18 September 1875 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: NN-B and MH-H, UCCL 02493)
My plan is this——You are to get Mr. Lowell or & Mr. Longfellow to be the first signers of my copyright petition; you must sign it yourself & get Mr. Whittier to do likewise. Then I’m Holmes will sign —he said he would if he didn’t have to stand at the head.1explanatory note Then I’m fixed. I will then put a gentlemanly chap under wages & send him personally to every author of distinction in the country & corral the rest of the signaturesⒶemendation. Then I’ll have the whole thing lithographed (about a thousand copies) & move upon the President2explanatory note & Congress in person, but in the subordinate capacity of a party who is merely the agent of better & wiser men—men whom the country cannot venture to laugh at.
I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (& if he should ask me to sit down & frame the paragraph for him I should blush——but still I would frame it.)
Next I would get a prime leader in Congress; I would also see that votes enough to carry the measure were privately secured before the bill was offered. This I would try through my leader & a salaried & my friends there.
And then if Europe chose to go on stealing from us, we would say with noble enthusiasm, “American law-makers do steal—but not from foreign authors, Ⓐemendation not from foreign authors!”
You see, what I want to drive into the public Congressional mind is the simple fact that the moral law is, “Thou shalt not steall”—no matter what Europe may do.
I swear I can’t see any use in robbing European authors for the benefit of American booksellers, anyway.
If we can ever get this thing through Congress, we can try making copyright perpetual, some day. There would be no sort of use in it, since only one book in a hundred millions outlives the present copyright term—no sort of use except that the writer of that one book have his rights—which is something.
If we only had some God in the country’s laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.
The only man who ever signed my petition with alacrity, & said that the fact that a thing was right was all-sufficient, was Rev. Dr. Bushnell.
I have lost my old petition, but (which was brief)3explanatory note but will draft & enclose another—not in the words it ought to be, but in the substance. I want Mr. Lowell to furnish the words (& the ideas too,) if he will do it.
Say—Redpath beseeches me to lecture in Boston in November—telegraphs that Beecher’s & Nast’s withdrawal has put him in the tightest kind of a place. So I guess I’ll do that old “Roughing It” lecture over again in November & repeat it 2 or 3 times in New York while I am at it.4explanatory note
Can I take a carriage after the lecture & go out & stay with you that night provided you find at that distant time that it will not inconvenience you? Is Aldrich home yet?
With love to you all—
To the Hon. the Senate & House of Representatives in Congress assembled:
Whereas, There being no provision in the Christian code of morals which justifies robbery in retaliation for robbery, but the moral law being simply “Thou shalt not steal,” no matter what thy neighbor does may do—and
Whereas, In violation of this principle the United States has legalized the robbery of foreign authors by American publishers refusing to them the benefit of copyright—&—
Whereas, There being nothing in the Christian code of morals which justifires Ⓐemendation a man in requiring that another man shall promise to stop stealing from him before he will consent to stop stealing from said other man—
Therefore, We, your petitioners, American authors & artists, do pray your honorable body to grant unto Ⓐemendation all foreign authors & artists full & free copyright in the United States (upon the same terms which we ourselves enjoy); & that you do this not as an act of grace or charity, but as a their right; & furthermore that you do this without hampering the deed with a any provision requiring a like justice at the hands of foreign governments toward American authors & artists.5explanatory note We petition thus, as being the only persons craftsmen in our country legitimately concerned in the matter.
Believeing that the infusing the spirit of God into our laws will be something better than the empty honor of putting His name in the Constitution, we will ever pray, etc.
Signed.
Clemens may have been prompted to draft the enclosed petition concerning international copyright by Reade’s Tribune letters, many of which—including the two most recent—dealt with this subject. Clemens’s February petition had been aimed at lengthening the duration of domestic copyright (see 14 Sept 75 to Howells, n. 1click to open link; Reade 1875 [bib13841], 1875 [bib13842]; 8 Feb 75 to Coxclick to open link). His last known meeting with Holmes was at the 15 December 1874 Atlantic Monthly dinner.
Ulysses S. Grant.
This “lost” petition was probably a version of the “Petition. (Concerning Copyright.)” that Clemens had drafted in late 1872. The Reverend Horace Bushnell, Twichell’s theological mentor, agreed to sign the petition “a long way down and let the literary gentlemen have their lead” ( L5 , 256–58; SLC 1872).
