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Colonel Sherburn 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 hand