January 24 Friday – Sam wrote from Hartford to his mother, and sister Pamela Moffett.

This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office as I came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, & young James Gordon Bennett [(1841-1918)] asked me to write impersonally twice a week for the Herald, & said if I would, I might have full swing, & abuse anybody & everybody I wanted to…. But the best thing that has happened was here. This great American Publishing Co. kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I met Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, & with his usual whole-souled way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift…he said, “Now here—you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business, I don’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains; I’ll tell you what do to & how to do it.” And he did. And I listened well, & then came up here & have made a splendid contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with illustrations…My per centage is to be a fifth more than they paid Richardson….I had made up my mind to one thing—I wasn’t going to touch a book unless there was money in it, & a good deal of it. I told them so.

Sam listed the newspapers he would be writing for, and cautioned the family not to talk to anyone regarding this letter [MTL 2: 160-4].

Sam also wrote to Mary Mason Fairbanks asking her not to “abuse” him “on account of that dinner-speech in reply to the toast to woman” [MTL 2: 165-6].