When Samuel Clemens first visited Hartford in 1868 to see about the publication of his first full-length work, The Innocents Abroad: The New Pilgrims’ Progress, he was still a “special correspondent” for the San Francisco paper, the Alta California. These three letters describe his first impressions of the city, its sights, its industries, and its people.
Glimpse of Hartford
by Mark Twain
Excerpted from “MARK TWAIN ON HIS TRAVELS,” Alta California, March 3, 1868
Hartford.
I am in Hartford, Connecticut, now, (January 25th), but I am confident I shall get this letter finished yet, if I keep at it. I think this is the best built and the handsomest town I have ever seen. They call New England the land of steady habits, and I see the evidence about me that it was not named amiss. As I came along the principal street, to-day — smoking, of course — I noticed that of the two hundred men in sight at one time, only two were smoking beside myself. I had to walk three blocks to find a cigar store. I saw no drinking saloons at all in the street — but I was not looking for any. I hear no swearing here, I see no one chewing tobacco, I have found nobody drunk. What a singular country it is. At the hospitable mansion where I am a guest, I have to smoke surreptitiously when all are in bed, to save my reputation, and then draw suspicion upon the cat when the family detect the unfamiliar odor. I never was so absurdly proper in the broad light of day on my life as I have been for the last day or two. So far, I am safe; but I am sorry to say that the cat has lost caste. She has steadily decreased in popularity since I made my advent here. She has achieved a reputation for smoking, and may justly be regarded as degraded, a dishonored, a ruined cat.
They have the broadest, straightest streets in Hartford that ever led a sinner to destruction; and the dwelling houses are the amplest in size, and the shapeliest, and have the most capacious ornamental grounds about them. But I would speak of other things. This is the centre of Connecticut wealth. Hartford dollars have a place in half the great moneyed enterprises in the Union. All those Phoenix and Charter Oak Insurance Companies, whose gorgeous chromo-lithographic show-cards it has been my delight to study in far away cities, are located here. The Sharp’s rifle factory is here; the great silk factory of this section is here; the heaviest subscription publication houses in the land are here; and the last, and greatest, the Colt’s revolver manufactory is a Hartford institution. Some friends went with me to see the revolver establishment. It comprises a great range of tall brick buildings, and on every floor is a dense wilderness of strange iron machines that stretches away into remote distances and confusing perspectives — a tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels, and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism. There are machines to cut all the various parts of a pistol, roughly, from the original steel; machines to trim them down and polish them; machines to brand and number them; machines to bore the barrels out; machines to rifle them; machines that shave them down neatly to a proper size, as deftly as one would shave a candle in a lathe; machines that do everything but shape the wooden stocks and trace the ornamental work upon the barrels. One can stumble over a bar of iron as he goes in at one end of the establishment, and find it transformed into a burnished, symmetrical, deadly “navy” as he passes out at the other. It did not seem to me that in all that world of complex machinery there were two machines alike, or designed to perform the same office. It must have required more brains to invent all those things than would serve to stock fifty Senates like ours. I took a living interest in that birth-place of six-shooters, because I had seen so many graceful specimens of their performances in the deadfalls of Washoe and California.
They showed us the new battery gun on wheels — the Gatling gun, or rather, it is a cluster of six to ten savage tubes that carry great conical pellets of lead, with unerring accuracy, a distance of two and a half miles. It feeds itself with cartridges, and you work it with a crank like a hand organ; you can fire it faster than four men can count. When fired rapidly, the reports blend together like the clattering of a watchman’s rattle. It can be discharged four hundred times in a minute! I liked it very much, and went on grinding it as long as they could afford cartridges for the amusement — which was not very long.
The Charter Oak.
You may have heard of the Charter Oak. It used to stand in Hartford. The Charter of the State of Connecticut was once hidden in it, at a time of great political tribulation, and this happy accident made it famous. Its memory is dearly cherished in this ancient town. Anything that is made of its wood is deeply venerated by the inhabitants, and is regarded as very precious. I went all about the town with a citizen whose ancestors came over with the Pilgrims in the Quaker City — in the Mayflower, I should say — and he showed me all the historic relics of Hartford. He showed me a beautiful carved chair in the Senate Chamber, where the bewigged and awfully homely old-time Governors of the Commonwealth frown from their canvasses overhead. “Made from Charter Oak,” he said. I gazed upon it with inexpressible solicitude. He showed me another carved chair in the House, “Charter Oak,” he said. I gazed again with interest. Then we looked at the rusty, stained and famous old Charter, and presently I turned to move away. But he solemnly drew me back and pointed to the frame. “Charter Oak,” said he. I worshipped. We went down to Wadworth’s Atheneum, and I wanted to look at the pictures, but he conveyed me silently to a corner and pointed to a log, rudely shaped somewhat like a chair, and whispered, “Charter Oak.” I exhibited the accustomed reverence. He showed me a walking stick, a needlecase, a dog-collar, a three-legged stool, a boot-jack, a diner-table, a ten-pen alley, a tooth-pick, a —-
I interrupted him and said, “Never mind — we’ll bunch the whole lumber year, and call it —”
“Charter Oak,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “now let us go and see some Charter Oak, for a change.”
