25 November 1867 • Washington, D.C. (MS: NPV, UCCL 00162)
P.S.—I room with Bill Stewart & board at Willard’s Hotel. 1explanatory note
Tired & sleepy—been in Congress all day & making newspaper acquaintances. Stewart is to look up a clerkship in the Patent Office for Orion—things necessarily move slowly where there are is so much business & such armies of office-seekers to be attended to. I guess it will be all right. I intend it shall be all right.2explanatory note
I have 18 invitations to lecture, at $100 each, in various parts of the Union—have declined them all.3explanatory note I am for business, now.
Belong on the Tribune staff, & shall write occasionally. Am offered the same berth to-day on the Herald by letter. Shall write Mr. Bennett & accept, as soon as I hear from Tribune that it will not interfere.4explanatory note Am pretty well known, now—intend to be better known. Am hob-nobbing with these old Generals & Senators & other humbugs for no good purpose.5explanatory note Don’t have any more trouble making friends than I did in California. All serene. Good-bye. Shall continue on the “Alta.”
224 F. cor. 14th.
Willard’s was on Pennsylvania Avenue at the northwest corner of Fourteenth Street West, less than a block from Stewart’s and Clemens’s rooms, and across the street from the Washington bureau of the Tribune, which was at 470 Fourteenth Street West. Refurbished and renamed in 1847 from the old City Hotel, it was a fashionable gathering place for Washington society (Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, 2:445 n. 1; Marbut, 136; Poore, 97).
In 1867 the Patent Office in Washington employed ninety-three clerks and temporary clerks at yearly salaries ranging from $1,000 to $1,600 (Interior Department, 151–52). See also 9 Jan 68click to open letter and 24 Jan 68, both to JLC and PAMclick to open letter.
The surviving documents do not establish which “old Generals & Senators & other humbugs” Clemens encountered between 22 November and the date of this letter. On 21 November the Senate began to meet in a special extension of the first session, adjourning on 2 December, the same day the second regular session of the Fortieth Congress convened.
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Vassar College Library (NPV).
L2 , 116–117; MTB , 1:346–47; Davis 1954, excerpt.
see McKinney Family Papers, pp. 512–14.