BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

INTRODUCTION

The books of my own to which I refer are We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (New York: Macmillan, 1988; coauthored with Seth Cagin); At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002); and Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). I am also the author of the children’s book Yours for Justice, Ida B. Wells: The Daring Life of a Crusading Journalist (Atlanta: Peachtree Press, 2009; illustrated by Stephen Alcorn).

1: JUNE 2, 1892

The story this book relates of the lynching of Robert Lewis in Port Jervis, New York, on June 2, 1892, is largely based on coverage of the incident and its aftermath that appeared in local newspapers, regional periodicals including those from New York City, as well as the national press. Most of the events described herein, including the inquest into the lynching, took place during the months of June and July 1892. The local news coverage, consisting of the Port Jervis Gazette (PJG), the Evening Gazette (EG), the Tri-States Union (TSU), and the Port Jervis Union (PJU), can be viewed on microfilm at the Port Jervis Free Library. See also Kristopher B. Burrell, “Bob Lewis’ Encounter with the ‘Great Death’: Port Jervis’ Entrance into the United States of Lyncherdom” (CUNY Hostos Community College, New York, NY, 2003).

• For the Sarah Cassidy story see PJG 4/29/1891, PJU 4/29/1891, and the New York Times 4/30/1891.
• In New York, Lena McMahon had lived at an orphanage affiliated with St. Stephen’s, a Catholic church on the east side of New York City. She was accompanied to Port Jervis in 1874 or 1875 by a priest who was likely from either St. Stephen’s or the Society for the Protection of Destitute Roman Catholic Children in the City of New York. The society, known informally as “the Protectory,” was founded in 1863 in response to the famous Orphan Train Movement led by the reformer Charles Loring Brace, which had been successful in “placing out” tens of thousands of abandoned city children in small towns across the country. The Protectory’s purpose was to ensure that Catholic children were not sent to be raised in Protestant homes.
• John McMahon and Theresa Reddy McMahon were not strangers to the unhappy experience of watching someone close to them run afoul of the law, which might explain their initial sympathy for Philip Foley’s legal predicament. During a labor dispute at the Pountney glassworks in 1877, Thomas Reddy and a fellow striker had ambushed the owner William Pountney as the latter attempted to escort a scab from his boardinghouse to the factory. Pountney, who was “badly pounded,” took out a warrant for Reddy and his accomplice, both of whom hurriedly left town. Of course, George Lea’s allegations regarding Foley were far more personal, as they involved a man who had won the devoted affection of the McMahons’ daughter. See EG 7/5/1877 and 8/14/1877.

2: CITY IN PROGRESS

The D&H Canal was dug between 1825 and 1828 under the supervision of the chief engineer Benjamin Wright, one of the builders of the Erie Canal. His resident engineer (and chief engineer as of 1827) was John Bloomfield Jervis, later known as a designer of locomotives and as chief engineer of the Croton Aqueduct (1842), which bought fresh drinking water to New York City.

