For nearly two decades Frank J. Webb's novel The Garies and Their Friends (London and New York, 1857) has eluded us. When we narrowly missed buying a copy three years ago, we alerted international dealer and collector circles of our interest. This year a British dealer finally offered us one. This is the second novel by an African-American writer, which in itself makes the work of extreme interest to us. But, even more interesting, Frank Webb was a Philadelphian, a product of this city's black middle class, and his novel is set in Philadelphia, in the racially tumultuous period of the late 1830s to the early 1850s. Though the book has all the elements of a typical sentimental potboiler of the period, it is in fact an important narrative of black life in antebellum Philadelphia. Webb drew exclusively upon his own experiences and those of the determined, self-educated, and steady-working Philadelphia blacks among whom he was raised.

Though the book was well received in England, in its time it had no American career, even though the publisher, G. Routledge & Co., as the imprint indicates, had a distribution network here. After diligent though hardly complete digging, we have yet to find an American review of the work, and no mention of it even in antislavery newspapers. The black intellectual and educator Charlotte Forten of Philadelphia knew the Webbs and writes in her diary of socializing with them in 1858. Ms. Forten also diligently reported on her reading in her diary. She makes no mention of Webb's book. Robert Adger and William Carl Bolivar, local 19th-century black bibliophiles who collected Afro-Americana, both published catalogues of their collection; neither owned the novel.

Webb's novel has suffered from 133 years of political incorrectness—ignored, probably disliked, in his time; and misunderstood in ours. Though published with impeccable antislavery credentials—prefaces by Harriet Beecher Stowe and the British antislavery leader Henry Brougham, and dedicated to Lady Byron—most antislavery Americans of the time were not prepared to confront the issues of northern racism and colorphobia raised in the novel. The book, however, does appear to have had a sub rosa career among black readers. In 1870 Webb's two novellas, Two Wolves and a Lamb and Marvin Hayle, were serialized in Frederick Douglass' newspaper The New Era, where he was introduced as “Author of ‘The Garies,’” an indication of prior knowledge of the work by Douglass' primarily black readers.

In our time the book has been equally bemusing. Arthur P. Davis, who wrote an introduction to the 1969 Arno Press reprint—effectively the first American edition—seems to have expected—and preferred—a strong antislavery work. “The work, in short, is not the kind of protest novel that one would expect from a free Negro in 1857. Perhaps its mildness [toward slavery] accounts in some measure for its lack of popularity.” Critic James H. DeVries confuses Webb's black characters' acceptance of American middle class values with a lack of black identity and culture. “In short, most blacks in the novel bear the trappings of white culture. Whether this was done to enable the white readers to easily identify with the blacks or whether the blacks of that city had not yet developed a strong racial identity is impossible to discover.”

The Garies and Their Friends is not an antislavery novel, rather it is an anti-racist work, and the first American novel to deal with race relations and colorphobia in the urban north. It is also the first novel written from the point of view of northern free blacks, and the first to explore the role of color and complexion and crossing the color line—a theme much worked by later black writers. And the more we learn of Frank Webb the more we agree with Stowe's remark that “the incidents related are mostly true ones, woven together by a slight web of fiction.” If this fictionalized study of race relations by the son of the free black urban middle class was offensive to his contemporaries and lacking acceptable racial consciousness to us today, that, we submit, is not Webb's problem. The dilemma itself underscores the importance of a book which highlights the discomforting issues of race and class pulsating through American life and thought. The critics also ignore the fact that Webb's novel celebrates the supportive and nurturing role of the black extended family and community.

