The Civil War Lives Through Mark Twain’s Fiction—and Donald Trump’s Reality

It is 2023, and every day I wake to a pundit or member of Congress calling for civil war—or its euphemistic parlance, a “national divorce.” They cloak their ambition as civic concern, but I know the real plot. They want to strip the United States down and sell it for parts, partitioning it into oligarch and plutocrat fiefdoms that will war with each other for profit, and they want ordinary Americans to think it was their own idea.

I know this is the plot because the plotters have told us and because I have spent years detailing their agenda in books and articles. I am not alone: hundreds have written books and documents revealing other facets of coordinated malign intent. Despite the undisputed veracity of the threat, no officials have acted to stop it, and the media will rarely spell out their vision of the Divided States of America.

I do not think we, the American people, want another civil war. But I know we are being pushed there, and I refuse to go.

To be an American in the twenty-first century is to be viewed by officials as disposable. This is not a new feeling for the majority of Americans who have lived under various forms of subjugation—racial, ethnic, class—but what is new is how wide the net has been cast and how overt the agenda is.

Our current era—when American institutions greet their own dissolution with a shrug, when rights and resources are tossed away as if the collapse of the country is not only inevitable but desirable—has no precedent. Throw in digital surveillance and climate change and there is no clear road map out of an old war fought with new technology under a relentlessly ticking clock. Lincoln warned in 1838 that if the United States of America died, it would be by its own hand. But what we have is more like assisted suicide.

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It is easy to love your homeland and hate your government. I have done it all my life and consider myself in the company of patriots. But there is a pain in loving a place that is so terrible and wonderful at once. You love it like a child and you love it like a parent, with an irrational depth and the fiercest desire to protect it from harm. You mourn the lost leverage of the ordinary American—of elections, of courts, of protest, of documentation. You remember when those things seemed to matter, or at least when the powerful felt obligated to pretend they did.

When a calamity hits, I research what past writers were doing when they faced the same hardships. What I find is that they spent most of their time surviving—thus the dearth of literature about the Spanish flu—but the pain haunts their subsequent work. This is most obvious in books written after a war, even when they do not cover the war itself. The Great Gatsby is just as much a World War I novel as A Farewell to Arms. In art a person can process the dark emotions society forbids them to express. This is why power brokers want to replace artists with artificial intelligence. There must be no lingering memory of what was because that might remind us of what we thought we would be. There can be no intrinsic humanity in art because then you start seeing people instead of mythic red and blue lines. You start tracking the blood, like Lincoln wanted. You start feeling for the people who bleed.

The Civil War haunts Mark Twain’s work even though he rarely addressed it outright. Twain grew up in an America of rapid growth and political instability. He entered early adulthood when America was at war and spent the rest of his life watching an American aristocracy sell the public an illusion as they undid the progress toward equality made in the war’s aftermath. Twain was born in a state that was neither north nor south, a state everyone wanted so badly they kept assaulting it. His solution in 1861 was to flee the fire and immortalize the flames. Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn. Sam Clemens, Mark Twain.

Dreams by day, repentance by night. You preemptively tear yourself apart so that the people who want to do that to you and to your country cannot do it first.

And then you piece yourself back together in prose because there is nothing left to be but an American. There is nowhere else to belong than to a colossal contradictory land whose sins persist to the present, whose potential is unlimited, whose threatened dissolution taunts you. A land built on principles never fully practiced, a land whose new tenets—the mainstreaming of elite criminal impunity, the contrived and bloodthirsty “national divorce”—build off the worst of this country’s history to create a future of unprecedented danger. You reject it and also know that abandoning America is the most self-destructive move of all. Where would you be without each other, you and this terrible, wonderful country?

“You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it,” Clemens wrote in 1899, discussing why he would not publish his autobiography. “You are much too ashamed of yourself. It’s too disgusting. For that reason I confine myself to drawing the portraits of others.”

So you write about America, you write about history, you write in the second person, you write for a second chance. You wander America like an open wound that past and future conspire to never let heal. There is some consolation that others wandered the same roads and shouldered the same weight.

When Twain went out with the comet, it was not with the silent satisfaction of a life well lived but with fear that he would become the icon of a country besieged by newly empowered predatory forces: mercenary capitalists and scheming imperialists. People who were as good at understanding human nature as he was and who used that knowledge to inflict pain. People who were as good at inventing America as he was and could undo that creation with a pen and a sword and an offshore account.

The people who want to destroy my country are banking on us not missing America. To miss America is to remember America. To remember America is to explore America. To explore America is to see the best and worst in everything—to reconcile, to repent.

“There’s a famous writer,” I told my daughter when she was seven years old. “And he’s from Missouri, you know, you can go see his house.”

Mark Twain’s boyhood home is in the center of Hannibal, on a cobblestoned square where significant buildings from his early life were preserved. You know you are getting close to it when you begin to encounter the total commercialization of Twain, whose face is slapped onto anything a person can sell. There is no object too banal for a portrait. Twain’s arch condemnations of human gullibility line signposts on town streets as tourists embody the very idiocy he mocks. This is more fun than it sounds because it is refreshing to see an irreverent man with horrible business sense flourish after he’s dead. You get the sense he would laugh—and approve—if he saw Hannibal now.

The knockabout nature of Hannibal is not new: the town was built on legends and lies. At the southern approach to Hannibal is Lovers’ Leap, a fenced-in cliff over the river marked with a plaque honoring two doomed Native Americans who allegedly plummeted to a watery grave. This tale is so ubiquitous in America that Twain noted in 1883, “There are fifty Lovers’ Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped.” The origin of the Lovers’ Leap myth, in which either a Native American couple from feuding tribes or a Native American and their forbidden white lover die in a suicide pact, is likely a manifestation of nineteenth-century white guilt. Natives were being massacred and romanticized and commercialized all at once. Ellis Parker Butler, a brochure writer for Midwestern towns, remarked in 1919 that Lovers’ Leap was such a popular concept that a backstory would be invented when none existed: “There was always an Indian legend, and always the same one. If there was no legend, we wrote one, and it was again always the same one.”

