Confederate Bushwhacker: Mark Twain in the Shadow of the Civil War

By Jerome Loving

Confederate Bushwhacker is a microbiography set in the most important and pivotal year in the life of its subject. In 1885, Mark Twain was at the peak of his career as an author and a businessman, as his own publishing firm brought out not only the U.S. edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but also the triumphantly successful Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. Twenty years after the end of the Civil War, Twain finally tells the story of his past as a deserter from the losing side, while simultaneously befriending and publishing the general from the winning side. Coincidentally, the year also marks the beginning of Twain’s descent into misfortune, his transformation from a humorist into a pessimist and determinist. Interwoven throughout this portrait are the headlines and crises of 1885—black lynchings, Indian uprisings, anti-Chinese violence, labor unrest, and the death of Grant. The year was at once Twain’s annus mirabilis and the year of his undoing. The meticulous treatment of this single year by the esteemed biographer Jerome Loving enables him to look backward and forward to capture both Twain and the country at large in a time of crisis and transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Release date: Sep 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611684728

Jerome Loving

Jerome Loving, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University, is the author of Walt Whitman: Song of Himself and The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser, both from UC Press.

Book preview

between."

ONE

On the Eve of Huckleberry Finn

In the summer of 1884, Mark Twain took off his shirt and sat for the bust of Roman orator or general. An odd photograph shows the bare-chested humorist, in a pose that for a long time no one could make much sense of. The bust makes up part of the front matter in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). It accompanies a warning to critics to keep their hands off the book. The sculptor was Karl Gerhardt. He had only recently returned from Paris, where he had been supported by Clemens to study art since 1881. The story of how Mark Twain came to sponsor this third-rate artist and ultimately include a piece of his work in his literary masterpiece is remarkable for its portraiture of Victorian manners. As a matter of fact, Mark Twain removed his shirt for an artist whose wife had first taken off hers for the famous author.

By the time it happened, he had been married for almost exactly ten years. Mark Twain, or Sam Clemens, was comfortably established with a wife and three children in his steamboat gothic mansion in Hartford, Connecticut. It was located in the neighborhood of Nook Farm, in the upscale, genteel part of the town. One of his neighbors was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Another was Charles Dudley Warner, who had coauthored The Gilded Age with him in 1873. Even before Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain was so famous that everybody wanted a piece of him. His second book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), sold almost 120,000 copies in its initial run between 1869 and 1877. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was so popular that he had to resort to a form letter to respond to the clamor for its sequel. One day his butler, a former slave by the name of George Griffin, announced that there was a lady waiting to see him. Thinking it was another unwelcome book agent, Clemens, who was given to petty domestic rages from time to time, marched into the drawing room and began to assault a young, very attractive woman with a succession of rude & raspy questions. Not even her delicate manner and ardent beauty could modify his stance against her — at first. Then, as he told his friend William Dean Howells about the romance of that moment, there she stood, with her pretty face bent floorward whilst I inquired, but always with her honest eyes looking me in the face when it came her turn to answer.

Mark Twain was forty-six. Hattie Gerhardt was eighteen and married to a twenty-eight-year-old mechanic at the local Pratt & Whitney machine shop. He was an untrained sculptor who worked away at his avocation in the evenings. His young wife had boldly come to the Nook Farm enclave of famous authors to see whether she could interest any of them in her husband’s work, to see if one of them wouldn’t pronounce her man a true artist. She evidently went to the Clemens mansion first, where she urged Mark Twain to come downtown to her flat and view one of his works. I don’t know anything about art, the artist and businessman soon to become his own publisher responded, but he was eventually persuaded to examine a statue made of clay that her husband had just finished. And soon after she had departed, he was sorry he hadn’t gone home with her to see it that very day. Clearly charmed by the young woman, he told Howells a few weeks later, "Damnation, how can a man be such a hound? — why didn’t I go with her now? Yes, & how mean I should have felt if I had known that out of her poverty she had hired a hack & brought it along to convey me. But luckily for what was left of my peace of mind, I didn’t know that." He also didn’t know then that Hattie had subsequently and immediately repaired to his neighbor Warner’s house with the same proposal.