• An article in the Warwick Advertiser on 6/9/1892 shared Interstate Commerce Commission data for 1891. It reported that of the nation’s 153,235 trainmen, 1,450 had been killed on the job, and 13,172 injured.
• Two good sources for the background history of Orange County, New York, are Samuel Eager, An Outline History of Orange County (Newburgh, NY: S. T. Callahan, 1846); and Philip H. Smith, Legends of the Shawangunk (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965).
• The history of African American lives in lower New York State can be found in David Levine, “African American History: A Past Rooted in the Hudson Valley,” Hudson Valley Magazine, January 26, 2017; A. J. Williams-Myers, “The African Presence in the Mid-Hudson Valley Before 1800,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 8, no. 1 (January 31, 1984); and Kevin Barrett, “Orange County’s Civil War Colored Troops,” Orange County Historical Society Journal 26 (November 1997); see also A. J. Williams-Myers, Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African-American Presence in the Hudson River Valley in the Early Twentieth Century (Newburgh, NY: Africa World Press, 1994).
• Articles dealing with the history of the Kidnapping Club include Jonathan Daniel Wells, “The So-Called Kidnapping Club Featured Cops Selling Free Black New Yorkers into Slavery,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 14, 2020; Marjorie Waters, “Before Solomon Northrup: Fighting Slave Catchers in New York,” History News Network, October 18, 2013; and Parul Sehgal, “When a Kidnapping Ring Targeted New York’s Black Children,” New York Times, 10/27/2020. See also Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (New York: Bold Type Books, 2020).
• The link between the threat of lynching and its terroristic effect on Black families and as a cause of Black migration is treated eloquently in numerous memoirs and histories. Two recommended examples are by Richard Wright: Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940) and Black Boy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945). As there was no hope of protection from local white authorities or from the national government, it was this terror, this risk of falling prey to a lynch mob, that inspired much Black migration—to Kansas, to Oklahoma, and to Northern industrial cities. While lynching was more likely to be recorded by coverage in local newspapers or recalled through oral history, almost every African American family has a story of an ancestor who simply disappeared, or had “come up missing,” because of an altercation with whites, a dispute over land or wages, or a romantic misadventure. Black-owned newspapers, most famously the Chicago Defender, regularly cited lynching in encouraging readers to depart the South; so blatant was the problem that white employment recruiters from Northern industries, who went to Birmingham, Mobile, or Savannah to appeal for Black workers to emigrate for jobs in Northern mills, emphasized the greater safety from lynching in the North.
• Stephen Crane’s short story “The Knife” is collected in Whilomville Stories (1900) and is available at http://www.online-literature.com/crane/whilomville-stories/8/; Jacqueline Goldsby’s eye-opening cultural history A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) contains extensive commentary on the lynching of Robert Lewis and the Stephen Crane novella The Monster. Information about the family of Stephen Crane and their lives in Port Jervis is in JoAnn Crane-Coriston, Crane Chronicles: Over 300 Years of the Crane Family. Privately compiled genealogical and historical articles created in 2000 are in the “Stephen Crane Folder” at the Minisink Valley Historical Society (MVHS).
• The background of Port Jervis is drawn from the shelves of the MVHS; city directories, archival travel and historical brochures; Gerald M. Best, Minisink Valley Express (Newburgh, NY: Hungerford Press, 1956); Daniel J. Dwyer and Peter Osborne, Our Town: Historic Port Jervis, 1907–2007 (Port Jervis, NY: Minisink Press, 2007); and interviews with former and current residents.
• An account of the period’s baseball craze is James E. Overmyer’s “Baseball for the Insane: The Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital and Its ‘Asylums,’” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 19, no. 2 (Spring 2011). Walt Whitman mentions baseball in Leaves of Grass and hailed it often as “America’s game.” His comments cited are from Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden, volume 4 (1889), available at Project Gutenberg.

3: A SHADOW CAST OVER MY SUNSHADE

Regarding the “Bully Acre,” native Ralph Drake remembers Port Jervis generally as “a bully town, where a crowd would gang up on a person.”

• The descriptions of the movements of Lena McMahon and Philip Foley, the alleged assault at the riverside, and the immediate aftermath are drawn largely from EG, TSU, and PJU for June 3–10, 1892, as well as these same journals’ coverage of the inquest (June 6–10).

4: “I AM NOT THE MAN”

The account of the capture and lynching of Robert Lewis is reported extensively in the local Port Jervis press, as well as in regional newspapers including the Poughkeepsie News, the New York Sun, the Middletown Argus, the Delaware Gazette (Delhi, NY), the New-York Tribune, and the Honesdale (PA) Citizen. Additional commentary is in the Goshen Independent-Republican, the New York Times, the Middletown Daily Times, and the Orange County Press.

• Other details about the lynching and the regional reaction come from the “Robert Lewis Lynching File” at the MVHS; Kristopher B. Burrell, “Bob Lewis’s Encounter with the ‘Great Death’: Port Jervis’s Entrance into the United States of Lyncherdom,” CUNY Academic Works, MVHS, 2003; and Bruce J. Friedman’s “The Day of the Lynching,” SAGA: True Adventure for Men, April 1955.
• Whether African Americans and the Irish shared a belief in premonitions and spirits, or newspaper writers amused themselves by pretending as much, local Orange County papers occasionally mixed straight news with allusions to the supernatural. Several articles appeared over the years alluding to unseen forces using extreme weather as a means of reacting disapprovingly to the Lewis lynching. Many examples, such as the one quoted here, reported actual events while attempting to amuse white readers with what they presumed to be Black people’s superstitious nature. Under the headline GHOST OF SI HARRIS, the piece (PJG 12/29/1884) reported: “A few days ago Si Harris, a well-known colored man of Middletown, died and since then the colored people of that village have been troubled in their mind by the appearance of his ghost. With no respect for his memory [they] gave a grand ball at the North Street rink on Christmas Eve and the roof fell in, the entire party barely escaping with their lives. Moreover, a ghastly, distorted face with fiery red eyes has been seen peering in at windows.”

