The Slave Glascock’s Ben in Mark Twain

Composing his quasi-autobiographical tales of Tom and Huck, Mark Twain followed convention in using fictional names for the actual locales of his boyhood: thus St. Petersburg for Hannibal, Cardiff Hill for the town’s Holliday’s Hill, and nearby in the Mississippi River Jackson’s Island for one of his favorite haunts, Glasscock’s Island. But Twain had additional reasons for changing the name of the island. He would find the word “Glasscock” troublesome and potentially inhibiting not only because of its coarsely humorous implications but in a related and more important way because of its personally disturbing psychological associations with racial and sexual violence. In 1849 in the woods just outside Hannibal a slave, Ben, owned by one Thomas Glascock and thus known as Glascock’s Ben, killed a white boy and raped and killed his sister, setting in motion an unprecedented public uproar. At the time the thirteen-year-old Clemens apprenticed for the Hannibal Missouri Courier and set the type for its November 8 edition, which headlined the calamity “Atrocious Murder and Rape” and began, “One of the most horrible murders and fiendish acts was committed in this county a few days since, that has ever come within our knowledge. In cruelty and atrocity, it was a deed worthy only of the arch fiend himself.”¹ With the teenaged Clemens much involved, the Courier followed closely Glascock’s Ben’s eventual trial and execution (January 1850), and throughout supplied readers both with transcriptions of the evidential testimony (including an account of the man’s semen-stained pants and the “well grown” girl’s being unclothed) and with detailed descriptions of the appalling crime itself. Glascock’s Ben had chanced upon ten-year-old Thomas Bright and his twelve-year old sister Susan, who were nutting in a remote woodland. Taken with desire—“the girl looked so pretty,” he later confessed—he beat the boy to death, raped the girl, and then cut her throat and disfigured her body. Clemens never forgot this terrible affair.² When late in life he sketched some of his childhood memories in “Villagers of 1840–3” (1897), he remembered Glascock’s Ben—“He raped and murdered a girl of 13 in the woods [and] confessed to forcing 3 young women in Va.”³ And in 1901, contemplating a book, he asked one of his publishers to search out old newspapers dealing with Glascock’s Ben: “about 1849, I should say. . . . he raped a young girl and clubbed her and her young brother to death. It was in Marion County, Missouri, between Hannibal and Palmyra. I remember all about it.”⁴

I believe the actions of Glascock’s Ben deeply affected the teenaged Clemens, a troubled adolescent (the family had recently been impoverished by the death of his father and had ended the boy’s formal schooling), to the point of his unconsciously identifying not only with the victims but also with the aggressor himself and that as a consequence when in the 1870s he began to draw upon boyhood memories for his tales of Huck and Tom, Clemens consciously and unconsciously informed them with material related to Glascock’s Ben.⁵ It is likely enough that the depressed young Clemens could envision himself in the slain Bright boy, Thomas. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer he has his persona-laden Thomas sentimentally picture his own “bright young life so rudely blighted, so untimely cut down,” and in Huckleberry Finn’s Raftsmen’s Passage, he has Huck (himself like the apprentice Clemens, “thirteen or fourteen or along there”) take the name of a murdered boy named Allbright.⁶ But it is also likely that the adolescent Clemens, experiencing lingering anger toward his late father and the vexing advent of sexuality, unconsciously identified himself with Glascock Ben’s vengeful and passionate aggression. In short, as a way of understanding and empowering himself, the frustrated and precociously imaginative thirteen-year-old internalized a disturbingly forceful black man.

It is to the point that in Tom Sawyer the young hero, seething at Becky’s rejection of him, goes to Jackson’s Island...