Civil War

When news of the attack on Fort Sumter arrived in New York, nobody really knew what the public reaction would be, or what course the state should take. William M. Evarts met with five other prominent men in a private office on Pine Street on Tuesday after the firing on Sumter to feel the pulse of the people, and to call a public meeting. “We did not know whether we dared to do it, lest the fewness of the number should be counted and the game be lost; and then we did not dare take the Academy of Music, for fear our shrunken columns would display the poorness of the patriotism of New York.”
The arrival of the Civil War seemed to hit everyone as a surprise. Certainly the states had their differences, but what would separation actually mean? Nobody foresaw the bloodiness of the conflict that would come. As Henry Adams noted, “Not one man in America wanted the Civil War, or expected or intended it. A small minority wanted secession. The vast majority wanted to go on with their occupation in peace. Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what happened.”

Evarts was nervous that federal troops might be harassed in New York as they had just been in Baltimore. When the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, with Evarts, the Colonel, and the Mayor at the head, marched down Broadway the cheers of the crowds came as a great relief. The public meeting was a great success and a Union Defense Committee was formed with Evarts as secretary, and it soon organized sixty-six regiments and expedited the movement of troops and supplies to the front lines.

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Evarts had campaigned for Zachary Taylor in 1848; when Taylor won, William Seward managed to have Prescott Hall appointed district attorney for the southern district of New York, and Evarts became Hall’s assistant DA. The United States had a history of citizens launching freelance military schemes, from Aaron Burr’s journey down the Ohio River, to the adventures against the Indian territories which Evarts's father had opposed. As Assistant DA, Evarts had instructions to enforce the neutrality act and to stop various filibustering expeditions to Cuba and Latin America. Evarts placed marines aboard the ships in New York Harbor chartered by Narciso Lopez, who was plotting to liberate Cuba and he seized the ship Kate Boyd, which was loaded with munitions bound for Haiti.

After the end of the war with Mexico, the issue of slavery dominated political debate. Evarts helped form the Republican Party in New York in 1856. When Governor William Seward campaigned for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1860, Evarts was chairman of the New York delegation and nominated Seward at the convention. Seward, as leader of the "irrepressibles" was the strongest voice against slavery, and came into the convention the establishment favorite. He led for the first two ballots, but Horace Greeley led the opposition and eventually the more conservative westerner Lincoln took the lead and finally won the nomination. It was a crushing blow to the Seward camp; Thurlow Weed burst into tears, but Evarts quickly made his way to the stage of the “Wigwam”, mounted the secretary’s table, and with great emotion moved the unanimous approval of Lincoln’s nomination. As Evarts left the Wigwam, he turned to his fellow delegate and remarked, with his characteristic dry humor: "Well, Curtis, at least we have saved the Declaration of Independence!"

Lincoln carried New York, Seward became Secretary of State, and Evarts name was soon floated to succeed Seward as senator. His name was placed in nomination and he led Horace Greeley through two ballots, until the Thurlow Weed / Horace Greeley feud boiled over and the dark horse Harris eventually won.

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During the war Evarts was retained by the the government to prosecute Confederate privateers. The Confederate ship Savannah had left Charleston and captured a northern merchant ship, before being captured herself by a northern warship. The crew was paraded through New York and taunting crowds demanded they be hanged. The United States had always permitted privateering in wartime, and while President Lincoln had declared Confederate privateers to be pirates, a convic tion would probably have led to Confederate reprisals. The issue, which Evarts wiggled around, came down to the question of whether in a civil war a crew had any rights as belligerents, or (anticipating the questions still being asked in Guantanamo) were deemed unlawful combatants.

The British were allowing ships, such as the Florida, to be built and go to sea and then capture American merchantmen. Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in England, feared the rapid destruction of the merchant marine. Seward telegraphed Evarts in April of 1863 requesting him to sail to London to assist Adams on the legal matters of enforcing neutrality. The Alexandra, another Confederate cruiser was said to be almost ready in Liverpool, and more ships were being built.