5: SOUTHERN METHODS OUTDONE

Reactions to the lynching cited are from the Goshen Independent-Republican, the Middletown Argus, the New-York Tribune, the New York Recorder, and the Los Angeles Herald. Additional regional commentary was cited from the Monticello Watchman, the Honesdale (PA) Herald and the Honesdale Citizen, the Newburgh Daily Journal, and the Susquehanna (PA) Tri-Weekly Journal. Countless U.S. papers gave an account and/or editorial comment about the Port Jervis lynching during the first and second weeks of June 1892.

• The depiction of Robert Lewis’s mother comes from the Paterson (NJ) Daily News and the Paterson Morning Call. The most detailed accounts of the funeral are in the local journals for June 4–6. The town’s Black population did decline from 230 in 1880 to 125 in 1900, whether due to fear in the aftermath of the Lewis lynching or economic factors is unknown.
• The published admonition to Lena to abide by her parents’ advice ran in the Orange County Press on 6/14/1892.
• Questions about Northern overconfidence in their ability to wield justice are raised in Jason Sokol’s All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (New York: Basic Books, 2014); and Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
• In early August 1892, two months after the lynching of Robert Lewis, one of the most notorious murders in the nation’s history occurred in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden, thirty-two, was accused of killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet. The case—the Irish American small-town family, Lizzie’s dislike for and resentment of her stepmother, and the many mysteries that, despite her acquittal, were never resolved—bear some resemblance to the Port Jervis saga.
• The Newburgh lynching of Robert Mulliner on June 21, 1863, is reported in the Newburgh Daily Telegraph and the Newburgh Journal. See also the Middletown Whig Press for 7/1/1863. Related accounts of the New York City Draft Riots are in Herbert Asbury’s classic The Gangs of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927); and James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan, originally published in New York, 1930 (reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1991). The account of Union troops of the 124th New York Regiment tossing a Black man in a blanket appears in the Newburgh Daily Union 4/14/1865.
• A sensational mob killing of the era was the “Kelsey Outrage,” the 1872 murder of a white man named Charles G. Kelsey in Huntington, Long Island, who had sent love poems to a young neighbor, Julia Smith, thus infuriating a competing suitor. A dozen disguised and hooded men seized Kelsey and coated him with layers of hot tar, feathers, and wool so thick he was believed to have succumbed from the torture. His bloody shirt, his necktie, and one of his boots were discovered later on a beach. The alleged leader of the mob soon after married Smith. See the New York Times 11/25/1872.
• Historians of lynching in the South have noted their contagious potential—one lynching inspiring another, often at a location nearby. It is not unlikely, given the frequent press descriptions and mentions of lynching at the time, that the Port Jervis lynching was at least in part a response to the drumbeat of reports of Southern lynching that ran in the nation’s newspapers from 1890 to 1892. It may be instructive to contrast the Robert Lewis lynching of 1892 with an 1885 incident in Port Jervis in which a Black stranger committed five separate assaults on adolescent white girls along North Orange Street in the course of a single afternoon. The girls reported being chased, pushed to the ground, choked, and threatened by “a coffee-colored [man], of burly frame, and a wicked countenance.” Their tearful accounts led police to arrest thirty-year-old George Robinson, who said he had come to town a week earlier in search of work. He denied the charges against him but was identified by all five victims. It was thought his motive was robbery, although the Gazette ventured that “he may possibly have had a more hellish object in view.” Convicted of assault in the third degree, he was sentenced to a year of hard labor. There is no record of the girls’ families or anyone else urging extrajudicial punishment. See PJG 10/13/1885 and TSU 10/15/1885.

6: THE VIGOROUS PEN OF IDA B. WELLS

The Southern myth of Reconstruction—that it was a program of federal overreach that unjustly punished the defeated South—has often tended to obscure key historical aspects of the period, including the effect of the North’s ultimate capitulation; Redemption, the South’s quasi-religious crusade of resistance; and the eventual institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation, Black disenfranchisement, convict labor, and lynching. Of the vast literature on this sweeping subject, I found particularly helpful Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Rayford W. Logan’s indispensable The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997).

