Slavery in Antebellum Hannibal

Missouri came into the Union as a slave state in eighteen twenty one, and slavery was woven into Hannibal from its earliest days. Moses Bates, the man credited with founding the settlement, brought enslaved people with him to clear the land, build cabins and fences, and plant the first crops. They were among the actual first people to work this ground, though history long recorded only Bates's name.

Missouri slavery did not look like slavery in the cotton-producing Deep South. Hannibal had no large plantations requiring hundreds of workers in permanent labor gangs. Enslaved people here were more often held in small numbers, hired out for domestic work or skilled trades, leased to neighbors for seasonal labor, or employed in the pork packing establishments and sawmills that lined the riverfront.

But they were subject to the same Slave Codes of eighteen oh four that governed all enslaved people in the state, which monitored their movements, restricted their freedoms, and authorized severe punishments. Samuel Clemens grew up watching all of this. He saw enslaved people in his neighbors' houses, on the river boats, and in the market.

He saw the fear. And he saw the casual acceptance that surrounded it. Decades later, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would put the question of Jim's humanity and freedom at the center of a story set on this same Mississippi River.

Scholars have argued that the novel is Twain's reckoning with what he witnessed as a boy in Hannibal, the complicity of a town in a system he came to see as a moral catastrophe.