The topic of entitlement now began to have even added cogency in the Clemens-Lampton household. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, John Marshall bought for about $400 approximately seventy thousand acres of land in Fentress County , south of Jamestown . The cost and the amount of land are estimates based on family oral history. The soil was poor and the terrain hilly; access was limited to dirt paths. John Marshall, though, envisioned the press of heavy immigration one day making the land valuable. Probably some of the initial purchase was made with the last of his inheritance from his father; additional parcels were purchased over many years. Apparently John Marshall expended with each purchase all the cash he had and bought again when he had accumulated more. At his death, he put his hope in the future value of the land to his descendants. He died "house poor," scraping for dollars, but his descendants, he expected, would be rich. His children lived, more or less, under his injunction never to sell. At different times the Tennessee land became for them, especially for Sam, a bitter joke, a psychological albatross, and an unheeded reminder of the destructiveness of unrealistic and uncontrollable dreams of wealth.
The Clemens family had a hardscrabble existence in Tennessee . Times were hard, and America was in transition. Industry and foreign trade were beginning to become profitable, and manufacturers in New England and owners of fertile land in Virginia did well. But people at the edge of the wilderness, earning their living by farming in rocky, soil-poor country or by providing goods and services to their rural communities, usually lived poorly. Cash was scarce. The barter system prevailed, if one had something to barter. And President Andrew Jackson's successful attempt to close the Bank of the United States , the most stable bank in the country, dried up credit and drained cash from the national economy. In 1834 there was a nationwide financial crash. Small loans became almost impossible to get. Twain believed that before the crash his father was worth not less than $3,500 separate from the value of the land, afterward "less than one-fourth of that amount." With most of John Marshall's cash tied up in non-income-producing land, the family lived at a level far below what it considered its due. There was no legal business, and the grocery and general goods store barely managed, so they took in boarders. What to do? Where to go? John Marshall was "a proud man, a silent, austere man, and not a person likely to abide among the scenes of his vanished grandeur and be the target for public commiseration."
In the late 1820s, Jane's father, Benjamin Lampton, a successful farmer and storekeeper in Columbia , had visited Missouri , which, in 1821, had become the twenty-fourth state as one of the conditions of the Missouri Compromise: Missouri had been admitted as a slave state, Maine as a free state . John Marshall Clemens had inherited eight slaves, seven of whom he had sold for economic reasons. One slave girl remained to help in the household. Jane Lampton's family had of course owned slaves, and Jane was used to household and field slaves, though slavery was not the economic basis of farming in Kentucky to the extent it was further south. But it was an integral part of the lives and minds of Samuel Clemens' parents; the Lamptons, like most visitors and migrants from southern states, found Missouri 's slave-state status familiar and congenial. One of Benjamin's brothers had settled in Boone County , Missouri , about five years before. John Quarles, married to Jane's favorite sister, a shopkeeper, a farmer, and also an ex-Virginian, decided to strike out for Missouri also.
Four hundred miles northwestward from north-central Tennessee to St. Louis , one went on foot or horseback or by wagon to the Ohio River on the Kentucky-Ohio border, and from there by flatboat to St. Louis . And that was, by and large, far enough. Beyond Missouri were the territories, the prairies, vast emptiness, huge deserts, high mountains, Indian country and Mexican possessions, Texas and California . Few travelers and fewer migrants went that far, because there was little economic motivation to do so. Missouri , which was far enough away, had good soil and ample water.
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Excerpted from The Singular Mark Twain, by Fred Kaplan Copyright© 2003 by Fred Kaplan. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
