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Colonel Sherburn is described as the "best dressed man" in town and enjoys a heightened status and affluence. Throughout the two chapters in which he appears, he steadfastly maintains his composure and self-possession. He remains calm when Boggs drunkenly threatens him and casually shoots and kills the drunkard when he refuses to quiet down. His eerily calm disposition continues even when an angry mob of bystanders chases after him and threatens to lynch him. Sherburn is unimpressed with the mob and maintains an air of apathy and aloofness, taking "his stand, perfectly ca’m and deliberate, not saying a word." The crowd is intimidated by his indifference, and Sherburn gains the upper hand by belittling the mob.
Twain uses the speech that Sherburn delivers to the crowd as a means of critiquing society. Sherburn comments on society's cowardice and selfishness, arguing that no one in the crowd has the gall to actually follow through with their threats of violence. Too apprehensive to kill a man in broad daylight, the men will take to the streets at night and kill in anonymity by hiding in numbers. Twain attacks mob mentality in Sherburn's assertion that a mob does not "fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass." Sherburn observes that this phenomenon extends to the courts, where jurors refuse to execute murderers because they fear that "the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do." The crowd seems to understand that Sherburn is right and they disperse.
Sherburn's speech is perhaps the most poignant, profound passage in the entire novel. By having a murderer deliver this social commentary, Twain uses Sherburn's character to add to the moral confusion that defines the text. Huck repeatedly encounters an unsteady sense of justice and morality in the adult world. In this section of the story, we see an innocent man murdered in cold blood while the murderer is able to escape unscathed and deliver a sophisticated critique of society. Evidently, Huck is encountering a twisted world in which justice is nonexistent and morality is warped.
