Huckleberry Finn and American Reconstruction

At the end of the Civil war the American South was a wasteland. The grandest plantations lay in ruin, the railroads looked like scrap metal, and due to the abrupt extermination of slavery, the economy was in a dismal downward spiral. Faced with the challenge of rebuilding their society while ignoring the throbbing sting of defeat, proud white southerners were in a state of confusion regarding morals, rights, and traditions. The South was also faced with an entirely new breed of Southerner: the liberated Black American. A victory had just been won for freedom and democracy, and though the Southerners believed in these ideals as always, no codes existed in the South mandating they be applied equitably to everyone. The result was a conflict nearly as sharp as, but much more obscure than, the Civil War itself. America's upright, noble ideals flooded into the former Confederate States of America, mixing with its corrupt caste system, temperamental love of conformity, and inherited prejudices as oil would with water. Though many voices have tried to capture this troubled time, one man's exceptional understanding of it has endured to this day. Through his greatest work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain offers an analysis of this post-Civil War conflict that is unique because of its painful factual integrity and unusual point of view. Using the misadventures of Huck, an innocent young boy in the pre-Civil War world, as a vehicle through which to tackle the complex conflict of this era, Mark Twain shows us how the South's tenacity to the principles of democracy and freedom clashed brutally with it's love of conformity and prejudice.