December 31 Thursday – In Hartford Sam wrote to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, fronting the letter with a self-portrait in black ink [see MTL 6: 336]. Sam and Aldrich went back and forth with jokes and photographs (Sam later claimed he “sent him 45 envelops of all possible sizes, containing an aggregate of near seventy differing pictures of myself, house & family.”
Aldrich replied:
“…it is no use to send any more letters here. The post-office at this point is to be blown up.” Then he planted a seed that was to prove damaging to Sam in his famous Whittier dinner speech of 1877: “R.W.E., H.W.L., O.W.H and other conspirators in masks, have been seen flitting about the town for several days passed.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the masked conspirators that would be imitated by tramps in Sam’s later debacle for Whittier’s birthday) [MTL 6: 336-7].