Mark Twain's Ambivalence Toward the “Tennessee Land”

MARK TWAIN’S AMBIVALENCE TOWARD THE “TENNESSEE LAND” AND HIS PIONEER ROOTS IN KENTUCKY: THE SAVAGE “OTHER” AND THE “SIVILIZED” ORDER by John Butwell A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of English Middle Tennessee State University August 2021 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Carl Ostrowski, Chair Dr. Ellen Donovan Dr. Kevin Donovan For Ruth Oakes Butwell 1929-2018 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to so many people for their guidance, patience, and assistance during the process of researching and writing this dissertation. They include my committee, initially chaired by Dr. Patricia Bradley prior to her retirement but chaired in its final stages by Dr. Carl Ostrowski, who initially served as one of my readers. Both chairs were immensely helpful, as were both of my readers, Dr. Ellen Donovan and Dr. Kevin Donovan. The graduate program directors in the Department of English likewise made it possible for me to initiate and complete this work, beginning with Dr. Kevin Donovan, followed by the late Dr. David Lavery and continuing through the present director, Dr. Rhonda McDaniel. Nor do I want to overlook thanking all the Department of English faculty members who taught my graduate courses here at Middle Tennessee State University, and the Graduate English secretary, Deborah Flanigan, who scheduled all my dissertation research hours. Research sources that also deserve grateful acknowledgment include Dr. Lawrence Howe, who graciously sent me a copy of his presentation on the Tennessee land to the American Literature Association; the Fentress County Register of Deeds Office in Jamestown, Tennessee; the Adair County Clerk’s Office and Public Library in Columbia, Kentucky; the Tennessee State Library Archives in Nashville; the regional office of the National Archives in greater Atlanta; and the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, which forwarded copies to me of certain original correspondence by and to Twain. iii Additionally, my colleagues and supervisors at Motlow State Community College have been supportive of my work as I struggled through the writing process, especially Smyrna Academic Dean Dr. Gregory Killough and his predecessor Elizabeth Fitch, who authorized the fee waivers for my final semesters of this project. Likewise, I could not have completed my work without the financial assistance of repeated fellowships and teaching assistantships from the Middle Tennessee State University College of Graduate Studies and Department of English. Thanks also go to my friend and colleague, the Rev. Joseph Cejka, for the gifts of not one but two recent books of Twain scholarship and texts. Finally, I must thank my family. I could not and would not have written this dissertation without them. My sister, Ann Louise Butwell, was the first to encourage me to continue my studies after I earned my master’s, and her husband, John Wright Rios, has been equally supportive. I’m dedicating this study to my late mother, Ruth Oakes Butwell, who not only raised me (as a single parent) with high expectations for me. She also helped defray living costs for my wife and me during otherwise unassisted summers, as did our son, Marc Williams. Thanks, Mom and Marc. One of our grandsons, Nicholas Dees, helped us unpack our heavily loaded moving van when we first arrived in Murfreesboro in hundred-degree weather. He probably saved my life. Family members on all sides provided all kinds of support for my graduate education, including my late father, Richard Lee Butwell, because his doctorate from Oxford set a high bar for my educational aspirations, and he contributed genetically toward my ability to write a dissertation at all. iv But most of all, I thank my wife, Connie Esh, who worked long hours to support us during my studies, both as a journalist for two local newspapers and as an educational assistant at a local grade school. Without her, my doctoral studies would not have been possible. Hey, Connie. Thanks for attending all those endless county commission meetings and wiping down all those lunchroom tables among all those screaming kids. Thanks for accompanying me on all those research road trips to Fentress and Adair counties, and sitting through that three-hour traffic jam with me in the summer heat on the eight-lane interstate north of Atlanta. And thanks for being there to share the little thrills that come from tracing the life and works of one of our all-time favorite authors, such as standing in the vacant field beside Wolf Creek on Jim Buck’s farm where the Clemens cabin once stood (in which Mark Twain may have been conceived), or holding the authentic signature of “Saml. L. Clemens” on a deposition at the National Archives. You are my Livy. v ABSTRACT This study