Mark Twain’s Encounter with Alexander Campbell

The Old Curmudgeon attended a Disciples of Christ seminary back in The Day. In the American Christianity course, he became somewhat acquainted with the founders of the Disciples of Christ denomination -- The Campbell brothers and Barton Stone. He has also, for a long time, been a fan of Mark Twain. One of his favorite stories involves a time when the paths of Alexander Campbell and a young Samuel Clemens crossed.

Wikipedia provides the following introductory information about Campbell and the DOC:

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), often abbreviated as the Disciples of Christ or Christian Church, is a denomination of Christian Protestantism that grew out of the Restoration Movement founded by Thomas Campbell and Alexander Campbell of Pennsylvania and West Virginia (then Virginia) and Barton W. Stone of Kentucky. Both families were originally Presbyterians. There are about 800,000 members in the United States and Canada.

As a young “printer’s devil,” Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) was an apprentice in the printing shop of one, Mr, Ament. His cohort at the time, according to the story, was named Wales. It was not clear to The Old Curmudgeon if Wales actually existed or is merely a literary device used as an alter ego to the author. Upon researching the matter further, TOC was reminded that Wales McCormick was "seventeen or eighteen years old and a giant...He was a reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles and was delightful company."

The Curmudgeon hope that you will find this story to be not without humor. It is excerpted from The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider.
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I have said that Wales was reckless, and he was. It was the recklessness of ever-bubbling and indestructible good spirits flowing from the joy of youth. I think there wasn’t anything that that vast boy wouldn’t do to procure five minutes’ entertainment for himself. One never knew where he would break out next. Among his shining characteristics was the most limitless and adorable irreverence. There didn’t seem to be anything serious in his life for him; there didn’t seem to be anything he fevered.

Once the celebrated founder of the at that time new and widespread sect called Campbellites arrived in our village from Kentucky and it made a prodigious excitement. The farmers and their families drove or tramped into the village from miles around to get a sight of the illustrious Alexander Campbell and to have a chance to hear him preach. When he preached in a church many had to be disappointed, for there was no church that would begin to hold all the applicants; so in order to accommodate all, he preached in the open air in the public square and that was the first time in my life that I had realized what a mighty population this planet contains when you get them all together.

He preached a sermon on one of these occasions which he had written especially for that occasion. All the Campbellites wanted it printed, so that they could save it and read it over and over again and get it by heart. So they drummed up sixteen dollars, which was a large sum then, and for this great sum Mr. Ament contracted to print five hundred copies of that sermon and put them in yellow paper covers. It was a sixteen-page duodecimo pamphlet and it was a great event in our office. As we regarded it, it was a book, and it promoted us to the dignity of book printers. Moreover, no such mass of actual money as sixteen dollars, in one bunch, had ever entered that office on any previous occasion. People didn’t pay for their paper and for their advertising in money; they paid in drygoods, sugar, coffee, hickory wood, oak wood, turnips, pumpkins, onions, watermelons – and it was very seldom indeed that a man paid in money, and when that happened we thought there was something the matter with him.

We set up the great book in pages –eight pages to a form – and by help of a printer’s manual we managed to get the pages in their apparently crazy but really sane places on the imposing-stone. We printed that form on a Thursday. Then we set up the remaining eight pages, locked them into a form and struck a proof. Wales read the proof and presently was aghast, for he had struck a snag. And it was a bad time to strike a snag, because it was Saturday; it was approaching noon; Saturday afternoon was our holiday and we wanted to get away and go fishing. At such a time as this Wales struck that snag and showed us what had happened. He had left out a couple of words in a thin-spaced page of solid matter and there wasn’t another breakline for two or three pages ahead. What in the world was to be done? Overrun all those pages in order to get in the two missing words? Apparently there was no other way. It would take an hour to do it. Then a revise must be sent to the great minister; we must wait for him to read the revise; if he encountered any errors we must correct them. It looked as if we might lose half the afternoon before we could get away.

Then Wales had one of his brilliant ideas. In the line in which the “out” had been made occurred the name Jesus Christ. Wales reduced it in the French way to J.C. It made room for the missing words but it took 99 per cent of the solemnity out of a particularly solemn sentence. We sent off the revise and waited. We were not intending to wait long. In the circumstances we meant to get out and go fishing before that revise should get back, but we were not speedy enough. Presently that great Alexander Campbell appeared at the far end of that sixty-foot room, and his countenance cast a gloom over the whole place. He strode down to our end and what he said was brief, but it was very stern and it was to the point. He read Wales a lecture. He said, “So long as you live, don’t you ever diminish the Saviour’s name again. Put it all in.” He repeated this admonition a couple of times to emphasize it, then he want away.

In that day the common swearers of the region had a way of their own of emphasizing the Saviour’s name when they were using it profanely and this fact intruded itself into Wales’s incorrigible mind. It offered him an opportunity for a momentary entertainment which seemed to him to be more precious and more valuable than even fishing and swimming could afford. So he imposed upon himself the long and weary and dreary task of overrunning all those pages in order to improve upon his former work and incidentally and thoughtfully improve upon the great preacher’s admonition. He enlarged the offending J. C. into Jesus H. Christ. Wales knew that that would make prodigious troubles and it did. But it was not in him to resist it. He had to succumb to the law of his make. I don’t remember what his punishment was but he was not the person to care for that. He had already collected his dividend.