Hannibal was a sleepy river town characteristic of that day. William Dean Howells, in a brief sketch of Mark Twain's career, says: "Hannibal as a name is hopelessly confused and ineffective; but if we know nothing of Mr. Clemens from Hannibal, we can know much of Hannibal from Mr. Clemens, who, in fact, has studied a loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding, Mississippi river town of thirty years ago, with such strong reality in his boy's romance of 'Tom Sawyer,' that we need inquire nothing further concerning the type. The original perhaps no longer exists anywhere, certainly not in Hannibal, which has grown into a flourishing little city. The morality of the place was the morality of a slave-holding community, fierce, arrogant, onesided; the religion was Calvinism in various phases, with its predestinate aristocracy of saints and its rabble of hopeless sinners. Doubtless young Clemens escaped neither of the opposing influences wholly. His people, like the rest, were slave-holders; but his father, like so many other slave-holders, abhorred slavery--silently, as he must in such a time and place."