Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis—Robert Benjamin Lewis—W.D. Howells Connections: Research Notes

It is a well-known obstacle to understanding the true history of the United States that so much writing—personal and for publication—by Black and Indigenous Americans has been ignored, lost, or scattered. Ironically, the same dominant white cultural attitudes that built this obstacle occasionally resulted in white writing that reveals important personal details and anecdotes about people of color that might otherwise be lost to history. Racist mockery and condescension can sometimes be peeled back, exposing hints that may lead to fruitful lines of inquiry.

I recently stumbled upon such a case: the essay “Mrs. Johnson,” by William Dean Howells, a central figure in late 19^th-and early 20^th-century American letters, first published in The Atlantic in January 1868 and later in the volume Suburban Sketches. At the time, Howells was assistant editor of The Atlantic.

As I explain in “A Subject of Unique Interest: Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis and William Dean Howells” Howells’s “Mrs. Johnson” was in real life Mary Freeman Heuston Lewis (1816-1868), the widow of Robert Benjamin Lewis (c.1802-1858). R.B. Lewis was the author of one of the first Black and Native ethnologies, Light and Truth: Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History, Containing the Universal History of the Colored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time, first published in 1836.

Here, I draw out further possible connections between Howells and his circle and the Lewises and their circle. My hope is that these leads may help others discover more information about Mary Lewis, R.B. Lewis, their children—including their daughter Mary Augusta and her husband William F. Johnson of the Howard Orphan Asylum in Weeksville, Brooklyn—and the distribution and influence of Light and Truth. Any information found may also illuminate intellectual, political, and social flow between the Boston-area Black and white abolitionist and civil rights communities.

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Once I made the connection between W.D. Howells and Mary Lewis, I realized that, even leaving aside Mary, there were few degrees of separation between Howells and R.B. Lewis.

Lewis first published Light and Truth in Maine in 1836. But he transferred his copyright in 1843 to “a committee of colored gentlemen” and they printed an edition in 1844 in Boston. This committee was Thomas Dalton (1794-1883), James Scott (c. 1797-1888), Andress V. Lewis (1810-1898) (no known family relation to R.B. Lewis), and Charles H. Roberts (?-?). The printer was Benjamin F. Roberts (1815-1881) (no known family relation to Charles H.). These men were stalwarts of the Boston Black abolitionist and civil rights movement. They almost certainly knew Lewis personally; although Lewis’s movements have been difficult to track, he was in Boston in 1835, when he married Mary—a marriage announced in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. Lewis appears to have been a freemason, and he was probably a member of the African Lodge in Boston, later the Prince Hall Grand Lodge, with Dalton and likely a few of the other men as well.

Howells’s circle of friends in Cambridge and Boston also included stalwart anti-slavery advocates, although, of course, they had much less at stake than Lewis and his Boston circle. Howells’s knowledge of Italian as well as his position at The Atlantic led to his quick adoption into the Dante Club, which met Wednesday evenings at the Cambridge home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was also a frequent guest at and later a member of the Saturday Club, a monthly meeting of men that included the core Dante group and other white Boston-area intellectuals. Longfellow and his family were ardently anti-slavery, and Longfellow’s account books show numerous donations to individual refugees from slavery and to anti-slavery efforts, while his journals and letters show him closely following related events and trials. Longfellow’s closest friend was Charles Sumner. His close friend, near neighbor, and eventual in-law was Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Early in his Atlantic career, Howells came to know both Sumner and Dana.

Sumner grew up on the back, Black, side of Beacon Hill. He was part of the Black abolitionists’ community, known to them personally for decades, a visitor in their barbershops. Dana had been a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee with leaders of the Black community.

When Shadrach Minkins was arrested in 1850 as a fugitive slave, Dana and the Black lawyer Robert Morris were among the lawyers defending him. After Minkins’s rescue and escape, Morris and James Scott—of the “committee of colored gentlemen”—were among those men arrested. Dana was Scott’s defense lawyer.

Benjamin F. Roberts, printer of Light and Truth, sued the City of Boston in 1848 on behalf of his daughter Sarah, charging that she had been illegally excluded from her neighborhood school because of her color; his lawyer was Morris. When they lost this case, Sumner agreed to join the appeal. Although they also lost this landmark appeal in 1850, Roberts, Sumner, and Morris maintained personal relationships until their deaths and their efforts eventually persuaded the state legislature to ban segregated schools in 1855.