The novel follows the fortunes of two families as they confront the virulent and violent racial climate of Philadelphia. The Garies of the title refers to Mr. Garie, a Georgia planter and slaveowner who lives in comfortable near-feudal self-sufficiency with Emily, his mulatto slave mistress, and their two children, Clarence and little Emily. Mr. Garie is a warm-hearted, loving, ingenuous man who sincerely regards himself as husband and father to his slave family, though he knows Georgia law will never recognize their union nor permit the emancipation of his wife and children. Living as he does a comfortable day at a time, he is stunned when Emily implores him to consider relocating the family to Europe or to a free state so they can legally live as man and wife and free her and the children from the threat of slavery. She is pregnant with their third child, and does not want it to be born a slave. “He was a Southerner in almost all his feelings, and had never had a scruple respecting the ownership of slaves. But now the fact that he was the master as well as the father of his children, and that whilst he resided where he did it was out of his power to manumit them; that in the event of his death they might be seized and sold by his heirs, whoever they might be, sent a thrill of horror through him. He had known all this before, but it had never stood out in such bold relief until now.” Mr. Garie agrees to find a manager for the plantation and settle the family in Philadelphia.

He selects this city after a visit from George Winston, a very light skinned former slave from New Orleans. Originally from the Savannah region, and a friend of Emily's from childhood, Winston was sold to a New Orleans businessman as a child, raised and educated by this kindly master, and finally freed and taken into his former master's business. Winston routinely travels north on business and is light skinned enough to pass for white when it is to his advantage to do so. He too is looking to settle outside the South, and tells Garie and Emily of the bustling black community of Philadelphia with its schools and religious, social, and cultural organizations, where Emily can find company and friends.

George Winston's role is brief, but central. He articulates the dilemma of an educated light skinned black in America. “… amongst the whites, he could not form either social or business connections, should his identity with the African race be discovered; and whilst, on the other hand, he would have found sufficiently refined associations amongst the people of colour to satisfy his social wants, he felt that he could not bear the isolation and contumely to which they were subjected. He, therefore, decided on leaving the United States, and on going to some country where, if he must struggle for success in life, he might do it without the additional embarrassments that would be thrown in his way in his native land, solely because he belonged to an oppressed race.” While most blacks rejected the program of African resettlement of the American Colonization Society, many were supporters of black controlled emigration movements, most targeting Central America or the Caribbean region, where people of color were a majority. Many leaders of black Philadelphia supported Haitian emigration in the 1820s, and later supporters of such movements among the Philadelphia black intelligentsia included the artist Robert Douglass, Jr. and the mathemetician and educator Robert Campbell, both probably known to Webb. And, shortly after the publication of his book, Frank Webb, in March of 1858, left to settle in Jamaica, where he had obtained a position as postmaster.

In Philadelphia we meet the Ellis family, possibly modeled on Webb's family, at the least a composite of characteristics of black Philadelphians known to him. Charles Ellis is a self-employed carpenter who owns his own home in a small side street in either the southern section of the city or the immediately adjacent Moyamensing area, where blacks and white workers lived cheek by jowl in uncomfortable and often hostile proximity. His wife Ellen occasionally works in service to a rich white family. They have three children—Esther, Caddy, and a young son Charlie, about ten when we meet him, who might possibly be the young Frank Webb.

The other central black character in Philadelphia is Mr. Walters, a black capitalist and property owner described by Mr. Ellis: “He is as black as a man can conveniently be. He is very wealthy; some say that he is worth half a million of dollars. He owns, to my certain knowledge, one hundred brick houses.” Walters is modeled on several wealthy black community leaders who would have been known to Webb, such as James Forten, Joseph Cassey, and Robert Purvis, all with extensive property holdings in the city.

The villain of the piece is a creation George Lippard would have envied. George Stevens, known as Slippery George, is a corrupt and unscrupulous Philadelphia lawyer, politically connected to some of the more violent street gangs (mainly Irish) and fire companies, over whom he exercises considerable control. His practice consists mainly of using forgery and perjury to free his frequently arrested clients, supplemented by a variety of very shady business dealings. As repulsive physically as he is morally, and a thoroughgoing racist, he is destined to become the Garies' new neighbor and Mr. Garie's assassin.