I meant that for a joke. But how was he to know that, being a stranger? He took me around and showed me Charter Oak enough to build a plank road from here to Great Salt Lake City. It is a shame to confess it, but I did begin to get a little weary of Charter Oak, finally, and when he invited me to go home with him to tea, it filled me with a blessed sense of relief. He introduced me to his wife, and they left me alone a moment to amuse myself with their little boy. I said, in a grave, paternal way, “My son, what is your name?” And he said, “Charter Oak Johnson.” This was sufficient for a sensitive nature like mine. I departed out of that mansion without another word. I said to myself, “Let whatsoever shall come of this be laid to other souls than mine. I go hence a vengeful and a desperate man. My mind is made up. I will return to ‘N___ Farm’ again, and damn the reputation of that cat forever.”
Hartford has a population of 40,000 souls, and the most of them ride in sleighs. That is a sign of prosperity, and a knowledge of how to live — isn’t it?
Excerpted from “LETTERS FROM ‘MARK TWAIN,’” Alta California, September 6, 1868:
Hartford — The “Blue Laws.”
I have been here several days. Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief. It is a city of 40,000 inhabitants, and seems to be composed almost entirely of dwelling houses — not single-shaped affairs, stood on end and packed together like a “deck” of cards, but massive private hotels, scattered along the broad, straight streets, from fifty all the way up to two hundred yards apart. Each house sits in the midst of about an acre of green grass, or flower beds or ornamental shrubbery, guarded on all sides by the trimmest hedges of of arbor-vitae, and by files of huge forest trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud. Some of these stately dwellings are almost buried from sight in parks and forests of these noble trees. Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.
I am able to follow Main street, from the State House to Spring Grove Cemetery, and Asylum street and Farmington avenue, from the railway depot to their terminations. I have learned that much of the city from constant and tireless practice in going over the ground. These streets answer the description of Hartford which I have given above. The large dwellings all stand far apart, each in the centre of its great grass-plat and its forest trees. There is not a mean building or slovenly piece of ground to offend the eye in all the wide area I have traversed as above. To live in this style one must have his bank account, of course. Then, where are the poor of Hartford? I confess I do not know. They are “corralled,” doubtless — corralled in some unsanctified corner of this paradise whither my feet have not yet wandered, I suppose.
The reason for this uniform grandeur is easily explained. The Blue-Law spirit is not utterly dead in Connecticut yet. The law prohibiting the harboring of sinful playing-cards in dwelling houses was annulled only something over a year ago. Up to that time, conscientious people whose instincts forbade them to break the law, would no more think of keeping an entire pack of cards in their dwellings than they would have thought of driving for pleasure in these beautiful streets on the blessed Sabbath. Therefore, they never entered into a friendly game of “draw,” “old sledge,” or anything of that kind, without first taking a couple of cards from the pack and destroying them. There was not a whole pack of cards in any house in Hartford. Thus was the majesty of the law upheld — thus was its purity secured against taint. Another blue-law of the city preserves the beauty and uniformity of the streets and buildings. By its terms you must obtain permission from the city government before you build on your lot — before you construct an addition to your house — before you erect a stable. You cannot build a house just when you please, and you cannot build just any sort of a house you please either.
If you propose to put up a plain brick dwelling, 25 by 40, on your ground, the lord of the palace next you may complain to the Aldermen that your small enterprise will spoil the appearance of the street and diminsh the value of his property. That finishes you. If you propose to build an addition to the rear of your house, your neighbor may complain that it will obstruct his view of the railway, or the church, or the river, or something, and thus bring down his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. And that closes out that proposition. If you decide to build a stable on your premises for your horses and your carriage, the party next door may affirm “with many holiday and lady terms,” that the fragrance of a stable doth offend his nostrils unto death — and then you will find that you must build your blasphemous stable elsewhere. You must get permission of the authorities before you attempt to build — and that you cannot get permission to build an edifice that will detract from the comeliness of the street, is a thing you may safely setting in your mind beforehand. By this means hath Hartford become a most beautiful city. People accustomed to large liberties will call this an unjust, unrighteous law. Very well, they are entitled to their opinion, and I to mine. I don’t care how unrighteous a thing is, so long as it is pleasant — I like this law. I exult in it every time I walk abroad in these delightful streets. I hope it will never be repealed.
