Huck Finn came out in 1884, when slaves had been freed but when the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing freed slaves as well as carpetbaggers and other liberal whites in the South in an attempt to turn back Reconstruction. I believe Clemens had moved west by that time, but he still was a Southerner who was effectively repudiating his upbringing in "Huck Finn" while Harriet Beecher Stowe was a Yankee who had no such emotional investment (not to take anything away from her work).
Within a dozen years of the publication of Huck Finn, most of the Southern states, with Confederate veterans back in control, had adopted segregation laws that one might say reimposed slavery without making the masters responsible for the upkeep of their black workers. The "Jim Crow" segregation laws were at least in part a reaction to efforts by the agrarian populists to make coalitions between black and white sharecroppers against the Southern Democratic establishment.
-- Jim Cullen
---------------------------------------- THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST James M. Cullen, Editor P.O. Box 150517, Austin, Texas 78715-0517 Phone: 512-447-0455 Internet: populist at usa.net Home page: http://www.eden.com/~reporter ----------------------------------------