“The steady trudging came to be like work the play had somehow oozed out of it the stillness of the woods and the somberness of the night began to throw a depressing influence over the spirits of the boys…”Īs the men slogged farther into the woods around Hannibal, Marion County - seemingly with no real plan of action or direction - the men began to quibble over whose job it was to cook. But that could not be kept up,” Twain wrote in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” “The first hour was all fun, all idle nonsense and laughter. In all, the famed author’s two-week stint as a soldier in the Civil War largely amounted to him larping as a Confederate. Twain’s vote was seemingly a vote for the status quo he had grown up around.īut as the war approached Missouri, Twain decided to take a stand - albeit a brief one. In 1860 Twain had voted for John Bell in the presidential election, who, although a Tennessee slaveholder, had opposed secession. Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, had grown up amid slavery in the South. The few, the band of brothers, called themselves the Marion Rangers, with Twain entering their ranks as a second lieutenant. Claiborne Fox Jackson’s call of 50,000 militia to defend their home state. The 25-year-old Missourian, alongside 14 other idealistic young men, answered Gov. Louis Magazine, on a small yellow mule carrying a valise, a carpetbag, two gray blankets, a homemade quilt, a squirrel rifle, 20 yards of rope, a frying pan and, perhaps most importantly of all, an umbrella. In the summer of 1861, the former riverboat pilot went to war, according to the St. “These, by their very numbers, are respectable and therefore entitled to a sort of voice, - not a loud one, but a modest one not a boastful one but an apologetic one. “Thousands entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped out again, permanently,” he continued. “You have heard from a great many people who did something in the war is it not fair and right that you listen a little moment to one who started out to do something in it but didn’t?” wrote Mark Twain in his semi-fictionalized wartime account, titled “ The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”
Mark Twain Fought for the South in the Civil War.
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