 Modern critics have connected the novella 's themes of racial division to a violent episode in Port Jervis ' history . On June 2 , 1892 , an African @-@ American man named Robert Lewis was lynched for allegedly assaulting a local white woman . On his way to the Port Jervis jail , Lewis was set upon by a mob of several hundred men who dragged him through the town , beat him and hanged him from a tree . William Howe Crane lived within sight of where the lynching took place and was one of the few men , together with the chief of police , who attempted to intervene . Although Stephen Crane was not present , there were detailed accounts published in both the Port Jervis Gazette and the New York Tribune , and Crane contributed to the Tribune at the time . The Gazette marked the day of Lewis ' lynching as " one of the most disgraceful scenes that was ever enacted in Port Jervis " , and activist Ida B. Wells launched a campaign to investigate the murder as well as the widespread theory that Lewis was set up . Of the 1 @,@ 134 reported lynchings throughout the United States between 1882 and 1899 , Lewis was the only black man to be lynched in New York . 
