Mark Metzler Sawin

The details surrounding George Newman’s writing of A Miserable Revenge are largely unknown. The manuscript is undated, but handwriting analysis and the dates used within the story provide strong evidence that it was written in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Assuming this date range is correct, where it was written also becomes clear: In the fall of 1875, Newman moved to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where, except for a few brief periods, he lived until his death in 1944.

Answering why the book was written is more difficult. The book mirrors the sensational stories of the times—the dime novel thrillers full of scheming villains, truehearted lovers, and cunning heroes, all pulled together in dark mysteries, wrenching drama, and outrageous plot twists. These novels were the major recreational medium of the time, and multiple textual clues in Newman’s narrative, as well as references in his surviving correspondence, show that he enjoyed this genre. As for his intentions for the manuscript, there is no evidence that he ever attempted to publish it, or even that he gave it to friends or family to read.

What we do know is that George Newman was not like the predominantly white, middle-class dime novel readers and writers of his era. During the years he wrote this manuscript, he was an ambitious, well-educated Black leader working tirelessly to advance the educational, social, and political status of his Black community amid the complex and turbulent politics of Reconstruction-era Virginia. This context may help explain the idiosyncrasies in his narrative.

For most modern readers, Newman’s story contains two obvious plot flaws. First, at many points, characters are inexplicably incapable of recognizing people they intimately know when they meet them in a new context. However, as soon as the identities are revealed, they fully recognize and accept them without any sign of finding this unsettling or even odd. Second, villainous characters do horrific things and refuse to confess or seek forgiveness even when their guilt is forcibly exposed. However, when their crimes are exposed, their victims immediately forgive them, and the villains become kind and trustworthy citizens of a restored society. These two plot devices simply don’t ring true to most readers: People in the real world don’t forgive—they seek revenge! Newman’s title, A Miserable Revenge, shows he understood this, but his text shows something different. The narrative is ultimately one of restoration and forgiveness—indeed, the term “forgive” is used more than twice as often as “revenge” throughout the story. As an ambitious Black man living in a society where racial slavery had been the norm for more than two hundred years and Jim Crow segregation was stripping away the rights gained by the Civil War and becoming the new normal, Newman took a more pragmatic stance, embracing forgiveness (or at least tolerance) as a more practical way forward than seeking even justified revenge.

In this essay, I use government records, newspaper articles, and surviving documents to reconstruct George Newman’s reality in Harrisonburg, Virginia, during the decade when he wrote A Miserable Revenge. Between 1875 and 1885, he went from being a twenty-year-old single man who had just come to town to being a married, well-respected school principal, Methodist minister, and political activist who exercised significant influence in the local educational, civic, and political arenas. His successes came not from angry protest, hot rhetoric, or vengeful demands, but from tact, poise, compromise, and a discomfiting willingness to work with people who at times actively opposed all he most valued—traits that may help explain the oddly blind forgiveness pervasive in A Miserable Revenge.

 

The Life of George Newman

On February 4, 1855, George Newman was born near the town of Winchester, the seat of Frederick County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. In 1850, that region’s almost sixteen thousand inhabitants were four-fifths white and one-fifth Black. George’s parents, Elias and Jane Newman, were among the area’s significant but still uncommon free Black population—72 percent of the Black population in their area was enslaved.^[1] When George was born, it was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read or write, and though the Newmans were free, it didn’t matter: For all children, Black and white, educational options were extremely limited, as there were no public schools in Virginia. But the Newmans were convinced that education was the best way to better their children’s lives, so they apprenticed them to white families who promised to teach them the basics of reading, writing, and math. The 1860 census shows both George and his younger brother James living with white landowner William Parnell near the border of Frederick and Clarke counties. While no further documents from George’s early life survive, family stories recorded by his granddaughter Ruth Toliver note that after the Civil War, George went to Washington, DC, where several of his older siblings had settled to seek careers and further their education. The first Black school in Washington, DC, opened in 1807, and by the time of the Civil War, 1,200 Black children were attending primary schools in the city. Family memory holds that George attended one of the district’s first high schools at Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church and that he quickly proved himself a strong scholar and a standout in religion, piano, and voice. Newman’s later memoirs record that he also took an interest in politics, frequently visiting Congress to watch lawmakers in action.^[2]

By 1873, Newman had enough education to accept a position at a newly opened school for Black students in Linden, Virginia, about sixty miles west of Washington, DC, at the border of Warren and Fauquier counties. Though only eighteen years old, he was solely responsible for this small school, housed in the basement of the Mt. Paran Church. In a letter he wrote to his brother Samuel on April 14, 1874, he noted that he was “getting along very well,” but was starting to feel isolated tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains: “I am getting dreadfully tired of those lonesome hills.” He had visited his parents over Easter, a journey of about thirty miles along the Virginia Midland, and then Baltimore and Ohio rail lines that ran from Linden to Strasburg and up the Shenandoah Valley to Winchester. He reported that he had some “dog fun [with] all the ladies,” and bragged to his brother that he could “now chat a girl crazy”—with youthful bravado, he signed the letter “Sir Geo. A. Newman.”^[3]

His letter ends with a poem in the postscript that contains the dramatic refrain “I’m dying, Katrin, dying,” concluding with the humorous line: “I’m dying, Katrin, dying. I’m dying my mustache!” This little ditty was frequently reprinted in newspapers and magazines in the early 1870s, but was most prominently featured in the widely read publications of Frank Leslie’s press out of Boston. Printing serialized sensational fiction and illustrations of the latest news, trends, and fashions, Frank Leslie’s publications were popular among America’s young readers, who passed editions around for years. The publisher encouraged this book-like consumption of their periodicals by repackaging bound annual volumes of their stories and illustrations for easy circulation. That Newman quotes this poem is telling because it suggests that some of the odd phrases and grandiose linguistic stylings in A Miserable Revenge may have come from his reading of Frank Leslie’s publications. For example, Newman writes: “The eventful night had passed, and the great Day God was slowly but surely making his appearance in the Oriental horizon” (59). The odd phrase “Oriental horizon” appears in only a few other places in print. One of these is in a story in Frank Leslie’s Pleasant Hours, in which an aristocratic man says, “when the aurora of morn shall again illuminate the Oriental horizon, I will award you a pecuniary compensation for your amiable hospitality.” In this same edition, there is also a sensational story called “A Mean Revenge.” Newman’s use of such flowery language and peculiar phrasings, coupled with his copying of this pun-fueled poem, suggests he was an active consumer of Frank Leslie’s publications.^[4]

