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The marriage of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton was fated to be a loveless affair, and not solely because of strikingly dissimilar personalities. Jane had been jilted by a young doctor whom she loved and in retribution married John Marshall on the rebound. In a thinly veiled portrait of his father, Twain sketched the tragic consequences: "Stern, unsmiling, never demonstrated affection for wife or child. Had found out he had been married to spite another man."[7] Though his parents behaved in dignified fashion, making a point of mutual courtesy, Twain recalled no signs of outward affection, just a frosty arrangement that substituted handshakes for hugs at bedtime. This arid match would foster in Mark Twain a huge craving for affection in his own marriage.

After a year or two, the newlyweds moved across the border to Gainesboro in northeastern Tennessee. Plagued by headaches and a weak chest, John Marshall Clemens hoped the salubrious mountain air might strengthen his health. Their first son, Orion—pronounced Or-ee-on—was born in 1825, his astral name a reflection of Jane's taste for the occult. Although John Marshall was an ambitious man, it soon grew apparent that the backwoods hamlet lacked any hint of a future. When Orion visited the cheerless spot more than forty years later, he encountered the "melancholy spectacle of doors closed with signs over them indicating past business; windows broken; houses faded or guiltless of paint."[8]

The young family pushed forty miles farther east to Jamestown, in Fentress County, a scenic hinterland of low, rolling mountains called the Knobs, where the career of John Marshall Clemens seemed briefly to flourish. Unlike Gainesboro, this new town breathed an air of possibility, having recently been named the county seat, and John emerged as a model citizen, serving as the county commissioner and clerk of the circuit court and even taking a hand in building the county courthouse and jail. He erected an impressive house that set envious tongues wagging. With their future more secure, the Clemenses expanded their progeny to include two daughters—Pamela (pronounced Pa-mee-la) born in 1827 and Margaret in 1830—and another son, Benjamin, in 1832; a first son, named Pleasant, died in infancy.

As he strode about town in a blue coat with brass buttons, John Marshall seemed to have satisfied his hunger for respectability. He even branched out into land speculation, amassing virgin forest at a time when real estate could be acquired for less than a penny an acre. Of his total investment, his author son Sam would later bandy about a figure of seventy-five thousand acres, while Orion could only establish title to thirty thousand acres.[9] With an overheated imagination, John Marshall daydreamed that his forest of yellow pine would someday yield a cornucopia of iron ore, coal, copper, and timber. This inheritance of the "Tennessee land" would assume mythic proportions in his children's minds, alternately teasing and tormenting them with hopes of future grandeur. The beckoning mirage of phantom wealth would make ordinary riches seem paltry in comparison. For Sam Clemens, it would breed lifelong fantasies of king-size wealth and countless schemes to attain it. He later pronounced this grim epitaph on the Tennessee land: "It kept us hoping and hoping, during forty years. It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers, and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year—no occasion to work."[10]

The time in Tennessee set a tragic pattern for John Marshall Clemens, who would attempt to scratch out a living as a lawyer and public servant only to be forced, for survival's sake, into the humdrum routine of keeping a store. When his business faltered, he was required to abandon the fine house in town—he was now land-rich but cash-poor—and move nine miles north to a secluded spot in the woods, Three Forks, where his family occupied a cramped log cabin, an abrupt comedown from their previous high status in town. This solitary place at the junction of three rivers preyed on his sociable young wife, who had grown accustomed to material comfort and a buoyant party life in Kentucky. "I had always been in society," Jane Clemens later complained, and was "very fond of company."[11] In this bleak backwater, John Marshall kept a store and served as the local postmaster at the nearby hamlet of Pall Mall.

In 1834 financial austerity brought on by Andrew Jackson's clash with the Second Bank of the United States snuffed out John Marshall Clemens's tenuous standing in Tennessee. Although Sam had not yet been born, the mood of that sudden wreckage must have formed the mental weather of his childhood; the specter of downward mobility shadowed his father, spawning constant status insecurity. As Twain recalled, "From being honored and envied as the most opulent citizen of Fentress county he suddenly woke up and found himself reduced to less than one-fourth of that amount. He was a proud man, a silent, austere man, and not a person likely to abide among the scenes of his vanished grandeur."[12] Stymied by ill luck, battered by hardship, John Marshall became a dour, defeated character, his ambitions thwarted in the wilderness. As Mark Twain wrote, in a character patterned after his father in The Gilded Age, Squire Hawkins was "not more than thirty- five" but with "a worn look that made him seem older."[13] Between the two of them, John and Jane Clemens had inherited six enslaved people, but by the time they left Tennessee, austerity had thinned that number down to one—a young woman named Jennie.