May 22, 2017 | Leave a comment Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30th 1835 in Florida. No, not the southern U.S. state. This Florida is a village in the U.S. state of Missouri. Never a large village, the population, according to the 2000 United States Census, was a whopping 9 residents! At 13 years of age Samuel became a printer’s apprentice, but by 1858 had switched professions and was a licensed river pilot. Florida, Missouri. A Bustling Metropolis! However, when Civil War broke out in 1861, river trade drew to a standstill, and so Samuel started writing for newspapers. He began to gain notoriety as a writer and would eventually complete 28 books including “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, published in 1869, and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, in 1885. Yes, Samuel Clemens wrote under the pseudonym Mark Twain, which was actually a term he would have used as a river pilot. Apparently, to river pilots, ‘mark twain’ means two fathoms, or a safe depth for navigation. A Young Mark Twain During the Civil War, Mark, as I will now refer to him, briefly fought on the side of the Confederates. Years later, in 1887, he was invited to a reunion of Union veterans in Baltimore, to explain why he left the American Civil War after just 2 weeks’ service in 1861. The former Confederate gave the following brilliant account of his decision to withdraw. Sporting His Trademark Moustache “When your secretary invited me to this reunion of the Union veterans of Maryland he requested me to come prepared to clear up a matter which he said had long been a subject of dispute and bad blood in war circles in this country – to wit, the true dimensions of my military services in the Civil War, and the effect they had upon the general result. I recognise the importance of this thing to history, and I have come prepared. Here are the details. I was in the Civil War two weeks. In that brief time, I rose from private to second lieutenant. The monumental feature of my campaign was the one battle which my command fought – it was in the summer of ’61. If I do say it, it was the bloodiest battle ever fought in human history; there is nothing approaching it for destruction of human life in the field, if you take into consideration the forces engaged and the proportion of death to survival. And yet you do not even know the name of that battle. Neither do I. It had a name, but I have forgotten it. It is no use to keep private information which you can’t show off. In our battle, there were just 15 men engaged on our side – all brigadier-generals but me, and I was a second-lieutenant. On the other side, there was one man. He was a stranger. We killed him. It was night, and we thought it was an army of observation; he looked like an army of observation – in fact, he looked bigger than an army of observation would in the day time; and some of us believed he was trying to surround us, and some thought he was going to turn our position, and so we shot him. Poor fellow, he probably wasn’t an army of observation after all, but that wasn’t our fault; as I say, he had all the look of it in the dim light. It was a sorrowful circumstance, but he took the chances of war, and he drew the wrong card; he over-estimated his fighting strength, and he suffered the likely result; but he fell as the brave should fall – with his face to the front and feet to the field – so we buried him with the honours of war, and took his things. So began and ended the only battle in the history of the world where the opposing force was utterly exterminated, swept from the face of the earth – to the last man. And yet you don’t know the name of that battle; you don’t even know the name of that man. Now, then, for the argument. Suppose I had continued in the war, and gone on as I began, and exterminated the opposing forces every time – every two weeks – where would your war have been? Why, you see yourself, the conflict would have been too one-sided. There was but one honourable course for me to pursue, and I pursued it. I withdrew to private life, and gave the Union cause a chance. There, now, you have the whole thing in a nutshell; it was not my presence in the Civil War that determined that tremendous contest – it was my retirement from it that brought the crash. It left the Confederate side too weak.” After his brief but eventful military career, Mark Twain’s light shone brightly. He became famous the world over, and was acquainted with presidents, artists, scientists, and even European royalty. So well known was he, that fan mail addressed to “Mark Twain, God knows where”, and “Mark Twain. Somewhere (Try Satan)”, duly landed on his doormat. In His Later Years In 1909, he said: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” Mark Twain died of a heart attack on the 21st April 1910, one day after the comet’s closest approach to Earth! Sources: http://www.abroadintheyard.com/ http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/about/bio.htm