Jeffs+Events+from+the+Novels


 * Event from the Novel**

In Chapter Thirty of the Huckleberry Finn the angry dauphin almost chokes Huck to death, but the duke stops him. The duke and the dauphin explain that they escaped after the gold was found. They do not trust eachother's testimony that they did not hide the gold in the coffin to retrieve it later, without the other knowing. The next day the duke and the dauphin head into a town and get into a fight, Huck takes this chance to get back to the raft and flee from them. When he reaches the raft he realizes that Jim got left behind.

A boy explains to Huck that the dauphin captured Jim and changed his identity to a runaway from a handbill that offered two hundred dollars for the capture of slave whom shared similar features to those of Jim. Huck realizes that it was the same fraudulent handbill that the duke had printed earlier. Dauphin left with Jim and sold his interest in the captured runaway for forty dollars to a farmer named Silas Phelps. Huck is shocked that the dauphin himself captured and quickly sold Jim.

This is not unusual for the time period leading up to the publication of the novel. It was very common for bounty hunters, men hired to catch escaped slaves, to capture any black whether they were free or had escaped and turn them into plantations for rewards. Quite often the black that they would turn in was not even the one they were being paid to catch. Additionally, the novels critique of history is seen when Huck and Tom attempt to free Jim. This was not very common in the mid to late 1800’s, but it sure sparked controversy. There are a few cases where blacks were captured by slave hunters in free states and the inhabitants of the free states spoke and acted out for the freedom of the captured. Home