Daniel (b. 1805?) was a slave owned by Clemens’s uncle, John Adams Quarles, who had a farm of several hundred acres near Florida, Missouri. In 1897, Clemens recalled that during his summers there:
All the negroes were friends of ours, & with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. . . . We had a faithful & affectionate good friend, ally & adviser in “Uncle Dan’l,” a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro-quarter, whose sympathies were wide & warm, & whose heart was honest & simple & knew no guile. He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for half a century, & yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, & have staged him in books under his own name & as “Jim,” & carted him all around—to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, & even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon—& he has endured it all with the patience & friendliness & loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race & my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling & this estimate have stood the test of fifty years & have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then. (SLC 1897–98, 44–46, in MTA, 1:100–101)
On 14 November 1855 Quarles emancipated his “old and faithful servant Dann who is now in the fiftieth year of his age about Six feet high complexion black” (Quarles, 240). Daniel appears as Uncle Dan’l in The Gilded Age (1874). He is Jim in [begin page 317] Huckleberry Finn (1885), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33–76 passim), and “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–212 passim).
