Mark Twain and Human Nature

Chapter Four. 1885–1889

C h a p t e r F o u r 1 8 8 5 – 1 8 8 9 I It could not be more than a few hundred yards from the drugstore where Boggs coughed out his last to the picket fence in front of Colonel Sherburn’s yard. It took Twain three years to travel that distance. He had pigeonholed the Huckleberry Finn manuscript in the late spring of 1880, breaking off at that point where a group of Bricksville citizens, perversely fascinated by the Boggs shooting, coalesce into a lynch mob and start their march toward Sherburn’s house, “snatching every clothes line they come to, to do the hanging with” (HF, 188).1 Twain resumed the manuscript in June 1883. Instead of the lynching he had prepared his readers for and despite the indications in his notes that he wanted to dramatize a lynching somewhere in his narrative, Twain was content to have Colonel Sherburn give the mob a tongue-lashing, accompanied perforce with a 1. Given his experience with the Western Pilot’s Benevolent Association, it should go without saying that Twain distinguished between a mob and a group formed to advance or enact a rational purpose. In “The New Dynasty” speech given to the Hartford Monday Evening Club in 1886, Twain criticized trade unions not for organizing but for being too narrowly interested in their own immediate welfare instead of consolidating their mutual interests and wresting power from the few. 1 4 1 double-barreled shotgun. His powder is dry and his rhetoric is effective; they meekly disperse and go back to business as usual. The particular interest here is not that Twain defeated his reader’s expectations ; that is something he does right along throughout the novel.2 Nor is it that Twain was forced to choose between two equally repellent alternatives—that mob violence should somehow oppose baseless aristocratic pretension and redress the injustice of cold-blooded murder or, conversely , that Sherburn should haughtily expose these publicly outraged citizens for the craven thugs they are. Twain had long-standing objections to both mindless mobs and prideful aristocrats, and preferring to satirize one over the other might have been altogether arbitrary with him. As early as 1869, in an unsigned piece in the Buffalo Express, he had found southern gallantry and lynch law perfectly compatible: “Keep ready the halter, therefore, oh chivalry of Memphis! Keep the lash knotted; keep the brand and the faggots in waiting, for prompt work with the next ‘nigger’ who may be suspected of any damnable crime! Wreak a swift vengeance upon him, for the satisfaction of the noble impulses that animate knightly hearts, and then leave time and accident to discover, if they will, whether he was guilty or no.”3 In A Tramp Abroad, he indulged in a similar bit of sarcasm when he observed of Colonel Baker, a well-bred Englishman and known sexual assailant who was confined to a “parlor” for his crimes, “Arkansaw would have certainly hanged Baker. I do not say she would have tried him first, but she would have hanged him, anyway” (TA, 354). Bricksville was apparently modeled after the real town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Twain wrote chapter 21 before he revisited the place Napoleon should have been in 1882; he reveals in Life on the Mississippi that, save the remnants of a brick chimney, it washed downriver years earlier. Nevertheless , Twain’s recollection of the town was likely an accurate one; it had the reputation of being an exceptionally coarse and violent place, even by regional standards.4 Bricksville is dirty and unkempt, and populated by a “mighty ornery lot” (HF, 181). It is decidedly “southern” in the sense that 1 4 2 M a r k Tw a i n a n d H u m a n N a t u r e 2. The most important and obvious instances are Huck’s fleeing the abuses of a father who he learns much later is already dead and Jim’s flight from slavery, when in fact the widow Douglas’s will had freed him some time earlier. There are also minor instances of complications that had done much to advance his plot but that Twain was happy enough to leave as unsolved mysteries, such as the fate of the star-crossed lovers Sophia Grangerford and Harney Shepherdson, the legitimacy of the supposedly English claimants to the Wilks estate, and so forth. 3. Mark Twain at the “Buffalo Express...