Huckleberry Finn and American Reconstruction

At the end of the Civil war the American South was a wasteland. The grandest plantations lay in ruin, the railroads looked like scrap metal, and due to the abrupt extermination of slavery, the economy was in a dismal downward spiral. Faced with the challenge of rebuilding their society while ignoring the throbbing sting of defeat, proud white southerners were in a state of confusion regarding morals, rights, and traditions. The South was also faced with an entirely new breed of Southerner: the liberated Black American. A victory had just been won for freedom and democracy, and though the Southerners believed in these ideals as always, no codes existed in the South mandating they be applied equitably to everyone. The result was a conflict nearly as sharp as, but much more obscure than, the Civil War itself. America's upright, noble ideals flooded into the former Confederate States of America, mixing with its corrupt caste system, temperamental love of conformity, and inherited prejudices as oil would with water. Though many voices have tried to capture this troubled time, one man's exceptional understanding of it has endured to this day. Through his greatest work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain offers an analysis of this post-Civil War conflict that is unique because of its painful factual integrity and unusual point of view. Using the misadventures of Huck, an innocent young boy in the pre-Civil War world, as a vehicle through which to tackle the complex conflict of this era, Mark Twain shows us how the South's tenacity to the principles of democracy and freedom clashed brutally with it's love of conformity and prejudice.

Though the outcome of the Civil War gave former slaves rights equal to Whites, many southerners still had difficulty placing Blacks and Whites on the same social plane, and so interpreted the Blacks' newly won freedom within the limits of their inherited prejudices. Embodying this open interpretation of democracy is Pap, Huck's father, who is the drunkard of the town. Pap snarls constantly at Huck about his rights as a father and a man, though he has done nothing notable in either role to earn him any respect at all. At one point, after Pap has returned to the small shack in which he is holding Huck captive after spending the entire day in town, he grumbles furiously about the way the government is mistreating him: "The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and up'ards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in clothes that ain't fitten for a hog. They call that govment! A man can't get his rights in a govment like this" (33). Though Pap's arguments are correct in spirit, and though the sentiments of fairness and justice he presents seem valid, his hypocrisy lies in the fact that the 'six thousand' he claims to be worth he has stolen from his son, and the decrepit state of his clothing and home are mostly the result of his being a filthy drunkard. The strong motif offered here by Twain is of people wishing to have every justice achievable by mankind, but to be exempt from the rules that make man just. Pap, a corrupt man and abusive father, demands the rights allotted to the most upright members of his society, but refuses to obey the conduct that makes them so. He desires conformity in the allocation of privileges, but uses the idea of freedom to defend his immoral actions, and ends up with a dissatisfying feeling of injustice that he has mistakenly diagnosed. Though on one hand he makes a compelling argument that certain rights should be applied to everyone, even Pap wishes to refuse some rights to certain members of the community. After he sees a Black man in public who is well shod, well educated, eligible to vote, and free from slavery, Pap flies into an indignant rage: "...when they told me there was a state in this country where they'd let that [black man] vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin...Here's a govment that calls itself a govment... and yet's got to set stock still for a whole six months before it can take a-hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free [black man]" (35). Though Huck Finn's story is set in the Pre-Civil War era, one of the book's main focuses is the injustice of the Reconstruction era. To tackle the issue of Reconstruction-era voting practices, Twain inserted the educated Black man with the purpose of highlighting how ridiculous Pap's diatribe against him is. Pap's threat to withdraw from the practice of voting is absurd; we sense that the vote of the noble Black man is more valuable than that of the town drunk. Clearly, Pap is the most useless member of society, yet he believes that any just government should value him high above this Black man, who despite his gentile manner and classy attire, Pap equates with the local slaves. Pap, a man who is a drain on his community, a cruel father, and a despicable alcoholic, believes he is evenhanded to demand rights equal to and above those of this worldly, tidy man, based solely on the prejudices he has inherited from his community, and his selective misinterpretations of freedom and democracy.

