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Henry Clay Lewis (1825–1850)
- University of Missouri Press
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149 Henry Clay Lewis (1825–1850) Born in Charleston, South Carolina, into a large family, Henry Clay Lewis had a more cosmopolitan and European-informed background than most of the other humorists as his parents were of French and Italian Jewish descent. He was only six when his mother died, and afterward he was raised haphazardly by family members when he was not on his own working on boats on the Ohio, Mississippi , and Yazoo rivers or in the cotton fields in Mississippi. After an apprenticeship to a physician, Lewis entered the Louisville Medical Institute and before the age of twenty-one had graduated with his medical degree. He settled to practice medicine in a backwoods community in Louisiana where he lived in a log cabin, donned boots and a coonskin cap, and became a “swamp doctor” to the often malnourished and fever-ridden inhabitants at the intersection between the Tensas River and Bayou Despair in the northeastern part of the state. He prospered and became active in Whig politics , but during the cholera epidemic of 1850 while returning home from a medical call, Lewis accidentally fell into a flooded bayou and drowned. Lewis is remembered only because of his stories based on his experiences as a medical student and a physician in the Louisiana swamps. His first sketch appeared in the New York Spirit of the Times in August 1845 and launched a series of dark, grotesque, and demonic narratives startling to readers then and now for their gothic sensibility. They recount the experiences of a young doctor, recalled in retrospect by an older narrator, as he comes to grips with life at the margins of society, where brutality and the struggle for survival have not yet been replaced by civility and social restraint. In their psychological depth and disturbing imagery, they have more in common with the fiction of his contemporaries Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville than with that of the other humorists of the frontier. Nine of his stories appeared in the New York sporting journal, but he wrote a good many more, obviously intent from the start on producing a full-scale book which appeared in 1850 as Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana “Swamp Doctor” under the pseudonym “Madison Tensas, M.D., Ex. V. P. M. S. U. Ky.” 150 Southern Frontier Humor Lewis did not live to see the full success and popularity of his book which went through six reprintings before the end of the century. Texts: “A Tight Race Considerin,’” “The Indefatigable Bear Hunter,” and “A Struggle for Life,” from Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana “Swamp Doctor” (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1850). A Tight Race Considerin’ During my medical studies, passed in a small village in Mississippi, I became acquainted with a family named Hibbs (a nom de plume of course), residing a few miles in the country. The family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Hibbs and son. They were plain, unlettered people, honest in intent and deed, but overflowing with that which amply made up for all their deficiencies of education, namely, warmhearted hospitality, the distinguishing trait of Southern character. They were originally from Virginia, from whence they had emigrated in quest of a clime more genial and a soil more productive than that in which their fathers toiled. Their search had been rewarded, their expectations realized, and now in their old age, though not wealthy in the “Astorian” sense, still they had sufficient to keep the wolf from the door and could drop something more substantial than condolence and tears in the hat that poverty hands round for the kind offerings of humanity. The old man was like the generality of old planters, men whose ambition is embraced by the family or social circle and whose thoughts turn more on the relative value of “Sea Island” and “Mastodon” and the improvement of their plantations than the “glorious victories of Whiggery in Kentucky” or the “triumphs of democracy in Arkansas.” The old lady was a shrewd, active dame, kindhearted and long-tongued, benevolent and impartial, making her coffee as strong for the poor pedestrian with his all upon his back as the broadcloth sojourner with his “up-country pacer.” She was a member of the church, as well as the daughter of a man who had once owned a race horse; and these circumstances gave her an indisputable right, she thought, to “let on all she knew” when religion or horseflesh was...