 

Harrisonburg in the 1870s

By 1875, George Newman had moved to Harrisonburg, Virginia, to become the principal of the Whipple School, which the Black population had established with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1866. By January 1868, they had acquired land along Blacks Run on Rock Street and built a school building—the first public school house in Harrisonburg, for though there were private white schools, it predated the white public schools constructed in the area. Starting in 1866, classes were held in an upper room of the Scanlon Hotel by two white sisters from New England, Martha W. Smith and Phoebe P. Libby, working under the supervision of the Freedmen’s Bureau and sponsored by Free Baptist and Presbyterian mission agencies. George Howard, a Black man from Washington, DC, also began teaching classes, and with him the enrollment jumped—he was joined by Elizabeth James, a white woman from Massachusetts who came to Harrisonburg with her daughter, Ida, and stayed on for several years to teach. In 1870, the US government began dismantling the Freedmen’s Bureau as Southern states launched their own school boards to provide for Black education—a requirement for all Confederate states to rejoin the Union. In response, the Whipple School changed format. Harrisonburg’s school board first met in 1871 and began renting the Whipple School building from the Black community while also providing salaries for its teachers. In 1871, they hired Mary F. Jackson, the daughter of Giles A. Jackson, an educated Black man who had been running a Freedmen’s Bureau school in Staunton, Virginia, since the late 1860s. Elizabeth James was replaced by James Peterson of Boston in 1873, but he left the next year, and from that point forward the school was staffed exclusively by Black teachers and administrators. Mary Jackson was joined for a year by Robert Scott Jr., a Black man from Charlottesville who ran a Freedmen’s Bureau school in New Kent County east of Richmond before coming to Harrisonburg. In 1875, George Newman was hired, and his initial six-year tenure there brought stability as he oversaw the school’s growth and hired its long-time faculty, including Lucy F. Simms, the noted educator and namesake of Harrisonburg’s later Black school, which was in service until public education was finally desegregated in 1965. Though Newman was still very young, his role as principal put him at the center of Harrisonburg’s Black civic life.^[5]

The environment George Newman entered in September 1875 was an energetic and growing cacophony of social, political, and economic change. The Civil War was just a decade in the past, and its emotional and physical wounds were still painfully apparent. Thousands of Union and Confederate troops had marched through Harrisonburg along the Valley Pike during the war, crisscrossing the area with battles and skirmishes, but the true pain came late in the war, when General Ulysses S. Grant ordered Major General Philip Sheridan to burn the Shenandoah Valley. Sheridan understood this plan well, noting, “Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war; but it is not. Reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life.”^[6] During September and October of 1864, his troops marched from Staunton to Strasburg, burning barns, mills, fields, and storehouses across two thousand square miles. Harrisonburg sat in the smoldering center, its agricultural economy destroyed.^[7]

This devastation, followed by US military occupation until Virginia finally rejoined the Union in 1870, made much of the area’s white population hostile toward the US federal government. However, local sympathies were complicated in Harrisonburg, because, although Virginia was the last state to rejoin the Union, it had also been the last to secede, and had done so only after months of heated debate. Its northern and western counties were culturally and economically Appalachian, not Southern, and far less economically reliant on enslaved labor; they thus opposed leaving the Union. When the Civil War began, these counties seceded not from the Union, but from Virginia, creating the new state of West Virginia in 1863. Rockingham County, with Harrisonburg as its county seat, wound up staying with Virginia, but just barely, and more because of geography than sentiment. Most of the counties that became West Virginia had enslaved populations under 10 percent, while those that remained in Virginia averaged over 40 percent. With an enslaved population of only 10 percent and a population more historically and culturally Appalachian than Southern, by sentiment, Rockingham County was more aligned with West Virginia than Virginia. Indeed, when Virginia finally did vote to secede, Rockingham’s delegate to the Virginia Assembly united with the counties that became West Virginia and refused to sign the secession document. However, when the split happened, Virginia kept the Shenandoah Valley, and the border thus became the ridge of the Alleghenies, putting Rockingham on the Virginia side of the divide.^[8]

Thus, the secession and division of the state, war and the burning of the Valley, slavery and emancipation, and reunification and Reconstruction were still reverberating in Harrisonburg in the 1870s as it tried to rebuild its economy and reestablish normalcy. Given the momentous end of more than two hundred years of bondage, these changes were especially profound for the city’s Black citizens. In the decades before the Civil War, Harrisonburg’s Black population had closely matched that of the county at large, hovering around 12 to 15 percent, with the vast majority of that population enslaved (83 percent in 1850). But by 1860, at the start of the war, that had changed, as Harrisonburg’s Black population jumped to almost 28 percent, driven largely by a marked increase in its free Black population, which jumped to 8 percent of its total population. Then, in the next two decades, while Harrisonburg’s white population grew by 70 percent, its Black population grew at nearly three times that rate, so that by 1880 its population was 38.4 percent Black—the highest in Harrisonburg’s history.

This rapid growth of Harrisonburg’s Black population also came at a time of huge political change caused by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution and the policies of Reconstruction—laws Virginia was forced to ratify to reenter the Union. These freed the Black population, made them citizens, required schools for their children, and guaranteed their rights to vote and participate in civic (but not social) life. However, by 1900 many of these rights were stripped away with the passage of Jim Crow laws and the legalization of “separate but equal” segregation—violations of the post–Civil War amendments that sparked another century and more of Black struggle for full rights and citizenship. This second, twentieth-century, struggle against the cruelty and violence of segregation has caused a sort of historical amnesia, however, obscuring the tumultuous but often triumphant years of the 1870s and 1880s, when Black citizens made huge strides toward equality through their tenacity, hard work, and strained political and social bargains.