In a grand convergence of sentimental literary conventions, all the principal players either know each other or discover a relationship. George Winston knows Charles Ellis from his Georgia boyhood. Mr. Walters is a friend of the Ellises, is introduced to Winston, and thus becomes Mr. Garie's business agent in Philadelphia and procures him a house. Ellen Ellis remembers Emily as a child back in Georgia, and the Ellis women agree to help set up the new Garie household. And George Stevens will discover he is a long lost relative of Mr. Garie and heir to his fortune.

In Philadelphia the newly settled Garies and the long established Ellises confront racism in a variety of forms, from petty to homicidal. The Garies have moved from a region where their relationship was generally tolerated to one where they have become hated “amalgamationists.” They have trouble finding a minister to marry them. When Mrs. Garie's race becomes known to their neighbor Stevens, he and his wife organize other parents to drive the Garie children out of their school. After Mr. and Mrs. Garie are killed in George Stevens' race riot, they are laid to rest in a black cemetery, since Emily cannot be interred with whites.

The Ellis family—the main focus is on young Charlie—struggle to avoid living down to expectations. The children are well schooled—in Webb's time there were public schools for blacks and about a dozen private, mostly black-run schools—and active members of black literary and educational societies. Mrs. Ellis' employer, the rich and socially prominent Mrs. Thomas, urges Ellen to forget about Charlie's education and put him into domestic service. “It isn't as though he was a white child. What use can Latin or Greek be to a coloured boy? None in the world—he'll have to be a common mechanic, or, perhaps, a servant, or barber, or something of that kind, and then what use would all his fine education be to him? Take my advice, Ellen, and don't have him taught things that will make him feel above the situation he, in all probability, will have to fill.” A few years later Charlie, who is artistically inclined, tries to find an apprenticeship in the printing trade as a commercial designer, but finds white workers refuse to allow it. He is finally hired by Mr. Burrell who, visiting a shop, witnesses the rejection of Charlie. For him, as for a few other whites in the novel, this witness to racism is an epiphanous event that shows its petty and mean spirited consequences, and, rather than sink into such a slough, Mr. Burrell finds a position for Charlie in his shop. Interestingly, Frank Webb was, for about three years, a commercial designer.

The dramatic high point of the novel centers around a racial attack on the black community. George Stevens has, for a while, been hatching a scheme to start a race riot to terrorize the black community, drive many away, and acquire the abandoned properties at a fraction of their value. When, through a series of incidents, he discovers his distant kinship to Garie, he includes the Garie house on his list of targets and plans to have his white working class minions, headed by his henchman McCloskey, murder Garie. Stevens' plot unfolded pretty much as planned, as his working class and street gang cronies attack and loot black homes, assault the occupants, and drive them out. In the attack on the Garies' home, McCloskey loses his nerve and Stevens is obliged to shoot Garie himself. Emily and their unborn child also die in the assault.

Stevens, however, made one fateful error. He lost his copy of the list of specific targets in a black-run used clothing store where he went to outfit himself for the occasion. The black proprietor passed the list on to Mr. Walters, also one of Stevens' targets. Walters, a man of action, acts. Several of the targeted families are warned and able to flee or prepare a defense. The Ellis family, who live in the heart of the district occupied by the rioters, are brought to Walters' home. Walters summons the mayor to demand action to stop the impending attack. The mayor refused to act, as Philadelphia officials had in actual race riots. Faced with official indifference, Walters and the Ellis family organize their defense. They are well armed, and Esther Ellis at her insistence quickly learns the art of loading pistols. Caddie and Charlie Ellis, with Charlie's friend Kinch, like defenders of a medieval castle, prepare a vat of boiling water heavily laced with cayenne pepper. The combination of pistols and pepperpot successfully repels the attack on Walters' house, but not all escape unharmed. Charles Ellis, attempting to sneak through the mob to warn the Garies, was spotted, chased, cornered by a gang, and thrown from a three-story building. He was left physically and psychologically crippled.