• The best introduction to T. Thomas Fortune is his powerful writings in the Age from the last decades of the nineteenth century up until the founding of the NAACP. Much of it can be found in T. Thomas Fortune: The Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, edited by Shawn Leigh Alexander (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008); see also Emma Lou Thornbrough, “The National Afro-American League 1887–1908,” Journal of Southern History 27, no. 4 (November 1961).
• Recognition of the life and work of Ida B. Wells has deservedly grown in recent years. A prolific writer, diarist, and public speaker, she has been the subject of several worthy biographies. I have relied on her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, edited by her daughter, Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Angela D. Sims, Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Paula J. Giddings, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistead, 2008); and Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). An insightful introduction to her early career is The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon Press 1995).
• Several of Wells’s own publications are essential sources, including Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Printing, 1892), and A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895). A lesser-known title by Wells, but deeply informative, is Mob Rule in New Orleans: Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (Chicago: self-published, 1900). Finally, a valuable compilation is Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, edited by Mia Bay (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
• Frances Willard’s thoughts about the threat to Southern white families from Black men is in “The Race Problem: Miss Willard on the Political Puzzle of the South,” The Voice, 10/23/1890.
• Bryan Stevenson’s remarks about the harmful effects of the “narrative of racial difference” can be found in Joe Helm, “The Author of ‘Just Mercy’ Says We’ve Made Talking About Race Political,” Washington Post, 3/16/2021.
• The anti-lynching movement’s development and trajectory in the twentieth century is well documented in historical issues of the NAACP’s official organ, The Crisis, the magazine founded in 1910 with W.E.B. Du Bois as editor. See as well Donald L. Grant’s “The Development of the Anti-lynching Reform Movement in the United States, 1883–1932” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1972). Also useful are books by the executive secretaries of the NAACP during the years of the fight for a federal anti-lynching law: James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1933); and two titles by Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), and A Man Called White (New York: Viking Press, 1948). The origins of lynching as nonlethal summary justice during the American Revolution and early years of the Republic are explained in James Cutler’s seminal Lynch-Law: An Investigation into Lynching in the United States (New York: Longmans, Green, 1905).

7: INQUEST

While there is no official transcript of the inquest extant, it was the custom of the press at the time to transcribe verbatim the arguments presented by lawyers, the statements of witnesses, and the coroner’s rulings. For coverage of the coroner’s inquest into the lynching of Robert Lewis, see the PJG, EG, TSU, and PJU for the period June 6–12, 1892. Another consolidated source for the history surrounding the lynching and the inquest is a series of articles by Peter Osborne, executive director of the MVHS, that appeared in the Tri-States Gazette 4/22/1985, 4/29/1985, 5/13/1985, and 6/24/1985.

8: THE AUTHOR OF MY MISFORTUNE

Detective Elwell’s mention of John Westfall as someone who, like Robert Lewis, carried messages between Foley and Lena, introduces a man who appears to have been an outsize figure in Port Jervis but whose actual involvement in the McMahon-Foley relationship and the Lewis lynching are unsubstantiated. He was, like Lewis, a Black teamster, and lived with his mother, Emma, and white stepfather, William Franklin, at 6 West Street, directly across the street from the McMahons. John was born in 1861. His biological father, Ira Westfall, had been killed in the Civil War. In his twenties, John Westfall was a player-manager of the Red Stockings, the town’s premier Black baseball team, and there are press mentions of someone bearing his name as a participant in a Black musical program at the opera house. Six years after the Lewis lynching, he enlisted and served in the Spanish-American War, but returned only to encounter trouble back home. Local newspapers record his involvement over the years in several altercations, and he died in 1900 after being struck in the head with a rock following a fight in a saloon. See EG 3/19/1887 and 6/25/1892, as well as PJU 5/6/1892 and TSU 11/28/1889, 2/1/1900, and 2/15/1900.