Morris’s personal library, held by Boston College, includes a copy of Light and Truth, inscribed “1850.”

Benjamin F. Roberts had a separate connection to Longfellow. His father, Robert Roberts (1780-1860), author of The House Servant’s Directory, had been butler to Nathan Appleton during the early childhood of Appleton’s daughter Fanny, Longfellow’s second wife.

There is another possible connection between Howells himself and R.B. Lewis, through Mary Lewis’s previous employment. Mary and many of her children were still living in Bath, Maine, in 1860, two years after R.B.’s death.  In 1865, just a couple of years before Howells hired her, Mary and her daughter Esther (listed as “Astoria” in the Massachusetts state census) were living in Dorchester, today a part of Boston, in the home of bookseller Charles Augustus Clapp. We don’t know why Mary moved to Boston, but without R.B.’s income, she probably needed work. Perhaps R.B.’s friends in Boston found a position for her with Clapp, a member of an extended family of anti-slavery activists. In 1859, in his mid-20s, Clapp had been hired at Ticknor & Fields Old Corner Bookstore in downtown Boston; William Ticknor and James Fields worked in the building. Clapp must have been good at his job, because when Ticknor & Fields moved and E.P. Dutton & Co. took over the Bookstore in 1864, the firm made Clapp a partner. At about the same time the Howellses hired Mary Lewis, Clapp and his family moved to New York with Dutton. If Mary wanted to stay in Boston, she would need a new position.

Ticknor & Fields published The Atlantic and Fields was Howells’s (sometimes overbearing) boss. Did Howells and Mary Lewis learn of each other through Fields?

Boston and Cambridge were still small places in those days, and it often seems like everybody knew everybody.  I believe that, although he essentially dismisses the existence of “Mrs. Johnson’s” husband’s book in his essay, Howells could have put his hands on a copy of Light and Truth if he had wanted to (and maybe he did; we don’t know). It is also hard for me to believe that no one in Howells’s circles or in Black Boston/Cambridge recognized the true identity of both “Mr. Johnson” and “Mrs. Johnson,” or of their son-in-law, “Professor Jones” (actually William F. Johnson). Were they offended? Did they comment in writing?

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Below, I lay out first a sketch of what I have been able to learn of the Lewis children’s lives. Then I provide a list of people whose letters, papers, and publications may mention Howells and his essay “Mrs. Johnson” and/or mention a member of the R.B. and Mary Lewis family who may not immediately be recognized as such. These same sources may contain references to the Johnsons of Weeksville’s Howard Orphan Asylum.

Mary Augusta Lewis (b. 1836). She graduated from the high school in Bath, ME, in 1856, which would make her one of the earliest Black female high school graduates in the country. She appears to have been living with the family of Lyman Daggett in Boston in 1860, the same year she married Rev. William F. Johnson, who would become the superintendent of the Howard Orphan Asylum in Weeksville, Brooklyn. Information about her and William can be found in books about Weeksville as well as in New York newspapers. William was on the anti-slavery/civil rights lecture circuit, sometimes sharing the stage with more well-known lecturers. “William Johnson” is a common name; references to him in diaries, letters, or articles may include “blind,” “Ithaca,” “magic lantern” and/or “phrenology.”

William’s family lived for many years in Ithaca, NY, where his father was the pastor of a church. Records there may refer to him, Mary Augusta, and the Lewises. In addition, William’s family has its own interesting history, and one of his relatives was composer and singer Henry Thacker Burleigh. Burleigh sang at Mary Augusta’s funeral in 1901; his papers may reference both the Johnsons’ work in Brooklyn and the Lewis family.

Perhaps someone can discover how this dynamic couple first met, which could explain further networks.

Benjamin H. Lewis (b. 1838). In 1860, at age 21, Benjamin was living with his mother and some siblings at home in Bath, ME. In 1863, a Black Benjamin Lewis was listed in the Draft Registrations Record as Class I in Bath as an unmarried mariner; this was probably but not necessarily Benjamin.

