Have you ever met a person who was manipulative? Has a person ever been able to outsmart you by thinking for himself? In the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the author, Mark Twain wrote a scene about a man named Colonel Sherburn who manipulated an entire crowd on his own. He was able to manipulate the mob easily because they were not thinking for themselves, but he was. It all started out with Sherburn killing a harmless drunk. The people of the town were in shock, but when Buck Harkness shouted, "Lynch him!" the crowd followed the leader blindly to Sherburn's house to lynch him. However, he got out of being lynched by thinking for himself, while the crowd was just following each other. These are some things Sherburn said or did to get out if being lynched. .
First, when Sherburn came out to the crowd, he was standing on a balcony with a gun. This symbolized that he was higher than everyone below him. The crowd felt like he was higher, and a more powerful person. Then he intimidated them with his gun. He looked down on everyone else because no one is greater than him, which was not true. .
When the crowd yelled for Sherburn to be lynched, he spoke to them about how a man was safe in the hands of ten thousand of their kind. Sherburn was basically laughing at the cowardice of the crowd and showing that he is obviously not scared of them. This renders them powerless to fight him because they felt if he wasn"t scared of all of them, there was no use. He also tells them he thinks their way of lynching is amusing by explaining how none of them could lynch a man on their own, they were all too scared too and wore blindfolds. Then Sherburn basically teaches them the right way to do it! How could they have done the job they came to do, when Sherburn saw them as cowards incapable of doing in the first place? He became their lynching instructor! They can"t kill the man who actually had to teach them how to kill because that would be incorrect.