The depiction of the mob is a product of fact and fiction. Webb was old enough to be aware of the riots of 1842 and certainly 1849. The 1842 riots in particular involved a white working class attack on black homes that destroyed many and led to the abandonment of even more. An 1847 report on the condition of the black community attributed a less-than-anticipated population growth to many blacks' abandoning their homes in the area of the 1842 riots. Both episodes, particularly the 1849 riot, featured armed black resistance. And, in these and earlier anti-black riots, officials blamed the victims and made excuses for white violence against blacks. Webb had probably also read such George Lippard novellas as The Life and Adventures of Charles Anderson Chester, The Killers, and The Bank Director's Son, published here in 1850 and '51, in which the 1849 riots were depicted as quickly “gotten up” at will by white street gangs and their leaders. While this may seem contrived, it may also express the view of part of the black community. The several major riots involving serious loss of property and lives were notable, and lesser episodes were frequent. Blacks living in the crowded sections of South Philadelphia and Moyamensing lived in expectation of unexpected violence. Also, the view that these riots were part of a scheme to drive blacks from their homes and cheaply acquire their property may well have been a widespread opinion among Philadelphia blacks.

Following the Garies' deaths, Mr. Walters and the Garies' white lawyer Mr. Balch make fateful arrangements for the Garie children. Though Garie's money goes to Stevens, Walters' possession of Stevens' hit list for the riots is incriminating enough to oblige Stevens to settle a large sum in trust for the children. Emily, the younger, is placed in the care of Mr. Walters and the Ellis family. Clarence is sent to Sudbury, Pennsylvania, to live with a white family and attend a private boys school, admonished never to reveal his black ancestry. Walters is apprehensive about this arrangement to oblige Clarence to live out his life as white, and utters his prophetic fears: “There's no doubt, my dear sir, but that I fully appreciate the advantage of being white. Yet, with all I have endured, and yet endure from day to day, I esteem myself happy in comparison with that man, who, mingling in the society of whites, is at the same time aware that he has African blood in his veins, and is liable at any moment to be ignominiously hurled from his position by the discovery of his origin. He is never safe. I have known instances where parties have gone on for years and years undetected; but some untoward circumstance brings them out at last, and down they fall for ever.”

And such is the fate of Clarence who, several years later as a young adult, is living comfortably in New York society and engaged to the daughter of a prominent businessman. He is “exposed,” ironically, by George Stevens' son, who remembers him. Cast out by white society, and unable to bring himself to accept the rigid restraints imposed on black society, Clarence literally languishes to death—victim of a fatal plot device. His sister, by contrast, marries Charlie Ellis and settles happily into the warm embrace of the Ellis family and the black community.

Little is known about Frank Webb, or his equally fascinating wife Mary, and we owe sincere thanks to our friends Dorothy Sterling, Dorothy Porter Wesley, and Professors Allan Austin and Jean Fagan Yellin for generously sharing their information on the Webbs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's introduction to The Garies briefly describes Frank as “a coloured young man, born and reared in the city of Philadelphia.” Frank was born around 1828; the 1850 census lists him as 21 years old. Perhaps he was the son of an earlier Frank Webb, active in the 'teens and 1820s as an elder of the First African Presbyterian Church, and a colleague of Absalom Jones and others in the Augustinian Society, a black interdenominational organization which promoted formal and classical education for the rising black clergy. The elder Webb is listed in city directories as a China packer living on Relief Alley, a small South Philadelphia back street similar to the location of the Ellis family. City directories for 1851 through 1854 list Frank J. Webb as a designer, or commercial artist in the printing trade, the same occupation Charlie Ellis finally secures.