Morality and Huckleberries.
I never saw any place before where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here. I do not know which has the ascendancy. Possibly the huckleberries, in their season, but the morality holds out the longest. The huckleberries are in season, now. They are a new beverage to me. This is my first acquaintance with them, and certainly it is a pleasant one. They are excellent. I had always thought a huckleberry was something like a turnip. On the contrary, they are no larger than buckshot. They are better than buckshot, though, and more digestible. The farmers boys and girls in the mountains near here turn out in their full strength, at this season of the year, and devote their whole talents to the gathering of huckleberries. They bring them to town and sell them for fifteen cents a quart. This is not a sudden and violent means of acquiring wealth. I spoke just now of the mountains near here, and if I had done it on my own responsibility I would apologize — but I get the term from the public — they call them mountains, and I think they do it with a deliberate intent to deceive. I think so because those mountains are not six hundred feet high. There is an amount of sin in this world that a man could hardly conceive of who had never been in it.
But the morality of this locality is something marvellous. I have only heard one man swear and seen only one man drunk in the ten days I have been here. And the same man that did the swearing was the man that contained the drunk. It was after midnight. Everybody else was in bed — otherwise they would have hanged him, no doubt. This sample gives you the complexion of male morality in Hartford. Young ladies walk these streets along as late as ten o’clock at night, and are not insulted. That is a specimen of both male and female morality, and of good order. I meet young ladies marching cheerfully along in the loneliest places, in the obscurity of the night and the added darkness of the sombre shadows of the trees — but I don’t dare to speak to them. I should be scalped, sure. I see the whole female element of the community apparently — hundreds and hundreds of pretty girls marching arm-in-arm — turn out about eight o’clock in the evening and swarm back and forth through Main street with a happy effrontery that is in the last degree entertaining to a stranger. What would you think of respectable young girls marching back and forth at night and unattended, from the head of Montgomery street to the top of the hill, or from the wharves of the city front half way to the Mission San Dolores? It is said that ladies of the highest respectability go freely to lectures and concerts at night in this city of 40,000 souls, without other escort than members of their own sex. We may expect the lion and the lamb to lie down together shortly in Connecticut, if it be constitutional for the Millenium to come in small doses. To me, a sinner, the prospect is anything but inviting.
Two or three of the churches here have massive steeples — or what were originally intended to be steeples — run up a few feet above the roof and then chopped square off. The natives call them “stump-tails.” These churches would be exceedingly attractive edificies if they wre finished, but in their present condition they are the saddest looking affairs you can imagine. A departed Christian must feel absurd enough, reporting himself in Paradise from a stump-tail church. But I suppose the people go on the principle of not standing on small matters so they get to Paradise — getting there being the main thing. If such be the case, they are something like the Minister of the Navy of one of those one-horse Central American Republics — a republic with a hundred thousand inhabitants, grand officials enough for a hundred millions, an “army” of five hundred ragamuffins and a “navy” consisting of one solitary 60-ton schooner. In Panama I heard
Excerpted from “LETTER FROM ‘MARK TWAIN,’” Alta California, November 22, 1868:
E. Pluribus Unim.
I have a boil on one side of my nose and a cold on the other, and whether I sneeze or blow it is all one; I get the lockjaw anyhow. I never fully comprehended before how inscrutable are the ways of Providence. For my feeble finite wisdom is utterly stumped with the simple problem of what great and good end is to be accomplished by the conferring of this boil and this cold on me both at the same time, but Providence understands it easy enough. The ways of Providence are too inscrutable for the subscriber.
I have not been working very hard, but I have got this book of mine ready for the engravers and electrotypers at last, though it will not be issued from the publishing house till March. Not knowing what else to name it, I have called it “THE NEW PILGRIM’S PROGRESS,” I am told that Bancroft is to be the agent for it on the Pacific Coast and in China.
This reminds me that I see by the papers that I am going to China in the spring. I was not quite certain of it before, but I am now, I suppose. I start out lecturing the 15th of November, and as my engagements extend far into March, I shall have ample time to think it all over.
