SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 26 (of 78)
A Tramp in Mud Time (1861)
Chapter 26
A Tramp in Mud Time (1861)
So I did end up getting involved in the war, in a small way, for a short while.
I initially intended to hurl in a bit of poetry here illuminating my glorious military career—such as of the nights spent awake with only the moon and I standing watch over the horses and mules and things. That might have been well in its way, but on the premise that war talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting, whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull, I will instead briefly proffer a prose outline of those illustrious and gaudy experiences.
To put these things in a nutshell—which I have written about in a more comprehensive manner elsewhere—I half-heartedly joined a ragtag bunch of southern sympathizers for an annoying and miserable two weeks in the country south of Hannibal. We called ourselves the Marion County Rangers. My touching experiences with this crowd led me to quickly comprehend with a sort of certain perspicacity that I wasn’t cut out for war.
To be truthful, the reason I resigned my post and gave up my commission was because I had become incapacitated by fatigue through persistent retreating. I could have eventually become a good soldier, if I had waited. I had got part of it learned. I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.
As mentioned, prior to my brief involvement in the great conflict of the age, I had long been undecided about where I stood in connection with it. Slavery was so much a part of the very fabric of society in which I grew up that it seemed normal and natural to me, but then I would remember Sandy and his singing; and the slave women who had saved me from drowning; the murder of the slave and the cavalier response to it by the people of my village; those dozen I had seen chained together at the wharf, about to be sold downriver; and not least of all Uncle Dan’l.
When I reflected on these that I had known, and how they had never done me any harm, but on the contrary had looked out for me, I wondered if Orion, in his abolitionist views, was right after all.
Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls. I began to perceive that education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
EDITOR’S NOTES: After several years had passed, Twain spoke and wrote about his brief experiences as a Confederate irregular. The stories told on various occasions did not always match one another. For a couple of examples, see the speech “My Military History,” given in 1877, and the much longer 1885 sketch Private History of a Campaign that Failed, a fictionalized but true-to-spirit story that Twain wrote about his brief foray into quasi-military service.
In that tale, using the Civil War and his experience in it as a metaphor for all war, Twain summarized the situation by saying that warfare involves the killing of strangers against whom one feels no personal animosity. The first person he shared the story with was his friend Ulysses S. Grant, whose forces had been marching south to meet Twain’s ragtag bunch around the time the latter sagely disbanded.
In addition to the writings mentioned above, while discussing the Boer War in South Africa at the time of his ‘round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-1896, Twain wrote the following:
As a military man, I wish to point out what seems to me to be military errors in the conduct of the campaign which we have just been considering. I have seen active service in the field, and it was in the actualities of war that I acquired my training and my right to speak. I served two weeks in the beginning of our Civil War, and during all that time commanded a battery of infantry composed of twelve men. General Grant knew the history of my campaign, for I told it him. I also told him the principle upon which I had conducted it; which was, to tire the enemy. I tired out and disqualified many battalions, yet never had a casualty myself nor lost a man. General Grant was not given to paying compliments, yet he said frankly that if I had conducted the whole war much bloodshed would have been spared, and that what the army might have lost through the inspiriting results of collision in the field would have been amply made up by the liberalizing influences of travel. Further endorsement does not seem to me to be necessary.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.