Explore young Mark Twain’s transformation from a proslavery Southerner to a staunch unionist. How did Twain view the Civil War?
In time, Samuel Clemens came to understand and despite slavery, but in his youth, slaves were an accepted part of life. Jennie, the Clemens’s’ house girl, was a second mother to Twian, and the slaves children were his playmates. On the winter evenings, the whole family, black and white, would gather in front of an open fire to hear Uncle Ned, a slave, tell weird and wonderful stories about ghosts, spells, charms, and other manifestations of the supernatural. On at least one occasion, a slave saved Samuel from drowning. Such human relationships with blacks were the source of Twain’s tender account of Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim on their Mississippi raft. There is little doubt that Huck and, by implication, the young Clemens found more genuine affection and fatherly guidance in black men than he ever did in whites. The busy, cold John Clemens, in particular, was never close to his children. He died when Samuel was twelve. He did “vividly remember,” He later wrote, “seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a southern slave-market. They had the saddest faces I ever saw.” For the US as well as for Samuel Clemens, the decades immediately preceding the Civil War were, on the whole, a time of confidence. The nation’s future appeared bright. The anxious, uncertain years after independence were far behind, and the continuing growth of capitalism, combined with the natural abundance of the continent, promised unceasing prosperity. God, nature, and the course of history were on the nation’s side. Reformers would take care of any problems that rapid growth might bring; progress, it appeared, was inevitable. Walt Whitman sensed this at his editor’s desk in Brooklyn when he