This goes back to an old classroom debate from my college days that is now decided by Mark Twain’s own words in his autobiography (volume 1). [1]

I was studying American literature back in the “Middle Ages”—at Portland State in the ‘70s. The debate jumped me like a giant Calaveras frog. A student in my class said he believed Mark Twain to be a racist and that he favored slavery!

Mark Twain does not dwell on racial topics in his autobiography. But he wrote enough for me to settle that long-ago debate, as if there ever was a doubt. And a funny coincidence made me smile contentedly when I read these words of his: “… slavery was a bald, grotesque and unwarrantable usurpation.”

Ha!  "Unwarrantable,” he said. Over a century ago, Mark Twain wrote that slavery was an unwarrantable usurpation.

Forty years after my fellow student aired his alternate and startling perspective, I read Mark Twain’s dismissal of human bondage---unwarrantable, he said.

For the last decade, you understand, I have earned my keep as a warranty analyst, trained at great length to know precisely what is warrantable and what is not.

Now I have the proof in Twain’s own words that doubting his belief in equality and fairness for all is—well, un-warrantable.

Image: Mark Twain in his later years[2]

[1] Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume I, see Amazon or Powell’s Books: http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Mark-Twain-Volume-Authoritative/dp/0520267192 and http://www.powells.com/s?kw=autobiography+of+mark+twain&class=

[2] See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Twain1909.jpg – photo in the public domain in the U.S. where copyright has expired