I have seen a New England forest in October, and so I suppose I have looked upon almost the fairest vision the earth affords. The first trees to change were the maples, which doffed their robes of green and took to themselves a brilliant bloody red — and shortly the long walls of shining emerald that bordered the roads were splendid with these random bursts of flame. A distant prospect gave to a forest the resemblance of a garment splotched with blood. the chestnuts changed next, but more slowly, and day after day their rich green panoply fainted away and dissolved into a soft sunset blending of dainty tints — of gold and purple, touched with a crimson blush here and there — and finally, some frosty morning, came out in the imperial yellow of China, and stood ready, with the mistaken wisdom of trees the world over, to undress for winter. A great forest mottled from end to end with these changing splendors, these opaline minglings of exquisite dyes, subdued and softened by distance, seems etherealized, stripped of the grossness of earth and suffused with the tender grace of pictures we see in dreams.
Indigent Nomenclature Legend.
Don’t direct any more letters to me at Hartford until I find out which Hartford I live in. They mix such things here in New England. I think I am in Hartford proper, but no man may hope to be certain. Because right here in one nest we have Hartford, and Old Hartford, and New Hartford, and West Hartford and East Hartford, and Hartford-on-the-Hill, and Hartford-around-generally. It is the strangest thing — this paucity of names in Yankee land. You find that it is not a matter confined to Hartford, but is a distemper that afflicts all New England. They get a name that suits them and then hitch distinguishing handles to it and hang them on all the villages round about. It reminds me of the man who said that Adam went on naming his descendants until he ran out of names and then said gravely, “Let the rest be called Smith.” Down there at New Haven they have Old Haven, West Haven, South Haven, West-by-sou’-West Haven and East-by-east-nor’-east-half-east-Haven, and the oldest man in the world can’t tell which one of them Yale College is in. The boys in New England are smart, but after they have learned everything else they have to devote a couple of years to the geography of New Haven before they can enter college, and then half of them can’t do it till they go to sea voyage and learn how to box the compass. That is why there are so many more New England sailors than any other. Some of them spend their whole lives in the whaling service trying to fit themselves for college. This class of people have colonized the City of New Bedford, Mass. It is well known that nine-tenths of the old salts there became old salts just in this way. Their lives a failure — they have lived in vain — they have never been able to get the hang of the New Haven geography.
In this connection they tell a story of a stranger who was coming up the Connecticut River, and was trying his best to sleep; but every now and then the boat would stop and a man would thrust his head into the room. First he sung out “Haddam!” and then “East Haddam!” and then “Haddam Neck!” and then “North Haddam!” and then “Great Haddam!” “Little Haddam!” “Old Haddam!” “New Haddam!” “Irish Haddam!” “Dutch Haddam!”
“Haddam-Haddam!” and then the stranger jumped out of bed all excited and says:
“I’m a Methodist preacher, full of grace, and forty years in service without guile! I’m a meek and lowly Christian, but d—n these Haddams, I wish the devil had ’em, I say!”
A Relic.
The gentlemen of the Courant have given me a facsimile copy of the first issue of that paper. It is about twice as large as a sheet of foolscap, and bears date October 29, 1764 — something over a hundred years ago. In its columns, under date of “Boston, October 8th,” — for it will be remembered that news travelled slowly in those days — I find broad hints of the dissatisfaction among the colonists which was within the next ten or eleven years to breed the American Revolution. Read:
“There seems to be a disposition in many of the inhabitants of this and the neighboring Governments to clothe themselves with their own manufacture.”
British taxation without representation was worrying them. Again:
“It is now out of fashion to put on mourning at the funeral of the nearest relation, which will make a saving to this town of twenty-thousand sterling per annum. It is surprising how suddenly, as well as how generally, an old custom is abolished; it shows, however, the good sense of the town, for it is certainly prudent to retrench our extravagant expenses, while we have something left to subsist ourselves, rather than be driven to it by fatal necessity.
“We hear that the laudable practice of frugality is now introducing itself in all the neighboring towns, an instance of which we have from Charlestown, at a funeral there the beginning of last week, which the relatives and others attended without any other mourning than which is prescribed in a recent agreement.
“Indeed we are told that all the funerals of last week were conducted on the new Plan of Frugality.
“Nothing but FRUGALITY can now save distress’d northern colonies from impending ruin. It ought to be a consolation to the good people of a certain province that the greatest man in it exhibits the most rigid example of this political as well as moral virtue.”
Who could he have been? Has his greatness totally passed form history and the memories of men?
