Lewis G. Clarke
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Lewis G. Clarke
Lewis G. Clarke was an anti-slavery activist and possible inspiration for the main character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In his autobiography he described a childhood in which he was forced to spin flax all waking hours of every day. In photographs that he distributed at lectures after the Civil War, he is sometimes shown next to a spinning wheel for flax; he would sign the images with a quotation from his autobiography, “I rased that flax and spun that thred.” Such photographs often featured a piece of rough flax strung through the corner. The ripped hole in the lower right of the larger photograph here probably once held such a thread.