1 May 1877 • Baltimore, Md. (MS, correspondence card, in pencil: NN-BGC, UCCL 01422)
Found I was not absolutely needed in Washington, so I only staid 24 hours, & am on my way home, now. I called at the White House, & got admission to MⒶemendation Col. Rodgers,2explanatory note because I wanted to inquire what was the right hour to go & infest the President. It was my luck to strike the place in the dead waste & middle of the day, the very busiest time. I perceived that Mr. Rodgers took me for George Francis Train3explanatory note & had made up his mind not to let me get at the President; so at the end of half an hour I took my letter of introduction from the table & went away. It was a great pity all round, & a loss to the nation, for I was brim full of the Eastern question.4explanatory note I didn’t get to see the President or the Chief Magistrate either, though I had a sort of glimpse of a lady at a window who resembled her portraits.5explanatory note
A modern history of the White House and its staffing describes Rogers (1829–93) as “hapless,” noting that Hayes, unable to lure either of his first two choices,
reluctantly chose his former Cincinnati law partner (from the firm of Corwine Hayes & Rogers) and college classmate, William K. Rogers, for the role of private secretary but assigned him little independent authority. Rogers did not, for example, have responsibility for making even minor federal appointments, as had prior private secretaries. His main role in the White House was to serve as a friend and cheerleader for presidential decisions, rather than manage the internal workings of the White House. (Warshaw 2013, 21)
Train was an eccentric writer, lecturer, and self-promoter whom Clemens had been ridiculing in public and in print since January 1868 (14 Jan 1868 to JLC and family, L2, 156, 157–58 n. 5; 6 Mar 1869 to OLL [2nd of 2], L3, 145, 148 n. 6). Train attempted to repay Clemens in a New York lecture on 6 May 1877, which was quoted in the New York World:
“My writings were, besides being profound and erudite, always sparkling and brilliant. At times I indeed descended to humor—the highest, best kind of humor, mark you: as, for instance, my celebrated anecdote of the Englishman who inquired of an American whether the law of hen tail existed in the United States, and to whom the American replied: ‘No, but we have the universal rule of cocktails,’ etc.—little gems that I threw gaily from the end of my pen. Well, now, imagine my astonishment one day upon learning that some young picayune humorist in California was calling himself Mark Twain. You see he had said to himself very shrewdly that Train was a name known the world over and a name that would always attract crowds, and so in effect he stole it and that same Mark Twain has been for fifteen years living upon my audiences. I have borne this silently and like a Christian [immense sensation in the audience, in which Mr. Train took a part with his left eyelid] for all these years, but now, when they begin to mix me up with him, as he has endeavored to have himself mixed up with me, it is a little too much, and I won’t stand it. Besides, I can’t discover that this Twain ever wrote anything funny except his exquisite ‘Punch, brothers, punch with care’ song. Why even his play, The Gilded Age, would have fallen flat if it hadn’t been for me. Shall I tell you about that?”
“O yes, let’s have it. Give it to Mark; he hasn’t got any friends,” responded the house.
“Well, you see, the night it was produced I took a box and invited Matilda Heron and Bijou to go with me. I saw at once that this thing was a dead failure. There wasn’t any fun in it. It was as dreary as a tomb. Say I, ‘Pshaw, this fellow has stolen my name, but I’ll help him.’ So I got up and stepped to the front of the box. Everybody recognized me. I clapped. The effect was, of course, instantaneous. The house accepted my judgment and the play was stamped a success. So much for this Mark Twain. I wrote him a letter the next day and he didn’t have the politeness to answer it.” (“Train on Twain,” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 May 1877, 4, reprinting the New York World of 7 May)
No letter from Train to Clemens is known to survive. Colonel Sellers had its New York debut on 16 September 1874, to mixed reviews, and ran until 9 January 1875. No confirmation has been found that Train, with Matilda Heron and her young daughter, Bijou, both celebrated actresses, attended any performance (14 Aug 1876 to Conway, n. 3; 20 Sept 1874 to Howells, L6, 233–35).
5The “Chief Magistrate” was Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, the former Lucy Webb (1831–89), whom he had married in 1852 and with whom he had eight children. As an 1850 graduate of Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College she was the first First Lady to have a college degree. A member of a fervently abolitionist family, she visited Hayes’s Union army encampments during the Civil War, helping to care for the soldiers who served under him. After the war she supported the granting of civil rights, including voting rights, to African Americans. She was Hayes’s confidante throughout his political career, and as First Lady her commitment to public service was unprecedented. According to a recent biographer, her effectiveness was enhanced by “her pronounced personality, most often characterized as including a spontaneous warmth, charitable impulse, self-deprecating humor, and natural empathy.” If Clemens recognized her from her portraits, it was because “her appearance generated a great amount of press”:
Technology had now advanced to the point where an accurate eyewitness pen sketch of events and public figures could be reproduced in the “illustrated” weekly magazines like Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s and so the entire nation had a sense of what the new First Lady looked like from sketches made on Inauguration Day in 1877. (“Lucy Hayes” 2018)
MS, correspondence card, in pencil, NN-BGC.
MTL , 1:293–94; MTHL , 1:175–76.
See Howells Letters in Description of Provenanceclick to open letter.