Mark Twain and the Ideology of Southern Slavery

This paper sets out to explore what has been acknowledged as one principal feature of slavery's relationship to its society in the southern United States—namely the ideological supports to this institution. The centrality of the role played by ideology was most vigorously advanced by Eugene Genovese in the 1960s, in The Political Economy of Slavery and since then in subsequent studies, perhaps most notably in his examination of George Fitzhugh. ¹ However, Genovese primarily undertook his depiction by specifying ideology's institutional manifestations—a tactic justified by his view of ideology as a hegemonic structure which he labelled ‘seigneuralism’. But ideology as a concept has, since the 1960s, come to be recognised as far less homologous than such a label perhaps implies, rendering descriptions of its functioning more difficult, as one seeks to advance beyond Genovese's level of generalisation. My paper's endeavour to make progress, therefore, assumes a specific focus: Mark Twain's treatment of slavery and the Black in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (henceforth HF) and Life on the Mississippi (henceforth LM). ² I will regard these two texts as two contrasting windows through which we can view the South's post-bellum ideology in the 1880s. This exercise gains authority from the fact that many historians regard the 1880s as pivotal in the drift from ante-bellum slavery through emancipation and reconstruction towards the widespread establishment of modes of debt peonage in the post-bellum South.