addresses two interrelated questions on Mark Twain and Native Americans from a historicist perspective. The first is why Mark Twain came to abhor the infamous “Tennessee land” that his father, John Marshall Clemens, left to the Clemens heirs. For the first time in Twain studies, the study confirms Twain’s claim that the land, mostly in Fentress County, exceeded 75,000 acres; a search of land grant records, property transfers, lawsuits, and tax records in the Fentress Register of Deeds Office, the National Archives in Atlanta, and the Tennessee State Library Archives in Nashville places the acreage closer to 93,000. The study also documents how Twain’s father used a “shell game” to circumvent the statutory limit of five thousand acres per land grant per individual. Twain came to loathe the legacy because its remote location in the Cumberland Plateau made it nearly impossible to exploit commercially, leaving Twain with the resulting tax burden. Secondly, the study identifies the root cause of Twain’s persistent antipathy toward Native Americans, a hostility that long has puzzled scholars, as the participation of Twain’s ancestors in the late eighteenth-century preemption of Native American lands in central Kentucky, preceding his father’s acquisition of the “Tennessee land” in the early nineteenth-century. The study confirms from multiple sources that Twain’s mother repeatedly told her children about a Cherokee attack in which Twain’s great-great grandfather was fatally ambushed and Twain’s great-grandmother, entrapped in a cabin, was rescued by Twain’s future great-grandfather. Combined with the context that European Americans did not understand the limited validity of their land “purchases” vi from Native Americans, Twain’s mother’s harrowing stories of frontier violence left Twain with an enduring image that Native Americans, despite defending their land, were treacherously prone to randomly attack white settlers. Twain justifies the transcontinental spread of white hegemony as just another instance of territorial conquest such as Native Americans themselves had repeatedly perpetrated on each other, and therefore morally inconsequential. Twain’s position is consistent with his eventual belief that land ownership in Tennessee was an inconsequential quirk in his family’s fortunes that, in his family’s case, should be abandoned. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………….………...xii LIST OF ACRONYMS…………………………………….……….……….………….xiii CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER II: “VAST POSSESSIONS” IN THE “PINERIES”: HOW MARK TWAIN’S FATHER ACQUIRED THE TENNESSEE LAND……………………...23 The Land’s Influences on Twain’s Life and Work…………………….………... 28 John Marshall’s Piecemeal Acquisition Process: Not the Way Twain Tells It…..30 Tennessee’s Land-Claiming Process and John Marshall’s Role as “Locator”.….36 1830: Tennessee Land Grants Suddenly Become Easily Available………………41 The Initial Claimants for John Marshall’s Land Grants Usually Were His Friends and Relatives from Adair County, Kentucky……………….………. 45 Possible “Stretchers” in John Marshall’s Land Claims Resemble Those of His Son’s Literary Characters…………………………………………………….52 A Two-Tier Process of John Marshall Facilitating Original Entry-Making and Later Acquiring the Grant Tracts from a Second Set of Surrogates….….……56 Economic and Political Currents Delay the Grants’ Issuance………..……...........61 The Delayed Issuance of the Grants Also May Be Connected to Indian Removal, and Their Issuance May Be a Result of Removal…………………62 John Marshall’s Second Set of Surrogates, the Actual Grant Recipients, Were Mostly His Friends and Relatives from Northeast Missouri……………68 John Marshall’s Survey Markers on Mineral-Rich Grant Tract Lead to Its Legal Expansion by the State Supreme Court to Nearly Eight Square Miles………78 What Scholars Mean by the Term, “The Tennessee Land,” Compared to What John Marshall Meant and What Twain Meant at Different Times…...…80 Family Relationship between Polk’s Wife and Twain’s Step-Grandmother May Have Led to Polk’s Signatures on John Marshall’s Surrogate Grants…….….82 The Importance of Family Ties in the Frontier and Antebellum South and Upper South………………………………………………………………………...88 viii TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued) CHAPTER II, continued Was the Future US President Aware of John Marshall’s Apparent “Shell Game”?..................................................................................................93 CHAPTER III: TWAIN AND THE TENNESSEE LAND: THE BURDEN OF TRUST BETRAYED THROUGH REVERSAL AND DEFERMENT…………...………….96 Twain’s Ambivalence about His Father’s Mental Acuity……………..………...107 John Marshall’s Acumen Far Outpaced Orion’s, in Twain’s Opinion: The Grape-Growing Deal that Orion Vetoed…………………………….…109

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