8 November 1870 • (2nd of 2) • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00529)
As per my telegram to you, I am confined at home, to-day, giving the weight of my experience to the care of our new baby, (mother & child doing well,) but I have instructed our political man to send you the election returns.1explanatory note
By this mail I send a photograph & autograph to you, & a large one & a small one to for your friend,2explanatory note in the same package.
With all good wishes
On 9 November, the day after the elections, Josephus N. Larned, the Buffalo Express’s political editor, assessed the outcome. His editorial indicates why the New York Tribune, like the Express a reformist Republican paper, was anxious to have the earliest Buffalo returns:
The corrupt money power of Tammany has again overcome us in the State, notwithstanding a material reduction made in the former frauds of the metropolis. This time the “rural districts,” as they term the outside State in New York city, appears to be wholly responsible for our defeat. General Apathy, in fact, has had too extensively the command of the Republican forces.
In this county we have lost our Congressman without a doubt, . . . The whole county ticket, in fact, is gone, and we save nothing from the wreck. (Larned 1870 [bib11952])
And on 11 November he informed Express readers: “It is in the State of New York, alone, that the Republican party retreats from a disastrous field, with broken and disordered columns” (Larned 1870 [bib11953]).
Unidentified. The photographs presumably were prints of one or both of those Clemens had recently taken (20? May 70 to Paigeclick to open letter; 8 July 70 to OLC, n. 3click to open letter).
MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC).
L4 , 227–228.
The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).