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

This book’s subject is the contradiction inherent in Sam Clemens being the son of a border state. Fulton gives an account—part biography, part history, and part critical reading—of someone who exemplified the psychic divisions of Americans not just during but also after the Civil War, Clemens embodying a racist core of feelings most Americans held when confronted postwar with emancipated slaves, those suddenly equal citizens. Scholars have known about the story of Clemens’ reconstruction, but we have not had a clear picture of what he was before, nor an adequate tracing of how the change happened. Fulton’s book gives us that picture and change, and in the process complicates the story of how W. D. Howells can claim Mark Twain as the Lincoln of our Literature.

The book is a curious thing, however. The argument climaxes early, so that later chapters seem like a supplement. Showing us how strongly Clemens identified with the politics of the Southern cause in the first two chapters, Fulton deftly weaves history with biography to contextualize the actions and attitudes of Clemens before he invented Mark Twain. In the process, Fulton provides probably the best reading to date of “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” That background leads to the heart of the argument in chapter three: the satiric impulse of Clemens, manifested in attacks by Mark Twain on specific targets, “stemmed ultimately from Clemens’s Copperhead leanings.” Having a Copperhead mentality, and having to shed its politics but not its outsider point of view, becomes the basis for Mark Twain the satirist. Clemens had became a “responsible gadfly” because the Mark Twain persona, as the projection of a “southernized reconstructed southerner,” gave him the platform to criticize in a prophetic mode all American culture, North and South. Chapter four gives us Clemens during the impeachment crisis of President Johnson, by the end of which Clemens has aligned himself with the Radical Republicans. Chapter five covers the period from 1870 to Clemens’ death in 1910.

The thesis, though compelling, reads like an overstatement. Fulton names a specific origin in terms of a cause/effect relationship for the creation of the Mark Twain persona rather than assert more plausibly a border mentality as part of an overdetermined complex of causes. This overreaching finds an echo in Fulton’s taste for sensational rhetoric. Thus the title proclaims Clemens as a bushwhacker, which amounts to saying he was a criminal, when he was at worst a deserter. Also, Fulton claims that previous scholars have “whitewashed” the biographical facts of Clemens’ allegiance to states’ rights and slavery, a charge of willful misleading far different from misinterpretation or even indifference to the fuller picture. The effect of past scholarship may be the sense of a rush to judgment, but the deliberateness implied in “whitewash” is again to hint at criminal activity. His real target seems to be Albert Bigelow Paine, who characterized the stint with the Marion Rangers as camping out and having a good time.

Paine thus is the whipping boy and classic straw man; he stands for the supposed whitewashing activity of everyone. In his use of previous scholarship, Fulton shows a fondness for straw men: “Like so many others who have discerned nothing behind Clemens’s comic comments, biographer Albert Paine. . . .” Who are those people, “so many others”? Here we are only given Paine. One could say the opposite: too much criticism of Mark Twain finds everything behind his comments and forgets the comic delivery. Unfortunately, many places exist where the pattern is repeated: some critics have dismissed but none are cited; some analysts doubt, but only one is cited; “many” scholars turn out to be two. This tactic is combined with a parsimonious attitude about recent scholarship that might contradict or enrich a claim: e.g., Ann Ryan on race or Forrest Robinson on guilt.

Despite...