded reason was suspended from his
Masonic affiliation with the Craft. Spec-
ulation no doubt could conjure up any
one of a number of "valid" reasons for
his suspension from the Masonic frater-
nity during this period, considering his
unusual lifestyle since becoming a mem-
ber of the Craft. Masonic scholars and
researchers, however, have been unable
to document the reason, as of this
writing.

Oh, welll Life does go on, and it cer-
tainly did for Sam Clemens.

"I am generally placed at the head of
my breed of scribbers in this part of the
country," Sam wrote his mother in Jan-
uary 1866. The "Jumping Frog," re-
printed in The CaliSornian, a literary
journal, had consolidated his reputation
on the Coast. Nonetheless, Samuel
Clemens found that life in San Francis-
co and along the coast was full of queer
vicissitudes. One day might find him in
good financial fortune, with no debts,
and living high at the Occidental Hotel.
The next day might see him down and
out, by necessity an expert at skulking
and dodging, unpopular with the police
because he said they were brutal and
corrupt. At one point, he even found
himself in jail charged with drunken-
ness, and this was probably a warning
from the police of worse things to come.

Sam's answer was to depart in silence,
as correspondent for the Sacramento
Union, the most powerful newspaper in
the West. In March 1866, he sailed on
the steamer Ajax for "paradise," the
kingdom of Hawaii, for a trip that
would last five months away from San
Francisco. His dispatch to the Union,
from Honolulu, of the burning at sea of
the chipper ship Hornet, was a dramatic
scoop which was widely reprinted and
talked about. It brought him a new kind
of fame, as a straight news reporter, and
in the hope of parlaying this fame into
something more literary, he reworked
the Hornet story for the December issue
of Harper's New Monthly Magazine. He
liked to think of this first appearance in
a genteel Eastern journal as "my literary
debut," even though the debut was mar-
red by his mortifying discovery that the
magazine listed him as "Mark Swain."

By this time, the Civil War was over,
and Sam Clemens, a reconstructed
Southerner who had gone out West only
to find that his ambitions were really
national, now began a new venture, and
his first success, as a popular lecturer
shortly after his return to San Francisco.
He had learned a lot from his Freema-
son friend, Bro. Artemus Ward, the
prince of platform entertainers, and
within a short time, he found himself
the master of his audience, and at his
own will he could make it laugh or ap-
plaud or grasp in wonderment. His style
and presence delighted audiences at San
Francisco, Sacramento, and other Cali-
fornia towns.

Even with these victories, he had
begun to feel confined by the Coast.
After the freedom of Hawaii and the ex-
panses of the Pacific Ocean, San Fran-
cisco no longer seemed home to him,
but a "prison." Armed with a new com-
mission as traveling correspondent, this
time from the Alta California of San
Francisco, he planned to go to the Paris
(France) Exposition. But first, it was
time to see the States ag;:in, to go to
New York, see his mother at St. Louis,
and then go abroad. In December 1866,
he sailed from San Francisco on the
sidewheeler America, and arrived at
New York in January 1867, at age
thirty-one.

A trip to his home state of Missouri in
March 1867, after an absence of six
years, only reinforced his belief that the
East was where he now belonged. At St.
Louis, where his mother and sister now
lived, he felt reproach in the air, his
own and theirs. But at St. Louis, none-
theless, he tasted victory again on stage,
giving a performance quite different
from anyone else's on the lecture circuit,
and completely delighted his audience.
A week later, in early April, he repeated
his lecture success at Hannibal, Missou-
ri, then on north to Keokuk, Iowa, then
another lecture at Quincy, Illinois,
before starting on his return trip to New
York.

While at St. Louis, he apparently sat-
isfied the requirements for reinstate-
ment of his Masonic affiliations, as he
was reinstated as a member of the Craft
in good standing again on April 24,
1867.

In New York again, he saw the body
of his good friend Artemus Ward (Bro.
Charles F. Browne) returned to New
York from Southhampton, England,
where he died in March of tuberculosis
while on tour there. Dead at the age of
thirty-three, Artemus Ward left a va-
cant place in popular stage entertain-
ment that Mark Twain, his friend and
protege, would soon claim.

