The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. But now a complication came up. The Percy Driscoll estate was in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty per cent. of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate. But the creditors came forward, now, and complained that inasmuch as through an error for which they were in no way to blame the false heir was not inventoried at the time with the rest of the property, great wrong and loss had thereby been inflicted upon them. They rightly claimed that “Tom” was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; that they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place, they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll; therefore it was not he that had really committed the murder, the guilt lay with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was reason in this. Everybody granted that if “Tom” were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter.
As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river.
[Transcriber's Notes]
Introduction:
1. Background.
Welcome to Project Gutenberg's presentation of Pudd'nhead Wilson. The Italian twins in this novel, Luigi and Angelo, were inspired by a real pair of Italian conjoined twins who toured America in the 1890s. These were Giacomo and Giovanni Battista Tocci.
Homer Plessy was arrested for sitting in a whites-only passenger car on June 7, 1892, and one month later he stood before Judge John Howard Ferguson to plead his case. Plessy was an octaroon who could easily "pass white." Four years later, the Supreme Court condoned "Separate but Equal" laws in the famous Plessy vs. Ferguson case, which affirmed the decision of Justice Ferguson in local court. These events in 1892 unfolded as Twain wrote this story, and changed the tale that he ended up telling.
Arthur Conan Doyle released his best-selling collection of short stories, [The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes], on October 14, 1892. The stories had already appeared in The Strand Magazine, one each month, from July 1891 to June 1892. Holmes inspired Twain to add a component of forensics to this story.