page_title: Mark Twain in Nevada
section_title: Shifting sympathies
hierarchical_section_title: Mark Twain in Nevada / Correspondent / Shifting sympathies
caption_attribution_description: English: William H. Clagett (1938-1901), Montana Territorial Delegate
context_page_description: The use of the pen name of Mark Twain first occurred in Samuel Clemens's writing while in the Nevada Territory which he had journeyed to with his brother. Clemens/Twain lived in Nevada from 1861 to 1864, and visited the area twice after leaving. Historians such as Peter Messent see Clemens's time in Nevada as "the third major formative period of Mark Twain's career" due to his encounters with "writers and humorists who would both shape and put the finishing touches on his literary art." The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain states that despite the few "disagreeable experiences" he had there, Twain "thrived in Nevada." Among those things he learned was "how far he could push a joke", a lesson learned from some "disagreeable experiences" he brought upon himself.
context_section_description: When Clemens came to Virginia City, he began boasting that he had been a first lieutenant in the regular Confederate Army. It was soon found out that he had been merely a second lieutenant in a self-organized militia of Missouri farm boys. Because of this boast, Clemens offended people on both side of the issue, including his brother's boss, Territorial Governor James W. Nye, who called him a "damned secessionist." Humboldt County judge G.T. Sewall swore he would whip Clemens for his sympathies if he ran across him. In a letter to his friend William H. Clagett, Clemens complained of the news that "they" (Union troops) had "thrashed" and defeated "our Missourians".
  Clemens's behavior became an increasing embarrassment to his steadfastly loyal Republican brother Orion, as Samuel was seen as a disloyal troublemaker who spent too much time in the saloons. Samuel Clemens's attitude began to change in 1862 as the general opinion became more heavily Union when the Northern armies began winning more battles. Clemens began to hedge his Confederate sympathies, and then abandoned them outright. By September 1862, in his letters to Clagett, he began to refer to the Union soldiers as "we".
  The scrapbook Clemens kept while in Nevada initially was filled with newspaper articles that hailed secessionist opinions in the West, but by the end of 1862 he began pasting in editorials of leading citizens demanding that Orion purge the government of anyone with Southern sympathies. (Orion did fire a probate judge and notary public for this reason.) Samuel Clemens continued to collect articles about the results of people who expressed Southern sympathies that had just months before been tolerated. In July 1863, after a flag earlier planted on Mt. Davidson by Union supporters (to overlook Virginia City and mock its Southern sympathizers) survived an intense electrical storm, Clemens, now writing under his penname Mark Twain, presented its survival through the lightning strikes as a mystical omen of Union victory. With this, Twain publicly had shown his newly undivided devotion to the Union. He also portrayed an incident in San Francisco as an omen for the fall of the Confederate cause when all the lights suddenly went out at a meeting of Copperheads (Northern Democrats calling for immediate peace). Twain would go on to protest a clause in a proposed Nevada constitution to disfranchise any that voluntarily bore arms for the Confederacy, claiming that, even in his Missouri days, he always had an underlying affection for the Union.
  Historian Arthur G. Pettit points out that Twain mentally would separate his Southern values from his Confederate values, for "When loyalty to the Confederacy proved a handicap in the face of shifting Western opinion—especially when it began to interfere with Clemens's main business in the West, which was to make money—it did not take him long to decide that dropping the Confederate South was a small price to pay….Clemens was hardly the neophyte he made himself out to be in Roughing It."
caption: William H. Clagett received letters from Twain that indicate his shifting sympathies about the Civil War.
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