Library of Congress Mark Twain, circa 1867.
At the age of 25, Sam Clemens had every reason to feel pleased with himself. He was already one of the “aristocrats of the river” – a Mississippi steamboat pilot earning the princely sum of $250 a month. His job gave him the leisure to continue his process of self-education during slow stretches aboard, as he dipped into the works of Darwin and Macaulay, Suetonius and Shakespeare. The income gave him the wherewithal to live like a prince: in the finest New Orleans restaurants, the youth from Hannibal, Mo. dined on shrimp and oysters, washed them down with good brandy, smoked the very best cigars, and bought his brother Orion a splendid $12 pair of alligator-skin boots.
On this particular day, he had just finished a voyage aboard the side-wheeler steamboat Alonzo Child, bringing her safely 500 miles upriver from New Orleans. But apparently his mind still dwelt upon something that happened just before his departure. When he sat down to write Orion a long letter, he said nothing about the journey, but a great deal about a curious encounter in the Crescent City a week or two earlier: a visit to a psychic.
That Feb. 6, 1861 letter is one of few detailed ones to survive from a pivotal time in Sam Clemens’s life. It casts a strange – perhaps even unearthly – light on the complicated young man who would soon be Mark Twain.
That Feb. 6, 1861 letter is one of few detailed ones to survive from a pivotal time in Sam Clemens’s life. It casts a strange – perhaps even unearthly – light on the complicated young man who would soon be Mark Twain.
He had known about the fortune-teller for a long time; the only reason he finally went to see her – as he assured his brother, a bit too emphatically to be wholly convincing – was that he was bored. Madame Caprell’s advertisements and handbills, which she distributed liberally throughout New Orleans, touted her gifts as a “clairvoyant” and “seeress.”
Library of CongressAdvertisement for Madame Caprelle, New Orleans Daily Picayune, May 3, 1861. CLICK TO ENLARGE
More unusually, the ads also called her a “spiritual physician” who “locates all invisible diseases, and prescribes the proper remedies therefor.” Her gifts, she assured the public, were not supernatural, but scientific. One suspects that later generations might have had a different term for her profession. (In distant Vienna, a lad named Sigismund Schlomo Freud was not yet five years old.)
Madame Caprell’s fee was $2; her address, 37 Conti Street. Perhaps Clemens was nervous; he rang the wrong doorbell. Then he found the right one – and a few moments later, he told Orion, “stood in the Awful Presence”:
She is a very pleasant little lady – rather pretty – about 28 – say 5 feet 2 ¼ – would weigh 116 – has black eyes and hair – is polite and intelligent – uses good language, and talks much faster than I do.
She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door; and we were – alone. We sat down facing each other. Then she asked my age. And then she put her hand before her eyes a moment, and commenced talking as if she had a good deal to say, and not much time to say it in.
The conversation that followed made such an impression on Clemens that he wrote it all down almost word for word. In classic fashion, Madame Caprell began with a few easy hits. “You gain your livelihood on the water,” she said – as must have been obvious from the young man’s attire and his upriver accent. “You use entirely too much tobacco” – perhaps his breath told her this. She continued on a more flattering note: “There is more unswerving strength of will, & set purpose, and determination and energy in you than in all the balance of your family put together” – exactly what any precociously successful twenty-something would want to hear.
Scientifically based though they may have been, Madame Caprell’s prophecies were far from infallible. She told her client that he would marry twice. (He only married once.) She said he would have 10 children, a forecast that made him recoil in mock horror: “You must think I am fond of children.” “And you are,” she replied, although you pretend the contrary.” (She was right, but he would have only four.) She said he would die at the age of 28, 31, 34, 47 or 65 – or possibly 86, but only if he quit smoking. (He never did, and died of heart failure and respiratory disease at 74.) In at least one prediction, however, the seeress was eerily prescient. “You have written a great deal,” she said, “you write well – but you are rather out of practice; no matter – you will be in practice some day.”
In fact, although he did not know it yet, Sam Clemens stood on the brink of great life changes as 1861 began – changes that probably would never have come to pass without the Civil War. As the Union fell to pieces around him, he seemed to have no strong views on the matter one way or the other. On Jan. 26, the day that Louisiana seceded, he wrote in his journal only: “Great rejoicing. Flags, Dixie, soldiers.” Like many border-state Missourians at the start of the war, he vacillated. On one occasion, he distributed pro-secession cockades to a group of boys parading behind the Confederate flag. But shortly afterward, when he saw some other youths preparing to burn the Stars and Stripes, he rushed in to save it.
His views on slavery were similarly conventional. On the surface, at least, the young Clemens was a typical man of his place and time. He railed against “the infernal abolitionists” (even after Orion declared himself one). On a visit to New York, described the “mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese,” blacks and poor whites as a “mass of human vermin.” (He referred to the blacks using an epithet for which he remains controversial.)
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In later years, as Mark Twain, he would profess to have harbored deep doubts. He would recount an episode when, as a boy in Hannibal, he was horrified to see a white man “throw a lump of iron-ore at a slave-man in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly – he was dead in an hour.” On another occasion, he wrote he saw “a dozen black men and women chained to one another … awaiting shipment to the Southern slave market.” The incident, Twain implied, had shocked him. (The story is oddly similar to one that Abraham Lincoln told, about seeing 12 chained slaves on a steamboat “strung together precisely like so many fish on a trot line.”)
Yet these were all stories that he told only long after the war – at a time when he had befriended Frederick Douglass, put several black students through Yale Law School, and emerged as one of the nation’s fiercest white opponents of lynching. And something about them rings hollow. Although he professed shock at once seeing slaves chained together, this was something he would have witnessed almost daily along the New Orleans wharves, where the slave trade was conducted on a massive scale.
This is not to say that the young riverboat pilot’s inner moral qualms were not real. But one suspects that in his days on the Mississippi, he cruised a bit too easily between North and South, between free states and slave ones. As it would be for Huck and Jim, the river was his escape route – but in a different, and perhaps less flattering, sense.
All that would change very suddenly, not long after his visit to Madame Caprell. In May 1861, while Clemens was traveling up the Mississippi aboard the steamer Nebraska, a Union artillery battery blockading the river fired a warning shot across her bow. When the vessel failed to stop, a second shot smashed through her smokestack. The Nebraska was the last steamship to attempt such a voyage until the war’s end. The Mississippi River that Sam Clemens had known suddenly existed no longer.
Not even the fortune-teller could have fully predicted what came next. After a brief, unhappy stint as a Confederate soldier, Clemens left his old life behind and lit out for the territories, following Orion to Nevada. Instead of a Northerner or Southerner, he became a Westerner. Instead of a riverboat pilot, he became a writer. And instead of Sam Clemens, he became Mark Twain.
Sources: Edgar Marquess Branch et al., eds, “The Mark Twain Papers: Mark Twain’s Letters, Vol. 1, 1853-1866”; Mark Twain, “Life on the Mississippi”; New Orleans Daily Picayune, April 16, 1859, May 3 and 11, 1861; Ron Powers, “Mark Twain: A Life”; Arthur G. Pettit, “”Mark Twain and the South”; David Herbert Donald, “Lincoln”; Fred Kaplan, “The Singular Mark Twain”; Jerome Loving, “Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens”; Harriet Elinor Smith, ed., “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1″; Joe B. Fulton, “The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature.”
Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
