(I'm trying this again in plain text because the first version was oddly chopped up)
Randy -- A version of a talk I gave at the last Elmira conference on Twichell, Twain and the Hartford-based Chinese Educational Mission of the 1870s is at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church website:
http://www.ahcc.org/TWAIN/MarkJoeandBOYS4.htm
This might help show how the atmosphere in Hartford, and Clemens' close friend Twichell's involvement, contributed to the evolution you are seeking to trace. Twichell and the CEM's founder and inspiration, Yung Wing, spoke on platforms together against Chinese Exclusion, and Clemens backed them to the hilt.
But the CEM also became, I think, emblematic of Twichell's and Clemens' later widely diverging views on missionaries. This issue, of course, colored Clemens' writings and public statements in late life.
A year before his death, Clemens decided the best way to write autobiography was not to dictate, as he had been doing, but (he told Howells) to write absolutely truthful letters to friends but not send them. The first such was to Twichell, and it excoriates missionaries for, among other things, doing exactly what Twichell had been doing with the boys of the CEM: "He beguiles the little children to forsake their parents’ religion & break their hearts. Would you be willing to have a Mohammedan missionary do that with your children or grandchildren?"
Twichell, of course, had done all he could to beguile the boys (12 up to college age) of the CEM into Christianity; indeed, he and Harmony had seriously considered becoming missionaries abroad during their early married years, but when the CEM came to Hartford Twichell wrote: "Lo, God has brought the work to my very door." In 1909 he still felt this way; Clemens' views had evolved.
Steve
Steve Courtney
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