Mollie Godfrey and Brooks E. Hefner

In February 2021, Ruth Toliver, a retired educator and local historian of Black Harrisonburg, donated a family collection to James Madison University (JMU) Special Collections. A significant portion of this collection was devoted to Toliver’s grandfather George A. Newman. A trailblazing Black educator and civic leader in the Shenandoah Valley in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era, Newman was born with “free” status in 1855 and went on to serve on and off for over three decades as principal of two of Harrisonburg’s earliest Black schools, in leadership positions in the city’s most active Black civic and political organizations, and as the first Black person in the region to serve in federal appointments as US Storekeeper and US Marshal. Among his many contributions to the community, he is remembered for paying poll taxes for local Black men in response to rising disenfranchisement tactics after the end of Reconstruction.

In addition to all of this, Newman was an aspiring writer. Among his private papers—carefully guarded by his family for over one hundred years—was the 480-page manuscript of an unpublished novel written between 1876 and 1877, just after he arrived in Harrisonburg as a young man, and well before the 1890s boom in African American writing. Titled A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia, the novel is set in the antebellum era in Winchester in Frederick County, where Newman was apprenticed as a child before the Civil War. However, while it draws on autobiographical elements of Newman’s life, not least by its inclusion of a free Black character named George, the novel’s Black characters (referred to by the narrator as “our minor characters—our kitchen characters” [144]) are largely overshadowed by the novel’s primary cast of white characters. This focus, coupled with the novel’s composition dates, makes it not only among the earliest examples of the African American novel, but also the earliest known example of a “white life” novel, a designation literary scholars use to describe Black-authored novels that primarily feature white protagonists, with Newman’s novel preceding published work in this genre by over a decade.^[1]

Literature scholars often identify William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), and Martin R. Delany’s incomplete serial novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859; 1861–62) as the first African American novels. However, the discovery and publication of Hannah Crafts’s novel in manuscript, The Bondswoman’s Narrative, written in the 1850s and published with great fanfare in 2002, was a reminder that the literary productions of Black writers in the nineteenth century faced steep obstacles to appearing in print and that other important Black novels might reside in archives and family papers, to varying degrees unknown by and inaccessible to the public. George A. Newman’s A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia is such a manuscript, one that raises fascinating questions about what humanities scholar Elizabeth McHenry calls the “hidden” but “important genealogy” of unpublished, partially published, ghostwritten, or rejected early Black literature.^[2] Newman’s novel of antebellum Shenandoah Valley life may not compete for the designation of the “first” African American novel, but it is nonetheless a very early example, completed well before the surge in Black print in the United States in the 1890s.^[3] It also serves as a valuable document of antebellum Black life in this region of Virginia. With the notable exception of the nonfiction enslaved person’s narrative Aunt Betty’s Story: The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman—dictated by Veney to a white woman, published in 1889, and preserved electronically by the University of North Carolina in 1997—very few texts have documented the experience of free and enslaved Black people in the Shenandoah Valley, and even fewer have centered Black voices in their depiction of the region.^[4]

For much of the twentieth century, dominant histories of Black life in the Shenandoah Valley have been filtered through the perspective of white journalists and historians such as Joseph Waddell (1823–1914) and John W. Wayland (1916–80), who popularized the now-debunked myth of the Valley’s noninvolvement in slavery and its subsequent racial benevolence.^[5] Until relatively recently, historically white institutions in the area also showed little interest in preserving Black archives, and local Black residents have had little reason to trust these institutions to be good caretakers of their private collections. As a result, few of the private papers and photographs documenting Black life in the Shenandoah Valley have been publicly preserved and made available to researchers, which means that while figures such as Newman are well known and fondly remembered in the local Black community, they are less well known among students, scholars, and the broader public. However, recent community-driven and community-engaged projects have begun to recover a more accurate and inclusive history of the region. The preservation of Long’s Chapel in Zenda and the ongoing work to preserve the Dallard-Newman house in the Northeast Neighborhood of Harrisonburg are two local community-driven projects aimed at recovering nineteenth-century African American history by preserving historical buildings in the region, and other projects such as the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project, Celebrating Simms, and Racial Terror in Virginia have centered Black lives, voices, and perspectives in the recovery and retelling of local Black history. It is largely thanks to efforts such as these that the historical significance of local Black figures such as George A. Newman has begun to be more widely recognized, and the Toliver family’s decision to donate the Ruth and Lowell Toliver Collection of Newman Family Papers to JMU Special Collections—as well as JMU archivists’ commitment to digitizing and making as publicly accessible as possible important artifacts in that collection—demonstrates the reparative promise of long-term trust-building partnerships between communities and universities.^[6]