To put this lost era in perspective, let’s look at a few realities of the 1870s that may strike twenty-first-century readers as surprising. When George Newman arrived in Harrisonburg, there was already a thriving Black community that included Black-owned businesses dating back to the 1820s. And in the decade since emancipation, the community had expanded its infrastructure substantially, constructing two church buildings and its own schoolhouse staffed with well-educated Black teachers, and founding multiple businesses and civic organizations that fulfilled the insurance and banking needs for its growing middle class. It regularly held festivals and parades attended by both Blacks and whites, some of which were so large they necessitated the arrangement of special rail service to bring in guests from Alexandria, Georgetown, and Washington, DC. With Harrisonburg’s white population still bitter about US federal power, Black civic leaders ran the Fourth of July celebrations during the 1870s, and these events were kept orderly by white and Black police officers working together. Community parades included the city’s Black-run firefighting company, and public events often included speeches featuring Black pastors, civic leaders, and business owners. By 1880, Harrisonburg’s Conservative newspapers, the Rockingham Register and Old Commonwealth, were joined by a pro-Republican Black newspaper, The Virginia Post.^[9]

These remarkable achievements were supported by some progressive white citizens, but they always came at a price because the majority of Harrisonburg’s white population stubbornly, and at times violently, clung to social and economic control. All the major factories and businesses of the city were white-owned, and most eating and drinking establishments remained white-only despite the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that was designed to guarantee equal access. The city had Black police officers, but they were part of a legal system that disproportionately incarcerated and fined Harrisonburg’s Black citizens, and frequently whipped Black but not white citizens. In 1876, Virginia’s Black population was more than four times as likely to be in the state penitentiary than their white counterparts. (Tragically, this rate was better than the US average in 2020, when Black people were five times more likely to be incarcerated.)^[10] Racial lines were maintained by horrifically violent acts as well: In March 1878, Charlotte Harris, a Black woman from Harrisonburg, was lynched and her body left hanging from an oak tree near town for several days as a gruesome reminder of white control.^[11]

Perhaps most importantly, to the white population, the idea of Black citizens in prominent positions or professions of influence, let alone the notion of true racial equality, remained inconceivable because of the customs, traditions, and justifications forged by two centuries of living in a society that defined Black humans as property. Laws can change quickly; customs and traditions do not. After the Civil War, Black citizens gained legal rights, and their voting power forced accommodations to be made for their participation in civic life, but these new laws did not change the long-held assumptions of racial superiority among the white population. This reality is apparent in almost every article and editorial in Harrisonburg’s white newspapers of the time. Assumed white superiority was expressed bluntly in an 1870 Rockingham Register article with the tellingly proprietary title “Our Colored People.” Though it was ostensibly about the Black population’s new church and civic societies, it began by praising the town’s “Negroes” for their passivity during the war, noting that they “were not false to the South, turning against their owners and best friends, but, in many cases, cheerfully entering the Confederate army as the willing and faithful servants of those who had a right to control them.” It noted that after the war, while Black people were “proud of their freedom,” they did not allow it to “exhibit itself in insolent airs and intrusions upon the social rights and privileges of the whites.” It then commended the current Black population for its wisdom in understanding “what too many of them, in other parts of the South have yet to learn, that their true policy lies in the cultivation of harmony and good feeling with their white friends.”^[12]

In a more subtle example, the Rockingham Register commended Black organizers for putting on an impressive Fourth of July event when the white population refused to do so, seeing the United States not as their country, but as their oppressor. It admitted understanding why the Black population would “feel like rejoicing over some of the results of our hapless and fruitless struggle for separation and independence,” but it also expressed surprise that they were so “disposed to rejoice in their disenthralment from bonds of slavery.” It addressed its “‘fellow citizens of African descent,’” but by putting those words in quotes, it also implied the ironic nature of the idea of Black “fellow citizens.” Then, with damning praise, it marveled that there was “no drunkenness, no rudeness, no impudent, swaggering airs.” Tellingly, it expressed its highest praise for the event’s dinner, “which our colored friends know so well how to prepare,” and found its physical arrangement “a most happy one, the table for the whites being placed on one side of the Clerk’s office, and that for the colored people on the other.” This story contrasts starkly with its coverage of another group of Black Virginians who, a few years later, chose to celebrate the Confederacy’s defeat and their resulting freedom. It railed against these “fool niggers,” describing them as “the dirtiest, greasiest, and lousiest negroes in the city,” and made it clear that this was not how proper Black folks were to behave, stating that “not a solitary respectable colored man was to be found among the howling, motley crew.” So, while Harrisonburg’s white newspapers did acknowledge their Black citizens’ efforts and “delighted to see them endeavoring,” they always did so with the presumption that such endeavors would never actually mean true equality.^[13]

 

George Newman and Virginian Politics
in the 1870s and 1880s

This was the context when George Newman took charge of the Whipple School in 1875, and it was something he had to immediately contend with because, though he was only twenty years old, his role made him a civic leader. The school building he was responsible for was not just an educational facility, but the community’s civic gathering place, and the teachers and students under his charge (some of whom were adults) were recognized leaders from the major families of the community. Ulysses G. Wilson, who grew up in the community and later served as one of its educational leaders, wrote that “a generation of Negroes strove for mental development” during the 1870s, and “this little wooden structure . . . was the rendezvous of the colored citizens for quite a variety of purposes,” serving as church, school, courthouse, and meeting hall. Wilson remembered:

Here were held old-time devotion meetings, in which our fathers sang and prayed to the God in whom they trusted. Here were held the weekly sociables and festivals. Here were held the political club meetings where many an ambitious political Moses essayed to lead his sable hosts to the land of promise. Here were held night schools and singing schools. In fact no building has ever been erected in the town of Harrisonburg the name of which recalls so many varied past interests or causes . . . than the “little old school house by the creek.”^[14]

George Newman held the keys to this building, and it was under his care, putting him at the epicenter of the Black community.

