Monday’s Commercial article about Henry Jackson Lewis (professionally, H. J. Lewis) was anonymously rewritten from a 2007 article that I had lead-authored. But it did not include some additional information we have learned about him since then; hence, this summary, which may lead interested readers to some more detailed sources.
I’ve been on HJL’s trail (alas, only intermittently) for 40-odd years now. As an archaeologist working in the greater Mississippi Valley, I “discovered” him in January 1980 during a conference at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
This was in preparation for the then-imminent 100th anniversary of the SI’s great “Mound Survey” that explored the Eastern U.S. from 1881 to 1894. It proved that the mounds had been built by Eastern American Indians, rather than a mythical “Lost Race of Mound-Builders.”
At the SI’s National Anthropological Archives, I opened an “Arkansas” file folder, and out jumped 31 of HJL’s remarkable original (1882-83) pencil sketches of prehistoric American Indian mound sites in our state. Later, we found a few more that he’d done in 1883 at sites in adjacent states. Only one sketch (of a site on the south side of Memphis) had been published before, and it was not credited to him.
HJL lived in Pine Bluff, and was listed as an “artist” in 1870 (but as a “laborer” later in the ’70s). By 1879 he was selling drawings of regional scenes to national publications like Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. In 1882, The Commercial referred to him as a gifted “pencil artist and caricaturist.” Shortly afterward, the SI’s leading field archaeologist, Dr. Edward Palmer, probably saw him drawing scenes and caricatures on the waterfront in Memphis, and hired him on the spot.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
My book, Edward Palmer’s Arkansaw Mounds (“Arkansaw” was the way Palmer spelled “Arkansas”), was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1990, and reprinted by the University of Alabama Press in 2010. It included a brief summary of what was then known of Lewis’s life and his later career as editorial cartoonist. I also summarized Lewis’s work for Palmer at several sites in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, in Mississippi Archaeology, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1990.
With the support of the Arkansas Humanities Council and Old State House Museum in Little Rock, the SI, and the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago (which loaned several original Lewis drawings), my exhibit, “Black and White: The Art of H. J. Lewis,” opened at the OSH in 1990, then traveled to the Jefferson County Museum in Pine Bluff and (in 1991) the Old State Capitol Museum in Jackson, Miss., (the state where Lewis was born into slavery). The opening in Pine Bluff were especially well-attended.
In 1885, with his family growing, Lewis ran out of work in Pine Bluff and moved to Little Rock, where he worked for the Arkansas Gazette as a “porter.” While there, he watched white engravers at work and learned some techniques. As Sunday’s article noted, he moved to Indianapolis in 1889 and began his all-too-short editorial cartooning career for The Freeman, “A National Illustrated Colored Newspaper.” He attacked President Benjamin Harrison’s Republican administration for several months, but apparently Harrison’s Indiana allies put economic pressures on the paper, and the attacks ceased for a while, then were toned down. He was chronically ill in the cold climate, and died of the flu in 1891.
During the 1990s, I transcribed a taped 1968 DuSable interview with HJL’s last living son, and contacted his granddaughter (since deceased) in New York. This resulted in my book chapter “H. J. Lewis and His Family in Indiana and beyond, 1889-1990s,” in Indiana’s African American Heritage (Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, 1993), which includes some more of his drawings.
Much of this is summarized in the article I wrote with Mark Cervenka of the University of Houston, published in the on-line historical journal Common-Place (Volume 7, No. 3, April 2007). Since retiring, I have been working with Garland Taylor, an African-American artist and art historian, toward a book about Lewis, tentatively entitled H. J. Lewis, Freeman Artist. Taylor has discovered much new information, including the fact that HJL somehow escaped slavery and joined a “colored” Union Army unit that mustered him out in Pine Bluff in 1866, which brings him there four years before our previous first notice of him in official records and as an artist. With any luck, we’ll have the book published in 2022.
Marvin D. Jeter is an emeritus professor with the Arkansas Archeological Survey and worked as the University of Arkansas at Monticello Research Station archaeologist from 1978-1983 and 1988-2012.