Great Britain proclaimed neutrality, but it was an uneasy neutrality which kept Lincoln and Seward nervous. England had abolished slavery in 1833, but the real politick was that the English were concerned about the growing power of the United States, and perceived the British interests might best be protected if secession split the growing country in two.

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On the wall of the front room of our house in Bennington, I have a framed fragment of the flag of the USS Kearsarge, given to me when my mother moved out of the High Street house in Bethlehem. The note on the back, obviously typed by my father, reads:

“The Kearsarge was an important ship of the Union’s navy in the time of the Civil War. 1861-1864. The Alabama was a smaller, but faster, sailing ship, built for the Confederancy in England, which was a very successful blockade runner and thorn in the side of the Union Blockading ships.

After a lengthy series of cruises, during which she did a good deal of harm to the Union cause, the Alabama was caught, outside of the French seaport of Cherbourg, in 1864, trying to evade the Union’s ship, the Kearsarge. She was heavily outgunned and, as a sailing vessel only, was less manoeverable than her enemy which had auxiliary steam propulsion. The Alabama was sunk.

This little piece of flag – actually a bit of the “pennant” was given to my Grandfather, whose name was the same as mine, by Mary Winslow, whose father was the Captain of the Kearsarge, in 1869."

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Evarts went to London with letters of introduction from George Bancroft and Charles Sumner to Anthony Trollope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Baring, and William Gladstone. Arriving in London, Evarts drove a two-horse brougham about the city, making the acquaintance of the rich and powerful. He presented himself well; the Chief Justice Lord Coleridge found him “a very able man, full of good sense and moderation . . . He is a little hard, perhaps, but very clever, reasonable, and a gentleman.”

Henry Adams, working as his father’s secretary, was twenty years younger than Evarts but the two hit it off right away, talking incessantly of the law and the war and the need for reform at home. Adams noted how Evarts still smarted from the race for senator and was soured on his political luck.

“If you could have seen Evarts and me after dinner at one of those little colleges, conducting a noisy and jovial game of whist, with cigars and brandy and soda-water . . . You recollect, no doubt, that he wears his hat so that a plumb line dropped from its center would fall about twelve inches behind his heels. His speech is Yankee and his aspect shouts American with stentorian lungs. Fortunately his conversation and his mind make up for the peculiarities of dress and appearance, so that I was always relieved when he took off his hat and opened his mouth.”

Evarts lobbied the British to detain the Alexandra, which they finally did. When the case came to trial, the judge charged the jury that British neutrality laws aimed to prevent hostilities in British waters only, and forbade armament in port; but once outside British waters, a vessel could be armed. In other words, British shipbuilders could supply the Confederates with all the warcraft they could buy, if they were not armed within British ports (in my copy of Barrow’s biography of Evarts, my father noted in the margin: “Roosevelt’s Airplanes and Wilson’s Submarines”).

Returning to the US, Evarts urged Lincoln to visit Europe, but the gawky Lincoln replied that he would feel embarrassed to meet men of such great classical learning. Evarts, on the other hand, loved the give-and-take of puns and intellect, and invited George Bancroft to bring Sir Henry Holland, the travel writer, to visit his farm at Windsor: "I will show you the ignoble pen from which, in the shape of pork, your elegant pen has received some of its sense and strength."

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Chief Justice Taney died in October 1864, and Evarts name was bandied about as a successor. The Court of Appeals unanimously petitioned Lincoln to appoint Evarts: “He is preeminent for his refinement, courtesy, and dignity of his manner, and these qualities are not undeserving of consideration in a man who is to occupy the place heretofore filled by a Jay, Ellsworth, Marshall, and Taney.”

Evarts, who never lacked self-confidence, concurred in a letter to Richard Henry Dana: “Aside from Gov. Chase I am justified in thinking that many things concur to make me a very prominent, if not the most prominent candidate.”

Chase of course felt differently: “Evarts is a man of sterling abilities and excellent learning and a much greater lawyer than I ever pretended to be. The truth is, I always thought myself much over-estimated. And yet I think I have more judgment than Evarts, and that tried by the Marshall standard, I should make a better judge.”

Chase got the job, and again Evarts was disappointed.

