December 27 Thursday – In Hartford, Sam wrote individual apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes for his embarrassing speech at Whittier’s Dec. 17 birthday party. He claimed he’d given the speech “innocently & unwarned,” and spoke of his mortification. He wrote of Livy’s “distress”; that:

“…yours were sacred names to her. We do not talk about this misfortune—it scorches; so we only think—and think. [Sam pleaded that he was] only heedlessly a savage, not premeditatedly, [and that he was] under as severe punishment as even you could adjudge to me if you were required to appoint my penalty” [MTLE 2: 212]. Note: years later he would insist the sketch had been funny.