Here is Samuel Langhorne Clemens in action during the Civil War. “Soon a 128-pounder struck our anchor, smashed it into flying bolts, and bounded over the vessel, taking away part of our smoke-stack; then another cut away the iron boat-davits as if they were pipe-stems, whereupon the boat dropped into the water. Another ripped up the iron plating and glanced over; another went through the plating and lodged in the heavy casemate; another struck the pilot-house, knocked the plating to pieces, and sent fragments of iron and splinters into the pilots, one of whom fell mortally wounded, and was taken away.” He's in Rear Admiral Henry Walke's Naval Scenes and Reminiscences of the Civil War in the United States, on the Southern and Western Water During the Years 1861,1862 and 1863 (1877), which regularly names the pilots killed or wounded. No Tom Sawyer, no Huckleberry Finn, no Jim, no Aunt Rachel.

Here is Mark Twain in action at the end of “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875), positively heroic in his bland gall, staying within genre, doing humorous narrative in this antebellum memoir, not tragedy and horror, staying inside the comic voice of the self-interested person who sees the Civil War only from his/her extremely limited perspective. “[N]ext the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during the several years, leaving most of the pilots idle and the cost of living advancing all the time.”

What audacity to put it this way: first to celebrate the bliss of white Southern mastery, its rank and dignity, in the antebellum slaveholding South, then glumly to admit its defeat by an inglorious consortium of factors (railroads, pilot unions, the war) – to not repudiate the chivalry, still to assert its just sovereignty. Rank and dignity are also license and liberty. “The moment that the boat was underway in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best.”