Emboldened by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that promised to “protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights,” Harrisonburg’s Black community began to prepare for the 1876 national election. Eighty Black men from the community gathered at the Whipple School on March 24, 1876, joined by nine Republican-appointed federal officers from the area (all white), as well as by John Francis Lewis, Rockingham County’s most prominent politician.^[15] Lewis and the Republican-appointed officials were seen as sympathetic but not fully trustworthy allies. From the time Virginia rejoined in the Union in 1870 until 1875, Lewis had been a US senator, and as a Republican had supported Congressional Reconstruction laws that helped establish the Freedmen’s Bureau and protect Black rights. But the Black community knew him as a more complicated figure—before the war, he was part of one of the largest slave-holding families in the Valley, and he had owned at least one Black woman, whom he kept as a servant. Earlier that year, Lewis had lost his Senate seat, but he had then been appointed US Marshal for the western district of Virginia by President Grant.^[16]

Harrisonburg’s Black citizens, having voted in eight of the state’s yearly elections by 1875, had grown dubious of the Republican Party’s intentions, questioning the sincerity of their pledges to support the welfare of Black citizens. At the meeting in the Whipple School, Joseph T. Williams directly addressed this concern. He was arguably the Black citizen Harrisonburg’s white leaders most knew and admired, and this gave him influence. He was a light-skinned “mulatto,” who owned and ran the town’s high-end barber shop where the city’s white politicians and businessmen went multiple times each week, chatting with “Joe” as they got their faces shaved and shoes shined. These connections served Williams well—the mayor appointed him as the city’s first Black police officer, and by 1875 he had gained enough money and clout to buy the house of a prominent white attorney in one of Harrisonburg’s nicest neighborhoods. A few years earlier, the conservative Rockingham Register praised him for telling his brethren that he “shaved for ten cents, and voted as he pleased” and was not beholden to the Republican ticket.^[17] But by 1876, Williams was fed up. He had gained wealth and status, but only to a point. His job as an “officer of the law” frequently meant arresting his Black neighbors on dubious charges, and it was then he who had to execute the judge’s sentences—often a public lashing by whip—a demeaning reminder of the horrors of enslavement. So, with a white former US senator in Harrisonburg’s Black schoolhouse, Williams was blunt. He asked “why it was that the colored people, who did the voting, were not given some of the offices,” pointing out that when Republicans won, all the choice government appointments “were given to white Republicans and the colored Republicans entirely ignored.” He also noted the Republican Party’s silence about the daily humiliations suffered by the Black community, and made it clear that such behavior would not be tolerated—they did not have to vote for Republicans. This worked. Lewis made a conciliatory speech, and by the end of the meeting, these eighty Black citizens and ten white federal appointees nominated Giles Jackson (a Black educator and father of Mary F. Jackson, a teacher at the Whipple School) to serve with John Lewis as voting representatives to the upcoming state-level convention.^[18]

This was a remarkable scene: Black citizens were seeking to gain and protect their rights by uniting with a white leader—a man who came from a family that had likely enslaved some of them just a decade before. And, in some ways, it worked. Though they did not carry Virginia for the Republicans that year, it helped them build a power base from which they would exercise greater influence in the future. And there was work to be done. The 1876 election was fierce and ugly. It had the highest voter turnout in US history, with 82.6 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, but it was also marred by the reality that white Southerners had prevented thousands of Black Republicans from voting by intimidation and fraud, unfairly giving Democrat Samuel Tilden the majority of the popular vote. Republicans contested the electoral college vote, and it took five months of Congressional wrangling before a shady, behind-the-scenes compromise was finally struck. This put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, but with the promise that all federal troops would be removed from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction and surrendering several Southern states to white Democratic control. In the midst of the months of election uncertainty, the Rockingham Register published an article entitled “KEEP COOL,” telling Harrisonburg citizens that “the conflicting partisans should now meet each other as citizens.” It called for “the preservation of peace and law and order,” saying: “The election is over and the Negro is still free, still has his school taxes paid, still has his vote.” But the “still” in those conciliatory sentences concealed a clear threat—if elections went differently, such rights may not remain.^[19] This was the reality that soon faced George Newman, for it was he who picked up the political torch when Joseph T. Williams left the community, moving north after the election compromise.^[20]

By 1877, George Newman’s stature was increasing beyond his status as principal of the school. In June, he married Margaret (“Maggie”) Dallard, the daughter of Ambrose Dallard, a formerly enslaved man who, along with his twin brother Reuben, was one of the first Black property holders in Harrisonburg after the Civil War. Newman also became a leader in Harrisonburg’s John Wesley Methodist Church, serving on many of its major committees as it strove to build a new church, and becoming its unofficial historian by pulling together the stories of its founding from its earliest members. During this time, he also became an ordained minister—his children fondly remembered traveling with him as he served as an itinerant Methodist minister, preaching at the many small churches scattered throughout the area. He also moved beyond the Methodist church, working to help establish a United Brethren in Christ Church with his father-in-law, Ambrose Dallard. Ulysses G. Wilson, one of Newman’s students, and later a colleague, noted that the community regarded him as “a painstaking instructor, a constant student, a valuable churchman, and not a few of our most successful young men along literary lines bless him for the habit of persistent, systematic study acquired under his tutorship.”^[21]

It is thus not surprising that in the tense months following Charlotte Harris’s lynching in 1878, Newman emerged as one of the community’s leaders, becoming the “Grand Secretary” of the Independent Sons and Daughters of Purity, Harrisonburg’s largest Black civic organization. He, along with his brother-in-law James W. Cochran, a Black shoemaker who owned his own store and was sixteen years Newman’s senior, headed a large fundraising festival for the organization in August at Conrad’s Store (now Elkton, Virginia), rallying chapters from across the region. It drew hundreds of participants, and the papers noted that Newman’s address to the crowd was “well-prepared, . . . attentively listened to, and well received by all present.” The event was only marred by the appearance of white “hucksters” who undermined the fair’s fundraising efforts by selling their own “stale cakes . . . sour apples, and ice cream slops half frozen.” The white reporter covering the event condemned such tricks, calling them “an indignity to the colored people,” and was “surprised by the patience and forbearance with which it was borne by them.” He clearly did not consider the consequences of a Black group running off white people—the Black community, still remembering Charlotte Harris’s body hanging from a tree six months earlier, did not have that luxury.^[22]

