8 November 1870 • (2nd of 2) • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: DLC, UCCL 00529)
As per my telegram to you, I am confined at home, to-day, giving the weight of my experience to the care of our new baby, (mother & child doing well,) but I have instructed our political man to send you the election returns.1explanatory note
By this mail I send a photograph & autograph to you, & a large one & a small one to for your friend,2explanatory note in the same package.
With all good wishes
On 9 November, the day after the elections, Josephus N. Larned, the Buffalo Express’s political editor, assessed the outcome. His editorial indicates why the New York Tribune, like the Express a reformist Republican paper, was anxious to have the earliest Buffalo returns:
The corrupt money power of Tammany has again overcome us in the State, notwithstanding a material reduction made in the former frauds of the metropolis. This time the “rural districts,” as they term the outside State in New York city, appears to be wholly responsible for our defeat. General Apathy, in fact, has had too extensively the command of the Republican forces.
In this county we have lost our Congressman without a doubt, . . . The whole county ticket, in fact, is gone, and we save nothing from the wreck. (Larned 1870 [bib11952])
And on 11 November he informed Express readers: “It is in the State of New York, alone, that the Republican party retreats from a disastrous field, with broken and disordered columns” (Larned 1870 [bib11953]).
Unidentified. The photographs presumably were prints of one or both of those Clemens had recently taken (20? May 70 to Paigeclick to open link; 8 July 70 to OLC, n. 3click to open link).
References
- United States Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 4: 1870–1871. Edited by Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1995
- Larned, Josephus Nelson. “The Election.” Buffalo Express, 9 November, 1. 1870
- Larned, Josephus Nelson. “The General Result.” Buffalo Express, 11 November, 2. 1870
MS, Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress (DLC).
L4 , 227–228.
The Whitelaw Reid Papers (part of the Papers of the Reid Family) were donated to DLC between 1953 and 1957 by Helen Rogers Reid (Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.