The feuding Grangerfords embody this misinterpretation in the most rudimentary of ways. They cling to honor and gentility by fighting a terrible vendetta. It is the most extreme sort of democratic process - that one man, once insulted, can make his retribution devastate his enemy for generations. The Grangerfords' crossed values are cleverly illustrated by the titles on their bookshelf, which Huck examines appreciatively: "[One of the books] was "Friendship's Offering," full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't read the poetry. Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was Dr. Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was sick or dead" (137). The title "Friendship's Offering" calls to mind parables of loving thy neighbor, which the Grangerfords undoubtedly hear when they ostentatiously attend church every Sunday. However, the Grangerfords seem to have missed the internal messages of such parables, and, like Huck, have skipped over the meaningful poetry to focus on the book's pretty pictures, continuing to harbor rancor against their peers. The book of Henry Clay's speeches renews our awareness of the Grangerford's reliance on democracy, and of their inexplicable belief that their blood feud is somehow righteous and honorable. Finally, the copy of Dr. Gunn's Family Medicine represents the inevitable outcome of the clash between their grudge and their valiant pursuit of 'justice': death. As the Grangerfords struggle to harmonize insults, prejudice, justice, and democracy, they grapple with yet another potent demon: conformity. As a member of an honorable family with deeply rooted traditions, it seems a matter of duty that as his father before him, and his grandfather before that, Colonel Grangerford should keep up the tradition of hating and killing the Shepherdsons. He must surely find comfort in perpetuating this battle which he has presumably lived his whole life fighting, however, one might hope that if it were not for the southern conservative love of conformity and monochromatic custom that is so ingrained in this man's psyche, that he might come to his senses and make a radical change in his family's mores in hopes of keeping his children alive. Hope as we might, we find that not only has the Colonel reinforced this old feud by raising sons willing to fight, but he starts teaching his children hatred at a young age, before they can even grasp the concept of death. After Huck witnesses and asks Buck for an explanation of the constant violence, we discover that young Buck Grangerford knows little of the feud, except for the schematics of its conception and his lust to fight: "A feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in - and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud" (156). Clearly, Colonel Grangerford has given his children a rather simple and friendly explanation of the feud; Buck seems to believe that by killing he is doing his family a favor, lending his cousins an innocent helping hand. Buck's jaded impression of death coupled with his imminent danger clarifies the Grangerford's malformed sense of justice for the reader, because, sadly, it is being executed at the expense of a blameless child with no way to gauge his danger. The Colonel believes that the honorable thing to do is to conform to the example of his forefathers, and to do that he must keep alive and even feed their stale prejudices with the lifeblood of his own children. Yet somehow, this disparaging truth is balanced for the Grangerfords by the sensation that they are upholding the very virtues their society was built on - honor, democracy, freedom - by continuing the feud.

As Huck's closest confidant and an escaped slave, Jim's relation to this metaphoric conflict is slightly more specific than that of Pap or the Grangerfords. Jim is the symbol of freedom: an oppressed slave working with his environment to the best of his ability to achieve the virtually unattainable goal of freedom. His oppressors, naturally, take the shape of nearly everyone else in Jim's world. Every white slave holder and supporter of slavery brings to light the traits of prejudice and conformity that the reader has come to detest. Jim's true liberty manifests through his mind, which makes it perhaps the purest and most radical statement about the idea of freedom in the book. Though he is physically enslaved, Jim uses his remarkable mental capacity to free himself from his bondage to southern custom, and even from his desperate reality. In one telling instance, Jim misinterprets a trick that is played on him by Tom Sawyer, but uses the situation to his advantage, earning relative fame and prosperity despite his situation: "Tom slipped Jim's hat off his head and hung it on a limb right over him...Jim said witches bewitched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the State...[Black people] would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any [black person] in that country" (7-8). Though Tom's joke could be construed as innocent child's play, it is probable that had Jim been white and free, Tom would not have disrespected him so. One might expect that it would exacerbate Jim's dehumanized status as a slave to suffer constant insubordination at the hands of a child. In representation of freedom and justice, Jim turns his humiliation into pride, and makes a name for himself with the only means he has. Jim seizes what vestiges of freedom and justice he can and perseveres, though the forces of injustice bear down on him. Unfortunately for Jim, this is not Tom Sawyer's final transgression against him that is due in part to his subjugated state. Near the book's end, Tom sawyer trusts in the prejudices he has inherited, and plays a frightful game with Jim's life without a trace of remorse. Though Tom has gained knowledge that Jim is technically a free man, he keeps this fact a secret when he learns that Huck Finn is working desperately to free Jim from bondage, and elects to play an unintentionally vicious game, gambling Jim's future. After Jim is captured for being a runaway slave, Tom and Huck share plans for facilitating his rescue: "[Tom] told me what [his plan] was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine, for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed, besides" (292). Though Huck's plan had been simple and to the point, Tom's plan is an insane and dangerous endeavor, involving made-up rules and principles that Tom derives from adventure stories he has heard of in the past. The low value Tom places on Jim's life leads him to construct a ridiculous circus out of his escape, and he invents a series of ethical codes and honorable guidelines regarding the art of a proper escape to coerce Huck into obliging him in his frustrating pursuit of 'adventure.' Twain's commentary on slavery here serves to simplify the deeper conflicts of Reconstruction, and make it clear to the reader that though before the Reconstruction era slavery had been demolished as an institution, as a school of thought it was very much alive and well. Though Jim has complete control over his freedom in his mind, and is still able to earn some respect despite his condition of servitude, he is still undermined by Tom Sawyer, who has grown up learning to conform to the prejudices of the world around him.

The Reconstruction era was a troubled time for the South, in which old values and prejudices collided with the new ideals and ethics that were becoming necessary to America's survival. From the plight of the malcontent drunkard in search of a scapegoat; to the old family too wrapped in tradition to preserve its own longevity; to the mistreated Black man, whose very life is a gamble; every facet of southern society contained some approximation of the greater social conflict: the battle between old and new, freedom and conformity, justice and hate. Weaving the epic conflict of a destroyed society into his greatest novel, Twain accurately crafted a reflection of one of America's most conflicted eras.