Around the time of this celebration, the organization also decided to celebrate Emancipation Day, a controversial and provocative act in the area. First celebrated in Washington, DC, in 1864, it became a tradition to mark Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation with parades and speeches, making it an unofficial holiday among Black communities. But such a holiday was not well tolerated by the white citizens of Virginia. For example, in Warrenton, Virginia, when Black citizens chose to celebrate the event, the local white magistrates marked the occasion by also setting it as the day the city would publicly execute a Black man. When a celebration was announced in Harrisonburg, the white newspaper printed an editorial suggesting that Black citizens were not united in its support, and implied that many opposed it. But the Black community responded quickly, holding a large meeting at the schoolhouse to refute this “disagreement that was supposed to have been in existence.” They sent word to the newspapers that the community had unanimously approved a resolution that “we the citizens of Harrisonburg endorse the actions of the committee . . . to carry on the celebration of ‘Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.’” George Newman was among the ten prominent Black citizens to sign the document, and it was written up and submitted to the paper by one of his young teachers, J. W. Coles, who wrote: “I close, hoping the public will be satisfied as to the coming celebration.”^[23]

By the end of 1878, George Newman was not only helping lead Harrisonburg’s Black community, but serving in national leadership roles as well. As Grand Secretary of the Independent Sons and Daughters of Purity, he attended their annual meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, where representatives from Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and Michigan were present. His reports showed that the society had added sixteen new lodges and 550 new members that year, and was going forward with plans to expand its cooperative life insurance company, which in 1878 had paid out $1,500 and ended the year with $3,000 still in reserves.^[24] It is through this organization that Newman seems to have met the influential Black leader Robert H. Robinson. Robinson’s grandmother Caroline Branham was George Washington’s personal slave. Shortly after Robert’s birth, she arranged with the Washington family to have her grandson educated and freed. They agreed, selling him to a Quaker family in 1827 under the agreement that they apprentice him to professionals who would give him a good education. So, when Robert turned twenty-one in 1846, he was freed and thereafter dedicated his life to the abolition of slavery and the expansion of Black rights.^[25] He became a prominent minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Grand Master of the Black Masonic orders in Washington, DC. Living in Alexandria in 1864, he and his sons, Robert B. and Magnus L., launched the first Emancipation Day celebration—an event that attracted the attention of Frederick Douglass and his son Frederick Douglass Jr., both of whom became close family friends. Apparently impressed by the vibrant activities of the Black population in the Shenandoah Valley, the Robinson family moved to Staunton in 1878, and then to Harrisonburg in 1879, bringing with them their substantial political weight and connections. It was their influence that brought Frederick Douglass to speak in Staunton and visit Harrisonburg in April 1879, at which time Robert H. was serving as a Methodist minister and his sons were serving as teachers. Becoming well established in Harrisonburg by 1880, and with the presidential election looming, Robert B. and Magnus launched Harrisonburg’s first Black-owned newspaper, The Virginia Post, to support the Republican Party in the area.^[26]

With the powerful new support of the Robinson family, as well as the highly motivated community surrounding him, George Newman helped lead a far more aggressive political push that was then emerging in Virginia around the issue of “readjustment” of the state’s debt and Black rights. Though only twenty-four years old, he was one of the primary people his community turned to for political guidance and leadership. This is indicated by the city council election results of the summer of 1879: Though he did not run for office, George Newman received thirty votes—the only Black man to receive any votes, and more votes than some white men who were running.^[27] As the new school year was set to begin in November, he was again appointed principal, with A. C. Coles and Lucy Simms as his first and second assistants, respectively. Then, in March 1880, the Organization of Colored Republicans officially met in Harrisonburg, with shoemaker businessman James W. Cochran serving as president, teacher John W. Coles as secretary, and George Newman as assistant secretary. Despite his less prominent official role, Newman gave the evening’s speech, pushing for resolutions to gain them delegates at the state convention in April.^[28] This was not the only Republican organization he attended; he was also part of the general Republican County Convention, made up of white Republicans that met at the courthouse few weeks later. He became the only Black member of their executive committee, serving as secretary. Through his influence, the group took the recommendations of the “Colored Republicans” seriously, and in the end nominated former senator John F. Lewis as one of their delegates and Black business leader James W. Cochran as the other, with George Newman serving as Cochran’s alternate.^[29]

The years between 1879 and 1883, when George Newman was highly involved with politics, included one of the most radical and volatile moments in Virginia’s political history. Virginia was divided between Democrats and Republicans, but when Virginia was still struggling to rejoin the Union in the late 1860s, a statewide “Conservative” Party that strongly rejected federal authority also emerged. This group was the dominant political force in Virginia in the early 1870s, uniting most white voters, whether Democrat or Republican, in state contests. However, this unified voting bloc began to split over the huge debt Virginia had accrued during the Civil War, which totaled more than $45.6 million in 1871. Virginia’s wealthy planter class and business elites, many of whom held the bonds that funded the state debt, pushed through legislation that agreed to repay the debt at 6 percent interest, arguing that it would stabilize the state’s finances and encourage investment and growth from outside sources. But the debt was so high that this “Funding Act” of 1871 required the state to raise taxes and slash all other expenses while paying more than half its annual income to the bondholders. Small farmers and working-class white Virginians grumbled as their taxes went up while the public schools they strongly supported suddenly had their funding slashed just as they were beginning to get established. Then, when a nationwide economic collapse hit in 1873, the funding of the state debt grew increasingly painful and thus even more politically contentious. What emerged was a largely class-based “Readjuster” movement that sought to substantially “readjust” the amount the state would pay to bondholders while also reinstating strong support for the public school systems—a direct political challenge to the “Funders,” who wanted to maintain high taxes to fully fund the debt owed to bond holders. By the end of the 1870s, this Readjuster versus Funder conflict split the Conservative Party, as well as the Democratic and Republican parties in Virginia, with white farmers (“grangers”) and laboring classes, regardless of their historic party loyalties, strongly supporting the Readjusters.^[30]