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The end of the war came in sight shortly after the election. Lincoln was sworn in to his second term on March 4th, 1865.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

The war officially ended on April 9;

Lincoln was shot to death at Ford’s Theater April 14th.

Printer's Devil

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down until the average is three letters and a half. I can put 1,200 words on your page, and there's not another man alive that can come within two hundred of it. My page is worth $84 to me. It takes exactly as long to fill your magazine pages with long words as it does with short ones - four hours. Now then, look at the criminal injustice of this requirement of yours. I am careful, I am economical of my time and labor. For the family's sake I've got to be so. So I never write 'metropolis' for 7 cents, because I can get the same money for 'city.' I never write 'policeman,' because I can get the same price for 'cop'. And so on and so on. I never write 'valetudinarian' at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for 7 cents; I wouldn't do it for 15.

-Mark Twain

When he was twelve years old Samuel Clemens became apprenticed to his older brother Orion as a printer’s devil on the Hannibal Journal, handsetting type, and contributing an occasional story. In 1853 when he turned eighteen he headed east, working in Philadelphia and New York City. In this era of handset type his skill was in constant demand so he joined the printer’s union, jobbed around, and educated himself in the evenings in the public libraries. He returned to the Midwest after a few years, setting type and writing a few articles in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Keokuk, Iowa, until he met riverboat captain Horace Bixby in 1857.

Bixby agreed to train him as a riverboat pilot. Between 1858 and 1861, Clemens left behind the drudgery of printing to learn the romance and the ways of the Mississippi River, and he piloted steamboats between St. Louis and New Orleans until the Civil War stopped river traffic in 1861. Signing up as a soldier, he spent two weeks with the Marion Rangers, a ragtag Union militia, and then “lit out for the territories”, following his brother Orion who had become secretary to James W. Nye, the Governor of Nevada Territory.

It was in Nevada in 1863, while writing for the Virginia City Enterprise, that Clemens first became the writer Mark Twain. Within two years he moved to San Francisco to continue his newspaper career writing for the Morning Call and the Californian, and here he first met other writers, including Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard. Like many celebrities, Clemens took on a new identity as he reinvented his life, and when he became Mark Twain he embarked on a life-long quest to get rich, be famous, and be accepted and honored as a writer of serious literature.

In 1866 he sailed to the Sandwich Islands as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. On his return to California he started to lecture on his travels and soon travelled east to New York to lecture and to publish his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Following his success he continued east on a pilgrimage cruise to Europe and the Holy Land and as a result of friendships he made on the cruise was introduced to his future wife Olivia Langdon when he returned to New York City in 1867.

In 1868 he finished his account of his trip, The Innocents Abroad and heavily courted Livy, the daughter of a wealthy timber and coal merchant, Jervis Langdon, from Elmira, NY. Livy was thoughtful and deep and an original in her own way and balanced Sam's often impetuous nature. “I take as much pride in her brains as I do in her beauty‚ & as much pride in her happy & equable disposition as I do in her brains.”

The next year they became engaged and he purchased one third ownership in the Buffalo Express with help from his future father-in-law. By the time he was 35 years old, through his own creativity and a good marriage, Sam Clemens had risen from rural printer’s devil to metropolitan publisher.

When The Innocents Abroad was published Mark Twain became a bestselling author, and after meeting William Dean Howells in Boston he became an esteemed member of the literary establishment as well. Like many celebrities of our day Mark Twain developed an outsized life style which demanded that he continued to generate wealth through his writings, constant lectures, and business ventures. He cultivated relationships not only with the literati, but also with the industrial magnates, such as Henry Rogers of Standard Oil, and Andrew Carnegie. In 1871, seeking literary companionship, he sold his interest in the Buffalo Express and moved his family to Nook Farm in Hartford to become part of the community started by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In 1873, in the book he coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, he coined the term The Gilded Age and in his own life style also came to represent the excesses of that era. He led a grand life, which required a grand income. He consistently invested in business ventures to support his travels; when those businesses failed he was forced to continue his writing and lecturing to bail out his debts. Fortunately in 1876 he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in 1877 marketed the Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrapbook which actually worked and was somewhat successful. He started traveling abroad more, visiting Bermuda, and then living in Germany, Italy, France, and England until 1879.

