Journalism in Tennessee
Annotated Edition, with a modern retelling
Original story from Sketches New and Old · Written about 1871 · In the public domain
Annotations and modern retelling © 2026 R. M. Hume
Twain learned newspapers from the inside, on the rough frontier papers of Nevada and California, where rival editors really did trade insults in print, horsewhip one another in the street, and now and then exchange gunfire as a form of professional disagreement. This sketch takes that world and turns the dial past absurd.
A mild, sickly narrator takes a quiet editing job for his health and spends one afternoon being shot, bombed, thrown out a window, and mobbed, while his chief editor treats the carnage as ordinary office weather and complains only that the new man’s writing is not peppery enough. All the comedy lives in the gap between the narrator’s gentle manners and the violence he keeps politely absorbing. It is satire with the safety off: the target is the partisan press, and the method is to take its bloodthirsty language literally.
Journalism in Tennessee
As Mark Twain wrote it, about 1871
The editor of the Memphis Avalanche swoops thus mildly down upon a correspondent who posted him as a Radical:—“While he was writing the first word, the middle, dotting his i’s, crossing his t’s, and punching his period, he knew he was concocting a sentence that was saturated with infamy and reeking with falsehood.”—Exchange.
I was told by the physician that a Southern climate would improve my health, and so I went down to Tennessee, and got a berth on the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop as associate editor. When I went on duty I found the chief editor sitting tilted back in a three-legged chair with his feet on a pine table. There was another pine table in the room and another afflicted chair, and both were half buried under newspapers and scraps and sheets of manuscript. There was a wooden box of sand, sprinkled with cigar stubs and “old soldiers,” and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal-ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the “Spirit of the Tennessee Press,” condensing into the article all of their contents that seemed of interest.
I wrote as follows:
SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
The editors of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake evidently labor under a misapprehension with regard to the Ballyhack railroad. It is not the object of the company to leave Buzzardville off to one side. On the contrary, they consider it one of the most important points along the line, and consequently can have no desire to slight it. The gentlemen of the Earthquake will, of course, take pleasure in making the correction.
John W. Blossom, Esq., the able editor of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, arrived in the city yesterday. He is stopping at the Van Buren House.
We observe that our contemporary of the Mud Springs Morning Howl has fallen into the error of supposing that the election of Van Werter is not an established fact, but he will have discovered his mistake before this reminder reaches him, no doubt. He was doubtless misled by incomplete election returns.
It is pleasant to note that the city of Blathersville is endeavoring to contract with some New York gentlemen to pave its well-nigh impassable streets with the Nicholson pavement. The Daily Hurrah urges the measure with ability, and seems confident of ultimate success.
I passed my manuscript over to the chief editor for acceptance, alteration, or destruction. He glanced at it and his face clouded. He ran his eye down the pages, and his countenance grew portentous. It was easy to see that something was wrong. Presently he sprang up and said:
“Thunder and lightning! Do you suppose I am going to speak of those cattle that way? Do you suppose my subscribers are going to stand such gruel as that? Give me the pen!”
I never saw a pen scrape and scratch its way so viciously, or plow through another man’s verbs and adjectives so relentlessly. While he was in the midst of his work, somebody shot at him through the open window, and marred the symmetry of my ear.
“Ah,” said he, “that is that scoundrel Smith, of the Moral Volcano—he was due yesterday.” And he snatched a navy revolver from his belt and fired—Smith dropped, shot in the thigh. The shot spoiled Smith’s aim, who was just taking a second chance and he crippled a stranger. It was me. Merely a finger shot off.
Then the chief editor went on with his erasure; and interlineations. Just as he finished them a hand grenade came down the stove-pipe, and the explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments. However, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.
“That stove is utterly ruined,” said the chief editor.
I said I believed it was.
“Well, no matter—don’t want it this kind of weather. I know the man that did it. I’ll get him. Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.”
I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn’t have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:
SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS
The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains—or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.
That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.
We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.
Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement—it wants a jail and a poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about his business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.
“Now that is the way to write—peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”
About this time a brick came through the window with a splintering crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back. I moved out of range—I began to feel in the way.
The chief said, “That was the Colonel, likely. I’ve been expecting him for two days. He will be up now right away.”
He was correct. The Colonel appeared in the door a moment afterward with a dragoon revolver in his hand.
He said, “Sir, have I the honor of addressing the poltroon who edits this mangy sheet?”
“You have. Be seated, sir. Be careful of the chair, one of its legs is gone. I believe I have the honor of addressing the putrid liar, Colonel Blatherskite Tecumseh?”
“Right, Sir. I have a little account to settle with you. If you are at leisure we will begin.”
“I have an article on the ‘Encouraging Progress of Moral and Intellectual Development in America’ to finish, but there is no hurry. Begin.”
Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel’s bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel’s left shoulder was clipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped. I then said, I believed I would go out and take a walk, as this was a private matter, and I had a delicacy about participating in it further. But both gentlemen begged me to keep my seat, and assured me that I was not in the way.
They then talked about the elections and the crops while they reloaded, and I fell to tying up my wounds. But presently they opened fire again with animation, and every shot took effect—but it is proper to remark that five out of the six fell to my share. The sixth one mortally wounded the Colonel, who remarked, with fine humor, that he would have to say good morning now, as he had business uptown. He then inquired the way to the undertaker’s and left.
The chief turned to me and said, “I am expecting company to dinner, and shall have to get ready. It will be a favor to me if you will read proof and attend to the customers.”
I winced a little at the idea of attending to the customers, but I was too bewildered by the fusillade that was still ringing in my ears to think of anything to say.
He continued, “Jones will be here at three—cowhide him. Gillespie will call earlier, perhaps—throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be along about four—kill him. That is all for today, I believe. If you have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police—give the chief inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in the drawer—ammunition there in the corner—lint and bandages up there in the pigeonholes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon, downstairs. He advertises—we take it out in trade.”
He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I had been through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were gone from me. Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window. Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took the job off my hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill of fare, I had lost my scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson, left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs, politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends. Then ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one either, could describe. People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up, thrown out of the window. There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy, with a confused and frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all was over. In five minutes there was silence, and the gory chief and I sat alone and surveyed the sanguinary ruin that strewed the floor around us.
He said, “You’ll like this place when you get used to it.”
I said, “I’ll have to get you to excuse me; I think maybe I might write to suit you after a while; as soon as I had had some practice and learned the language I am confident I could. But, to speak the plain truth, that sort of energy of expression has its inconveniences, and a man is liable to interruption.
“You see that yourself. Vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the public, no doubt, but then I do not like to attract so much attention as it calls forth. I can’t write with comfort when I am interrupted so much as I have been to-day. I like this berth well enough, but I don’t like to be left here to wait on the customers. The experiences are novel, I grant you, and entertaining, too, after a fashion, but they are not judiciously distributed. A gentleman shoots at you through the window and cripples me; a bombshell comes down the stove-pipe for your gratification and sends the stove door down my throat; a friend drops in to swap compliments with you, and freckles me with bullet-holes till my skin won’t hold my principles; you go to dinner, and Jones comes with his cowhide, Gillespie throws me out of the window, Thompson tears all my clothes off, and an entire stranger takes my scalp with the easy freedom of an old acquaintance; and in less than five minutes all the blackguards in the country arrive in their war-paint, and proceed to scare the rest of me to death with their tomahawks. Take it altogether, I never had such a spirited time in all my life as I have had to-day. No; I like you, and I like your calm unruffled way of explaining things to the customers, but you see I am not used to it. The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger. The paragraphs which I have written to-day, and into whose cold sentences your masterly hand has infused the fervent spirit of Tennesseean journalism, will wake up another nest of hornets. All that mob of editors will come—and they will come hungry, too, and want somebody for breakfast. I shall have to bid you adieu. I decline to be present at these festivities. I came South for my health, I will go back on the same errand, and suddenly. Tennesseean journalism is too stirring for me.”
After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital.
Journalism in Tennessee, Told Once More
A modern retelling by R. M. Hume
A doctor told me a warm climate would fix my health, so I went down to Tennessee and took a desk. That is the short version of how I ended up like this. The long version is one afternoon, and I would rather tell you the long one, because the short one makes it sound like the weather’s fault.
The paper was called the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop, which should have told me something, and I signed on as associate editor. My first day I found the chief editor tipped back in a three-legged chair with his boots on a pine table, dressed about twenty years out of fashion and calm as a Sunday. The table was half buried under old papers and scraps of manuscript. A stove stood in the corner with its door hanging by the top hinge, and a wooden box of sand on the floor did duty as the office spittoon. He was frowning over a single word. He told me to read through the other papers and write up a friendly little roundup of what the neighboring editors were saying. So I did. I wrote it the way you would write a note to people you were hoping to get along with. Polite. A gentle correction here, a kind word there, a gentleman is in town and stopping at the hotel.
The chief read it and his face fell in by the third line. He stood up, said he was not going to talk about those cattle that way, took the pen out of my hand, and went to work. I have never watched a man butcher another man’s adjectives with such purpose. Where I had written that a neighboring paper was under a small misapprehension, he wrote that its editors were inveterate liars trying to palm off a vile and brutal falsehood. Where I had noted that a visiting gentleman was stopping at the hotel, he wrote that the same gentleman was down here again sponging at the hotel. He called one entire town a one-horse affair of two gin-mills and a blacksmith shop. He handed it back and told me that was how you wrote, peppery and to the point, and that mild writing gave him the jitters.
