Unlike the so-called modern patriots, exemplified by the insurrectionists on January 6 in the US, Mark Twain was not a nationalist.  As Azar Nafisi said,

“defending the Jews, women, the people of the Congo , workers, and all of the oppressed; claiming to be a revolutionary, already predicting the ideological wars to come when he declared not, “My country right or wrong, but “my country when it is right.”

Twain realized what modern conservatives often don’t—that his beloved country could do wrong. They were not exceptional. In many ways his countrymen and women were wrong. Even some of the maiden aunts like Miss Watson who seemed to be so perfect taking Huck into the closet to pray and making him go to Sunday School, but was actually utterly spoiled by their own racism. After all, she would decide to sell Jim, her slave, and then his wife and children to someone else. What could be more utterly degenerate than that?  No amount of church or Sunday school could wash away that sin! Yet people believed that was natural and good. How was that possible? America, Twain knew, must look the dreadful truth in the face and not shrink from its own sins.

Twain told a story from his youth when he saw a German hotel manager who mistreated his Indian servant who accepted  his punishment without a word of protest.  Twain realized that beatings were the way white people demonstrated their disapproval of actions of their slaves. Beatings were as natural as rain. Twain remembered how his own father, whom he had been raised to honour and respect, would cuff their slave boy. Again this was completely natural. Twain even admitted in his notebook that he had thought such actions were natural although he also “felt sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.”

Of course, one cannot be a brilliant novelist like Mark Twain without having deep empathy. It is the stock and trade of the artist. Later in life Twain realized that his parents had mistaught him. Slavery and racism was profound sin. His parents were not always right. This is what he wrote in his notebooks:

“In those 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 betray him to the slave catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slaveholders 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 strange thing, the conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education & stick to it.”

The “conscience” is what we are taught by elders and others in authority in our society and it can be horribly wrong, as Huck discovered.

Huck felt miserable when he helped the slave Jim escape. It was in his world the worst thing anybody could do, because property, especially slave property was sacred. Huck felt “trembly” and “feverish” when he did that. He was to blame because Jim was almost free. He was rightly to blame for that and knew he had committed a horrible sin. He felt horrible that Miss Watson was deprived of her property because of him. This is the conclusion Huck’s conscience led him to:

“Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, and coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; that man that hadn’t ever done harm to me.”

This shows  the abject poverty of  complete acquiescence with the conventional morality can be. We moderns must remember that.