Editor’s Note: One of Missouri’s most acclaimed native sons, Samuel Clemens – more commonly known as Mark Twain – had more than a passing acquaintance with the legal profession. In this article, which originally appeared in the March, 1935 issue of the Missouri Bar Journal, South Dakota Bar Journal Editor Alvin Wagoner reflects on the lawyers who passed through the noted writer’s life – and their influence on his humor.

Missouri lawyers are naturally interested in the approaching centenary of the birth of Mark Twain. He was born in the frontier village of Florida, near Hannibal on the 30th of November, 1835, spent his boyhood at Hannibal, cruised the Mississippi as a steamboat pilot during his young manhood, headquarters at Saint Louis, and before he rounded out his life gave the state of Missouri a glorious place in the literary sun.

John Marshall Clemens, father of the humorist, practiced law at Columbia, Virginia, at Gainsborough, Jamestown, Three Forks and Pall Mall, all in the state of Tennessee, and also at Florida and Hannibal, Missouri. He was administrator of the probate court, and clerk of the circuit or district court, successively during his migrations from Virginia through Tennessee to his final abiding place in Missouri. Never a very successful lawyer, he doubtless knew considerable law and passed on a remarkable heritage of knowledge in that field to his son. Abundant evidence of this theory appears in every book that Twain wrote.

Practice of the law by John Marshal [sic] Clemens was, however, intermittent and somewhat desultory. His real avocation, when not office holding, was store-keeping[sic]. Yet he was always known in his later years as “Judge” Clemens.

Speaking of his boyhood days in “Life on the Mississippi” Twain says: “My father was justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the power of life and death over men, and could hang anybody whe [sic] offended him.”

Orion Clemens, eldest brother of Mark Twain, evidently studied law in East Tennessee. The record is not complete but he apparently practiced law in the itinerant, hap-hazard [sic] Clemens way in Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Nevada, California, Connecticut, and possibly the District of Columbia. He was always a journalist and newspaper editor on the side, but never edited a bar journal.

Twain had long and intimate associations with his brother Orion in several states. In the “Autobiography” he tells us that Orion was for a time in the Saint Louis law office of Edward Bates, who was afterwards a member of Lincoln’s Cabinet. “Bates was a very fine man,” he says, “an honorable and upright man, and a distinguished lawyer. But the vagrant, uncertain, half-poetic fancies and ambitions of Orion Clemens were too much for Bates and presently they parted company.”

Twain himself was a printer, river pilot, journalist, silver miner, placer miner, editor, foreign correspondent of newspapers, manufacturer of typesetting machines,―in which business he lost a fortune,―publisher and world-traveler. He never seriously studied law, but he considered doing so. In an early letter he informs his mother that a fortune teller had told him he “should become a lawyer; in that direction success lay.” And in “Roughing It” he tells us, “I once studied law for a week, but gave it up as too dull and prosaic.”

In a letter written to Orion from New Orleans in 1861, just as the piloting days were coming to an end, Twain gives a further account of the encounter with the fortune teller: “She invited me into the little back parlor, closed the door, and we were alone. . . . She said to me, ‘Yours is a watery planet; you gain your livelihood on the water, but you should have been a lawyer―there is where your talents lie. . . . Try the law―you will certainly succeed.’”

But he disregarded the admonitions from beyond the veil and four years later he writes his sister from Carson City, Nevada, “Tell Mrs. Benson I never intend to be a lawyer. I have been a slave several times in my life, but I’ll never be one again.”

Nevertheless, Mark Twain’s interest in the law and lawyers never failed. There are more lawyers, more trials, and allusions to the law in his books than in the books of any other author in the whole field of our literature, not even excepting Dickens. Howells records that Twain was “always reading some vital book” such as “a volume of great trials . . . which gave him life at first hand.” Albert Biglow [sic] Paine has also set it down in his biography of the great humorist that Twain made a scrapbook of the notorious Beecher-Tilton trial and carried it about over the country with him on his lecture tours. Nothing came from this directly. While staying in London, he had Charles Warren Stoddard gather a like scrapbook on the trials of the famous Tichborne Claimant. Later he makes reference to this material a number of times.