In the novel we find the Ellis family active in black community educational affairs such as literary societies and lyceums. Webb's obvious literacy suggests his family was also active in such groups as the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored People, the Rush Library Company and Debating Society, the Desmosthenian Institute, the Minerva Literary Association, the Edgeworth Literary Association, and the Gilbert Lyceum, all black literary and educational organizations active during Frank's youth. We do know that in 1854 Frank gave a public lecture on “The Martial Capacity of Blacks” for a later-formed literary and debating society, the Banneker Institute, composed of some of black Philadelphia's brightest young men who became leading community figures in the later 19th century.

Around 1845 Frank married his beautiful and talented wife Mary. According to a biographical account by Frank, she was the daughter of a fugitive slave and “a Spanish gentleman of wealth.” This interracial affair may have inspired the creation of the Garie family, though Webb would have been aware of several black families settled in Philadelphia by white father-masters. Born in Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1828, Mary enjoyed comfortable circumstances and a good education, provided first by her father's wealth and later by her mother's hard work. When Frank's business failed Mary cultivated her elocutionary talents with an eye towards a career giving dramatic readings. Mary had previously met Harriet Beecher Stowe, who dramatised portions of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Mary's readings. Debuting in Philadelphia in April of 1855, she was a success. She toured New York and New England later in 1855, and in 1856, armed with letters of introduction from Stowe, Frank and Mary were off to England, Mary to continue her successful dramatic presentations, and Frank to finish and publish his novel.

While Frank may have been working on his novel for some time, he probably wrote the bulk of it during his enforced leisure after his business failed. Chapter 4 provides a clue. George Winston, passing as a white southerner at a Philadelphia hotel, is hustled by the black staff who are members of the Vigilance Committee, the local black underground railroad organization. It was their practice to pose as former slaves and sham a longing for the old plantation to pry loose a few dollars from visiting southerners. While Frank may have been aware of the black hotel workers' involvement in the underground railroad, their role received extensive—and probably unwanted—publicity in a slave rescue episode from Bloodgood's Hotel in July of 1855.

Stowe's introduction gave the Webbs entree to the wealthy and aristocratic British antislavery establishment. The Illustrated London News for August 2, 1856 gives a glowing review of Mary's reading at the home of the Duchess of Sutherland. An illustration of Mary at the podium accompanying the article shows her a strikingly beautiful woman. “Her color is a rich olive,” the reviewer notes, “and her features are remarkably delicate and expressive.”

Stowe, travelling in England with her sister Mary Beecher Perkins, met the Webbs frequently. “Harriet and I went to lunch with Mr. & Mrs. Webb—who are very nicely established in Portman Place,” Mary Perkins wrote her husband in August of 1856. “She is engaged to read in London for a long time—it is very successful—Mr. Webb has written a story & we hope it will take.” “Mr. and Mrs. Webb were here in high feather,” she again wrote in the summer of 1857, “intimate with dukes & duchesses & lords & ladies without number. It would have made a southerner gnash his teeth to see the attentions she rec'd.”

Mary Webb was apparently somewhat frail and became sick in the fall of 1857. The Webbs spent most of the winter in southern France and returned to Philadelphia briefly in March of 1858, en route to Kingston, Jamaica, where Frank had secured a position as postmaster. “Bade Mr. and Mrs Webb farewell,” Charlotte Forten wrote in her diary on March 26, “They sail on Sunday.” And they sailed, at least for now, into obscurity. Mary, we have been told, died within a couple of years. In 1870 Webb's two novellas appeared in The New Era. In 1890 and 1896, two articles appeared in the A. M. E. Christian Review by one Frank J. Webb, Jr. We trust the several scholars currently interested in Frank Webb will eventually flesh out his story. We need a new edition of The Garies that centers the novel in the life and experiences of its author and recognizes it as an important black narrative.

Though this is our 1990 report, we are preparing it in 1991. It is Spring. In Philadelphia we have just concluded a fractious primary election marked by intense racial polarization. Nationally, the news is filled with controversy on quotas, minority rights, affirmative action, and reverse discrimination. On university campuses arguments rage over the theory and practice of diversity. Suddenly Frank Webb's novel seems depressingly current.