Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Humorists, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910
Sherrard Clemens was a Republican Congressman from West Virginia in the
war days, and then went out to St. Louis, where the James Clemens branch
lived, and still lives, and there he became a warm rebel. This was after
the war. At the time that he was a Republican I was a rebel; but by the
time he had become a rebel I was become (temporarily) a Republican. The
Clemenses have always done the best they could to keep the political
balances level, no matter how much it might inconvenience them. I did
not know what had become of Sherrard Clemens; but once I introduced
Senator Hawley to a Republican mass meeting in New England, and then I
got a bitter letter from Sherrard from St. Louis. He said that the
Republicans of the North--no, the "mudsills of the North"--had swept
away the old aristocracy of the South with fire and sword, and it ill
became me, an aristocrat by blood, to train with that kind of swine. Did
I forget that I was a Lambton?
That was a reference to my mother's side of the house. As I have already
said, she was a Lambton--Lambton with a p, for some of the American
Lamptons could not spell very well in early times, and so the name
suffered at their hands. She was a native of Kentucky, and married my
father in Lexington in 1823, when she was twenty years old and he
twenty-four. Neither of them had an overplus of property. She brought
him two or three negroes, but nothing else, I think. They removed to the
remote and secluded village of Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of
east Tennessee. There their first crop of children was born, but as I
was of a later vintage I do not remember anything about it. I was
postponed--postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an unknown new State and
needed attractions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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