MEMOIRS OF SAM CLEMENS

I knew that I had not been Joe Johnston's first choice to be Vice
President. Johnston had hoped for an interparty alliance with a fellow
General, John Bell Hood of Texas and the Rebel Party. But Hood had no
interest in the Vice Presidency and Joe Johnston certainly was
uninterested in being Hood's Vice President. Johnston was planning to
recruit one of his relatives by marriage as Vice President, but
Johnston's pick was caught swindling the city he misgoverned. And
Johnston's third choice, South Carolina's Wade Hampton III, who is very
moderate for a Calhounite, had his leg broken by a mule and was infirm
from the resulting amputation.

So Johnston's choice fell to me. I was the Governor of West Missouri for
a year and a half when the banks were not foreclosing, the rain was
ample without any floods, and the legislature drowsy without the Good
Samaritans, Younger and James, raising hell (because both of them were
in Richmond, agitiating on the confederal level).

"I understand you have no real experience of the War," said General
Johnston to me.

It was the next to the last night of the convention and I skimmed the
truth just a little bit. "I fought for the South on a short term
enlistment." ( I figured the General did not want to have a deserter as
a running mate). "Then I headed West to attempt to bring Nevada into the
Confederacy."

General Johnston nodded somberly. "The Yankees treated you very
cruelly."

Actually, the Nevada mobs were as kindly and gentle as any mob could
have been to us damn rebels when they got news that Butler had lost
them the war at the Third Battle of Manassas. We kept our clothes,
escaped an application of tar and feathers, and were sent east as fast
as stages could take us there. But for nearly thirty years the plight
of the Nevada exiles have been taught in classrooms through out the
Confederacy.

That is why the Confederate Commonwealth Party nominated Johnston &
Clemens, putting me in line for the Presidency I had just inherited.

While my wife ate her eggs and hominy breakfast, I had ham, coffee,
buteer and toast. Laura had her newspaper while I had thin ledger books
to read. The one this morning was illustrated with some drawings of
ironbirds dropping shell shaped turds on a city being devastated by
explosives. That is what the War Department thinks is "looking ahead."

"Sam, the newspaper is suggesting that we put up a statue to General
Johnston as least as big as the one standing for General Lee."

"Have they ever paid fully for that one?" The Confederacy was notorious
for buying now and paying than than we had agreed to pay.

"Sam," Laura said tartly. "We owe the dear old President a lot."

"Oh, yes," I agreed. The War Department report quoted engineers and
bankers to the effect that we could build ironbirds in Richmond,
Charleston, Atlanta and Vulcan, Alabama, that could fly a hundred miles
at 40 miles every hour! I did not like it that they could guarantee
nothing but that each plane would cost $10,000 at a minimum.

That mad Russian, Alexander Feodorich Mozhaisky, invented the steam
powered glider only in 1884 and then it flew only fifty yards. Every day
since then, every country is trying to make the ironbird into a potent
killing machine.

Laura insisted to me that the appropriations for the Confederate White
House needed to be doubled, at the very least. "Mrs. Blaine put in
Tiffany gates and bulb lighting in the Yankee White Hiouse," my wife
told me, "and a water closet for each bedroom and two baths per floor."

"I'll see about it," I said, promising nothing definitely.

I rode in the presidential coach and four to downtown Richmond. In
Washington City, which the Lincoln Davis Executive Agreement kept in
Yankee hands despite being wholly surrounded by Southron land, the
business buildings of government were adjacent to the Yankee White
House. But my Presidential offices were blocks away. Another one of
those things that happened without planning.

On the top and fifth floor of the Confederate Office Building, the
"Cob," my Cabinet waited for me around a wide round table of dark, very
polished wood. We could see our ebony reflections in the wood. Most of
them were members of the Confederate Commonwealth but Lawrence Sullivan
Ross of Agriculture and Attorney General William Yates Atkinson were
Klansmen.

I invited them to take their seats. To my right, and then around the
table, were Mississippi's John Marshall Stone, Secretary of State;
Samuel McEnery of Louisiana, Secretary of War; the Attorney General and
the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Navy and Simon
Bolivar Buckner, Secretary of the Treasury. THe last time I saw Buckner
he was stuffed like a sausage into a General's uniform that ought to
have been let out some inches. Buckner was an amusing sidelight on the
big funeral that we gave Johnston.

McEnery briefed us on commotions in Cuba. The politics surrounding that
acquisition left us with a large national debt and a supposed State
where most people spoke Spanish. Besides aiding and abetting fugitive
slaves, the typical Cubano would break windows and block streets on the
drop of a hat.

