Joseph Hopkins Twichell

Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twichell (November 30, 1838 – December 20, 1918) was a writer and Congregational minister from Hartford, Connecticut. He was a close friend of writer Mark Twain for over forty years and is believed to be the model for the character "Harris" in A Tramp Abroad.

Twain and Twichell met at a church social after the Civil War when Twichell was pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, where he served for almost 50 years. Reverend Twichell performed Twain's wedding and christened his children. He counseled the author on literary as well as personal matters for the rest of his life. A scholar and devout Christian, Twichell was described as "a man with an exuberant sense of humor, and a profound understanding of the frailties of mankind."

Early life and education Twichell was born in Southington, Connecticut, to Edward Twichell and Selina Delight Carter. He attended the Lewis Academy in Southington and studied at Yale from 1855 to 1859. He rowed on the Yale crew the first time that Yale defeated Harvard.

Civil War In 1861 when the American Civil War broke out, Twichell was still attending Union Theological Seminary, and was not yet ordained. Strongly pro-abolition, he enlisted in the Union Army 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, and many of them were immigrants. In a letter to his father, he remarked: "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." He became pastor at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut at the recommendation of Horace Bushnell.

They followed the news reports of the adultery scandal involving Henry Ward Beecher, who was a brother of their mutual friend, Rev. Thomas K. Beecher, and their sister, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had written Uncle Tom's Cabin. 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 trial of Henry Ward Beecher together.

Twichell and Twain traveled together to Bermuda in 1877 and to Germany and Switzerland in 1878. The six week trip through the Black Forest and Swiss Alps in Europe became the basis for Twain's book, A Tramp Abroad.

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

Personal life Twichell married Julia Harmony Cushman in November 1865 and together they had nine 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.

Twichell died on December 20, 1918.