In June 1867, Sam Clemens boarded
the sidewheel steamer Quaker City and
sailed from New York on a five-month
tour of Europe and the Middle East. He
returned in November, a national ce-
lebrity as a result of his travel correspon-
dence, and which in 1869 led to the
publishing of his successful book, The
Innocents Abroad. Predictably, he had
described the Holy Land in derisive
terms, taking unholy verbal shots at the
Holy Land. He also ribbed his fellow
passengers for being brash, naive, and
too quick to believe themselves cul-
tured. He wrote, "The gentle reader will
never, never know what a consummate
ass he can become until he goes
abroad. "

One passenger who escaped his barbs,
was a handsome and wealthy shipboard
acquaintance, Charles Langdon, from
Elmira, New York. After seeing a pho-
tograph of his sister, Olivia, Sam
Clemens became smitten over her, and
remained in the East after the voyage to
woo the young, twenty-two year old
"Livy," his future wife, who he saw for
the first time at Christmas 1867.

In April 1868, Sam Clemens repor-
tedly sent his Masonic Lodge a gavel,
for which he had claimed to have cut
the handle himself from a cedar branch
he had obtained just outside the walls of
Jerusalem. Tradition holds that he had
the gavel made in Alexandria, Egypt. In
his attached letter to his Lodge, he
reportedly wrote: "This mallet is a
cedar, cut in the forest of Lebanon,
whence Solomon obtained the timbers
for the temple."

By the beginning of July 1868, he had
completed writing The Innocents
A broad at San Francisco, and after
delivering a farewell lecture there, sail-
ed for New York, never again expecting
to return out West.

In August 1868, he presented himself
at the gate of wealthy Jarvis Langdon's
baronial estate at Elmira, New York.
He was in love, and wanted to marry his
young daughter. Livy, however, disap-
proved of drinking, smoking, Western
manners, and even humorists, so Sam
Clemens courted her by offering, in all
sincerity, to make over his character
and his habits to meet her desires. For a
while, he even came close to religious
orthodoxy, prayed, went to church,
wrote a purple meditation on the
Nativity, and even showed signs of in-
tending to write a life of Christ.

This was quite a contrast from his
previous views, when he openly criticiz-
ed conventional religion, writing in
Mark Twain's Notebook: "If Christ were
here now, there is one thing he would
not be--a Christian." Sam Clemens felt
that the church of his time had lost
touch with everyday life, insisting that
man drop his religious illusions and de-
pend upon himself, not Providence, to
make a better world.

It seems that in choosing Livy as his
idol to worship, Samuel Clemens chose
his own willed transformations.

On October 8, 1868, Samuel Lang-
horne Clemens, for reasons probably
best known only to himself, demitted
from his Masonic Lodge, and presum-
ably never again affiliated with our
beloved Masonic fraternity. To this very
day, Masonic scholars and researchers
can only speculate as to why he chose to
become a "Maverick Mason."

Sam Clemens and Livy were formally
engaged in February 1869, and married
a year later at Elmira, New York. Livy
became his companion and first-draft
editor for the next 35 years. Cast in the
Victorian mold, she honed the rough
edges of his prose. No doubt, Sam chaf-
ed at times under her prudent deletions
but he cheerfully submitted his manu-
scripts to her. Livy seemed to have
reigned, rather than ruled, their mar-
ried life, and less as Sam's censor than
his muse.

Samuel Clemens did not become a
Christian, as he had promised to do
when he was courting Livy, but instead
became a foe of institutional and doctri-
nal Christianity, while Livy's Congrega-
tional faith, secure and unquestioned
until her marriage, was eroded to a
point where, at the end of her life, it no
longer offered her spiritual shelter and
refuge.

In his later life, Samuel Clemens was
haunted by personal tragedy, in the
deaths of loved ones, and bitterness fed
on the man who had, at one time, made
the world laugh. He grew cynical, bit-
ter, saddened, and obsessed with the
frailties of the human race.

Nonetheless, as Mark Twain, novelist
and lecturer, he became one of the best-
liked literary figures of the 1 9th Century.

Halley's Comet blazed into view in the
year of Samuel Clemens birth, 1835, at
a time when our nation still groped for
identity. Samuel Clemens died when the
comet reappeared 75 years later, trac-
ing a fiery tail across the night sky as
clearly as he had illuminated the char-
acter of his countrymen. Mixing cynism
with humor, Samuel Clemens, as Mark
Twain, worked his countrymen into
literary portraits that remain as vivid
and meaningful today as they were
nearly a century ago.
