Floating Capital: The Trouble with Whiteness on Twain's Mississippi

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In the antebellum slave market that was rigorously conducted on and along the Mississippi River, Mark Twain recognized a fundamental plot that he found still visible in his own post-frontier United States, where the promise of a free, unbounded space of nationalist imagining had finally dried up. The fundamental national plot Twain noted in the antebellum Mississippi's volatile market culture involved selling something that does not belong to you, the misappropriation of others' labor and sentience. Since the late eighteenth century, the river had been a primary conductor of commercial traffic, carrying, among more innocent commodities, slaves and slave-grown cotton. Imagining the great river highway, Twain identified our American pleasure with a commercial imperialism which perpetuated the piracy and slaving that had characterized the era of mercantile capitalism; in his Mississippi River fictions, he reproduces in miniature the volatile commercial space of the early modern oceans. For Twain, the North American West had not been about the political disinterest, domestic economy, and republican virtue long associated with agricultural settlement, from eighteenth-century European agrarian philosophy through Thomas Jefferson. The Mississippi River was the West that Twain returned to, again and again, because it was water and not land that could ever be settled. The river was a carrier