Mark Twain: Staunch Confederate? Once Upon a Time, 150 Years Ago, Professor Says

When scholars sparred recently over one professor’s decision to ditch the “n-word” and replace it with “slave” in a revised edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one issue was never in question: that Twain spurned racism.

But what scholars have overlooked is the bone — or rather, bones — Twain had to pick with the Union, despite his speeches celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s call for racial justice, said Dr. Joe B. Fulton, an award-winning professor of English at Baylor University, in a new book published during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s beginning.
What Twain witnessed during and after the Civil War turned him into a skeptic of “truth, justice and the American way” for the rest of his life, says Fulton in his latest book, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature.

“The war was the defeat of everything Twain had grown up believing,” Fulton said. “While he was growing up, he had learned from the pulpit that slavery was ‘right, righteous and sacred.’”

Twain, whose given name was Samuel Clemens, grew up in Missouri in a slave-holding family. He enlisted 150 years ago this month -- June -- in a Confederate militia, serving as a second lieutenant for two weeks. His desertion led many to describe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as halfhearted. However, Fulton noted the desertion may have been prompted by fear of hanging or confiscation of family property — a threat made to militia members by the Union, which controlled part of Missouri.

Via SHNV