Joseph Twichell

Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twichell (November 30, 1838 – December 20, 1918), writer and pastor, was Mark Twain's closest friend for over forty years, and appears in A Tramp Abroad as "Harris." Twain and Twichell met at a church social after the Civil War when Twichell was pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, his only pastorate for almost 50 years. Reverend Twichell performed Twain's wedding and christened his children, and counseled him on literary as well as personal matters for the rest of Twain's life. A scholar and devout, Twichell was described as "a man with an exuberant sense of humor, and a profound understanding of the frailties of mankind."

Early life

Twichell was born in Southington, Connecticut, to Edward Twichell and Selina Delight Carter.

He studied at Yale from 1855–1859. He was an athletic young man with deep-sunk eyes and a powerful jaw. He had rowed port waist on the Yale crew the first time the Yale defeated Harvard.

From 1859–61, Twichell attended Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Civil War

In 1861, Twichell was living on Waverly Place in New York City, attending Union Theological Seminary, but not yet ordained, when war broke out. Strongly pro-abolition, he enlisted in the Union Army (in the wrong state and with inadequate credentials) a few weeks after the Confederacy fired upon Fort Sumter in April.

Twichell became chaplain of the 71st New York State Volunteers, one of five regiments of the Excelsior Brigade commanded by General Daniel E. Sickles. The regiment was largely made up of working-class Irish Catholics from lower Manhattan, an unusual flock for a Congregationalist from Connecticut. He wrote his father: “If you ask why I fixed upon this regiment, composed as it is of rough, wicked men, I answer, that was the very reason. I should not expect a revival, but I should expect to make some good impressions by treating with kindness a class of men who are little used to it.”

In July 1861 the Excelsior Brigade was ordered to Washington, D.C., a capital in shock after the unexpected Union disaster at Bull Run. That fall, the brigade marched east through Maryland, with Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s division of the army’s Third Corps, to help defend the mouth of the Potomac River from Confederate harassment.

As the years passed, the friendship between Twichell and author Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, deepened. In 1870, Twitchell, along with Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, married Clemens to his wife, Olivia Langdon. Twichell's inspiration also fired Clemens's imagination to write about his piloting career on the Mississippi River. Clemens and Twichell undertook a walking trip of over 100 miles to Boston in 1874. It was aborted on the second day when they decided to take the train. They followed the news reports of the adultery scandal involving Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe and their mutual friend, Rev. Thomas K. Beecher. Of the scandal, Clemens wrote Twichell, "Mr. Tilton never has been entitled to any sympathy since the day he heard the news & did not go straight & kill Beecher & then humbly seek forgiveness for displaying so much vivacity."(p. 202) He and Twichell attended the Henry Ward Beecher trial together.

• John Winthrop (1891)
• Some Old Puritan Love Letters (1893)

Twichell married Julia Harmony Cushman in November 1865. Together, they had eleven children.

Their son Burton Parker Twichell married Katherine Eugenia Pratt, daughter of Charles Millard Pratt.

Their daughter Harmony Twichell (1876–1969) married the composer Charles Ives in 1908.