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Jackson Lewis, who was born into slavery, has been called the
first black political cartoonist. His drawings appeared in
publications across the nation. H. J. Lewis was born in Water
Valley, Mississippi, in 1837 or 1838. As a child, he fell into a
fire, maiming his left hand and blinding his left eye. Nothing
further is known about his youth, but by 1872, he was living in
Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), where he worked as a laborer in
the mid- to late 1870s. By 1879, he was selling drawings of city
and Arkansas River scenes to the national publication Harper’s
Weekly, and he later sold similar drawings to Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated Newspaper. On October 25, 1882, a Pine Bluff
Commercial article referred to him as a “caricaturist and pencil
artist” whose sketches “of both imaginary and real scenes are
wonderfully correct,” and concluded, “We bespeak for him a
brilliant and successful future.” In November 1882, Edward
Palmer, a leading archaeological fi