In 1870, a 31-year-old “mulatto” teacher Benjamin Lewis, born in Maine, was living near Raceland, Lafourche Parish, LA. B.H. Lewis, a 42-year-old “mulatto” schoolteacher born in Maine and living in the First Ward of neighboring Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, in 1880 is probably the same man. B.H. Lewis is married to 30-year-old Ester, born in Louisiana, and they have two children, 5-year-old Ann Mary and 2-year-old Benjamin Philip. Besides his age and birth in Maine, a further indication that this is indeed R.B. and Mary Lewis’s eldest son comes from scholar Rebecca J. Scott’s investigations into conflicts regarding terms of work and citizenship in post-emancipation Louisiana sugar parishes.[1] She notes that Benjamin Lewis was described in newspaper accounts as “of mixed negro and Indian blood…,” like R.B. and Mary. As white attacks against Republican office holders and Black people supporting them increased, “the state Republican leadership had turned in 1870 to the formation of a state militia [including] black volunteers…under General James Longstreet.”[2] Scott writes that Lewis taught at the Nichols School in Terrebonne parish and “was named captain of Company C of the Sixth Regiment Infantry.”[3] Teacher and activist for civil rights—this sounds like a Lewis son. Further investigation into his arrival in Louisiana and any possible descendants may shed light on the Maine connection, at the very least.

Rachel M. Lewis (b.1840). I have not been able to find anything except birth information.

Ann Caroline Lewis (b. 1841). Died in 1851. Buried in the Heuston Burying  Ground in Brunswick, ME.

Artemisa D. Lewis (b. 1843). In 1860, Artemisa was living with the family of Joseph H. Clapp in Augusta, ME. (It is possible that, through Artemisa, Joseph Clapp put Mary Lewis in contact with Charles Augustus Clapp, but these two men were quite distant cousins in a very extensive family. The Boston Black abolitionist community’s connections with the white abolitionist community seems a more likely route to Mary’s employment in Dorchester.)  By 1865, Artemisa was working as a servant for the family of merchant Frederick A. Taft of Dedham, MA. I can’t find any later records for her.

Hypatia R. Lewis (b. 1844). In 1865, Hypatia, like Artemisa, was working in Dedham, MA, as a “domestic.” She lived with the family of merchant Henry Cormerais. How did both sisters end up in Dedham at the same time? I don’t know, but it may not be a coincidence that among the tiny handful of Black and “mulatto” people in Dedham at the time (pop. ~5,000), one was John W. Hilton, barber, son of John Telemachus Hilton, an age contemporary of R.B. Lewis and one of the foremost abolitionists and community leaders of his generation in Boston. He was also a Prince Hall Mason; if he didn’t know R.B. Lewis personally, he definitely knew the “committee of colored gentleman.” Also living in Dedham was Macon Bolling Allen, the first Black lawyer to argue a case before a jury in the United States. He was admitted to the bar in Maine in 1844 and Boston in 1845. In addition, and quite possibly in connection with these other residents of Dedham, Edmund Quincy (1808-1877), a white officer of the Massachusetts and American Anti-Slavery Societies and close ally of William Lloyd Garrison, lived there.

By 1870, Hypatia had moved to Ithaca, NY, where she was living with the family of Ezra Cornell, co-founder of Cornell University. Did William F. Johnson, whose family was well established in Ithaca, help Hypatia get this job? Were there other connections between the Johnsons and the Cornells? Did Ezra Cornell, born a Quaker and later a Republican, know that he was employing the daughter of the author of Light and Truth? Did any of the Cornell children (including Alonzo Cornell, later governor of New York), who appear on the census with Hypatia, understand who her family was?

Ezra Cornell died in 1874. In 1875, Hypatia was still in Ithaca, but with the family of businessman George W. Wood, Jr. In 1880, she was staying with an older cousin and the cousin’s husband in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Hypatia’s 45-year-old cousin, Mary, reported that she and her own mother had been born in Maine and her father in Massachusetts: she is then likely to be the daughter of Mary Lewis’s sister Lydia and Christopher Egbert Bow. (Lydia’s family lived in Dresden, Kent, Ontario for some years, and Mary married Charles H. West there. A number of the Bow children moved to Ypsilanti.) Mary’s 47-year-old husband, Moses Marks, born in Kentucky, had been a soldier in the 102^nd US (Colored) Infantry. Mary was Mary Ann Bassett when she married Moses.

By 1892, Hypatia was living in Brooklyn and in 1894 married George Lyles. At some point, perhaps as soon as she arrived in Brooklyn, she began helping Mary Augusta and William Johnson manage the Howard Orphan Asylum. By 1910, after her sister’s and brother-in-law’s deaths, she had moved with Lyles to Orange, New Jersey. George died that year, and in 1917, Hypatia married Henry Price. She died later that year.

