How Mark Twains Views on Slavery Evolved

What did Mark Twain write about slavery? How did Twains background influence his position on slavery? Was he a racist? Born in a Slave State Mark Twain was a product of  Missouri, a slave state. His father was a judge, but he also traded in slaves at times. His uncle, John Quarles, owned 20 slaves, so Twain witnessed the practice of slavery firsthand whenever he spent summers at his uncles place. Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri,  Twain witnessed a slave owner brutally murder  a slave for merely doing something awkward. The owner had thrown a rock at the slave with such force that it killed him. Evolution of Twains Views on Slavery It is possible to trace the evolution of Twains thoughts on slavery in his writing, ranging from a pre-Civil War letter that reads somewhat racist to postwar utterances that reveal his clear opposition to slavery and his revulsion of slaveholders. His more telling statements on the subject are listed here in chronological order:   In a letter written in 1853, Twain wrote: I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern states, n----rs are considerably better than white people. Nearly two decades later, Twain  wrote to his good friend, novelist, literary critic, and playwright  William Dean Howells  about Roughing It  (1872):  I am as uplifted and reassured by it as a mother who has given birth to a white baby when she was awfully afraid it was going to be a mulatto. Twain laid bare his opinion of slavery in his classic  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,  published in 1884.  Huckleberry, a runaway boy, and Jim, a runaway slave, sailed down the Mississippi together on a flimsy raft. Both had escaped abuse: the boy at the hands of his family, Jim from his owners. As they travel,  Jim,  a caring and loyal friend, becomes a father figure to Huck, opening the boys eyes to the human face of slavery. Southern society at the time considered  helping a runaway slave like Jim, who was thought to be inviolable property, the worst crime you could commit short of murder. But Huck sympathized so profoundly with Jim that the boy freed him. In Twains Notebook #35, the writer explains:   It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck his father the worthless loafer should feel it approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—the unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early and stick to it. Twain  wrote in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889): The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholders moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. In  his essay The Lowest Animal  (1896), Twain wrote: Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another  and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another. In our day, he is always some mans slave for wages and does that mans work, and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who exclusively do their own work and provide their own living. Then in 1904, Twain wrote in his notebook: The skin of every human being contains a slave. Twain said In his autobiography, finished in 1910 just four months before his death and published in three volumes, beginning at his behest  in 2010: The class lines were quite clearly drawn and the familiar social life of each class was restricted to that class. For most of Twains life, he railed against slavery in letters, essays, and novels as an evil manifestation of mans inhumanity to man. He eventually became a crusader against the thinking that sought to justify it.