Mark Twain's Benevolence

With the 180th anniversary of his birth approaching, it might be an apt time to present a different side to the acerbic wit we associate with one of America’s best-loved writers through a letter found in American History, 1493-1945: From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. More than just an anecdote about a great man of letters, it is also a piece of correspondence which gives evidence to the United States’ post-American Civil War racial settlement and the legacies of that conflict and slavery.

This letter (GLC07971) from Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, to an unnamed ‘Sir’ at Yale Law school on Christmas Eve of 1885, concerns the writer enquiring about how much money he needs to provide in order to fund a student’s board. The interesting thing about this letter, beyond its act of generosity, is that he is funding this student because of his colour: “I do not think I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color” writes Twain.

He goes on to explain why he is funding this black student by stating how “We [the white race presumably] have ground the manhood out of them & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.” This is a letter that throws into relief the failure of Reconstruction in the years after the end of the Civil War, written as it is, almost 23 years after the Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1862/3), the subsequent 13th (1865), 14th (1868) and 15th (1870) Amendments to the US Constitution. Decades after this Civil War that ended slavery and despite its appended legislation designed to complete that emancipation, Twain still feels a sense of guilt over the plight of African Americans.

The Reconstruction era is usually considered a failure in terms of what it delivered for the African American population and freed slaves and in this letter you can see that Twain also agrees that no new advantages have been wrought for a student who was probably not even born when the Civil War ended. We don’t know whether this student is descended from slaves or free blacks but Twain does not make a distinction here, suggesting that African Americans as a whole had got a poor deal from history. 

One curiosity to this story is that when the Civil War broke out the young Twain, a native of Missouri (where slavery was legal prior to the war but a state whose citizens fought on both sides of the divide), had briefly been in a Confederate militia force. The Confederate States had, of course, fought to maintain a particularly southern way of life that included the peculiar institution of slavery. His dalliance with this great event, and presumably his commitment to the Confederate cause, did not last long before he left to work in the Nevada Territory and then on to San Francisco.

His writing career consequently bloomed, giving him fame and the riches that enabled him to bestow such benevolence evidenced in this letter and leaving us this record that gives an insight into the mind of a renowned writer and an era of American history.

American History, 1493-1945: From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York is available for purchase now. For more information, including trial access and price enquires, please email us at info@amdigital.co.uk.