SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 24 (of 78)
Archangel of Peace (1861)
Chapter 24
Archangel of Peace (1861)
I found myself in New Orleans when Louisiana seceded from the Union. That was on the 26th of January, 1861. In an attempt to avoid being pressed into service by either side, I took passage on a boat north, back to Hannibal—in fact, The Nebraska was the last passenger ship allowed up the Mississippi from St. Louis until after the war.
Later that year, in Keokuk, Iowa, with war fever high, a powerful speech was delivered that captured the crowd’s attention and helped them view armed conflict from a different perspective.
This oration, and its unassailable logic, impressed me and influenced my thinking greatly.
I later used the speech as a basis for my essay The War Prayer, which I wrote several decades after the speech—a short time ago, in fact.
Long before that, I had written about that speech—how it came about and how it was received—in one of my books; probably Old Times on the Mississippi. The reader can find it on his own if he wants to; I have neither the inclination nor the time to hunt it up just now.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain recalls where he wrote about Henry Clay Dean’s Keokuk speech as being in “Old Times on the Mississippi,” but that was actually the name of a series of magazine articles that he wrote. The book in which it really appeared was a reworking and expanding of those articles entitled Life on the Mississippi, which was published in 1883.
The section in that book that recounts Dean’s speech can be found in chapter 57, “An Archangel.”
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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.