Born on February 4, 1855, in Winchester, Virginia, to free Black parents, Newman moved to Harrisonburg in 1875 to serve as principal of the local Black school. He served for thirty-three years as a teacher and administrator in the city school system—chiefly at the Effinger Street School—and also held teaching positions in Warren County, Augusta County, and West Virginia. Along with Ulysses G. Wilson, local educator and half-brother of the esteemed educator Lucy F. Simms, Newman paid the poll taxes of local Black men in response to disenfranchisement tactics during segregation. In addition to being an influential educator, Newman was a minister, a musician, and a member of the Mt. Zion Lodge of Masons in Staunton. Outside of teaching, Newman took positions as an agent of the Internal Revenue Service and a Deputy US Marshal. He is remembered as a trailblazing member of Harrisonburg’s early African American community and a respected educational leader. He is commemorated as a central early figure in the Celebrating Simms exhibit, and by current efforts to turn his family home—built in 1875 and one of few Black homes to survive “Urban Renewal” in the 1960s—into a local Black history museum. More information about Newman’s life can be found in the Chronology and About the Author sections included in this volume.

The process of bringing Newman’s fascinating novel into digital and print publication began with a series of conversations among ourselves, JMU archivists Kate Morris and Tiffany Cole, and Ruth Toliver to discuss the Toliver family’s goals for the unpublished work that Newman’s descendants had carefully guarded for so many years. With the Toliver family’s blessing, JMU Special Collections committed to digitizing the manuscript, and we committed to seeking grant funding to transcribe the manuscript and bring it into print. The project began in earnest with a grant from Virginia Humanities in the summer of 2022, which enabled the initial transcription of A Miserable Revenge by our collaborators and coeditors Jeslyn Pool and Evan Sizemore, then Master of Arts in English students at JMU. Using digital images created by our partners in JMU Special Collections, Pool and Sizemore carefully transcribed Newman’s handwritten manuscript, which featured ornate and sometimes difficult-to-decipher handwriting, missing pages, and, in some cases, pages that had been torn or partially destroyed. They also mapped the real-world historical locations featured in the novel and created detailed character maps and plot summaries to break down the somewhat convoluted plot of A Miserable Revenge, several of which are included as supplementary material. As collaborators, we have built on their work, establishing and refining editorial choices to present the novel in a readable format for contemporary readers. More details on the editorial challenges and decisions appear in our Note on the Text.

Pool’s and Sizemore’s early contextual research also supported our efforts to determine the novel’s likely dates of composition, and they worked closely with us and archivists Tiffany Cole and Kate Morris on this process. Together, we dated the paper on which the manuscript was written, dated the material recorded on the back of several manuscript pages, matched the dates and days of the week mentioned in the manuscript with real calendars Newman might have used as he wrote, and compared Newman’s handwriting in the manuscript with other dated material in the family papers. Newman’s novel was written on paper with a “Congress” watermark in the upper-left corner. Tiffany was able to trace this to Phillip J. King’s Congress Mill, which was erected after the Revolutionary War “on the grounds of the old courthouse in York where Congress once met” and began embossing its paper with that watermark after 1829.^[7] Congress paper became popular with New York paper dealers, and was in wide use on correspondence and other papers throughout the last third of the nineteenth century. We then examined material written on the verso of the manuscript, including Newman’s speech “An Essay on Truth,” which we were able to confidently date between 1877 and 1878 based on historical events referenced in the speech and local newspaper reports describing the speech’s delivery. Jeslyn matched the dates and days of the week mentioned in the novel with real calendars Newman might have used as he wrote, determining that these days and dates aligned with calendars from either 1876 and 1877 or 1882 and 1883. Finally, Jeslyn compared Newman’s handwriting in the novel manuscript with other dated material in the family papers, noting that Newman’s handwriting became significantly tighter and more slanted over the years. Based on the similarity in Newman’s handwriting in the novel and “An Essay on Truth,” we were able to determine they were written around the same time. Finally, since the watermarks show that the novel is written on the front of the paper and the essay on the back, we felt it was likely that Newman wrote the novel first and later used the verso pages to write his essay. This means 1876 and 1877 are the most likely dates of composition, placing the novel’s composition soon after Newman arrived in Harrisonburg in 1875 at the tail end of the Reconstruction era, just as he was beginning to become a prominent voice in the civic life of his new community.

