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Joseph Vance Lewis, otherwise known as J. Vance Lewis (December 25, 1853? - April 24, 1925) was a slave who was freed through emancipation and who came “out of the ditch” to become a lawyer and was admitted to the US Supreme Court. Lewis wrote an autobiographical narrative entitled ''Out of the Ditch. A True Story of an Ex-Slave''. ==Slave life== According to his autobiography, J. Vance Lewis was born on Christmas Day (according to his narrative he would have been born in approximately 1853, but the actual date was more than likely ten or more years later, as will be discussed below) to Doc and Rosa Lewis. The Lewis family were slaves on the plantation of Colonel Duncan Stewart Cage, Sr. in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana near the town of Houma. Born into slavery, Lewis knew no other life. When he was about ten years old, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 brought about the realization that he was a slave. The rejoicing and excitement surrounding freedom provoked the consciousness of how miserable his parents and everyone else had been on the plantation. Lewis was depressed at this point, he did not see himself being freed, but saw freedom as being forced from the life he knew; the plantation was his home. The farm consisted of what seemed to Lewis to be hundreds of slaves. All those who had worked the plantation prior to the Emancipation Proclamation were given the option to stay by Colonel Cage, who claimed to be a “poor man” without them. About two hundred former slaves remained and resumed the work they had done previously as paid employees. Soon after slaves were transformed into employees, an Irishman by the name of Jimmie Welch was hired to be an “overseer”. Most of the workers hated him. In an attempt to win the favor of the workers and to keep his power, Welch offered the following:
When everyone was dismissed from the gathering where Welch had made this announcement, a man named Rev. Frank Benjamin went to go kill his pig. Welch claimed that Benjamin killed the biggest hog in the pen, which angered Welch who charged Franklin with hog theft, because he promised a pig, not a hog. Lewis’s father, Doc Lewis, was appointed to be the judge in this case. This appears to have been J. Vance Lewis’s first exposure to the legal system and its place in his narrative implies that it had some significant influence in the outcome of his future. His father had served well in the trial, and his final word about when a pig becomes a hog convinced the jury that Benjamin was innocent. Benjamin had testified that he killed the pig after he had seen it nursing. After the trail, J. Vance Lewis overheard Mr. Cage remark that Doc was a “born lawyer”. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「J. Vance Lewis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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