• The disapproval of interracial romance was not (and has never been) a white viewpoint exclusively. Wells and T. Thomas Fortune were among the few Black civil rights figures to show their acceptance of Frederick Douglass’s second marriage, in 1884, to Helen Pitts, a white educator and suffragist, and to be welcomed as guests at the couple’s Washington home. “We are surprised at the amount of gush that intermarriage inspires in this country,” Fortune protested. “It is in strict keeping with all the sophistries kept alive by the papers and the people about the colored people. It is the ceaseless but futile effort to show that the human nature of the Black man and the human nature of the white man differ in some indefinable way, when we all know that, essentially, human nature is, in fundamental respects, the same wherever mankind is found.”
• The discussion of the possibility that Lena McMahon falsely claimed a sexual assault, perhaps with the intent to feature Foley as her rescuer, would be incomplete without a mention of the literary soap opera Thorns and Roses, which began appearing in the Tri-States Union on Thursday, May 19, 1892, and had an installment on June 2, the day of the lynching, and whose plot and characters paralleled Lena’s predicament. The story’s young heroine, Agnes, lives with her father and stepmother, who is cold and unkind to the girl. As Agnes grows into a young woman, she begins to resist her stepmother’s abuse, especially after she meets Will Hanly, a boy who comes to town to visit his relatives and takes an interest in her.
• “At last I had found someone who did not think me wicked or homely, but who saw goodness in my character and beauty in my features,” Agnes muses:

I seemed to have suddenly emerged from a great shadow and to stand in the broad, dazzling light of a new existence. My stepmother was not at all pleased to have the elegant city lad show a preference for me, but she had no means of controlling his tastes, and so her only recourse was to vent her displeasure on my unlucky head, which she did at every opportunity.

Indignant at one of Agnes’s displays of independence, the stepmother grabs her by the hair and cruelly holds her face near an open kitchen fire. The girl breaks free of the older woman and denounces her to her father, who is unwilling to take sides, and ultimately Agnes leaves home, vowing not to return. Out on the road alone at dusk—it is her first time away from home—she is assaulted by a drunken man:

I understood very well that he would not hesitate to deal with me as his fiendish nature might suggest. I continued to struggle for my freedom, but it was useless. I sent up scream after scream, but I had no hope of anyone hearing me.

• In the installment published on June 2, a hero on horseback comes along in the nick of time to drive the drunk ravager away, rescuing Agnes and her virtue. See Thorns and Roses, syndicated from A. N. Kellogg Newspaper Co., in TSU 5/19/1892 and 6/2/1892.

9: THE BLUNDERS OF VIRTUE

An essential source to study of the life and career of Stephen Crane is Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994). See also Paul Sorrentino, Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane: A Life in American Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923); John Berryman, Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001; edition of original 1950 publication, revised by author 1962); and Linda H. Davis, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). I also made use of the Stephen Crane Papers in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

