Mark Twain fought on the Confederate Side

[ThorsteinVeblen]

Discuss:

[Cat Atomic]

1. Only for a week or so, wasn't it?

And he didn't see any combat, as I recall.

[BrotherBuzz]

6. I understand four days then...

he hightailed it west! A lover, not a fighter.

[Don_G]

2. So?

Jefferson Davis was born in Indiana too but that didn't make him a "damm yankee."

[PurityOfEssence]

23. Jefferson Davis, like Abe Lincoln, was born in Kentucky

Now since we're on the subject of bushwackin' irregulars, Quantrill was born in Ohio...

I believe that Twain admitted in his later years that he'd made up the soldierin' incident.

[HereSince1628]

38. Of course not, Indianans are hoosiers, yankees are from the NE

I understand it was originally a slur and was derived from the Dutch for John Cheese.

I don't understand why everyone insists on calling midwestern folks Yankees. Can someone tell me how the "Unionists" came to be called by this handle?

[LuminousX]

3. Hmmm

1861 Civil War halts river traffic. Clemens briefly joins Confederacy and then travels with Orion to the Nevada Territories.
Reference Link


Yep. He did spend time fighting for the Confederacy. He more than makes up for it for his amazing biography of Joan of Arc.

[Room101]

15. He did not see combat

He got out of their pretty quick

[REP]

22. Talk About Damned By Faint Praise!

Twain's Joan of Arc is a literary joke in many, many ways. I adore Twain, but his Joan is laughably bad (and a man as talented as he is allowed to write at least one piece of complete crap). The best Joan is Shaw's.

[The Magistrate]

4. Hardly Enough To Accomplish Anything, Sir

"I have heard nothing against him except that he is a human being: that ought to be enough to hang any man."

[ThorsteinVeblen]

16. Here is my point in context:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=673835&mesg_id=673835

How I love my Veblen, Twain, Swift and Voltaire.

[DerekG]

5. Funny story, actually...

For the several days he participated in the Civil War, both Twain and his compatriots hid in the forest whenever Union soldiers were thought to be near.

My kind of soldier....

[Maddy McCall]

9. LOL!

[Maddy McCall]

7. Fought???

He moved west to Nevada to avoid conscription. Sounds quite pacifistic to me.

How many civil war battles did he fight in? Which ones, Thor? :eyes:

[ThorsteinVeblen]

18. I don't claim to know

My only point is that being from the South doesn't condemn a man to hell.

[Maddy McCall]

21. That is perhaps the only point you have made with which I agree.

Why not just say that rather than find some tangential, non relevant, obscure way to make it?

If you are trying to find an example of a "good" confederate soldier, I guess you found it with Clemens. However, if you want to find a "good" example of what a confederate truly was, better look in the direction of Forrest.

[Art_from_Ark]

31. That SOB Forrest has a town named after him in Arkansas!

Forrest City, in St. Francis County

And in Tennessee... Holy mackeral!

"We're not taking sides, but we'll note that once they start changing the names of Nathan Bedford Forrest memorials in Tennessee, they'll have a big job on their hands. According to James W. Loewen, author of "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong," there are more parks, statues, buildings, plaques and other memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee than to any other person in a single state -- more than Lincoln in Illinois, Lee or Washington in Virginia, or either Roosevelt in New York"

http://www.civilwarbuff.org/feb03.htm

[Yupster]

37. My favorite Confederate soldier was

Sir Henry Morgan Stanley.

Born in Wales, Stanley worked as a cabin boy on an English ship. He was adopted by a kind New Orleans family which took him off the ship.

When the Civil War began, he joined the Confederate Army, but was captured in Grant's counterattack at Shiloh.

To get out of Yankee prison, he volunteered for the federal navy in which he served until his health deteriorated and he was allowed to leave.

Then he became a journalist, being most famous for chasing Dr. Livingstone around Africa.

