The Hannibal Years: Day By Day

Sam’s third birthday.

– Sam’s fifth birthday.
 

Sam’s fourth birthday.

November 30 Tuesday – Sam’s sixth birthday.
 

November 30 Wednesday – Baby Sam’s first  birthday.
 

November 30 Thursday – Sam’s second birthday.

November 30 Wednesday – Sam’s seventh birthday.

November 30 Thursday – Sam’s eighth birthday.

November 30 Saturday – Sam’s ninth birthday (he didn’t want to be called “Sammy” any longer.) In his 1906 Autobiography, Sam claimed to be a private smoker from age nine, and a public one after his father’s death, in 1847 [Neider 43].

November 30 Sunday – Sam’s tenth birthday.

November 30 Monday – Sam’s eleventh birthday.

November 30 Tuesday – Sam’s twelfth birthday.

November 30 Thursday – Sam’s thirteenth birthday.

November 30 Saturday – Sam’s fifteenth birthday.

November 30 Sunday – Sam’s sixteenth birthday.

November 30 Tuesday – Sam’s seventeenth birthday.

November 30 Friday – Sam’s fourteenth birthday.

November 4 Thursday – “Conubial Bliss,” another unsigned sketch of Sam’s about a rowdy Irishman on “Holliday’s Hill” appeared in the Hannibal Journal [ET&S 1: 85]: 

November 5 Thursday – Hannibal Gazette announced John Marshall Clemens’ candidacy for clerk of the circuit court in 1847’s election.

John Marshall Clemens was sworn in as a judge of the Monroe County court. Wecter calls this the “zenith of his professional life and one that fixed upon him ever after the title of ‘Judge’” [Wecter 48]. He received two dollars a day while the court met [49]. John had trained to be a lawyer and was very exacting in his work. His letters show the graceful Spenserian script which educated people of the day displayed. Sam got his exacting nature from his father, and his humor and red hair from his mother.

November 6 Thursday – Record of Jimmy Finn’s death [MTP].

November 6 Thursday – County records show $8.25 for coffin Jimmy Finn, pauper, town drunk and model for Huck Finn’s Pap [Wecter 150].

November 8 Thursday – “Glasscock’s Ben” was accused of killing Thomas Bright with a rock, then raping his twelve-year-old sister, Susan Bright, and mutilating her. He was hanged early the next year.

Yellow fever hit Hannibal in early winter, as well as another siege of cholera [Wecter 214].

November  30 Monday – Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) was born two months  premature in the hamlet of Florida, Missouri to John Marshall Clemens (1798-1847) and Jane Lampton Clemens (1803-1890). The baby was named Samuel, for  John’s father; Langhorne, for the friend of John  Marshall’s who had helped him in his youth in Virginia.

The Clemens family moved to Hannibal: John, Jane, Orion, Pamela, Benjamin, Sammy (nearly age four), the baby Henry, and a slave girl Jennie. Paine, in Boy’s Life of Mark Twain says the family lived first at Pavey’s Hotel(later Planter’s Hotel). The Paveys later moved to St. Louis. Wecter gives the time of the move as “about mid-November” [56].

The first home for the Clemens was the Virginia House, a rickety two-story hotel close to the river at the northwest corner of Main and Hill Streets [Varble 129].