The stereotype image of Mark Twain is of the frontier humorist. Before the civil war, the word "stereotype" referred to the process of creating a duplicate printing plate by molding a form of print-ready type with paper mache and then filling the mold with soft metal such as lead. "Cliche" was the noise made when the hot metal filled the cool mold. Mark Twain never fit into a stereotype, and abominated cliches. He did however invest (and lose) over $50,000 in the Kaolotype stereotype process, which used a clay to form the mold. As a writer, Twain wrote as much about his adventures abroad (Innocents Abroad, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the Prince and the Pauper) as he did about the west, and he spent (wasted) as much time managing his investments in technology as he did in writing.

One of Samuel Clemens most substantial investments was in the Paige Typositor. James W. Paige obviously never heard of the principle of Occam’s Razor, which posits that the simplest solution to a problem is usually the best. Paige first worked on mechanically setting type around 1873, and within two years had developed a composing machine. However, it couldn’t justify (spread type across a column), and it couldn’t distribute used type back into its storage cases.

It was difficult to raise capital, as no one believed it possible to automatically justify a line of type, but Clemens, who had spent his youth handcasting type, and his adult career trying to capitalize on his literary creations, understood the incredible potential of a typesetting machine.

Gutenberg had revolutionized printing in the late 1400’s when he developed a system for casting molded moveable metal type. By the nineteenth century, mechanization had started to transform many industries with improvements in looms, the sewing machine, metal fabrication, paper, guns and machine tools. Printing presses had gained speed with improvements such as the Hoe rotary press, but the actual setting of type was still a laborious hand process, where the typesetter would select an individual letter, set it in place, and then, when the piece had been printed, would distribute the letters back to their individual storage places. It was a process that begged for automation.

Clemens, the old printer’s devil, invested his first royalties from Huckleberry Finn in Paige's new machine. Paige set out to create more than a mere machine; he aimed to create a compositor "in the truest sense of the word, as it performs simultaneously all the work of a human compositor." By 1881, Paige had completed a machine which both composed and distributed type, but still without justification. Working with the Pratt & Whitney Company, he was able to automatically justify type by 1887. Clemens loved to watch the machine click and clack and set line upon line, and was heard to exclaim, 'We only need one more thing, a phonograph on the distributor to yell, "Where in Hell is the printer's devil, I want more type!" ‘

The Paige patent has been called the most voluminous ever taken out in the history of invention. One patent examiner died while the case was pending, another died insane, and the patent attorney who originally prepared the case also died in an asylum. The noted printer Theodore De Vinne said, when someone compared the Paige compositor to the Jacquard loom: 'True, but the Paige compositor unravels any old fabric, and from it reweaves any new design which the imagination of man can conceive.'

Paige continued to tinker with the machine, and Clemens continued to invest. In all, Clemens invested over $300,000 in the invention. Paige brought it to Chicago in 1892, and it was put in service at the Chicago Herald in 1894, where it worked well. But by then Otto Merganthaler’s Linotype, a simpler machine which cast type from molten lead, had established itself in the field.

I am a compositor-expert, of old and seasoned experience; nineteen years ago I delivered the final-and-for-good verdict that the linotype would never be able to earn its own living nor anyone else’s: it takes fourteen acres of ground now, to accommodate its factories in England.

Publish or ?

My classmate Charlie Scribner once wrote, “If you want to start a publishing company, the first thing you need to do is marry the daughter of the richest man in America”.

Charlie's great-grandfather, the first Charles Scribner married the daughter of John Insley Blair who started the country store in Butt’s Bridge, New Jersey. Blair began his career as postmaster of Butts Bridge in 1825, and decided the town needed to upgrade its image. The town changed its name to Gravel Hill, and then fifteen years later, with Blair evidently clearly in control of his community, it changed its name again to Blairstown.

