Word: civil
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...could even be said that Barack Obama owes a debt to Twain. In post--Civil War America, a nation struggling to fit together the pieces of its racial puzzle, Twain spoke loud and clear about race. And in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel that qualifies as a classic by every definition but his own--"something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read"--he produced one of the wisest meditations on race in all of American literature...
...sophisticated because antislavery fiction--some of it by former slaves--had been a staple of the years before the Civil War. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain melded his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story...
Twain was born in Missouri, a slave state, and fought in the Civil War, however briefly, on the Confederate side. His father occasionally owned a slave, and some members of his family owned many more. But Twain emerged as a man whose racial attitudes were not what one might expect from someone of his background. Again and again, in the postwar years, he seemed compelled to tackle the challenge of race...
...slavery was wrong, was it worth fighting a war to destroy it? Twain seems to have thought so. Indeed, his underappreciated short story A Trial may be viewed as a justification for the Civil War. A Trial tells of a ship's captain who dotes on his first mate, a black man. The ship docks at an island, where Bill Noakes, the self-proclaimed toughest man on the island, charges on board and demands to fight the captain, who promptly dumps him into the water. The next night, the same thing occurs. A week later, evidently enraged by his humiliation...
...analogy to the Civil War is clear. At first Noakes is merely an irritant whom the captain is satisfied merely to fight and hold at bay. Only after Noakes murders the Negro mate does the captain suddenly gird for battle, demanding an end to the man's life despite the objections of the other captains, who seem to want him to be treated more gently. It is by the captain's single-minded will that Noakes is brought to justice--much like Lincoln's single-minded will in fighting a war that began as a struggle over union...