Prosperity came laggingly enough to the Clemens household.  The year 1840 brought hard times:  the business venture paid little or no return; law practice was not much more remunerative.  Judge Clemens ran for the office of justice of the peace and was elected, but fees were neither large nor frequent.  By the end of the year it became necessary to part with Jennie, the slave-girl—­a grief to all of them, for they were fond of her in spite of her wilfulness, and she regarded them as “her family.”  She was tall, well formed, nearly black, and brought a good price.  A Methodist minister in Hannibal sold a negro child at the same time to another minister who took it to his home farther South.  As the steamboat moved away from the landing the child’s mother stood at the water’s edge, shrieking her anguish.  We are prone to consider these things harshly now, when slavery has been dead for nearly half a century, but it was a sacred institution then, and to sell a child from its mother was little more than to sell to-day a calf from its lowing dam.  One could be sorry, of course, in both instances, but necessity or convenience are matters usually considered before sentiment.  Mark Twain once said of his mother: 

“Kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation.  She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand.  As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for.”

Yet Jane Clemens must have had qualms at times—­vague, unassembled doubts that troubled her spirit.  After Jennie was gone a little black chore-boy was hired from his owner, who had bought him on the east shore of Maryland and brought him to that remote Western village, far from family and friends.

He was a cheery spirit in spite of that, and gentle, but very noisy.  All day he went about singing, whistling, and whooping until his noise became monotonous, maddening.  One day Little Sam said: 

“Ma—­[that was the Southern term]—­,make Sandy stop singing all the time.  It’s awful.”

Tears suddenly came into his mother’s eyes.

“Poor thing!  He is sold away from his home.  When he sings it shows maybe he is not remembering.  When he’s still I am afraid he is thinking, and I can’t bear it.”

Yet any one in that day who advanced the idea of freeing the slaves was held in abhorrence.  An abolitionist was something to despise, to stone out of the community.  The children held the name in horror, as belonging to something less than human; something with claws, perhaps, and a tail.