Euclid H. Lewis (b. 1846). In 1859, the year following his father’s death, 13-year-old Euclid was issued a mariner’s certificate of protection at the Port of Bath. In 1860, he appears in the census for Bath with his mother and siblings with no occupation listed. I haven’t been able to find more about Euclid.

Henry C. or Henry H. (b.~1848). Henry shows up on the 1850 and 1860 censuses with his family, but I can find no definite record of him after that. He may have later lived with Heuston relatives.

In the 1850 census, 6-month-old daughter Europa V. appears, but she does not appear in the 1860 census. In the 1860 census, 8-year-old son Victoren H. appears. If, like some of his siblings, he was named after a historical figure in Light and Truth, he was probably named Victorinus. I can find no more records concerning him, but he may be the “Hippolyto Thucydides” of Howells’s “Mrs. Johnson.”

Esther (b. 1856). Esther lived with her mother from birth through Mary’s (and seemingly Esther’s) employment by the Howellses, which ended in 1867. It’s not clear where mother and daughter went immediately after, but Mary died at 80 Phillips Street in Boston in 1868. According to the 1870 census, Esther was living with the family of Lyman Daggett in Charlestown and attending school (according to Howells, “Naomi” refused to go to school in Cambridge and could barely read, so this contradiction is interesting). This was the same family that had employed Mary Augusta, Esther’s eldest sister, back in 1860 in Boston. Lyman Daggett’s father, Milton, had for many years been an official at the Bromfield Street Methodist Episcopal Church, and Lyman and his wife were also active members. In the 1810s, Bromfield Street had recruited Samuel Snowden, who would be one of the foremost Black activists of his day, to pastor the new May Street (later Revere Street) Church for Bromfield’s growing number of Black congregants. The two churches maintained at least a formal relationship into the early 1900s, so it’s possible the Daggetts had a connection with the Boston-area Black activist community that led to their long-term relationship with the Lewis family. Esther died in Charlestown in 1871.

If the timeline in “Mrs. Johnson” is accurate, Mary and Esther Lewis arrived at the Howells household on Sacramento Street in April 1867 and left in the autumn of 1867. Discussion of them in relation to the Howells family may have continued after the publication of “Mrs. Johnson” in Suburban Sketches in 1871. Information about them may possibly be found in the correspondence, diaries, or other writings of the following people—in addition to the people mentioned already—associated with the Howellses.

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Parents and siblings of W.D. and Elinor Mead Howells. Both W.D. and Elinor were frequent and chatty correspondents with their own families and their in-laws; letters regularly went back and forth. Various members of both the Howells and Mead families stayed in the Sacramento St. house while the Lewises lived there. W.D.’s sister Annie, in particular, appears to have had some kind of personal relationship with Mary Lewis.

 Henry James lived with his parents on Quincy Street, about 15 minutes’ walk from the Howells house. James was served Mary Lewis’s excellent dinner on June 5, 1867, after which Elinor encountered William F. Johnson having tea with his mother-in-law in her dining room. Both James and his brother William, and possibly the other members of the James family, became close to the Howellses.

John Fiske, historian, lived about a block away on Oxford Street and spent considerable time with the Howellses.

Arthur G. Sedgwick, lawyer, editor, and writer. Dined at Sacramento St.

Francis J. Child, professor of rhetoric and oratory, who lived a short walk away on Kirkland St., “one of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends,” according to Howells.

Friends or close acquaintances of the Howellses during this period James Russell Lowell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Eliot Norton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Agassiz, and their families.

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The remarkable Lewis family—who played vital roles in the intellectual lives and civil rights activism of the Black community, and thereby also influenced many members of the white community—deserves to be better known, not just as individuals, but as a family. My hope is that more information about them will soon come to light.

Notes

[1] Scott, Rebecca J. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008; Scott, Rebecca J. “Building, Bridging, and Breaching the Color Line: Rural Collective Action in Louisiana and Cuba, 1865-1912.” In Democracy, Revolution, and History, edited by Theda Skocpol, 143–66. Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture. Ithaca, N.Y. London: Cornell University Press, 1998; Cooper, Frederick, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

[2] Beyond Slavery, p. 70.

[3] Beyond Slavery, p. 71.