Feature for Black History Month: John T. Lewis (1835-1906)

For Black History Month 2026, Newsline is offering a feature for each week in February to celebrate our Black forebears in the Church of the Brethren.

In this issue, we celebrate the faith and witness of John T. Lewis, whose extraordinary life included a close friendship with Mark Twain.

From a Messenger magazine piece written by past editor, the late Kenneth I. Morse:

Mark Twain called him “the most picturesque of men” and “an implacable Dunker-Baptist.” He was one of the few Black members of the Brethren in the years before the Civil War, having united with the Pipe Creek congregation in Maryland in 1853 when he was 18 years old.

Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) had many reasons to admire Lewis, his friend for more than 30 years. Lewis had served as coachman for Clemens’ father-in-law and later was a tenant farmer at Quarry Farm near Elmira, N.Y., where the famous writer spent many summers.

On Aug. 23, 1877, Lewis saved the lives of Clemens’ sister-in-law, Ida Langdon, her young daughter Julia, and Nora, a nurse, when a runaway horse carried their carriage dangerously downhill toward a turn in the road. Clemens, in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells, described how Lewis, who was coming up the hill with a load of manure, “gathered his vast strength and…seized the gray horse’s bit as he plunged by and fetched him up standing!”

Lewis, in preparing his own obituary, observed that he had long been cut off from the church, but he wrote, “I have tried to be faithful to the New testament and order of the Brethren.”

*John T. Lewis (at right) in a photo taken in 1903 with Samuel L. Clemens (at left), the writer known as Mark Twain. Photo credit: Library of Congress*

The Bible that “through the kindness of Brother John T. Lewis” was returned to the Dunker meetinghouse on the Antietam Civil War battlefield (cover at left, inscription at right). Credit: National Park Service

An excerpt from the Brethren Historical Library and Archives newsletter “News and Notes,” Issue 6, 2019:

No discussion of the Mumma meetinghouse and the [Civil War] Battle of Antietam would be complete without retelling of the theft and eventual return of the Bible used by the preachers during worship services…. In brief, the Bible was kept in the church at the time of the battle and was stolen by a soldier, Nathan Dykeman, from Millport, N.Y. Like many others who later pilfered bricks or other items from the church, he was no doubt looking for a souvenir. The Bible was taken to his home in New York where it remained in his family for the next forty years.

Dykeman’s sister decided to return the Bible in 1903 and sold it to veterans from her brother’s old regiment for $10.00. Details are lacking, but they contacted John T. Lewis, an elderly African American Dunker farmer who had been baptized into the Brethren faith in Maryland, but was then living in Elmira, N.Y. Lewis, one of only a handful of Black Brethren before the Civil War, was photographed with the Bible and put the veterans in touch with John E. Otto, the last resident preacher at Mumma’s, and the Bible was safely shipped back to the congregation. Today it is on display at the battlefield park’s visitor center.

An excerpt from “Old Bibles and Radical Compassion” by Frank Ramirez, published in the Nov. 2010 issue of Messenger magazine:

I have before me the Mumma Meeting House Bible, but I like to call it the John Lewis Bible. Bless his heart, he sent it back here. After the Battle of Antietam, it was grabbed as a souvenir by a Union soldier. People took off with anything that wasn’t nailed down after the battle was over.

The Bible went on a long journey, making its way to upstate New York. No doubt it went to many reunions of the unit. Eventually, when the soldier died, his family decided to send it back to Sharpsburg. But there was a problem: they didn’t know any Dunkers.

Then someone realized they did. Everyone in that part of the country knew John Lewis. He was that rarity, an African-American Dunker, who’d been baptized in Maryland, but moved further north to find employment.

He still wore the plain garb and the long beard with no mustache. He was well known to and admired by Mark Twain, and that was before he risked his life to leap through the air and calm a runaway horse dragging a cart to doom, saving two of Twain’s relatives from certain death in the process. That brought instant fame—and some fortune—to the hardworking Lewis, who some say served as the model for the runaway slave Jim in the Great American novel Huckleberry Finn.

I like calling it the John Lewis Bible, and I wonder: Where would the John Lewis Bible open to automatically? What Bible passage would it point to if it could speak? John 13—the foundation text for the feetwashing—that signature ordinance which defines us even more than the mode of baptism which gave us our Dunker nickname? Matthew 5 to 7—the Sermon on the Mount—which describes the way Jesus taught us to live? James 1:27—which tells us that religion calls us to take care of widows and orphans in their distress and keep oneself unstained from the world?

I know where I would like it to open…. I think the letter of James, the Sermon on the Mount, and the ethics of Jesus are all grounded in Leviticus 19. That chapter, which I call the heart of the holiness code, enjoins all of God’s people to be holy, as God is holy…. Holiness is not simply a matter of acting better than the neighbors. It’s about loving the neighbors. All of them.

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