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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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SLAVE / SLAVERY

The skin of every human being contains a slave.
- Notebook, 1904

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Photo of Clemens and John T. Lewis
courtesy of Dave Thomson

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 man's slave for wages, and does that man's 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.
- "The Lowest Animal"

No animal inflicts it but Man and the Ant; no animal endures it with contentment and transmits it to his posterity without shame but Man alone.
- "Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man"

Searching for Jim
Recommended resource:
SEARCHING FOR JIM;
SLAVERY IN SAM CLEMENS'S WORLD

by Terrell Dempsey
available from amazon.com

In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing--the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible--there were good commercial reasons for it--but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. 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 & stick to it.
- Notebook #35 (reprinted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Univ. of California Press, 2003)

...the "poor whites" of our South who were always despised, and frequently insulted, by the slave lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them. And there was only one redeeming feature connected with that pitiful piece of history; and that was, that secretly the "poor white" did detest the slave lord, and did feel his own shame. That feeling was not brought to the surface, but the fact that it was there and could have been brought out, under favoring circumstances, was something--in fact it was enough; for it showed that a man is at bottom a man, after all, even if it doesn't show on the outside.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.
- quoted by Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch in letter to New York Herald Tribune, November 19, 1941

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