William Mahone of Petersburg, Virginia, emerged as the leader of this Readjuster movement. Diminutive in size (he weighed less than a hundred pounds), but with inexhaustible energy and drive, he had been a celebrated general for the Confederacy, commanding its forces at the Battle of the Crater in 1864, which resulted in the most horrific slaughter of Black troops in the entire war.^[31] After the war, he had thrown himself into rebuilding Virginia’s economy, creating the Norfolk and Western Railroad company and becoming one of the few industrial tycoons in the state. Though originally a staunch Conservative who opposed Congress’s “radical” reforms that granted greater rights to Black citizens, he was also a deeply pragmatic man, and by the late 1870s he recognized that the best way to gain political power for the Readjusters was to court the Black citizens who controlled nearly one-third of the statewide votes. In many ways, this was an easy sell, because Black voters strongly supported increased funding of public schools and a reduction of payments to the debt—the key elements of the Readjusters’ platform. But by the late 1870s, as seen in Harrisonburg’s local politics, Black voters were also demanding greater political influence at the state and national level, in terms of funding, political positions, and rights. However, courting the Black vote created complications for the party: It risked alienating their white supporters because most white Readjusters saw increases in Black political power as a direct threat. As the poorer classes, they felt they were often in direct competition with Black workers for jobs and opportunities. In the past, this demographic had supported the Conservative Party, which had instigated humiliating policies such as public whippings and a steady disenfranchisement of Black voters via arrests for petty charges, as well as through poll taxes, gerrymandering, and intimidation. These tactics had reduced the number of Blacks in the state legislature from thirty in 1870, when Reconstruction-era rights were still protected by the federal government, to just five in 1878.^[32]

During the 1879 legislative races, both Funders and Readjusters tried to lure Black voters, with the Readjusters making strong economic arguments about better funding for Black schools and institutions, as well as lower taxes, while the Funders were benefited by the national Republican Party. Republican President Hayes publicly denounced the Readjusters, insisting that they would split the party and warning that the resulting Republican losses would cause further erosion of Black rights. These conflicting messages caused political tumult, but when the dust cleared, Black loyalty to the Republican Party triumphed. Ironically, instead of hurting the Readjusters, it wound up helping them. Virginia’s General Assembly was highly fractured because of the election, with no single party controlling a majority of the votes, so Mahone began an intensive lobbying effort, strongly courting the fourteen new Black Republican Assembly members, promising to abolish public whippings, fund Black schools and institutions, and provide government posts to Black citizens if they would support his Readjuster agenda. This worked, and the combined Readjuster-Republican bloc came to control the legislature that session, sending William Mahone to Washington as Virginia’s newly appointed senator.^[33]

These new political realities presented a strange challenge to George Newman. He and his Black community longed for true equality, and this new Funder-Readjuster feud suddenly made them politically powerful because it further fractured the white vote, giving a united Black vote more power in determining the outcome of state elections. To gain Black support, Mahone and his Readjusters were promising things that had never been promised before—government positions, equal pay for Black teachers, fully funded schools, and, most shockingly, an end to the color line. To prove their sincerity, the Readjusters did something Republicans never had—they opened their doors not just to their meetings, but also to their clubs and social events, welcoming full Black participation. They were also delivering in actual numbers of Black candidates elected to office. In the early 1870s, two amendments to the Virginia Constitution put restrictions on many Black men’s ability to vote, and because of that, in 1877 only eight Black candidates won seats in the General Assembly. But with the support of the Readjusters in 1879, fifteen were elected, and in 1881 another thirteen, more than tripling Black representation at the state level. In Washington, Mahone defied the tradition of the “Solid South” by abandoning the Democratic caucus and casting his votes with the Black-supported Republican Party.^[34] In 1880, Newman remained loyal to the Republican Party, helping lead a major rally for the Garfield and Arthur ticket. But while Black businessman James W. Cochran, Newman’s frequent political partner, advised the crowd to “stand square in this campaign” and vote Republican, “the only true ticket for the colored man,” Newman was far more tempered. His community recognized him as a passionate political activist, but also as an educator and a man of God—a devout leader of the John Wesley Methodist Church. His speech reflected all those roles, encouraging the crowd to focus on the higher good that went beyond party politics, advising them “to study the Bible, take that as a guide, to aim high in life, and to try to be useful to our fellow-man.”^[35] It seems he was conflicted about the best course of action to take in the 1880 election—one that in Rockingham County wound up being carried not by the Republicans or the Democrats, but by Mahone’s Readjusters. Harrisonburg’s John Paul, a wealthy white attorney who served in the Confederate Army, had become a staunch supporter of greater rights for Black citizens after he returned from the Civil War. He ran for office in 1878 and lost, but under Mahone’s influence, he ran again, this time as a Readjuster candidate, and won, becoming Virginia’s US congressman for the seventh district. Once in office, he publicly demanded an “end to the barriers of prejudice” and echoed Mahone’s call to end “all race distinctions” in Virginia law.^[36]

This strong support of Black rights changed the way Newman saw the political landscape. William Mahone and John Paul had both been high-ranking Confederate officers who fought a war to keep people who looked like him enslaved, and both came from the elite white classes that had historically barred him and his Black community from social and civic engagement. But now, they were advocating for him. Indeed, to his surprise, in May 1881 he received notice that through Mahone and Paul’s influence, he had been made a US Storekeeper and Gauger—a federal position of the Internal Revenue Service that put him in charge of the sale and taxation of liquor for the district. He was the first Black person in the region to receive a federal position, and it was proof positive that the Readjusters were living up to their promises.^[37]