Eventually he even got knighted.

[kodi]

8. its now understandable why they lost

.

[Liberal Classic]

10. True

Clemens was briefly a volunteer cavalryman.

From Merry Tales by Mark Twain:

The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what I have already told of it. We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another, and eating up the country. I marvel now at the patience of the farmers and their families. They ought to have shot us; on the contrary, they were as hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it. In one of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an Upper Mississippi pilot, who afterwards became famous as a dare-devil rebel spy, whose career bristled with desperate ad ventures. The look and style of his comrades suggested that they had not come into the war to play, and their deeds made good the conjecture later. They were fine horsemen and good revolver-shots; but their favorite arm was the lasso. Each had one at his pommel, and could snatch a man out of the saddle with it every time, on a full gallop, at any reasonable distance.

In another camp the chief was a fierce and profane old blacksmith of sixty, and he had furnished his twenty recruits with gigantic home-made bowie-knives, to be swung with the two hands, like the machetes of the Isthmus. It was a grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practicing their murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless old fanatic.

The last camp which we fell back upon was in a hollow near the village of Florida, where I was born--in Monroe County. Here we were warned, one day, that a Union colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regiment at his heels. This looked decidedly serious. Our boys went apart and consulted; then we went back and told the other companies present that the war was a disappointment to us and we were going to disband. They were getting ready, themselves, to fall back on some place or other, and were only waiting for General Tom Harris, who was expected to arrive at any moment; so they tried to persuade us to wait a little while, but the majority of us said no, we were accustomed to falling back, and didn't need any of Tom Harris's help; we could get along perfectly well without him--and save time too. So about half of our fifteen, including myself, mounted and left on the instant; the others yielded to persuasion and staid -- staid through the war.

An hour later we met General Harris on the road, with two or three people in his company--his staff, probably, but we could not tell; none of them were in uniform; uniforms had not come into vogue among us yet. Harris ordered us back; but we told him there was a Union colonel coming with a whole regiment in his wake, and it looked as if there was going to be a disturbance; so we had concluded to go home. He raged a little, but it was of no use; our minds were made up. We had done our share; had killed one man, exterminated one army, such as it was; let him go and kill the rest, and that would end the war. I did not see that brisk young general again until last year; then he was wearing white hair and whiskers.

In time I came to know that Union colonel whose coming frightened me out of the war and crippled the Southern cause to that extent--General Grant. I came within a few hours of seeing him when he was as unknown as I was myself; at a time when anybody could have said, "Grant?--Ulysses S. Grant? I do not remember hearing the name before." It seems difficult to realize that there was once a time when such a remark could be rationally made; but there was, and I was within a few miles of the place and the occasion too, though proceeding in the other direction.

The thoughtful will not throw this war-paper of mine lightly aside as being valueless. It has this value: it is a not unfair picture of what went on in many and many a militia camp in the first months of the rebellion, when the green recruits were without discipline, without the steadying and heartening influence of trained leaders; when all their circumstances were new and strange, and charged with exaggerated terrors, and before the invaluable experience of actual collision in the field had turned them from rabbits into soldiers. If this side of the picture of that early day has not before been put into history, then history has been to that degree incomplete, for it had and has its rightful place there. There was more Bull Run material scattered through the early camps of this country than exhibited itself at Bull Run. And yet it learned its trade presently, and helped to fight the great battles later. I could have become a soldier myself, if I had waited. I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.

[Maddy McCall]

12. Great quote...

"I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating."

He was no Nathan Bedford Forrest, that's for sure. :-)

[0007]

32. "Letters from Earth" I dearly love

Anyone who hasn't read it, please do!!

[fabius]

11. Read about it in...

Life on the Mississippi. Great book.

Mark Twain oughta be there up on Mt. Rushmore too. And FDR.

[Maddy McCall]

13. I agree that he was an american gem.

He was truly a great man, but there should be no faces on the sacred Black Hills.

