15 June 1869 • New York, N.Y. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00317)
I am very exceedingly & particularly obliged to you for that paragraph this morning about Memphis. The old gentleman is highly gratified.2explanatory note I hope to be able to do a favor for you some time in case you will do me the honor to ask one.
After becoming nationally known for his Civil War dispatches to the Cincinnati Gazette, Reid (1837–1912) joined the staff of the New York Tribune in September 1868 as Horace Greeley’s assistant and chief editorial writer, assuming the duties of managing editor in mid-May 1869, when John Russell Young resigned (Duncan, 18–19, 36–39; Cortissoz, 1:148–49; Baehr, 71–72).
The gratified individual was Jervis Langdon, who arrived at the St. Nicholas with his wife, daughter, and Clemens on 10 June, en route to Hartford for the 17 June wedding of Alice Hooker and John Day. Langdon was owed five hundred thousand dollars by Memphis, Tennessee, the result of his investment in the northern firm of Brown and Company, which had contracted to pave the city’s streets. When payment for the work was not promptly forthcoming, Clemens used his influence with the New York Tribune to bring public pressure on Memphis. The Tribune editorialized on 15 June (4):
We see from the newspapers of Memphis that they are claiming theirs as the best paved city in the South. From the same papers we see that the contractors Northern men who put down the pavements are ill-esteemed because they want to get their pay. We see also in the same journals earnest appeals to Northern capitalists to make investments in the South, and exhibits of the inducements offered for Northern capital. Are we to understand that this Memphis business is a sample of the inducements they offer?
For Memphis’s response, see 26 June 69 to Reid, n. 1click to open letter (“Morning Arrivals,” New York Evening Express, 11 June 69, 3; hotel arrivals, New York Tribune, 11 June 69, 8, 12 June 69, 5; 23 June 69 to PAMclick to open letter).
MS, Papers of the Reid Family, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (DLC).
L3 , 264–265.
donated to DLC between 1953 and 1973 by Mrs. Helen Rogers Reid and her sons, Whitelaw Reid and Ogden R. Reid.