• Stephen Crane’s older sister Agnes, an award-winning scholar and later a teacher at Port Jervis’s Mountain House School, died in 1884 of meningitis at age twenty-eight; two years later, in the kind of occupational mishap all too common in Port Jervis, his brother Luther was fatally injured while working as a railroad flagman; he was twenty-three.
• The historian Larzer Ziff’s quote about the youth who grew up in the wake of the Civil War is from The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 149. The notion of “flapdoodle” is introduced in Clifton Fadiman’s introduction to The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), p. xvi.
• It has long been a mainstay of local lore in Port Jervis that a young Stephen Crane absorbed his preternatural feel for the experience of combat in the Civil War by listening to war stories shared by the veterans who gathered daily at the foot of the Civil War monument in Orange Square. More likely he encountered such men more generally while living in the town—from the fathers of friends and neighbors, in village saloons, and at the Farnum Building, where his brother William had his law office, including the barbershop on the Farnum Building’s ground floor (which also makes a cameo appearance in The Monster). One individual who has been specifically credited with Stephen’s interest in the subject was John B. Van Petten, a distinguished Civil War officer and New York State legislator who served as a history instructor at Claverack College, a military academy Crane attended in 1890. See Robert G. Eurich, “The Wanderer’s Home: How Port Jervis and Its Region Affected the Life and Work of Stephen Crane,” 2015, PortJervisNY.com; see also Thomas F. O’Donnell, “John B. Van Petten, Stephen Crane’s History Teacher,” American Literature 27, no. 2 (May 1955).
• The Willa Cather quotes that appear in this chapter are from her “When I Knew Stephen Crane,” in Stephen Crane: Bloom’s Classic Critical Views (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009). A sketch of the financial pressures under which Crane labored is in Joseph Liebling, “The Dollars Damned Him,” New Yorker, 8/5/1961.
• “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” was originally published in the New York Press, 12/2/1894.
• For scholarly consideration of Crane’s The Monster, see Jacqueline Goldsby, “The Drift of the Public Mind: Stephen Crane,” in Goldsby, Spectacular Secret; Ralph Ellison, “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction,” in Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964); and Elaine Marshall, “Crane’s ‘The Monster’ Seen in the Light of Robert Lewis’s Lynching,” Nineteenth Century Literature 51, no. 2 (September 1996).
• Other analyses of The Monster cited here include James Nagel, “The Significance of Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 31, no. 3 (Spring 1999); and David Greven, “Iterated Horrors: ‘The Monster’ and Manhood,” in Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism, edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), p. 55.
• Also of interest are Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: NYU Press, 2008), p. 105; John Cleman, “Blunders of Virtue: The Problem of Race in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster,’” American Literary Realism 34, no. 2 (Winter 2002); Stanley Wertheim, “Unraveling the Humanist: Stephen Crane and Ethnic Minorities,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 30, no. 3 (Spring 1998); and Chester L. Wolford, Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1989).
• For an account of the Dora Clark affair, see the New York Journal 9/20/1896, 10/11/1896, and 10/17/1896; and the New York Sun 10/16/1896 and 10/17/1896. See The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane, edited by R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York: NYU Press, 1966), pp. 217–66; see also Christopher Benfry, “Dora,” chapter 8 in The Double Life of Stephen Crane (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Charles Becker, the corrupt police officer who arrested Clark and was the target of her complaint, was convicted in 1912 of having arranged the murder of a bookie named Herman Rosenthal and died in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1915.
• Several melodramas of the late Victorian era featured plots involving physical or facial mutilation. Possibly the best known was “East Lynne,” based on an 1861 novel by Ellen Wood, which became a stage play that toured widely. An audience favorite known as a sure moneymaker at the box office, it was presented at George Lea’s opera house in Port Jervis dozens of times. In the drama, a woman leaves her decent, hardworking husband and infant children for an aristocrat. She bears his illegitimate child but soon learns he is a cad who has no intention of marrying her. In a train accident, the child is killed and she is disfigured. She then returns, unrecognizable, to her original husband, who has moved on and has remarried, and who hires her as a nanny to the very children she had abandoned. She reveals her true identity on her deathbed and is forgiven. Americans were also familiar in the late nineteenth century with the story of London’s Joseph Merrick, “the Elephant Man,” and the P. T. Barnum Museum’s forty-year-long-running attraction of “What Is It?” (William Henry Johnson, a Black man with a tapered cranium likely caused by microcephaly, and billed as a missing link). Later, Johnson became a novelty act called Zip the Pinhead at Coney Island and with Ringling Bros., alongside other sideshow stars such as Minnie Woolsey, a.k.a. “Koo-Koo the Bird Girl.” The name “Henry Johnson” is that given the Black protagonist in The Monster.
• Dialogue from The Monster is from Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 168–69.
• Stephen Crane’s work generally speaks of his humane conviction that all people have inherent dignity and deserve respect, and in The Monster his main character is a Black man who behaves heroically and suffers unjust ostracization and disdain. But Crane’s writings were not free of the casual racist attitudes of the times in which he lived. In The Monster he appears to use racist vocabulary self-consciously, as when he names the place where Henry Johnson’s girlfriend Bella Farragut lives “Watermelon Alley,” and has a minor white character refer to Johnson as a “coon,” yet such allusions and terms were even then offensive and today deserve censure.
• In 1959, a half century after the publication of The Monster, a film based on the story, Face of Fire, directed by Albert Band, was released, starring the actor James Whitmore. Face of Fire closely follows the original tale, with a key difference: the film’s “Henry” is a white handyman (Whitmore) named “Monk” Johnson. The fact that despite so essential a change the film works as a powerful allegory of intolerance and small-town claustrophobia is testament to Crane’s faith that the tale was timeless and universal. Whitmore in 1951 had narrated the director John Huston’s film adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage, which starred Audie Murphy. In 1964 Whitmore would play the lead in the movie based on John Howard Griffin’s best-selling memoir Black Like Me (1961), based on the experiences of a white journalist who disguised himself to live as an unemployed Black man in the 1950s Jim Crow South.
• Stephen Crane’s letters to William Crane of October 29, 1897, and March 2, 1899, are in Stephen Crane: Letters, edited by R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (London: Peter Owen, 1960), p. 147. See also Helen R. Crane, “My Uncle, Stephen Crane,” in American Mercury 31 (January 1934).
• William Crane, as the executor of Stephen’s estate, later sold the copyright to his brother’s published and unpublished manuscripts to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for five thousand dollars.
• The phrase “guilty monster,” in reference to Robert Lewis, is from PJG 6/11/1892: “Had the guilty monster been reserved for regular legal methods,” Rector Evans of Grace Episcopal Church in Middletown observed at the time of the Lewis lynching, “he would have escaped with a punishment utterly inadequate to the appalling offense.”
• For the Harold Frederic incident and Gilder quote see Stephen Crane, The Works of Stephen Crane, volume 7 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969), p. xxix.
• Julian Hawthorne’s review of The Monster appears in Book News, 2/18/1900, pp. 337–38.

