John T. Lewis

In creating the character of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain drew upon several real-life people: Uncle Dan’l, a middle-aged enslaved man on the farm of young Sam Clemens’ uncle; George Griffin, a formerly enslaved man who lived with the Clemens family and who served as his butler, friend, and confidant; and John T. Lewis of Elmira, New York, the hometown of Sam Clemens’ in-laws.

From 1870 on, Twain and his family spent nearly every summer on Quarry Farm outside of Elmira. The town had a sizeable and proud African American population of free Blacks and emancipated people because it had been a stronghold of abolitionism and was active in the Underground Railroad.

John T. Lewis was born a free man in Maryland who had migrated to upstate New York. Twain and Lewis met in 1877 after he saved the lives of Twain’s sister-in-law and her daughter by courageously stopping their runaway carriage at no small risk to his own safety. Lewis was an Elder in the Church of the Brethren, and he and Twain often talked about religion and other such matters.

Lewis loved to read, and Twain would send him every one of his books when they came out, with a loving inscription in each one. After Lewis retired from farming, Twain and his in-laws arranged to have him receive a pension. When Twain returned to writing Huckleberry Finn in 1879 while at Elmira, Lewis was one of the real-life people upon whom he based the character of Jim. It is even possible that his acquaintance with Lewis caused Twain to continue working on the novel after having earlier set it aside.

Published in 1884/1885, Huckleberry Finn is about a racist boy’s realization of the full humanity of Jim, a fugitive slave. Ten years later, in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Twain would deconstruct the very idea of race itself as nothing more than “a fiction of law and custom” without any basis in biology. As Toni Morrison stated, “Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read.”

Mark Twain (1835-1910) and John T. Lewis (1835-1906) are both buried with their families in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira.

For more details about Lewis, please read “John T. Lewis: Black American Hero of the Nineteenth Century” by Sharon Burleson Schuster.