A Historical Guide to Mark Twain by Fishkin Shelley Fisher;

Author:Fishkin, Shelley Fisher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2002-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

NOTES

For an extended discussion of the issues raised in this chapter, see the following books and articles by the author from which some of the material in this chapter is drawn: Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); “In Praise of ‘Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn’ by Ralph Wiley,” Mark Twain Circular (Oct.–Dec. 1999); “Mark Twain’s Historical View at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Proceedings of the 1999 Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminar (Kyoto, Japan: Ritsumeikan University, 2000); “New Perspectives on ‘Jim’ in the 1990s,” Mark Twain Review (Korea) (Winter 1999); “The Challenge of Teaching Huckleberry Finn,” in Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom, ed. James Leonard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); “Racial Attitudes,” in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson (New York: Garland, 1993); “False Starts, Fragments and Fumbles: Mark Twain’s Unpublished Writing on Race,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 20 (October 1991); “Race and Culture at the Century’s End: A Social Context for Pudd’nhead Wilson,” in Essays in Arts and Sciences 19 (May 1990).

1. Samuel L. Clemens to Jane Lampton Clemens, 31 August 1853, in Mark Twain’s Letters, vol. 1, 1853–1866, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 9. The context was Clemens’s visit to the Court House in Syracuse, New York, which had been the center of a widely publicized incident involving a fugitive slave originally from the Hannibal area.

2. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 633.

3. Thomas Gossett reminds us, “among the colonists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it is the heathenism of the Negroes and Indians, rather than their race, which is emphasized as a basis for their enslavement (Race: The History of an Idea in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 3). And, as George Fredrickson notes, “The evidence strongly suggests that Africans and other non-Europeans were initially enslaved not so much because of their color and physical type as because of their legal and cultural vulnerability” (White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1981], 70). Fredrickson comments that “what made the slave trade seem a legitimate enterprise to Europeans was, first of all, the belief that slaves were in fact prisoners of war or criminals whose enslavement was an alternative to execution; or, to put the issue on a practical plane, that they were already properly condemned to slavery by the laws or customs of the African or Asian societies in which they originated, meaning that their purchase by European traders did not alter their condition. This was not, of course, an accurate picture of what occurred in places like the Guinea coast of West Africa. . . . But the fact that most slaves were acquired by purchase from native traders or

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