Chapters from My Autobiography | Page 3

handy time for
explanations. He tried to get me to go out with him, but I held back;
then he tried S., and he also declined. There was another guest, but
there was no trouble about him. We finally went out in a pile. There

was a decorous plunge for seats, and I got the one at Mr. Phelps's left,
the Count captured the one facing Phelps, and the other guest had to
take the place of honor, since he could not help himself. We returned to
the drawing-room in the original disorder. I had new shoes on, and they
were tight. At eleven I was privately crying; I couldn't help it, the pain
was so cruel. Conversation had been dead for an hour. S. had been due
at the bedside of a dying official ever since half past nine. At last we all
rose by one blessed impulse and went down to the street door without
explanations--in a pile, and no precedence; and so, parted.
The evening had its defects; still, I got my ancestor in, and was
satisfied.
Among the Virginian Clemenses were Jere. (already mentioned), and
Sherrard. Jere. Clemens had a wide reputation as a good pistol-shot,
and once it enabled him to get on the friendly side of some drummers
when they wouldn't have paid any attention to mere smooth words and
arguments. He was out stumping the State at the time. The drummers
were grouped in front of the stand, and had been hired by the
opposition to drum while he made his speech. When he was ready to
begin, he got out his revolver and laid it before him, and said in his soft,
silky way--
"I do not wish to hurt anybody, and shall try not to; but I have got just a
bullet apiece for those six drums, and if you should want to play on
them, don't stand behind them."
Sherrard Clemens was a Republican Congressman from West Virginia
in the war days, and then went out to St. Louis, where the James
Clemens branch lived, and still lives, and there he became a warm rebel.
This was after the war. At the time that he was a Republican I was a
rebel; but by the time he had become a rebel I was become (temporarily)
a Republican. The Clemenses have always done the best they could to
keep the political balances level, no matter how much it might
inconvenience them. I did not know what had become of Sherrard
Clemens; but once I introduced Senator Hawley to a Republican mass
meeting in New England, and then I got a bitter letter from Sherrard
from St. Louis. He said that the Republicans of the North--no, the

"mudsills of the North"--had swept away the old aristocracy of the
South with fire and sword, and it ill became me, an aristocrat by blood,
to train with that kind of swine. Did I forget that I was a Lambton?
That was a reference to my mother's side of the house. As I have
already said, she was a Lambton--Lambton with a p, for some of the
American Lamptons could not spell very well in early times, and so the
name suffered at their hands. She was a native of Kentucky, and
married my father in Lexington in 1823, when she was twenty years
old and he twenty-four. Neither of them had an overplus of property.
She brought him two or three negroes, but nothing else, I think. They
removed to the remote and secluded village of Jamestown, in the
mountain solitudes of east Tennessee. There their first crop of children
was born, but as I was of a later vintage I do not remember anything
about it. I was postponed--postponed to Missouri. Missouri was an
unknown new State and needed attractions.
I think that my eldest brother, Orion, my sisters Pamela and Margaret,
and my brother Benjamin were born in Jamestown. There may have
been others, but as to that I am not sure. It was a great lift for that little
village to have my parents come there. It was hoped that they would
stay, so that it would become a city. It was supposed that they would
stay. And so there was a boom; but by and by they went away, and
prices went down, and it was many years before Jamestown got another
start. I have written about Jamestown in the "Gilded Age," a book of
mine, but it was from hearsay, not from personal knowledge. My father
left a fine estate behind him in the region round about
Jamestown--75,000 acres.[2] When he died in 1847 he had owned it
about twenty years. The taxes were almost nothing (five dollars a year
for the whole), and he had always paid them regularly and