23 July 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NPV, UCCL 01253)
I was only joking.1explanatory note Nothing can persuade me to read a temperance tract or be a party to the dissemination of such injurious publications. Speaking It is temperance people who have persuaded the world to believe that the seller of rum is the proper person to be punished instead of the drinker of it. One could with as much sense say that God is the personage who should shoulder the blame for the sin that is in the world (& suffer the punishment) because He made sin attractive & put it in the reach of the sinner. It is temperance people who have made “the poor drunkard” a plt pet, in place of a despicable scoundrel worthy only of contempt, pitiless abuse, & speedy death.2explanatory note There is no estimating the harm that a few Goughs in temperance & a few Beechers in religion are able to do.3explanatory note Both of these causes would be much better off if both these persons had died in infancy. But never mind—I will not enlarge. I never would be able to make you comprehend I how frantically I hate the very name of total abstinence. I have taught Livy at last to drink a bottle of beer every night; & all in good time I shall taeach the children to do the same. If it is wrong, then, (as the Arabs say,) “On my head be it!”4explanatory note
We leave for Bateman’s Point, Newport, R.I., the last day of this month if all are well at that time. Livy is not very strong, & does not improve very fast, but the children are doing well. We have had no hot weather yet.
Did Watterson write Secretary Bristow about Sammy?5explanatory note And has Annie written Emma Parish?6explanatory note
In a letter not known to survive.
For Clemens’s previous, sympathetic view of temperance advocates, see 12 Mar 74 to the editor of the London Standard. click to open letter
John Bartholomew Gough, the famous reformed drunkard and sensational temperance lecturer, had been managed since 1872 by James Redpath, who also represented Clemens. Henry Ward Beecher preached against the evils of drink, but revealed his true attitude to Clemens. On 8 January 1868, shortly after dining at Beecher’s home, Clemens wrote his mother and sister: “I told Mr. Beecher that no dinner could be perfect without champaign, or at least some kind of Burgundy, & he said that privately he was a good deal of the same opinion, but it wouldn’t do to say it loud.” At that time Clemens thought Beecher “a brick” ( L2 , 144-45). Beecher’s long adultery trial, which Clemens followed, had recently come to an inconclusive end (see 29? July 74 to Twichell, n. 2click to open letter, and pp. 446, 448; Eubank, 300–303).
Benjamin Helm Bristow (1832-96), secretary of the treasury since July 1874, was being enlisted in the ongoing campaign to secure an appointment to the naval academy for Samuel Moffett. He had practiced law in Louisville in the early 1870s, where he evidently became acquainted with Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a relative by marriage of the Clemenses and Moffetts. Bristow’s primary public service as secretary was the 1875–76 defeat of the Whiskey Ring, a powerful alliance formed to evade payment of the whiskey tax.
No correspondence has been found between Annie Moffett and Emma Parish, who claimed a relationship to the Clemens family (see 29 Aug 74 to Parish, n. 2click to open letter).
MS, Jean Webster McKinney Family Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries (NPV).
L6 , 515–516; MTBus , 133, with omission.
see McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.