The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of our Literature (review)

After Samuel Clemens died in 1910, William Dean Howells hailed him as "the Lincoln of our literature." The characterization hardly described the young Samuel Clemens who briefly joined—and quickly deserted—the Marion Rangers, a Confederate militia in Missouri at the outset of the Civil War. In 1901, as chairman of an event honoring President Abraham Lincoln, Clemens reflected back on his pro-Confederate past, contending that "We of the South were not ashamed of the part we took. We believed in those days we were fighting for the right—and it was a noble fight, for we were fighting for our sweethearts, our homes, and our lives" (qtd. in Fulton 4). Paying homage to Lincoln, while embracing the sentimental version of the Lost Cause, Clemens confirmed his principles of social justice, while positioning both Northern and Southern young men as fighting for what they thought was right according to their divergent ways of life.

In his fourth book-length study of Mark Twain, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of our Literature, Joe B. Fulton imbues these lines with a rich, multivalent significance. Maintaining his interest in Twain (following other studies including Mark Twain in the Margins: The Quarry Farm Marginalia and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [University of Alabama Press, 2007]; The Reverend Mark Twain:Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content [Ohio State University Press, 2006]; and Mark Twain's Ethical Realism: The Aesthetics of Race, Class, and Gender [University of Missouri Press, 1998]), in this work Fulton relies on historical, biographical, and literary analysis to elucidate Clemens's evolution from a pro-slavery, secessionist Confederate to a supporter of Union ideals of racial justice. As a border-state Missourian and resident of the Nevada Territory, California, and Washington D.C., Clemens's political emendation was an ongoing and dynamic process rather than an instantaneous conversion, according to Fulton.

The author's express purpose in this work is to analyze "the writing Clemens produced during the years leading up to the Civil War, the war years themselves, and Reconstruction," which Fulton argues, "reveal the reconstruction of Mark Twain, a personal reconstruction that paralleled and responded to what transpired on American battlefields and in American politics" (xi). Covering the span of Clemens's life (1835-1910), Fulton's chapters are broadly organized by chronological and geographical movement through Clemens's experiences and writings in Missouri, Nevada, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. The author thus achieves a panoramic view, grounded in specific writings, both obscure and familiar, through which emerges a Mark Twain who became "heretical to both the Union and the Confederacy" (48).

In his autobiography, "Clemens summed up the [antebellum] attitudes in his little town on the Mississippi by stating that 'slavery was right, righteous, sacred'" (4). Yet Twain's decision to join a Confederate militia, according to Fulton, was less ideological than it was social and political. Though he deserted, and went west until covering the Impeachment Crisis of 1866-69 in Washington D.C., Clemens kept abreast of current affairs and reported through various types of comedic genres the politics of the Civil War and its aftermath. Relying on parallels from historian Reinhart Koselleck, Fulton convincingly demonstrates how the experience of defeat of the southern ideology through the Civil War created in Clemens a "skepticism toward all of the grand ideas advocated by later preachers and politicians" (4). Cultivating the persona of a reconstructed southerner became central to Clemens's later criticism of post-bellum American culture at large; for Clemens, the nation that had fought a bloody war to advance social justice advanced it very little as the rule of the dollar, imperialism, and lynching intensified. Not allowing hypocrisy on any side to slip the criticism of his pen, Clemens maintained his feelings of affinity for the South, and...