Warner did go. He evidently found merit in the statue and urged Clemens to see it, too. But he didn’t give him all the details of his visit, saying only that the work, while crude, showed definite promise. The next day Clemens had his coachman, Patrick McAleer, take him to examine the statue. The Gerhardts lived in the working-class section of East Hartford, on the second story of a small wooden cottage. When Clemens arrived, only Hattie was at home — her husband still at work at the machine shop. Genteel poverty showed everywhere, starting with the small parlor stuffed with a chair and a sofa. Plaster busts her husband had made littered the room, along with a couple of amateur paintings of flowers and birds. There was even a bust of Hattie, but it wasn’t the statue she wished to show her visitor. That was in the kitchen. Upon entering it, the girl, he told Howells in a letter marked "Private & Confidential, flew around, with enthusiasm, & snatched rag after rag from a tall something in the corner, & presently there stood the clay statue, life size — a graceful girlish creature, (life size) [he repeated himself] nude to the waist. It was the statue of a nymph-like figure interrupted as she was about to enter her

Reviews for Confederate Bushwhacker

[jhgreen_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Since Mark Twain is one of my favorite authors I appreciated receiving a copy through Library Thing and was prepared for several hours of reading enjoyment. The title, “Confederate Bushwhacker” is intriguing and the cover with caricatures of Samuel Clemens and Ulysses Grant suggests a light-hearted romp with America’s greatest humorist. I had expected a biography, but the reality is quite different—a “micro-biography” according to the front flap. The book focuses primarily on events in 1885 when Mr. Clemens’ company published Grant’s memoirs and his own “Huckleberry Finn.” The prelude of the book and the source of its title was Clemens’ two-week stint as a lieutenant in a Missouri brigade at the start of the Civil War. That much of the book was vintage Mark Twain since it was a direct quote from a talk he gave at a dinner in Boston. According to the book’s jacket Jerome Loving is a distinguished professor of English at Texas A&M University. Accordingly, it appears, he has written this book as a scholarly tome. Except for the Mark Twain quotations the language is dense and doesn’t make for easy reading. Judging by the testimonials on the back cover, this book is an important work: a "true masterstroke" and "a joy to read." I found it tedious, difficult to read, and far different than I had expected. I slogged through one third of it before deciding that I had more interesting things to do with my time.

[dulegstmiramherzen · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book, on the surface, looks like a much better book than it really is. While it was a good micro biography it was repetitive. If the book had been properly edited, it would have been an article instead of a whole book. He mentions, quotes or rephrases the same story in (what seems like) every chapter in the book. While the story, "The Private History of a Compaign That Failed" is a great addition to all the Civil War, you can only read the same story so many times before becoming bored. While I will loan this book out, I cannot recommend it

[ron_gilbert_18 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Loving-ly written by a man with an obvious grasp of the enigmatic Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), “Confederate Bushwhacker” dramatically chronicles the great American author's personal crises with his short-lived alliance with the Confederate Army and his life-long association with slavery. “Confederate Bushwhacker” is a detailed read that will be of special interest to those concerned with the more detailed ideas of a very conflicted human being.

[etxgardener · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was a hard read for me as it wasn't what I expected - a rather dry and academic mini-biography of Mark Twain in the year 1885 - written by an English professor from Texas A&M. Much of the story covers Twain's ambivalence towards both slavery and the Civil War. He initially volunteered for a Confederate militia in the border state of Missouri, but deserted shortly after the first real war fight. Later he married the daughter of a prominent abolitionist and made his home in New Haven, Connecticut and came to admire Ulysses S. Grant, ultimately publishing the general's memoirs.The book also uses contemporary sources to describe the turbulent political and racial atmosphere of the times, juxtapositioning actual events with the publishing of Huckleberry Finn This book is for the lit crit reader only.

[cheryl_in_cc_nv · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

What a mess. Recursive and repetitive, not a narrative, no development. TG it's short. Some tidbits, at least for me, as I don't believe I've read a Twain bio before. My only book dart is Heminway's comment on Huck Finn: If you read it you must stop where the nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." Well, I see his point, and almost agree with it, but Tom's juvenile and romantic sense of adventure is a theme Twain had cause to represent to his readers, relevant to the times & larger American culture. Anyway, that's about all I got out of the book, and I did struggle to find more. (If you don't believe me, note that the blurbs are by other Twain scholars, writers... not professional reviewers. Ok, yes, 'critic' can be used as a pejorative, but authors scratching each other's backs is worse....)"

[arelenriel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Overall this book was an excellent book that focused on several little known aspects of Twain's personal life and history. This includes his ill fated publishing company and his perspectives on slavery and the Civil War, Overall this was a good read.