Twain was therefore not ungrateful when a good law book fell into his hands. In later life when he stopped for a rainy night at a Missouri small-town hotel and asked the clerk to send him up something to read, there is apparently satisfaction as well as humor in the report that he received the “Compiled Statutes of Missouri” and the “Complete Horse Doctor.”

Moreover Twain was intimately associated with lawyers all his life long. The attempt to perfect, manufacture and market the Paige type setting [sic] machine and the final collapse of that adventure, from time to time engaged the talents of a number of lawyers. Clarence Seward, son of Lincoln’s Secretary of State [William Henry Seward], prepared the contract for the publication, by Twain, of General Grant’s Memoirs. Charles T. Lark, of New York City, prepared Twain’s will, and to him Twain wrote his last letter giving some instructions about his estate.

Any student of Twain’s “Letters” will quickly come to the conclusion that he was shrewd almost to canniness and entirely able to take care of himself in arranging a contract with a producer or publisher. Swooping down upon the unsuspecting Raymond, who was negotiating concerning a play presenting Colonel Mulberry Sellers, Twain wrote his agent, “I would let the play go to Raymond, and bind him up with a contract that would give him the bellyache every time he read it.”

And yet unfairness was no part of his fine loveable character. As has already been said he simply took care of himself. And although he helped publishers and actors to fortunes, taking care of himself in business transactions; after several unfortunate ventures, Twain was in the end able to accumulate an estate that was appraised at over six hundred thousand dollars.

Joseph H. Choate was not only Mark Twain’s lawyer in several matters, but was his intimate friend and cronie as well. They were the most popular after-dinner speakers of their day, were frequently appearing upon programs together, and were as frequently bantering each other. At a dinner given to Whitlaw Reid, Twain said, “Mr. Choate’s head is full of history, and some of it is true, too.” On the same occasion he delivered this thrust, “Choate here―he hasn’t got anything to say, but he says it just the same, and he can do it so felicitiously, too.”

When the Authors’ Club gave a dinner in honor of Mark Twain in London in June, 1899, he responded in part as follows:

“I wish to extend my thanks to the Authors’ Club for constituting me a member, at a reasonable price per year, and for giving me the benefit of your legal adviser. I believe you keep a lawyer. I have always kept a lawyer, too, though I have never made anything out of him. It is a service to an author to have lawyer. There is something so disagreeable in having a personal contact with a publisher. So it is better to work through a lawyer―and lose your case.”

It is hardly necessary to add that one of the most distinguished London lawyers of the day happened to be presiding as toastmaster at that dinner.

Mark Twain was fond of lawyers. The two dozen or more he has drawn for us in his books were always touched with a loving hand, with only one exception, Turlow G. Wilson, of “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.” He is the designing scoundrel at the bar.

Of course Twin rails and raves at lawyers and their procedure when it serves his turn. But there always seems a laugh behind his hand as he does it. Sometimes the high exaggeration gives the thing away, and we guess he is never half so savage as he wishes to appear. In the “Autobiography” there is a paragraph illustrating this:

“H——(the lawyer of Twain and Paige) was our joint lawyer, and I had every confidence in his wisdom and cleanliness. . . . I must throw in a parenthesis here or I shall do H—— an injustice. Here and there I have seemed to cast little reflections upon him. He is a great, fat, good-natured, kind-hearted, chicken-livered slave; with no more pride than a tramp, no more sand than a rabbit, no more sense than a wax-figure, and no more sex than a tape-worm. He sincerely thinks he is honest, he sincerely thinks he is honorable. It is my daily prayer to God that he be permitted to live and die in those superstitions. I gave him a twentieth of my American holdings, at Paige’s request; I gave him a twentieth of my foreign holdings, at his own supplication; I advanced forty thousand dollars in five years to keep those interests sound and valid for him. In return, he drafted every contract which I made with Paige in all that time―clear up to September, 1890―and pronounced them good and fair; and then I signed them.”

Of course, the type-setting [sic] machine had fallen in a wreck about Twain’s ears, and, when he wrote that blast, he may have been indulging merely the layman’s prerogative of fixing the blame upon his lawyer. Even in that event the incident and the abuse illustrate the overflowing humanness of the man. Lawyers may forgive him this blast, may forgive him Turlow G. Wilson, and join handsomely in the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, wistfully wishing that he might now come again among us to illuminate with his harmless exaggeration and buoyant humor the perplexities of our day.