While he was explaining this, somebody shot at him through the open window and took a piece off my ear. The chief said, without much interest, that it was a rival editor named Smith who had been due the day before, drew a pistol from his belt, and returned fire. Smith dropped. Smith’s parting shot, spoiled by the hit, went wide and cost me a finger. The chief went back to his editing. A moment later a bomb came down the stovepipe and blew the stove into a thousand pieces, and a stray fragment took out two of my teeth. The chief remarked that the stove was ruined. I agreed that it was.
Then the Colonel arrived. He appeared in the doorway with a very large pistol and asked, with tremendous courtesy, whether he had the honor of addressing the poltroon who edited this mangy sheet. The chief said that he did, invited him to sit, warned him about the broken chair, and asked whether he in turn had the honor of addressing the putrid liar Colonel Blatherskite Tecumseh. The Colonel allowed that he had a small account to settle. The chief said he had an article to finish first but there was no hurry, and they began. They fired at each other in a leisurely, conversational way, pausing to reload and discuss the crops. Very nearly every bullet in the room found me. On the last exchange the Colonel was mortally wounded. He observed, in fine humor, that he would have to say good morning, as he had business uptown, asked the way to the undertaker’s, and left.
The chief now told me he was expecting company for dinner and would have to get ready. He asked whether I would mind reading proof and looking after the customers while he was out. Then he ran down the afternoon’s appointments the way another man might leave a grocery list. Jones would be by at three; cowhide him. Gillespie might come earlier; throw him out the window. Ferguson would be along about four; kill him. The cowhides were under the table, he said, the weapons in the drawer, the bandages up in the pigeonholes, and if I got into any real difficulty the surgeon was downstairs and took his fee in advertising. Then he was gone.
I will not give you the next three hours in full. Gillespie came and put me out the window. Jones arrived, and when I went to cowhide him he obligingly saved me the trouble and cowhided me. A stranger who was not on the schedule left me in rags. And at last they backed me into the corner. A mob of editors and gamblers and politicians and plain desperadoes, all shouting and waving steel until the air glittered. I was in the very act of resigning when the chief came back through the door with a crowd of charmed and enthusiastic friends. What followed I could not describe if I tried. When it was over and the smoke had cleared, he and I sat alone among the wreckage, and he looked around the room and told me, kindly, that I would like the place once I got used to it.
I told him I would have to be excused. I said I felt certain I could learn to write the way he wanted, given a little practice, but that this sort of vigorous expression had its inconveniences, the chief one being that a man kept getting interrupted. I said I liked the work well enough and liked him better, and admired the calm, unruffled way he had of explaining things to the customers, but that I was simply not used to it. The Southern welcome, I said, ran a good deal warmer than my constitution was built to carry. I had come South for my health, and I intended to go back North for the same reason, and suddenly. We parted with real regret on both sides. Then I went and took a room at the hospital.
What Twain Was Doing
The engine of this sketch is a single move: take the language of the partisan press literally. Frontier editors wrote as though they wanted to kill one another, so Twain simply lets them. The metaphors of invective come off the page and turn into a real bullet, a real bomb, a real brick. The chief calls savage prose peppery and to the point, and the story answers by making the office as peppery as the prose.
The second engine is the chief himself. He treats a morning of gunfire the way another man treats a stack of proofs, reloading between shots to talk about the crops, filing kill Ferguson on the day’s list right after read proof. The comedy is the distance between his calm and the carnage, and between his idea of vigor and the mild narrator quietly absorbing every stray shot meant for someone else.
The target underneath is a press that mistakes venom for virtue. The chief’s rewrite, from a polite roundup into a page of libel, is the whole argument in miniature, and the bill for it is paid by the one man in the room who never insulted anyone. Twain reaches once for frontier war-paint and tomahawk imagery to caricature the mob; the modern retelling and the graphic novel drop that framing and keep the mob simply a mob.
A Note on This Edition
Twain’s words sit here as he wrote them, untouched. Everything around them is new, and it was made with AI and led by a person. R. M. Hume chose the story, wrote the notes and the modern retelling, and decided what stayed and what went. We do not hide the tool, and we do not pretend it ran the show. A person drove, the tool helped.
This is the third story in Mark Twain in an AI World, and it carries the same test the whole project runs. The Jumping Frog asked whether a machine could hear a joke across four languages. The Invalid’s Story narrowed it to a single straight face. This one hands the machine a room full of mayhem and asks whether it can keep the deadpan while everything explodes.
A fully illustrated graphic novel of Journalism in Tennessee is now on Kindle, drawn in the same hand as the Frog and the Invalid. This page is the reading edition and the place to start. Read the afternoon as Twain wrote it, then read it once more in the retelling, and decide for yourself whether the newest teller in the line keeps the chief’s calm.