ABSTRACT
When Mark Twain started writing Huckleberry Finn in 1876, he naively thought that he could separate his conscience from himself in order to face off with and kill it. The Private History of a Campaign that Failed an essay about Twain's brief participation in the Civil War published in the same year as Huckleberry Finn, commonly taken as one of Twain's anti-war pieces, can also be read as an oblique commentary on his recently completed novel. And indeed, as the essay reveals, the reason Twain deserted during the Civil War is related to the death of a father figure and the unresolved mystery of the identity of his killer. After this preamble, Twain relates, as the essay's title promises, his personal experience of the war during the summer of 1861 as a member of the "Marion Rangers," a local Confederate militia in his home county.
