23 May 1853
This satire upon Abner Gilstrap was part of the first installment of “Our Assistant's Column,” a new feature that Clemens wrote for the Hannibal Daily Journal shortly before he left home for St. Louis and eventually the East Coast. Clemens parodied Charles Wolfe's “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna” (1817), a poetic tribute to the British lieutenant general who died in 1809 from wounds received at the battle of Corunna, Spain, during the Peninsular War with Napoleon's armies. Thirteen years later, in October 1866, Clemens parodied the poem again, this time in his twenty-fourth letter from the Sandwich Islands.1
Recalling his original experiment, Clemens wrote in “My First Literary Venture” (no. 357): “It struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of gratuitous rascality and ‘see him squirm!’ I did it, putting the article into the form of a parody on the ‘Burial of Sir John Moore’—and a pretty crude parody it was, too.'2 Minnie Brashear has shown in detail that Clemens' satire was actually part of a long-simmering quarrel between the Journal and Abner Gilstrap, editor of the Bloomington (Mo.) Republican and a candidate for the legislature.3 Bad feeling had arisen when Bloomington lost the fight to be chosen as the terminus of what eventually became the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad (hence Clemens' reference to the “Iron Horse” in the penultimate stanza). On May 11 Gilstrap had published his latest contribution to the feud—some verses of satirical dialogue between [begin page 107] the Republican and the Journal.4 “The Burial of Sir Abner Gilstrap,” introduced by a brief prose comment, was Clemens' response. The author's memory that it was “a pretty crude parody” is borne out when we compare it with Wolfe's poem: Clemens closely followed Wolfe's first four stanzas and his last.
☞ We have pondered long and well over the BloomingtonⒶemendationRepublican's mysterious rhymes in that paper of the 11th, but can't discover what the editor was driving at, or what he intended to mean, and don't suppose he knows himself. We could guess better at the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics than his verses. HoweverⒶemendation, we'll reply with a random shot of the same sort:
The Burial of Sir Abner Gilstrap, Editor of the Bloomington “Republican.”
A PARODY ON “THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.”
“Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his corse to the ramparts we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.”
—[Burial of Sir John Moore.
[begin page 109] Not a sound was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his carcass through town we hurried;
Not e'en an obituary we wrote,
In respect for the rascal we buried.
We buried him darkly, at dead of night—
The dirt with our pitchforks turning;
By the moonbeams' grim and ghastly light,
And our candles dimly burning.
No useless coffin confined his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shirt we bound him;
But he lay like an Editor taking his rest,
With a Hannibal Journal around him.
Few and very shortⒶemendationwere the prayers we said,
And we felt not a pang of sorrow;
But we mused, as we gazed on the wretch now defunct—
Oh! where will he be to-morrow!
The “Iron Horse” will snort o'er his head,
And the notes of its whistle upbraid him;
But nothing he'll care if they let him sleep on,
In the grave where his nonsense hath laid him.
Slowly, but gladly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, we raised not a stone,
To mark where we buried a tory.
The first printing appeared in the Hannibal Daily Journal for 23 May 1853 (p. 3). This was followed three days later by a reprinting, evidently from the Daily's standing type, in the Hannibal Weekly Journal for 26 May 1853 (p. 2). Although collation disclosed no textual variants between the Daily and the Weekly printings, slight defects in inking do occur in the copies examined. The copy-text is therefore defined as embracing both printings, the only known copies of which are in MoHist, and the defects in inking are silently corrected whenever one printing is defective and the other is clear. Since the parody was part of Clemens' own “Our Assistant's Column,” he may well have typeset and proofread the sketch. There are no textual notes.