EPILOGUE

The account of Lena McMahon’s stillborn child is covered in the New York Sun 8/2/1894, PJU 8/1/1894, MDP 8/2/1894, and TSU 8/9/1894. Most regional papers carried a version of the story. The quote from Florence Kadel is in the “Robert Lewis Lynching File” at the MVHS. I was unable to locate a marriage record for Lena McMahon and Will (or William) Dowling in census records or relevant state and city databases.

• For background on the Chicago violence of 1919, see William M. Tuttle, Jr., “Contested Neighborhoods and Racial Violence: Prelude to the Chicago Riot of 1919,” Journal of Negro History 55, no. 4 (October 1970). Descriptions of the lynching incidents in Coatesville and Duluth, the violence in Springfield, Illinois, and the founding of the NAACP may be found in Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown.
• A historic account of the Ku Klux Klan in western Orange County is Chris Farlakas, “An Empire Built on Fear,” Middletown Times-Herald Record, 3/6/1988. Information was also provided by Ralph Drake.
• Sol Carley’s difficulties in Goshen are detailed in the Middletown Daily Press 4/3/1893. Carley went on to serve as an alderman in the Port Jervis city government.
• For later information about Rufus Perry, Jr., see the Brooklyn Eagle 5/15/1899. He remained active in local legal and political circles for many years, married Lillian S. Buchacher, and in 1912 converted to Judaism. In 1917 he was accused of having forged his father’s name on a house deed shortly before the older man’s death; he was cleared of criminal charges but was disbarred for five years. In 1927 he ran unsuccessfully for Kings County judge on the Socialist Party ticket. He died in 1930.
• The quote about the possible spread of mobbism is in the Americus (GA) Times-Recorder 4/24/1899, cited in Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, p. 22.
• Information regarding lynching and the death penalty is in Eliza Steelwater, The Hangman’s Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America’s Struggle with the Death Penalty (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
• In recent years Duluth has shown itself a singular model of accountability and remembrance for the 1920 lynching. A public memorial was unveiled near the site of the incident in 2003 that features bronze statues of the men who were put to death, and in June 2020, when the one hundredth anniversary of the lynching closely coincided with the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Governor Tim Walz honored the victims by declaring June 15 “Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie Commemoration Day.” A powerful tribute was spoken at the 2003 opening of the memorial by Warren Read, a great-grandson of one of the leaders of the lynch mob. “It was a long held family secret,” he told the gathering, “[until] its deeply buried shame was brought to the surface and unraveled. We will never know the destinies and legacies these men would have chosen for themselves if they had been allowed to make that choice. But I know this: their existence, however brief and cruelly interrupted, is forever woven into the fabric of my own life. My son will continue to be raised in an environment of tolerance, understanding and humility, now with ever more pertinence than before.” See “The 1920 Duluth, Minnesota, Lynchings,” on the website for America’s Black Holocaust Museum (https://ABHMuseum.org/on-this-day-in-history).
• On February 26, 1985, Port Jervians awoke to a headline in the Tri-States Gazette, O&R CREW RAZES SITE OF LYNCHING. According to the article, “the hanging tree came down Monday.” The tree, “cut down by Orange and Rockland Utilities workers from in front of the Baptist Church [on East Main Street], is believed by many residents to be the one from which Bob Lewis was lynched in 1892.”