From that point forward, Newman changed his political allegiance, still working within the Republican Party, but striving to pull it into a “mixed ticket” with the Readjusters. This caused a rift between him and James W. Cochran, who was unwilling to embrace Mahone and his movement. In an attempt to quietly get his own way, Cochran, as the seventh district’s official representative, declared its full support for the straight Republican ticket in early June 1881. When news of this got back to Harrisonburg, Newman and his fellow Readjusters rallied the Black citizens and forced a vote to see if such representation was indeed accurate. It was not. They declared that Cochran’s actions “falsely represented ninety per cent of the colored Republicans of the District,” and then unanimously voted for two resolutions: the first to “denounce the action of Mr. Cochran, and say he had no authority for making such a statement”; the second stating that they would “support the mixed ticket, unless the wisdom of the Republican State Convention shall reveal a better plan.”^[38] In the following months, the Black community continued to strongly support this “mixed ticket” of Republicans and Readjusters, widely circulating a flier that noted that a full convention of Black leaders had met in Washington, DC, and declared that they “fully endorse [William Mahone’s] manly course and feel rejoiced that Virginia has at last sent a representative who rises above party prejudices, and favors justice to all men regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It thus proclaimed that Mahone had their “hearty support and co-operation in all things pertaining to this patriotic end.”^[39]

Newman and his fellow “mixed ticket” supporters successfully carried both the region and state for the Readjuster Party in the 1881 election, voting in William E. Cameron as governor and Rockingham County’s own John Francis Lewis as lieutenant governor. Cameron was a former Confederate officer and lifelong Democrat before he joined the Readjusters; Lewis was a pro-Unionist who had refused to vote for secession, and then a Republican US senator before he too joined the Readjusters. Their joint win demonstrated the Readjusters’ ability to unite formerly divided groups. Working together with other state and federal Readjusters, such as John Paul and William Mahone, they extended this unification across color lines as well, creating major improvements for the state’s poor white and Black populations. For example, they helped secure a federal bill that earmarked $50,000 each for the construction of public buildings in Abingdon and Harrisonburg, Virginia—this money was used to construct the new Effinger Street Colored School in Harrisonburg in 1883. At the state level, Cameron, Lewis, and the Readjusters in the General Assembly pushed forward racial-integration programs in several areas and passed legislation for Black land-grant colleges that created Virginia State University in Petersburg in 1882.^[40]

Sadly, however, this “combination” approach that brought together poor whites and Blacks, Republicans and Democrats, struggled to remain coherent and strong. By 1883, Conservatives and Funders successfully stoked racial fears among whites, insisting that if Readjusters had their way, schools would soon be integrated and “mixed” marriages made legal—charges that were accurate, as some Readjusters were advocating for exactly that kind of destruction of the “color line.” But this was too much for most white Virginians, even within the Readjuster Party. For example, when liberal United Brethren minister, editor, and Readjuster A. P. Funkhouser ran for school superintendent in Harrisonburg, the white community protested. Chief among their objections was that he and his family had dined with a Black minister in their home, showing him “to be in favor of negro social equality, which is the basis of mixed schools.”^[41] Funkhouser received violent threats. Such intimidation was then common, as Funders threatened to kill Blacks who voted against their candidates. This threat became a reality in Danville, Virginia, where four Black Readjusters were shot and killed in the days leading up to the 1883 election, an act that kept most Black citizens away from the polls. Through such intimidation, the Funders won the election by twenty thousand votes; after that, the Readjuster Party began to wane: They lost even more seats in 1884 and the governorship in 1885.^[42]

But such intimidation did not stop Black Virginians’ political aspirations. They remained highly active, and George Newman remained at the forefront of their efforts. The Readjusters’ political losses in 1885 caused Newman to be removed from his lucrative position as Storekeeper and Gauger for his district, but he took this in stride, moving back to his lifelong educational profession, becoming a principal first in Staunton, Virginia, and then the next year at Harrisonburg’s new Effinger Street School, which had been built with funds secured through his and other Black leaders’ work with the Readjuster Party. He continued to politically push for educational gains, and in 1887 another Black primary school was opened in the county—the Newtown School in Elkton, where several of his children would later teach. In 1887, he was also successful in uniting the area’s Black voters to carry local elections for the Republicans, an effort that was noticed even outside of Virginia. Thus, when Republicans won the 1888 presidential election, many local newspapers speculated that Newman would become the local postmaster, though this never came to fruition.^[43]

These politically tumultuous times were also chaotic years in Newman’s personal life, as on March 24, 1887, his wife Maggie died of consumption, leaving him alone with four young children. Stability returned when he married Maggie’s younger sister Mary Dallard on May 16, 1888, though his life remained busy. Amid all of this family change, he continued to serve not only as principal of the Effinger Street School, but also as one of the pastors of the Methodist Episcopal church, and as a political workhorse, promoting the Readjuster and Republican parties at local and national levels. Soon after remarrying, he spent the summer months of 1888 in Washington, DC, lobbying hard for funding of Black public education and promoting Black influence in Virginian politics. He kept up this pressure, campaigning hard in the 1889 Virginia elections to help unite the Black vote. He wrote editorials emphasizing that “it is especially desirable that the colored Virginians should consolidate” and encouraging them not to focus on divisive rhetoric that often alienated and distracted Black voters, but to instead “lay aside all prejudice and join hands for success,” reminding them that the parties are “political and not social” and to “remember that nothing succeeds like success.” Putting up with prejudice, ignorance, and even anti-Black “allies” to achieve political goals was certainly galling, but it worked. John Mercer Langston was elected, becoming the last Black Virginian to serve in the US Congress for over one hundred years; the next elected in 1993.^[44] For these political efforts, Newman was again rewarded: In May 1890, local newspapers noted that George A. Newman, the “principal of the colored public school here, and a local politician of some note,” had been made a Deputy US Marshal and sent to the Oklahoma Territory. In this role, he was armed, given a badge, and sent by the federal justice system to serve subpoenas, writs, and warrants, and to arrest, hold, and transfer prisoners for trial. His meticulously kept records show that between May 1890 and August 1891 this job took him to Washington, DC, Illinois, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Alabama.^[45]

