I was about to hang this whole thing on Paine, because after following this
correspondence for several days I finally did a quick CTRL-F through "MT: A
Biography," & turned up these six specimens:

"Long afterward he {Uncle Dan'l] would become Nigger Jim in the Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn tales. . . ."

"Sometimes at evening they swam across to Glasscock's Island-the rendezvous
of Tom Sawyer's "Black Avengers" and the hiding-place of Huck and Nigger Jim
. . . ."

"In the Huckleberry Finn book, during those nights and days with Huck and
Nigger Jim on the raft-whether in stormlit blackness, still noontide, or the
lifting mists of morning-we can fairly 'smell' the river . . . ."

"The tale of Huck and Nigger Jim drifting down the mighty river on a raft,
cross-secting the various primitive aspects of human existence, constitutes
one of the most impressive examples of picaresque fiction in any language."

"We never wish to feel that Huck is anything but a real character. We want
him always the Huck who was willing to go to hell if necessary, rather than
sacrifice Nigger Jim . . . ."

"Certainly Huck's loyalty to that lovely soul Nigger Jim was beautiful . . .
."

But Michael's citations, specifically the on that purports to be from the
New York Sun the year *before* HF was published, are very suggestive. We all
seem to agree that Mark Twain the *author* did not use the expression
"Nigger Jim" in the book. But maybe later on, when he had occasion (and
there must have been thousands) to refer to the book and discuss it and do
readings etc., maybe he did adopt the expression himself as a shorthand way
to get his listeners into the picture. If so, that of course would have set
the pattern for Paine's subsequent phrasing.

But either way, I would have to conclude that the Paine biography must have
been the mechanism that gave the phrase wide circulation.

BTW, I was intrigued to find that the word turns up only nine times in all
of *Tom Sawyer.*

Peter Salwen