Bancroftiana, Number 117 Fall 2000: Who Was "G.G., Chief of Ordnance"? A Peek at the New Edition of Huckleberry Finn

Who Was "G.G., Chief of Ordnance"?
A Peek at the New Edition of Huckleberry Finn

Early next spring the Mark Twain Project will publish a new edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn edited by Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, with the assistance of Harriet Elinor Smith and the late Walter Blair. It is designed to replace an edition of the same title which we published just fifteen years ago. Why a new edition of Huck Finn now? The short answer is that the edition we published in 1985 was based on just half the original manuscript because the other half (some 663 pages of it) was then lost, and had been lost for a century. But in early 1991 word reached us that the first half of the manuscript had been found in a Los Angeles attic. Such a find—literally unthinkable until it occurred—changed profoundly the quantity and quality of the data on which the edited text could be based. There was nothing for it—the job had to be done over from the start.

Having to re-edit the text also required us to re-think everything we knew (or thought we knew) about Mark Twain's masterpiece. For instance, at the very beginning of his book, Mark Twain included two brief statements, each on a separate page—the only words in the book which are not spoken by Huck. One of these was the "Explanatory," which he signed "The Author," and in which he explained his use of seven dialects throughout the text. The other, which preceded the "Explanatory," was the following warning, which has puzzled some literal-minded readers:


NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this
narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting
to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be
shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

Notably, this warning was not signed by "The Author," but rather by his agent writing on the author's behalf. These are ostensibly not the author's words, but the words of "G. G.," who posts them much as he would a "No Trespassing" sign, by order of the author. So who is "G. G." and why is he given the title "Chief of Ordnance?" Our best guess in 1985 was that the mysterious initials were a somewhat guarded reference to Mark Twain's hero and friend General Ulysses S. Grant, a conjecture that has long since seemed inadequate.

Mark Twain, New York, 1884.

For the new edition, we had access for the first time to Mark Twain's manuscript of this "NOTICE." It showed, among other things, that he toyed with the idea of identifying "G. G." as "Chief of Artillery." This small detail established that the purpose of the title was to indicate that "G. G." had the fire-power to carry out his threats. Still, the identity of "G.G." remained stubbornly mysterious, until editor Lin Salamo suggested that the initials were a private joke, and that they stood not for the very public figure of General Grant, but for George Griffin, the Clemenses' butler and chief factotum from 1875 to 1891—an idea that could be strongly corroborated, if not actually proven. George Griffin died on 7 May 1897. It is not known when he was born. According to Clemens's unpublished manuscript "A Family Sketch" (1906), Griffin "was a Maryland slave by birth; the Proclamation set him free, & as a young fellow he saw his fair share of the Civil War as body servant to General Devens" (General Charles Devens, 1820-91, a distinguished Union officer). Griffin came one day in 1875 to wash windows at the Hartford house and stayed for nearly twenty years, becoming virtually a member of the family. Clemens said (also in 1906) that Griffin was

handsome, well built, shrewd, wise, polite, always good-natured, cheerful to gaiety, honest, religious, a cautious truth-speaker, devoted friend to the family, champion of its interests.... He was the peace-maker in the kitchen—in fact the peace-keeper, for by his good sense & right spirit & mollifying tongue he adjusted disputes in that quarter before they reached the quarrel-point.

But if Griffin was the "peace-keeper," in what sense could he also be "Chief of Ordnance" (or Artillery)? Therein lies the essence of the private joke, for Griffin sometimes showed a more combative side, as Clemens also explained in 1906:

One morning he appeared in my study in a high state of excitement, & wanted to borrow my revolver. He had had a rupture with a colored man, & was going to kill him on sight. I was surprised; for George was the best-natured man in the world, & the humanest; & now here was this bad streak in him & I had never suspected it. Presently, as he talked along, I got new light. The bad streak was bogus. I saw that at bottom he didn't want to kill anyone —he only wanted some person of known wisdom & high authority to persuade him out of it; it would save his character with his people; they would see that he was pro-perly bloodthirsty, but had been obliged to yield to wise & righteous counsel.

Clemens proceeded to tease Griffin about his pretended combativeness, first by offering to help him load the revolver, then by pretending shock that he would kill a man with a dependent wife and children. Griffin's "bloodthirsty" nature was obviously the subject of raillery between him and his employer.

In short, Griffin was an ideal Chief of Ordnance to sign the ironic warning about taking Huckleberry Finn seriously, especially in matters of race. Here was a freed slave, who had served the Union army in the Civil War, threatening to prosecute, banish, or simply shoot whoever dared to find a Motive, Moral, or Plot in a book that was in fact profoundly critical of slavery and nineteenth-century American racism. If editor Salamo's conjecture is correct (as it seems to me that it is), then Mark Twain and George Griffin stand together on the first two pages of the book as its author and guardian, in much the way Huck and Jim stand together as its principal characters. And one of them has stood there essentially unrecognized since 1885. If the private point of the joke was to kid George Griffin about his ferocity, we can be sure its humor amused only Mark Twain and his immediate family and friends. But there may also have been a public point to it, aimed more at posterity than at contemporary audiences. The public point may be simply the answer to this question: How long will it take for both the white man and the black man to be recognized? For if "G. G." really was intended for George Griffin, then the first two pages of Huckleberry Finn were "signed" by both a white man and a black man, acting in concert. And it has taken us only 115 years to find it out.

—Robert H. Hirst
Editor, Mark Twain Project