Mob Mentality In Huckleberry Finn

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Adam Smith once said, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable”. The society of the Southern United States can not truly be flourishing when over 40% of the population is enslaved with little to no rights. The Southerners with their so called “Christian values” own slaves who are suffering and struggling to stay alive. In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the twisted morality of Southern society is expressed through the adventures of a young boy named Huck Finn and a runaway slave named Jim. These adventures make the racism and bigotry of the Southern people apparent. Throughout the text, Mark Twain satirizes the nature of feuds, the gullibility of the Southern population, and the mob mentality in …show more content…
For example, when confronting the mob that came to lynch him, Colonel Sherburn exclaims, “The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is - a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass” (Twain 226-227). This quote conveys the reality that an individual is weak, and the only courage they receive is from the masses. Clearly, many of the individuals in the mob are participating in order to fit in and not because they have individual bravery. Similarly, when Sherburn defies the mob’s wishes, he shouts, “Now leave - and take your half-a-man with you - tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it, when he says this. The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went tearing off every which way” (Twain 227). This quote displays how weak the mob really was because only one person led the whole mob to scatter. When any real trouble came about, the “fearless” lynch mob scattered to avoid any sight of conflict. Using the character of Colonel Sherburn, Mark Twain ridicules the idea of the mob
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