Indeed, although A Miserable Revenge focuses primarily on its white cast of characters, the novel’s plot speaks to issues that were of central concern to Black communities in the Reconstruction era, including the trustworthiness (or not) of wealthy white Southerners, the need to reunify families wrongfully torn apart, the hope for reparations for those wrongfully denied their due, and the indisputable value of freedom. While some of the novel’s white characters receive a sentimental hero’s treatment, others act as the novel’s villains, including one of the novel’s wealthiest and superficially most upstanding citizens. If one looks deeper into the true nature of such so-called “gentlemen,” the novel argues, “a great many would be found inefficient to fill their respective places in society” (137) and unable to carry their words “into action” (143). Arguments for slavery are identified as one kind of dishonesty. As the narrator remarks, people “may say slavery is right,” but those same people “would rather be free” (213). Likewise, the most “miserable” villainy the novel can imagine is to tear children away from their families—also a central plot device in later works by Black authors such as Frances E. W. Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins—and the greatest good is for these families to be properly “restored.” Perhaps as a reminder to its imagined white readers, who were at the time of the novel’s composition debating going back on the nation’s promises to Black citizens, the narrator declares: “To be upright and honest is to be a man. . . . So to be a man is to be upright and honest” (213). In the romantic world of the novel, all such honest people are “rewarded”—or, if previously dishonest people are suitably repentant, “forgiven”—and, in the novel’s final pages, all of the novel’s enslaved characters are set free.

However, despite the novel’s clear critique of white American dishonesty embedded in its “white life” narrative, its depictions and descriptions of enslaved Black and Indigenous Americans often veer toward stereotype, a narrative practice prevalent in nineteenth-century American literature and not unknown in other examples of early African American fiction.^[8] On the one hand, these moments give us some insight into the complex and not always friendly relationships between free and enslaved Black people and their close descendants, as well as between Black and Indigenous Americans. On the other hand, they also give us a sense of the degree to which Newman was trying to write himself into popular American genres such as plantation fiction, known for its stereotypical and dialect-heavy representation of enslaved Black characters.^[9] In Newman’s hands—as in the hands of later authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt—these stereotypes are often undercut, as when Newman’s character “Uncle Jack” is revealed to be a classic Black folktale trickster figure, here cleverly playing the fool to avoid being whipped by his enslaver.^[10] Meanwhile, Newman’s comments about Indigenous Americans and Africans, especially in his speeches, reflect his embrace of an accommodationist and colonial model of racial uplift as a “civilizing mission” that was also widely advocated by other Black political leaders in the South, most famously by Booker T. Washington, who attended the Hampton Institute around the same time as Newman’s close friend and colleague Lucy F. Simms.^[11]

In addition to drawing on Black storytelling practices, Newman’s novel demonstrates a deep familiarity with a wide range of English and American literary sources, including not only popular fiction and serials but also works by William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Benjamin Franklin, and more. Indeed, many of the novel’s central plot lines—secret and mistaken identities, poisoning that looks like death, and a cast of minor characters used primarily for humor—are borrowed from Shakespeare. Though the novel is clearly the work of a writer not yet fully in control of such narrative elements as character development and dialogue, it nevertheless showcases Newman’s remarkable control over an incredibly complicated plot, as well as his admirable interest in using the conventions of popular fiction and the stage to explore the troubles of life in Virginia, a place of which virtually every character in the novel—white and Black—eventually grows “tired.” Richard Yarborough, who consulted with us at an early stage in this project, suggests that the novel’s complex plot can be productively compared to that of Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901–2) and the author’s use of white perspectives to that of Paul Laurence Dunbar in The Fanatics (1901) and Charles Chesnutt in The Colonel’s Dream (1905). “Had Newman spent more time with the character in his narrative who may be based on his own life,” Yarborough adds, “we might have ended up with a work similar to The Appointed (1894) by William Stowers and Walter Anderson,” another unconventional, post-Civil War African American novel.^[12]

To help contextualize this novel, we have included as supplementary material a few other short works written by Newman, including two speeches and two poems, two of which are from 1877–78, around the time he wrote this novel, and two from a little later in his life (1891 and 1913). In addition, this volume includes three companion essays by scholars whose expertise illuminates Newman’s novel in the context of the literary traditions with which it is in dialogue, its original historical moment, and contemporary K–12 social studies curricula. For contemporary readers, the novel will likely feel dated and unrealistic. But A Miserable Revenge’s wild storyline—its murderous plots, bewildering secret identities, disguised detective, and gruesome grave-robbing “revenge” plot—suggest its interesting affinity with mid- to late-nineteenth-century popular fiction, especially periodical fiction and dime novels, which—like his early experiment in “white life” writing—makes Newman’s work unique for his time. While some early African American novelists like Martin Delany did draw on popular-fiction formulas, the pioneering turn-of-the-century writer and editor Pauline Hopkins is usually seen as the earliest African American writer of genre fiction. Veronica T. Watson’s essay emphasizes how the novel resembles, and deviates from, later conventions of the “white life” novel, while incorporating elements and affective registers of the sentimental and gothic modes. Placing the novel in the context of these generic tropes, she reads the novel’s forgiving conclusion as deeply and intentionally unsettling, arguing that “as readers are made uncomfortable, perhaps even angry, by the outcome of the novel, we are thrust into the lived experience and emotional reality of nineteenth-century [Black people,] like George Newman, on the front lines agitating for social change” (386).