I had spoken to, and liked, Joseph Marti, the first island born
Congressman. Marti was completely fluent in English and so participated
fully in the CS House of Representatives. He also had run and won on the
Confederate Commonwealth Party,

"Why is it that Cingressman Marti thinks that our soldiers over reacted
because they heard a steam whisltle go off at a factor?"

"Congressman Marti is a sympathizer with the Black Republican
independence movement," McEnery said. "President Johnston agreed that
policy for Cuba gets made in Richmond but not in Havana."

"Isn't that contrary to the Confederate philosophy of government, Mr.
Attorney General?"

"Thay are not quite White," said Atkinson, "and our little brown Cuban
cousins need to learn English before they expect us to fully recognize
them as a part of the Confederacy."

Ross announced that the boll weevil was on the island of Cuba, and that
indications were that no cotton would make it to market from Cuba this
year. "Agriculture department estimates are that Alabama cotton will
be devastated next year, and the restoration of the Cotton South is
not in sight in the foreseeble future"

"Your Excellency, I do not know what to do, " Ross admitted. "This is
the worst panic since the origin of the Confederacy."

Buckner of Kentucky and the Treasury said that tax collection had
dropped along with the other entertainment the confederal government
provides for us. "It was bad enough when we were forced to suspend our
payments in specie because our reserve vaults had run empty. But now we
have been estranged from European bankers. and I cannot see how we can
wait till Europe reconsiders us creditworthy."

"We lived with paper money before," I said. "So did France. We can
survive a return to that status."

Buckner was appalled. He did not want the Treasury to mint copper and
certainly never wanted Confederate currency to be paper rectangles
again. "The boll weevil has wrecked the countryside and paper money
will do the same damage to the citiies."

"You will need a majority vote of each House of Congress to gain
authority to order the printing of fiat money," stated Atkinson, short
of breath and red of face. "Otherwise you violate Jubal Early's Sound
Dollar Act."

"Another problem is the siide in chattel prices where the weevils infest
cotton fields. Without normal cotton output, four in every five slaves
are now redundent, with nothing useful to do."

"Slave value is down to sixty cents on last year's dollar," Secretary of
State John M. Stone chimed in. "The squeeze out West is unending and
horrendous."

"Are the Yankees still offering seventy five million gold dollars for
Arizona?" I asked.

Buckner grew ever redder. "Congress angrily repudiated that cheeky
request. Confederate territory is not for sale: it was gained for the
South at far too high a price to ever be sold for mere Yankee gold."

More in sorrow than anger, Ross said that slave owners would rather eat
their Negroes if that was the only way they could avoid emancipating
them. And the Attorney General took a book off the shelf and read from
the Cornerstone Speech of Alexander Stephens, who had said in deathless
prose that the Confederacy rested upon the principle of white supremacy
and Negro inferiority.

With those responses, I dropped the subject of trading the desert we
could not develop on our own for a payment that could satisfy the Cuba
debt. Politics is the art of the possible.

"The Mormons of Utah appear to be following their Prophet, Woodruff, and
are obeying his Manifesto against plural marriage," said McEnery of the
religious cult that dominated the land north of the US territory of New
Mexico. On September 22, 1890, the Mormons decreed that men would no
longer be permitted more than a single wife.

I sighed and said nothing. Johnston's Cabinet did not want to hear from
the new President that he would have humored the immoral infidels and
guaranteed them multiple wives if Utah left the USA and joined the CSA.
But the Bible thumpers of the South would never okay "immorality," not
even if Utah was a land of gold and diamonds.

As the meeting broke up, Secretary Ross asked me if I minded if he
retired from his post. "I've already given up a lot, Your Excellency.
There is, or rather was, a small school in Texas called the Agricultural
and Mechanical College, and I would have saved it, I think, if I had not
been preoccupied with my position at Agriculture. Well, the
Agrimcultural and Mechanical College of Texas is gone now, sunk in
bankruptcy, its campus sold out in individual lots."

I said I was sorry to hear about that little school. But I did not think
the farmers of the South would understand why their champion left them
in the lurch. I asked "Little Sull" to stay on, and he nodded his head
and agreed to do that, at least for the remainder of the term.

Speaking of the remainder of the term, I made informal conversation with
Attorney General Atkinson, while I casually leaned against the
doorframe. The Constitution was explicit that the President shall not
be re-elected to that post. But I was a President who climbed to the
top from the Vice Presidency. As I had never once been elected, could I
stand for election to a term of my own?

"People have argued over that since the permament constution was written
thirty years ago, and they cannot agree on an answer. I think the
question could only be decided by our Supreme Court."