War is boldly hinted at in this paragraph:
“It is now confidently affirmed by some that the severity of a new a–t of p—-t [Act of Parliament] is to be imputed to letters, representations, NARRATIVES, etc., transmitted to the m—y [monarchy] about two years ago by persons of eminence this side the water; and that some copies of letters are actually in this town, and others soon expected. to whatever cause these severities are owing, it behooves the colonies to represent their grievances in the strongest point of light, and to unite in such measures as WILL BE EFFECTUAL to obtain redress.”
Cannot you fancy the ancient editor of the Connecticut Courant of a hundred years ago, in round Ben. Franklin spectacles, wig and cue, lace cuffs, coat-pocket-flaps like a cellar-door, long waistcoat, knee-breeches, stockings, low-quarter shoes with buckles on them like a window-sash — a man gravely culling “news” from Boston three weeks old; and “per latest advices” about Colonel Bouquet’s forces having crossed the river at Pittsburg full thirty days gone by; and thrilling rumors of war from Madrid, London, Versailles, Stockholm and the Hague, with the mildews of four awful months on them; and venerable canards, a 100 days out from Naples, telling how “between three and four hundred thousand” citizens had lately died of plague in that little kingdom — a man exulting over his little old sensation despatches and latest dates, and never, strangely enough, never having a vision of 1868 flash through his complacent brain with its revelations of telegraphs and locomotives — I say, can’t you fancy this old muff sitting at his desk and getting off this bit of sarcasm, and holding it up and cocking his eye at it, and reading it over, and chuckling to himself, and reading it again, and calling in the “devil” and inflicting it on him, and then sending it to the printers perfectly satisfied that it is the best and the boldest and the awfulest crusher that ever thundered from the press — can’t you? Thus:
“We hear that if any Persons can tell of any valuable Reversions in the Gift of the Crown undisposed of, they may have a good Premium for such Intelligence; as there are some few of the Children of the Gentlemen now in Power still unprovided for!”
Then the rusty old flint-lock gossips pleasantly about the servant of an Irish merchant having been successfully palming himself off on the Parisians as the “Prince of Angola” — “lately” — (about a year before, no doubt); and in stunning sensation italics he puts in the Sheriff’s proclamation commanding the contumacious John Wilkes, Esq., to “appear before the Lord, the King of Westminister,” to answer for certain “Trespasses, Contempts and Misdemeanors” whereof he has been convicted — and then in smaller type exults in the fact that that old time Head Centre is safe in France and will not be likely to honor the Lord the King’s pleasant invitation; in default of a better mining excitement he tells of a piece of ore, containing “divers particles of silver” which has been found in Florida and sent to England for assay — and probably much illuminated wild cat stock changed hands there on the strength of it; and he asserts that the “late report of the French having ceded New Orleans to the Spaniards is without foundation.”
But he always comes back to his pet hobby, sooner or later — hints of war with the mother country. Hear him:
“The northern colonists have sense enough, at least the sense of feeling; and can tell where the shoe pinches — The delicate ladies begin to find by experience, that the Shoes made at LYNN are much easier than those of the make of MR. HOSE of London — What is become of the noted Shoemaker of Essex?”
Yes, what is become of him — and what is become of both of you, since you are so brash about it? It is an even bet that where you are now you don’t toot you horn any louder than “the noted shoemaker of Essex” does.
But I will let him give it one more blast before I tumble him back into his dusty grave to sleep another century:
“It is fear’d by many who wish well to Great Britain, that the new A–t of P—t, will greatly distress, if not totally ruin, some of HER OWN manufactures. It is the tho’t that by means of this A–t, less of her woollen cloths, to the amount of some thousands sterling, will be purchas’d in this cold climate the insuing winter.”
He is a good deal worried for fear “Great Britain” will damage her prosperity if one lets him tell it. I will publish his joke, now, and then boost him back among the damned, where he belongs. I will print this joke in simplified justice to him, that people may see who originated it, and so give him the credit due (unless he stole it himself from some still more ancient periodical), for to this day it keeps turning up every now and then in the country newspapers with an aggravating pretence of being new and original:
“A Surprising Concatenation of Events to One Man in One Week — Published a Sunday — married a Monday — had a Child a Tuesday — stole a horse a Wednesday — banished a Thursday — died a Friday — buried a Saturday — all in one Week.”
There you are. In our day, since we know nothing of banishment (which he did), and since we do know something of divorcement (which he didn’t), we substitute the one for the other naturally enough when we steal the joke. I will now let this old buffer go. I don’t wish to be too hard on him, lest I meet his musty ghost prowling about his ancient haunts, in Hartford here, some night. Where be his comrades? Whither went he to take his ale? Who was he, anyhow?
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