:-)

[mitchum]

35. Agree with you...

Mt Rushmore is an incredibly tacky desecration of the Black Hills.
It's American kitsch.

[BrotherBuzz]

17. I don't know about Mt Rushmore

But if you include Mark Twain and FDR, can we include Will Rogers, as well?

[Maddy McCall]

20. Only if we also put Flannery O'Connor up there, too...

;-)

[BrotherBuzz]

24. Sure! I'm easy...

But we're gonna need a bigtent by the time we complete the list. ;-)

[Maddy McCall]

25. Or a big mountain.

Let's just do it in concrete on the Washington Mall instead. :-)

[BrotherBuzz]

26. works for me!

[TreasonousBastard]

14. He did not "fight"...

on anyone's side. He signed up with a bunch of buddies who thought it was a good idea at the time. He was absolutely the worst soldier they had, and his resignation was happily received with much gratitude from the Confederacy.

Don't have the titles handy, but his short "war stories" are hilarious. Except for the bitter and poignant ones.

Speaking of bitter and poignant-- his "War Payer" is framed on my wall, and I pass out copies at demonstrations.

[deutsey]

28. From "Mark Twain: A-Z"

While Missouri never formally declared for the Confederacy, its new governor, Clairborne Fox Jackson, (1806-1862), called for militia volunteers early in 1861. In June Mark Twain joined 14 other young men in Hannibal to form the Marion Rangers. By this time, Union forces were massing on the state's northern border. After two weeks of haphazard training and moving around under constant threat of Union attack, the unit disbanded without seeing any real military action. The circumstances of Mark Twain's leaving the Rangers have led to charges by some that he was a "deserter."

[Media_Lies_Daily]

19. If you're going to toss a grenade, make sure you let go of it after...

...you pull the pin...otherwise it may just blow up in your face.

Mark Twain's Civil War
By Jim Zwick
<http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/twain/twain_civil_war.html>

"There were probably few events in Mark Twain's life that gave him as much discomfort as his short stint as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. His account in "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" emphasizes the physical torments and climaxes with the moral dilemma raised by the shooting of a stranger on a dark night, but that he rarely mentioned his experiences during the war until many years later is an indication of the problems participation in the war presented for a Southern writer.

Mark Twain was piloting steamboats on the Mississippi in late 1860 and early 1861 as southern states seceded from the Union. Shortly after the war began in April of 1861, the river trade was brought to a close and he returned to Missouri. Missouri did not secede from the Union, but Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called for militia volunteers to protect the state from a Union invasion. Mark Twain and fourteen others from Hannibal responded by forming the Marion Rangers. The Marion Rangers stayed together for only two weeks. Fortunately for Twain, it disbanded during such an early phase of the war that formal charges of desertion were not levied against him.

To Neutral Territory

The appointment of his brother Orion as secretary of the Nevada territorial government provided an opportunity to avoid any further military involvement during the war. In July he and Orion left for Nevada and he remained in the West until 1866. It was while he was working as a journalist for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise that he first used the name "Mark Twain," and it could be argued that had the Civil War not forced him from his prestigious career as a steamboat pilot, Sam Clemens might never have achieved literary fame as Mark Twain."

[izzie]

27. This is all interesting but it was hard on most people. Take Lee.

Look at his back ground if you wish to see a man pulled apart.

[Minstrel Boy]

29. I hear Howard Dean's read him.

What a freepin' racist!

:eyes:

[Terwilliger]

30. minimally...then renounced the entire sham

and pursued leftist thinking throughout the rest of his days

[bookman]

33. Fought? Nope.

As detailed in many of the responses he flirted with a military group and then headed west.

His writings much later in his career would fit in very well here at DU.

[knight_of_the_star]

34. I wish he was still around

He would be having TOO much fun lambasting Bush and Co! They would HATE him!

[mitchum]

36. He is (that's the beauty of the printed word)