 

The Context of A Miserable Revenge

George Newman’s political and civic efforts from the time he came to Harrisonburg in 1875, through his work with the Republican Party in the 1870s and the Readjuster Party in the 1880s, involved constantly needing to rethink and reimagine how he saw and understood individuals, groups, and parties to best achieve a new society where Black Americans were finally given their rightful status as full citizens. Newman’s shift from the Republican to the Readjuster Party in the late 1870s was happening at the same time he was likely writing A Miserable Revenge. While his narrative in many ways follows the sensational patterns of the dime novels of that era, it is distinctive in the ways its characters rapidly change identities and loyalties, and the way they immediately forgive each other and move on with life despite horrific wrongs of the past. Desire for revenge logically emerges from anger and pain—but this very vengefulness brings even more pain and misunderstanding. Relief comes only when people accept one another, despite horrific past wrongs, and move on, together, to a better life. Revenge brings misery. Forgiveness brings a new, better world. By the end of the novel, blind forgiveness has turned a chaotic past into a peaceful future where long-lost family members are found, lovers are reunited and marry, and all the characters move from the slave-holding region that has brought them so much despair and agony to the freedom, opportunity, and egalitarianism of Boston, where they all live happily ever after. Tellingly, all this drama is quietly observed and occasionally commented on by the levelheaded free Black man, George.

George Newman’s political life would have led him to the idea that revenge was indeed miserable, and that, though difficult and often painful, forward movement required working even with those who had done you great wrongs in the past. This idea was also central to his Christian faith. His prominence as a leading educator and political figure in his community can obscure the fact that he was also an ordained minister and a deeply faithful Christian. It seems likely that as a Methodist minister and member of the John Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church, he would have read one of the primary texts of that denomination, The Works of John Wesley. This multivolume set contains many letters from Wesley to congregations, in which he advises and encourages them—helpful material for a pastor. In one letter, he addresses a group of congregants who are angry at the strife in their church and have been stirring up trouble for the minister, threatening to bring the church to ruin. Addressing them as “one that loves you well, and has loved you long,” Wesley advises a more peaceful strategy: “Either quietly attend the Sunday service, or quietly refrain from it; then there will be no strife at all. Now you make the strife of which you complain.” He advises them to support the leaders and work with them: “Do not, for so poor a reason, withdraw your subscription from the school or the preachers. What a miserable revenge would this be!”^[46] As an educator and minister who was constantly trying to raise funds for schools and churches, and as a political organizer who was constantly trying to unite the Black community to work with white political partners who had, in the past, worked against them, this letter would have certainly resonated with George Newman. Perhaps it also inspired his novel’s title.

Why George Newman wrote A Miserable Revenge cannot be known—it is a manuscript he wrote and set aside while he pursued a busy life of teaching, ministry, and civic service. It was written during a time of optimism, when he was working hard to bring about a better world for his Black community, and in a period when things were moving forward and getting better. This optimism is reflected in his story—it condemns revenge and ends in restitution and a better future. The central message of his manuscript and of his life at this time appear to be the same: Revenge is a miserable path; the good future lies on the path of compromise, forgiveness, and optimism.

As history shows, however, this progress did not continue; indeed, it reversed. Though he never stopped working to create a better world for his Black community, this movement backward impacted Newman’s outlook and optimism during the last fifty years of his life. After all his efforts in the 1870s and 1880s, he was shocked to see his efforts undone as the 1890s brought about harsh new segregation laws, political disenfranchisement, a rise in violence, and a vicious Jim Crow era that condemned Black Americans to disenfranchisement, oppression, and second-class status. While A Miserable Revenge shows Newman’s optimism in the 1870s, his later literary efforts show his increasing frustration and disappointment with the United States. In 1891, while serving his country as a federal deputy marshal, he was shocked when in Tennessee, despite holding a first-class rail ticket that his job provided him, he was forced into a “Jim Crow” car. In a poem also reprinted in this volume, “The Jim Crow Car of Tennessee” (1891), he vents his anger and frustration while also proclaiming his resolute determination to keep pushing for equality and justice. The third stanza states:

We know not where to take our case
To get ourselves relieved,
As Uncle Sam’s not in the race
When Afric’s Sons are grieved;
So we must rise in self defence,
Though humble we may be,
And show, by using common sense,
That we will still be free. (314)

The next year another Black man, Homer Plessy, sued the state of Louisiana when he too was kicked out of a first-class “white-only” railroad carriage. The result was the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, establishing the doctrine of “separate but equal” that codified the harsh Jim Crow segregation that would be the law of the land for the rest of George Newman’s life.

George Newman was a remarkable man whose life story has largely been forgotten and whose literary creations have sat quietly out of the public eye for well over a century. Now, generations later, it is important that we see them again, and recognize his effort, his optimism, and his disappointment as we face new versions of the same issues, frustrations, and realities that he spent his life addressing. Our remembering and understanding will, perhaps, finally help fulfill the optimistic goals that are apparent in A Miserable Revenge.

 

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Heatwole, John L. The Burning: Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. Rockbridge, 1998.

Ingle, Edward. The Negro in the District of Columbia. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1893.

Moore, James T. “Black Militancy in Readjuster Virginia, 1879–1883.” Journal of Southern History 41, no. 2 (1975): 167–88.

Palmer, Rosemarie. African American Heritage 1619–2020: A Chronology of Black Culture & History in Harrisonburg & Rockingham County, Virginia. Published by the author, 2021.

Penn, I. Garland. The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. Springfield, MA: Willey, 1891.

Sheridan, Philip Henry. Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army. C. L. Webster, 1888.

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Toliver, Ruth M. Keeping Up with Yesterday. Published by the author, 2009.

Wayland, John W. Historic Harrisonburg. McClure, 1949.

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