Henry J. Lewis was born in slavery in Mississippi, sometime in the late 1830s (the exact year of his birth is unknown). He was severely burned as a child, which left him blind in one eye and crippled in his left hand. He lived much of his life in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. In the 1870s he produced some engravings for Harper’s Weekly, and in the early 1880s worked as a sketch artist for the Smithsonian’s “Mound Survey” of pre-historic Native American sites in Arkansas and elsewhere. His cartoons in the Indianapolis Freeman in 1889 focused on themes of economic, social and political rights for African Americans. He died in April 1891.
On the eve of local elections in 1895, the Indianapolis Freeman printed a previously-published drawing by the late political cartoonist Henry J. Lewis, entited "A Song Without Words." The drawing used inserts within the larger frame to tell the story of a lynching by hanging (1), shooting (2) and fire (3). The persistence of Lewis's artwork after the transition from the editorship of Democratic-leaning independent Edward E. Cooper to that of Republican George L. Knox, demonstrates that the paper's visual themes--of organizing, political activism and the vote--transcended political party affiliation.