November 4 Tuesday – Election Day. Sam, a Mugwump, voted for the narrow winner, Grover Cleveland, the first democrat elected president since before the Civil War. Note: for a scholarly treatment of the Mugwumps, see Gerald McFarland’s “The New York Mugwumps of 1884: A Profile” in Political Science Quarterly (Mar., 1963) p 40-58. In MTA, Sam remembered the pact he, Twichell and Rev. Francis Goodwin made to vote for Cleveland. This was before the Australian system of secret balloting, so that everyone knew who a person voted for. Sam wrote that the vote for Cleveland nearly cost Twichell his congregation. (See MTA 2: 21-25.) Note: Was this story Sam’s imagination? Strong writes,

“As it actually happened it is not so interesting a story as Twain later made it by inventing the tale of Twichell’s almost losing his church because of the statement in the paper and because his Republican parishioners would not put up with his declaration that he was not going to vote a straight ticket. But this was Twain’s imagination at work. The only actual adverse reaction was one letter in the ‘Letters from the People’ column in the Courant regretting that a minister should express a political opinion instead of sticking to his theological concerns!” [88].

Sam also wrote to Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944) (a man who needed four names to be recognized), after James G. Blaine failed by 28 votes in his bid for the Republican nomination for President. The text is not available, but the paraphrase is that the letter was “full of explosive and obscene matter…bitter with rage against the corruption in Lincoln’s once great party” [MTPO; was 14 June 1876 MTLE 1: 70]. Blaine’s opponents chanted: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the State of Maine!”