Taken from Sam Clemens: Florida Days by Harold Roberts, published March 1942, The Twainian Volume 1 number 3
MUCH NEEDLESS PITY has been bestowed on Mark Twain because of his boyhood environment. The first settlers of Florida, almost to the man, came from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. They were not ignorant people. There was good blood in their veins. They were high-spirited, fearless, and resolute persons as were, necessarily, the pioneers of the entire early West. They were, too, neighborly and generous to a fault. They had a high sense of justice and honor. A man's word they construed and accepted as his bond. They have been pictured as depressed men who felt themselves hopelessly beaten by the odds that pioneer life threw against them.
Nothing, in their earlier life in Florida could be more untrue as descriptive of their attitudes. They brought to their task zest and resolute courage. The more imaginative among them felt the blood racing in their veins and a sense of ex- citement in their belief that they were helping to make history as builders of a new world. Measured by the comforts, born of scientific inventiveness, that modern society enjoys, they were poor people. But when their lives are interpreted in terms of vision, hope, courage, honor, neighborliness and capacity to respond warmly and wholesomely to simple pleasures and comforts, can one call them poor? Rather, should we not, of this day, be envious of their enjoyment of some fundamental things in life, now lost to us? Mark Twain need not be pitied because he belonged to these people.
John Marshall Clemens was probably the only resident of Florida who conformed but slightly to the pioneer pattern. He shared with his fellows their boom-time ambition to achieve success, but in a land where force and aggressiveness counted for more than passive intellectual gifts, he was forever at a disadvantage. He was an idealist, a scholar, a man highly respected for his integrity of character, but he lacked that last ounce of the something that makes one a success and another a failure. John Clemens, with equal enthusiasm and obstinacy, would have sunk his fortune in the Paige typesetting machine that ruined his son--and then insisted, just as scrupulously, on paying off his creditors to the last penny.
His various large-scale promotion schemes, his efforts to move the county-seat from Paris to Florida, all show that he possessed imagination, vision and foresight. Thirty years later, in a less crude environment, John Clemens would have been a rich man, perhaps as the originator of ideas as a corporation or railroad attorney during the economic upsurge following the Civil War.
But Florida, Missouri, in 1839, provided scant opportunity for the exercise of his ability. His mental equipment was geared to cope with problems in the abstract, rather than with those simpler concrete problems that faced pioneer life. He was constantly being frustrated in his efforts to make ends meet, to feed and support his growing family in the manner of the successful men of the community--notably his brother-in-law, John A. Quarles.
His wife, Jane Lampton Clemens, was the sister of Martha, wife of John Quarles. The Quarles family lived in comfortable style. John was the successful village magnate. It cannot be doubted that Martha Quarles showed herself to be a bit patronizing toward Jane--or, if not, the proud Jane, such is human nature, chose to imagine that she did. And Jane, resenting her sister's attitude, would take this resentment out on her husband in complaint against Florida and its people.
The two Johns had dissolved their partnership in the Quarles general store in the summer of 1836. John Clemens, during the ensuing 15 months of his stay in Florida, tried his hand at store-keeping in competition with Quarles. The venture did not succeed. In November, of 1839, he admitted defeat. Stories of the prosperty of Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi thirty miles to the east, came to him and to Jane. It was decided to move to Hannibal where Clemens could start anew and where Jane would no longer be compelled to play the part of the poor relation.
Little Sam Clemens, however, was not done with Florida. To the contrary, Florida was destined to influence him deeply throughout his life. It got into his blood, helped to fashion his genius and to give it utterance. Until he was a lad of eleven or twelve, he returned for long visits to Florida and the Quarles family. The experiences of these visits made lasting impressions and all his life were the subject of nostalgic remembrance.