John Blair, invested in the Lackawanna Coal and Iron Company (which eventually became part of Bethlehem Steel in 1922) in 1846 when it started rolling the first iron railroad rails in the USA. Blair then got into the railroad business, investing in the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western in 1852, and the Union Pacific in 1860, just as rail lines grew explosively across the country. He eventually managed 16 railroad companies from his own private railcar, which travelled throughout his empire and routinely logged over 40,000 miles a year on the rails. Blair was the largest owner of rail mileage in the world and, like THP, became one of the richest men in America.

Charles Scribner married Blair's daughter Emma in 1846 and started the publishing firm that same year that would become Charles Scribners Sons. Starting an independent publishing company was something of an innovation at that time. Most established houses were either printers, like the Harper Brothers who ventured into publishing to provide work for their presses; or a bookseller like William T. Armstrong who might publish a title to supply extra books to sell in his store.

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Blair had followed the Perkins lead in becoming an early adopter of industrial technology. The Perkins brothers invested heavily in the Monckton Iron Company near Lake Champlaign in Vermont during the War of 1812, started the Perkinsville Manufacturing Company in a mill just outside of Windsor in 1829, and founded the first commercial railroad in America in 1826. The Granite Railroad in Quincy, Mass, moved giant blocks of granite from the quarry in Quincy two and three quarter miles to the Neponset River to be transported by barge to Charlestown for the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument.

William Ticknor, the publisher, had first suggested a monument commemorating the Revolutionary War battle, and Thomas Handasyd Perkins assembled a committee at his house to get the project moving. The design committee included Daniel Webster, George Ticknor, Gilbert Stuart, and Washington Allston. An obelisk design was selected and the corner-stone was laid on June 17, 1825 by Lafayette on his anniversary tour, with Daniel Webster delivering the oration. The celebration was unequalled by anything previously seen in New England.

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In 1980 I married Cathy Clark, from Cooperstown, New York. By then, the family fortune had been substantially reduced.

When I told my father that I was interested in this attractive redhead, Cathy Clark, from Cooperstown, he seemed unusually interested, and much later I found out that he called up Sheldon and Caroline Keck, the art restorers who had cleaned the Stuart portrait and lived in Cooperstown, to enquire as to the suitability of the match.

Caroline Keck, was well known for her strong opinions and had served as personal conservator for Georgia O’Keeffe and Nelson A. Rockefeller. “Oh, no”, she told my father, “Those are the nice Clarks”, with whom they regularly played bridge, and not the Clarks of the Singer Sewing Machine fortune.

I borrowed money from my father, and, with Phil Zuckerman, my classmate from DU, started an independent publishing company, Applewood Books. We joked that Phil was related to Mort Zuckerman, who had just bought the Atlantic Monthly, but actually Phil came from Levittown on Long Island. We were pretty much on our own.

The times were calling for a fresh approach to publishing. Unpublished and “mid-list” writers were finding it increasingly difficult to be published. The rise of mass media, especially television, and the rise of chain stores such as B. Dalton and Walden Books and the decline of the “carriage trade” were giving rise to the “blockbuster syndrome”. Returns were endemic with some houses seeing returns of thirty to fifty percent.

“A Bushel of New Writers for a New Generation of Readers” was our slogan. We developed some promising writers (Eric Kraft, Alan Cheuse, Richard Elman), and published some entertaining books (Peter Leroy, The Bohemians, Cocktails at Somozas). We were soon being featured in the Boston Globe Magazine and our books were being reviewed in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times.

Phil and I bought two Radio Shack TRS-80 computers, and running Scripsit we set copy for our books (except for Eric Kraft who used his own Wang word processor). We went to Altertext on Brattle Street in Cambridge with their black boxes to convert from one language to another, and then to Compuworks on Mass Ave. where we rented time on its Compugraphic typesetters.

One day, two visiting Chinese publishers came to town and visited our offices. This was in the early eighties, before contact with China became common, but Phil's wife Disty had studied acupuncture in Taiwan and spoke Chinese. I explained with delight to the visiting dignitaries how just two people could run a publishing company using this new technology. I received a blank stare, and envisioned the millions of people in China willing to set copy by hand.

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By 1985, the market forces waved the invisible hand. Lacking the subsidization of great family wealth, my career as an independent publisher came to an end.