Henry Ward Beecher was one of Redpath’s most popular and lucrative clients during the 1874–75 season. He was not included on the “List of Lecturers of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. Season of 1875–6,” issued in August 1875, so presumably he withdrew shortly before it was printed ( Lyceum 1875, 1). Although Beecher’s adultery trial had ended in July with a hung jury, public opinion was still significantly against him, which might have influenced his decision. When forced by his debts to return to the lecture platform for the 1876–77 season, he was often well received and always well paid, but sometimes faced jeering crowds and hostile audiences, despite having been officially exonerated by his church. Thomas Nast’s withdrawal was for a more mundane reason: stage fright. Redpath recalled in 1880 that Nast was terrified of the platform on his only tour, during the 1873–74 season:
But although he could have made no end of money by remaining in the field a couple of years he backed out after he had lectured about 100 times and canceled about $5000 worth of conditional engagements for the spring. He read a written lecture on “American Humor,” and illustrated it with crayon sketches—sometimes in black and sometimes in colors—on mammoth sheets of drawing-paper. He drew these sketches in presence of the audience, and astonished both the profession and the public by his amazing rapidity and skill of execution. He read well and clearly, but he never could surmount his dislike of public appearances. His success was the event of the season. But no offers that have been made since have ever induced him to reappear as a lecturer. (“Tom Nast. James Redpath Talks about the Great Caricaturist,” San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Jan 80)
Only the United States, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire did not have an international copyright law based on reciprocity. Although such laws were enacted in Great Britain in 1837, and in Canada in 1875, they did not provide American authors with copyright protection abroad, since foreign authors had none in the United States. Clemens’s petition was never presented to Congress. The situation was not remedied until passage of the International Copyright Act of 1891, which did require “like justice” for American authors from foreign nations (Hudon, 56, 58–59; Solberg, 63–64; Copinger, 226).
References
- New York Public Library, Albert A. and Henry W. Berg Collection, New York
- Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Mass.
- 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 6: 1874–1875. Edited by Michael B. Frank and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 2002
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. “Mark Twain: Some Chapters from an Extraordinary Life. Ninth Paper.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 125 (July): 249–63. 1912
- Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. [Volume numbers in citations are to this edition; page numbers are the same in all editions.] 1912
- Paine, Albert Bigelow, ed. Mark Twain’s Letters. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1917
- Howells, William Dean. Life in Letters of William Dean Howells. Edited by Mildred Howells. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co. 1928
- MTHL. Mark Twain–Howells Letters. Edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, with the assistance of Frederick Anderson. 2 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1960
- Reade, Charles. “The Quintuple Iniquity.” New York Tribune, 11 September, 3. 1875
- Reade, Charles. “The Four Fogs.” New York Tribune, 15 September, 2. 1875
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5: 1872–1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1997
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). “‘Petition. (Concerning Copyright.)’ and ‘Circular to American Authors & Publishers.’ ” MS of eight pages, written ca. mid-December, CU-MARK. Published as “Petition. Concerning Copyright” in Appendix N of MTB, 3: 1637–39 where it is dated 1875. 1872
- Lyceum. Redpath’s Lyceum: Organ of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. [Season of 1875–76.] Boston: [Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau]. 1875
- Lyceum. Redpath’s Lyceum: Organ of Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau. Boston: [Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau]. [Season of 1874–75.]. 1874
- Shaplen, Robert. Free Love and Heavenly Sinners: The Story of the Great Henry Ward Beecher Scandal. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1954
- Hibben, Paxton. Henry Ward Beecher. An American Portrait. 2d ed. New York: Press of the Readers Club. 1942
- Clark, Charles Hopkins. “The Charter Oak City.” Scribner’s Monthly 13 (November): 1–21. 1876
- Pond, James B. Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage. New York: G. W. Dillingham Company. 1900
- Hudon, Edward G. “Mark Twain and the Copyright Dilemma.” American Bar Association Journal 52 (January): 56–60. 1966
- Solberg, Thorvald. Copyright Enactments of the United States,1783–1906. Copyright Office Bulletin No. 3. 2d ed., rev. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. 1906
- Copinger, Walter Arthur. The Law of Copyright, in Works of Literature and Art. London: Stevens and Haynes. 1870
MS, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (NN-B). MS, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MH-H, shelf mark bMS Am 1784.12 [3]), is copy-text for the enclosure.
L6 , 536–539; Paine 1912, 254–55, and MTB , 1:552–53, excerpts, letter only; MTL , 1:261–63, letter only; Howells 1928, 1:284–85, enclosure only; MTHL 1:99–102.
see Howells Letters in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.