In 2006, my husband and I drove past Lovers’ Leap and entered Twain’s hometown for the first time. I was twenty-eight and pregnant with my daughter. I did not know I would never move and that she and my son would be Missourians. I had grown up in

the postindustrial region of central Connecticut between Hartford and New Haven, an area that made national news in the 1990s for its gang and crack epidemics. Like Twain, I spent my childhood wondering what was beyond my hometown and longing to break free.

When I was ten and visited the Mark Twain House in Hartford, I saw for the first time a life I wanted: to write, to travel, to have a family, to live in a creepy old house filled with objects from around the world. I spent fifth grade writing extra-credit reports on Twain for my teacher while getting my ass kicked by classmates for my meticulous nerd treatises. I didn’t care: I had a local to emulate, and he had pissed off everyone too. I drew cartoons of Twain being condemned by society for upsetting their delicate sensibilities. I drew him enjoying the chaos he wrought because it did not matter so long as he had what he needed: his family, his writing, and America.

In my twenties, I moved around an America of diminishing opportunity, settling in Missouri not out of intent but inertia. As I’ve said, people of my generation don’t have dreams, we have circumstances. But even if I’d had enough money to move, I would have stayed. My unluckiest and luckiest circumstance is the same as Twain’s: I live in Missouri and I write everything down.

The weirdness of America permeated Twain’s stories as it did everyday life, and Twain stood out for his willingness to record it. He refused to give greater weight to the highbrow over the lowbrow, enjoying the way they feed off each other and make everyone nervous. Folklore and vernacular and hypocrisies and politics merged in books where the most damning views come through the eyes of a child. Huckleberry Finn is one of the most banned books in American history, first receiving the designation in 1885, one year after publication. It remains contested in our era of rampant school censorship. Detractors of Twain often hate each other, with one group finding offense in the pages the other admires and the other admiring the pages that offended their foes. You know you have written the great American novel when each detractor has a different reason for banning it.

Hannibal’s central attractions capitalize on the characters of Twain’s books. There is a white picket fence where the fence that inspired Tom Sawyer once stood and a brush so you can pretend to paint it like a sucker. The house of Twain’s childhood crush, who inspired Becky Thatcher, is on the same block as his father’s law office. Next door is the pharmacy of Ulysses S. Grant’s cousin, with whom the Clemens family lived after his father’s death. Later, Twain would go on to commission Ulysses S. Grant’s bestselling autobiography, rescuing the Grant family from financial and reputational ruin.

A small house belonging to Tom Blankenship, the goodhearted vagrant who inspired the character of Huckleberry Finn, is a block away. When we visited it in 2023, it was closed because a drunk driver had smashed their car through the fence outside. This seemed like the kind of thing that would happen to the actual Huckleberry Finn, so we considered it part of the Hannibal experience.

I have immersed my children in history since they were small because history buffs know their audience is limited and therefore usually don’t charge admission. This is how my kids wound up doing things like watching a reenactment of the 1872 election between Ulysses S. Grant and Horace Greeley on a summer afternoon in 2016. (My nine-year-old daughter and I voted for Grant only to have volunteers tear up our ballots because women couldn’t vote; Greeley was the choice of my five-year-old son, a member of the “fans of flamboyant neckbeards” voter bloc.) During their elementary school years, when their leisure time was at my mercy, my children saw every museum and historical site in St. Louis. When I ran out of free attractions in town, I took them to nearby sites in Missouri and Illinois.

I like traveling with children because they notice things that adults don’t, and they haven’t learned enough manners to not point them out.

My children have been to Hannibal a half dozen times. But until recently, they did not consider Twain an important part of the town. They saw him as a kind of mustachioed mascot who kept popping up on strange objects, like the giant rotating mug of root beer at the Mark Twain Dinette.

But they knew Hannibal. They knew that was where we went to watch a murmuration of migrating geese from Lovers’ Leap in winter, to spot islands from the deck of the Mark Twain Riverboat in summer, to explore caves and pull pranks and have sword battles with driftwood on the Mississippi shoreline all year long. My children were unwittingly living the twenty-first-century version of an idyllic Twain childhood as the same malevolent forces that threatened to destroy Twain’s America threatened theirs.

Above all, they knew Hannibal for the feature that defined it in Twain’s time: it’s a river town. A twenty-first-century Missouri river town is a living ruin premised on phantoms and fantasy. Hannibal has the requisite river town setup: floodwalls, railroad tracks, old-timey ice cream parlor, shops selling dubious “antiques,” a ghost hunter, a psychic, a thriving historical reenactment theater industry, a sign proclaiming it Mural City (every Missouri small town is Mural City unless it is Fireworks City, and sometimes it’s both), and ubiquitous historical markers commemorating when the whole country agreed Hannibal was someplace special.

When my kids were young, they could not grasp why one man had birthed an industry, but they went to the Twain museums to humor me. As they grew up, they found his quotes funnier and then more poignant. The Civil War–era chronology of his life became familiar in an awful way: an omen and a prelude. A history that never rested or repented but reaches from the grave to grab the present—to shake it to its senses or to strangle it, we do not know.

I am waiting for my children to discover Huckleberry Finn on their own because there is no surer way to get a child to reject a book than to insist that they read it. But I do want them to understand Twain because then they will understand what happened to America—his, theirs, ours.