September 2022
he confines his attention to the experiences of riverboating; he felt a genuine kinship with both men and locale. For instance, Twain takes particular pride in his ability to remember that Island No. 10, “a place so celebrated in the war,” was a mile nearer the Kentucky shore in 1861 when he was a pilot. More important are the associations Twain makes with pilots who fought in the war. More than once the author announces that in his own river days he had served under Horace Bixby and Ed Montgomery, who had led the opposing flotillas at Memphis. In that battle, after his ship had gone down, Confederate Captain Montgomery “swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity.” It is clear that Twain had found an aristocracy with whom he could associate and share an exalted status. When describing the river aristocracy Twain could even exhibit the same flowery romanticism (as in references to “gallant escape” and “honorable death”) that otherwise he would have scorned. Evidently Twain would have liked to have been one of these romantic heroes himself. In his notebook he recorded a short tale about how some wily Confederates, Jeff Thompson’s “Swamp Rats,” outwitted the enemy at Island No. 8. The importance of the story is the unconscious slip Twain made
in writing it: when he referred to Thompson’s men he wrote “we,” then had to strike it for “rebels.”
Try as he might, though, Twain could not share in the heroism of the river war. The pilots and soldiers were long gone; even the places themselves had changed. The only permanent vestige of the conflict that remained with which Twain might associate was the war cemetery. With these graveyards the author seemed to be enthralled, for his notebooks are dotted with references to them. Twain included in Life the inscription over the gateway of the Vicksburg National Cemetery. Privately he carried his tribute further, as when he transcribed in his notebook Theodore O’Hara’s famous eulogy: “On fame’s eternal camping ground/Their silent tents are spread/And glory guards with solemn round/The bivouac of the dead.”
Twain’s reverence for the war dead may be viewed in a sense as atonement for his own shirking of duty. Though he never served his country—either of them— he paid honor to those who did. Yet Civil War graveyards were manifestly the least satisfying of all of Twain’s associations with the war. Throughout Life on the Mississippi the author searched vainly for a war experience, even an ersatz one, in which he might attain status as a hero and thus efface his memory of skulking. Twain failed, of course, and had to cope with his guilt through defense mechanisms. One such mechanism involved a way of perceiving the war as a whole. Having failed to deflate it, having failed to experience or even to associate meaningfully with it, Twain transformed the image of war so that it ceased to be a thing of awe and reverence, but became one of loathing.
…which brings us to Fort Pillow. Forty miles above Memphis Twain passed the place where Bedford Forrest’s Confederates had butchered, some say deliberately massacred, a garrison of black Federals and white Tennessee Unionists. The author’s reaction to the incident is severe: “Massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of several Christian nations, but this is almost the only one that can be found in American history; perhaps it is the only one which rises to a size correspondent to that huge and somber title. We have the ‘Boston Massacre,’ where two or three people were killed; but we must bunch Anglo-Saxon history together to find the fellow to the Fort Pillow tragedy; and doubtless even then we must travel back to the days and the performances of Coeur de Lion, that fine ‘hero,’ before we accomplish it.”
This passage is significant in several ways. It underlines a theme of Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s distinction between the romance of the river and the violence along its banks. As such, the Fort Pillow massacre takes its place with the shooting of Boggs and the Grangerford- Shepherdson feud. Moreover, the passage corresponds to an incident that Twain would relate two years after publishing Life. “In “Private History,” the author tells of how the Marion Rangers’ first foray against the foe resulted in the death of a mysterious stranger, presumably an innocent civilian. The tragedy may never have occurred, but its narration allows Twain in a way to characterize the whole war as one big massacre, a lot of senseless killing. In the end, this is the image of war which Twain found most satisfying, for fleeing from senseless violence, the murder of the mysterious stranger, the massacre at Fort Pillow, provided the best possible justification for his desertion.
During his Southern foray, Twain was sometimes confronted with storied Confederate generals, of whom there were quite a few in postbellum New Orleans. In such encounters, Twain’s sense of inferiority led him to reduce their stature through one of his favorite devices, comic deflation.
At the Washington Artillery Armory in New Orleans, Twain had the opportunity to view E. B. D. Fabrino Julio’s famous equestrian portrait, The Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson. When referring to it in Life on the Mississippi, he sought to deflate the overblown aura of sanctity surrounding the two Confederate heroes by giving Julio’s painting alternative titles: “First Interview between “Last Interview between Lee and Jackson”; “Jackson Introducing himself Accepting Lee’s Invitation to Dinner”; Lee’s Invitation to Dinner—with Thanks”; “Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat”; “Jackson Reporting a Great Victory”; “Jackson Asking Lee for a Match.”
Reminds us that even when addressing America’s Civil War, Mark Twain could still be a funny guy.
Notes 1. Thomas Daniel Young, Floyd
2. Arlin Lee and Jackson”;
to Lee”; “Jackson “Jackson Declining
C. Watkins and Richard Croom Beatty, eds., The Literature of the South (Glenview IL: Scott, Foresman, 1968 [1952]), 100. Turner, “Samuel Langhorne Clemens [Mark Twain]” in Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora and Louis D. Rubin, 3.
Stephen Davis earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Emory University back in ‘79. Since then he’s been writing articles and books on “de waw.” His next title, The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Covers the Civil War, is now released by the University of Tennessee Press.
Jr., eds, Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 85-86. Arthur G. Pettit, Mark Twain (Lexington: and the South University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 13-14, 18, 20, 24.
Pettit, Twain and the South, 25-27.
Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo and Brenard L. Stein, eds., Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals (Berkeley, 1975), vol. 2, 436- 37. Subsequent references to Notebooks will appear in my text.
Steve Davis, “Mark Twain, the War, and Life on the Mississippi,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer 1979), 232. This article for Civil War News draws on my essay from way back.
