From The Twainian, Volume 17 Number 3 (1958)
This issue includes a few paragraphs on Twain’s “racial springs”. It begins with mention of a novel, “The Crisis”, by Winston Churchill. This is not the Winston Churchill who was Prime Minister of England, but an American novelist from St. Louis, Missouri.
HIS RACIAL SPRINGS
In “The Crisis” Mr. Churchill has gone exhaustively into the merging of racial currents that took place in Missouri, and most of us are familiar with it. “The Crisis,” however, is a story of Missouri in the early ’60’s, which was an entirely different Missouri from that of the late ’30's and early '40’s. The son of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton, one from Virginia, the other from Kentucky, was not a product of the “blending,” but an offshoot of the hardy Anglo-Saxon-Celtie stock, Scotch, Irish and Welsh, that came across the mountains following the war for independence, settled in Kentucky and Tennessee, and which subsequently obeyed a racial urge by trekking across the great river into the rich alluvial counties of Missouri, settling for the most part in the river sections, along water courses and adjacent to it. Any effort to give him a genealogy other than humble or to make him an aristocrat in the accepted sense of the word is mistaken. While possibly the real aristocracy of the South, the people from whose loins he sprang were not so accredited in their day, but belonged rather to the middle class farming element, with small holdings and few slaves. As contrasted with the often effeminate aristocracy of the old South, they were big, virile, ruthless, plain-spoken men, with all the varying moods that distinguish Celtic peoples surviving amid a newer and harsher environment—at times deeply religious, again with no religion; serious always, but with a grim and distinctive humor all their own; rich in imagination and saturated with legend; neither Puritans nor Cavaliers, but of the neutral breed that subjugated the continent. It was the race that sent Joe Bowers singing into the wilderness, followed Doniphan and Fremont to conquest beyond the mountains, and that rode with Shelby across the border.
They came by natural selection, with vitality unimpaired by previous civilization, and were led by a combined hunger for land and lust for adventure. The sweep of majestic and torrential rivers and the song of virginal forests called to them in a mighty language, and the music and beauty, the glamour and hazard of it all, were bred into the fiber of their child. From them came his ruggedness, his simplicity, his great gladness and that racial moodiness that, sweeping the gamut of human emotion from whimsicalness of sublimity, has been the distinguishing quality of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic genius. From them he inherited his love of adventure and the poetry of living.