Dear Camy, I've loaned someone my copy of _Life on the Mississippi_, so I can't check the context or tone of the statement you mention, but Twain wrote many other things that indicate you should take the statement with a grain of salt, a dash of irony, and understanding that this was a question he struggled with his whole life. How could people he knew as "moral," people he loved and/or respected, treat other human beings as they did? And if he admitted their brutality, how could he still love them (and himself) or respect them? It's a question we all face, I think. We've all known and loved people who we find have morally reprehensible beliefs. How we cope with the contradiction is something that makes Twain's writings continually relevant. Remember that, for Twain (as for some of us even to today), this includes his mother and father. In terms of what Twain himself said about slavery in Hannibal, the evidence is contradictory and gives evidence of his struggles with the question: In "From Bombay to Missouri," in _Mark Twain and the Damned Human Race_, for example, he writes about seeing a servant in Bombay struck: "The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the *usual* way of explaining one's desires to a slave. I was able to remember that the method seemed right and natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that elsewhere there were other methods; but I was also able to remember that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher. . . ." (244) You'll note that even here, Twain seems to assume that the appearance of meekness means that the beatings were actually "unresented." Elsewhere, he offers different views on this, but I think what he's trying to convey is that they didn't really know another way, or believe another way was possible. He continues: "My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature. When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron ore at a slave-man in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly--as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man's skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right to kill his slave it he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it." (245). Could he be serious when he wrote the lines in _Life on the Mississippi_ about never seeing a slave "mistreated"? At time, possibly. Would he have been serious about it all his life? I think not. In terms of what slavery was like in Hannibal, I would strongly second Gordon's recommendation to read Terrell's book. My own research took me into many of the same primary sources he used, and his book is well-written and accurate. Its impact on our understanding of Twain's work has only begun. Hope this helps a little. Best, Sharon McCoy