Mark Metzler Sawin’s essay also reveals how deeply indebted Newman was to popular formulas, quoting from serial novels in his letters, and likely adapting his novel’s title from a story called “A Mean Revenge,” published in Frank Leslie’s Pleasant Hours in 1869. Sawin reads Newman’s novel as a reflection of his Reconstruction-era optimism, condemning revenge as a miserable path and ending in restitution and a better future for both white and Black characters. However, Sawin notes that Newman was later shocked to see his local political efforts in the 1870s and 1880s 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 second-class status. Newman’s later literary efforts, which are included as supplementary material, show his increasing frustration and disappointment with the Jim Crow South, as well as his determination to keep pushing for equality and justice. In this respect, they represent important primary sources for historians seeking to recover Black perspectives on Reconstruction and its collapse in the Shenandoah Valley. On that note, the contribution from Leonard Richards highlights how this text might be used in local classrooms to help students confront and discuss “hard histories”; unpack the complexities of antebellum, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction politics; and build better connections between the local and the national, and between the past and the present. In particular, Richards turns to Newman’s shorter works, such as his “An Essay on Truth” (1877/1878) and his poem “The Jim Crow Car of Tennessee” (1891), which he argues can be fruitfully compared in the classroom to works by Reverend H. M. Turner, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Reverend Walter K. Brooks.

From the standpoint of cultural and local history, the long-delayed publication of a novel like this is always timely, but the current moment is of particular importance. George A. Newman arrived in Harrisonburg in 1875 and began work on this novel shortly after his arrival, most likely in 1876. This makes 2025 the 150th anniversary of the Newman’s arrival in Harrisonburg, a sesquicentennial event of profound importance to the Black community in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. The publication of this novel in 2025 is also timely because it has allowed Newman’s granddaughter Ruth Toliver, currently in her nineties, to participate in honoring her grandfather’s legacy in this way—both by writing a foreword to this volume and by taking part in a public symposium celebrating its publication. Indeed, Newman’s novel represents an important case study for developing appropriate strategies for bringing unpublished nineteenth-century Black literature into print in ways that honor the wishes of the author’s descendants and their community. Ruth Toliver, Dallard-Newman House leaders, and many other members of the Northeast Neighborhood have been doing incredible work over the years to recover and preserve the history of their community. Our work to bring Newman’s novel into print has been designed to ensure that those closest to Newman’s life and legacy are leaders at every stage in the process—contributing to the volume, partnering on our plans for the public symposium, and participating in the creation of a digital research hub for the novel, all in ways that are meaningful and affirming to them. For them, Newman’s novel is significant for its potential to help tell fuller, deeper stories about local Black leaders, Black educators, and Black life in the Shenandoah region, and for its potential to complement and amplify their own important work of historical recovery, community building, and memory-keeping. For all of us, the recovery and publication of Newman’s novel substantially enlarges the literary and cultural history of the state and the region, while importantly expanding the archive of African American literature more broadly.

A community-focused project should, by definition, be accessible to the community. For this reason, we have decided to make Newman’s A Miserable Revenge available in an open-access digital format, with print copies produced for community groups, schools, local and statewide libraries, and Newman’s descendants thanks to a second grant from Virginia Humanities. All too often, scholarly editions of rediscovered works, published by academic presses, put a price on material like Newman’s novel and can limit the distribution of literary work with important social and cultural value. Scholarly editions published by academic presses often cost two to three times the price of a contemporary novel published by a popular press, and their distribution networks tend to emphasize academic readers. An open-access digital edition will ensure not only that Newman’s novel remains free to access for anyone inside or outside the university but also that it will remain “in print” in perpetuity, and its availability will not be subject to the growing challenges of the publishing marketplace. Additionally, by hosting this edition at James Madison University, we hope to enhance the growing partnerships between JMU and the Harrisonburg community where Newman lived and worked, and where he wrote A Miserable Revenge. Publishing Newman’s novel in Harrisonburg is a reminder that Black literature emanates from and belongs in all kinds of what Eric Gardner calls “unexpected places.”^[13]

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