At the inaugural 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, one of Philadelphia's many African American reform groups, William Whipper called for blacks to commit themselves to total abstinence and “temperance in all things.” The group itself offered a resolution that subsumed a number of social desires and reforms under the rubric of temperance: “Resolved, That the successful promotion of all the principles of the Moral Reform Society, viz.: Education, Temperance, Economy, and Universal Love, depends greatly upon the practical prosecution of the Temperance Reform.” But of course temperance could only go so far, and at times those blacks most committed to temperance—whether conceived narrowly in terms of drinking, or more broadly in terms of a Franklinian commitment to economy and industry—seemed to lose sight of the limits of the black temperance movement in a racist culture. At the same 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, James Forten, Jr., addressed this issue head on. While endorsing temperance as a worthy social program of black elevation, he pointed to the central reality of the black experience in America: “that the arm of oppression is laid bare to crush us; that prejudice, like the never satiated tiger, selects us as its prey; that we have felt the withering blight of tyranny sweeping from before us, in its destructive course, our homes and our property.” But despite these obstacles, Forten advised, blacks should not give up the struggle to improve their lot and, as temperate and productive citizens, “to set an example to the rising generation.” As he rhetorically put it in his concluding remarks: “What … would the cause of learning and our country have lost, if a Franklin, a Rittenhouse, a Rush, could have been made to quail before the frowning brow of persecution?”¹

Emphasizing industry, frugality, and self-restraint, temperance, arguably the most influential reform movement of the antebellum period, was championed by a number of free blacks as a self-help program promising to bring about the social and economic elevation of the African American community.² Adopting what historian Gary Nash terms “the gospel of moral improvement,”³ Whipper and other leaders of Philadelphia's black middle class were at the forefront of this movement. Perhaps it was for this reason that it was in early national and antebellum Philadelphia, more than in any other urban center, that African Americans managed to create a relatively cohesive community. Attracted by the city's Enlightenment and antislavery ideals, and by the existence of a number of highly visible and prospering blacks, fugitive and freed slaves from the South flocked to Philadelphia, helping to make it, with a population of 15,000 African Americans by 1830, the largest black community in the antebellum North. As Emma Jones Lapsansky notes, this community, compared with others, “was economically well off,” to the extent that “a survey published in 1845 listed six Afro-Americans among the city's several dozen wealthiest people.”⁴ While the successes of these six people, and even of the less spectacularly successful black middle class, should not blind us to the reality that the majority of Philadelphia's black citizenry remained relatively poor, the important fact remains that Philadelphia's African Americans had succeeded in developing numerous autonomous institutions—Bethel and many other black churches; schools; reading societies; moral reform groups; Masonic fraternities; temperance organizations—that centrally contributed to their ability to survive and prosper in a city that by no means had transcended the racist beliefs and practices of the time.

With their insistence on the importance of blacks trying to achieve middle-class status, or, we could say, middle-class American identity, through the adoption of temperance ideals of self-help, Philadelphia's black reformers sought to break down or, at the very least, disturb the boundaries erected by whites to thwart black elevation. But as the litany of white names in Forten's listing suggests, the promotion of temperance could be taken as a surrendering to the Protestant-capitalist norms of the white community, a destructive abandoning of African traditions and values. We might therefore ask the following questions: In their apparent embrace of the economic and behavioral values of the dominant white culture, in their pursuit of material goods and comforts through the promotion of temperance and self-help, did not Philadelphia's black middle and upper classes risk cutting themselves off from their less economically successful brothers and sisters? Moreover, though temperance was promoted by many African Americans as a mode of antislavery action—show Northern and Southern whites that blacks are capable of leading temperate and productive lives, and slavery, lacking for legitimation, will disappear—did not such a strong commitment to the middle-class values of the white community threaten to diminish the interest of materially well-off blacks in the plight of the slaves? In short, were Philadelphia's black reformers disturbing or, unwittingly, firming up boundaries—between, say, free blacks and enslaved blacks, wealthy blacks and poor blacks, rich and poor, blacks and whites? Nowhere are these questions addressed more honestly and powerfully than in Frank J. Webb's grossly underrated The Garies and Their Friends (1857), a historical novel that represents the situation of Philadelphia's hardworking and temperate blacks of the middling and upper classes from the late 1830s to the 1850s.

Let me say at the outset of what will be an extended contextual reading of Garies, the second novel to be published by an African American, that I find Webb's novel to be deeply sympathetic in its portrayal of the contradictions and vulnerabilities of black middle-class life in Philadelphia, and often more realistic in its portrayals, and bracingly so, than sentimental or melodramatic, as some critics have complained.⁵ Though there are annoying lapses (and blind spots) in the book's moral vision, the novel, I will be arguing, values black pride over shame, community over the individual, integrity and freedom over money.⁶ To be sure, in his celebratory narrative of blacks' efforts to elevate themselves within capitalist culture, Webb can appear to be complicitous in promoting the very values that have contributed to the blacks' subordination. But as Brook Thomas observes on minorities' appropriations of such progressive narratives, “when previously excluded groups employ narratives of progressive emergence, they are not necessarily ironically inverting them,” in large part because the act of claiming rights of access to these narratives is, in and of itself, given the differing “temporal logic” of the oppressed group's situation, politically subversive.⁷ In Garies, I will be arguing, Webb challenges hierarchical and racialist models of exclusion by depicting blacks pragmatically making use of the master's tools in order to assert their claims to equal rights and opportunities in America.

In this respect, the novel must be viewed as an intervention in a key debate among blacks of the 1850s: whether or not to emigrate from America. From the point of view of Martin Delany, James Holly, and many others, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill made a mockery of the temperance values and ideals of “race-blind” groups such as the American Moral Reform Society, revealing that blacks, because of the color of their skin, will forever be an exploited, subordinate group in America.⁸ In 1854 Delany successfully sponsored a black emigration convention, which called for emigration to Central and South America and the Caribbean, and shortly thereafter Holly began to develop his own plans to lead blacks to Haiti. Frederick Douglass, of course, remained the principal black spokesperson for the anti-emigrationist position, maintaining throughout the 1850s that blacks had a moral right and responsibility to remain in America. In an 1855 column, “Colored People of Pennsylvania,” he suggested that the example of Pennsylvania's “thrifty, enterprizing and industrious” blacks, who “plant more stakes, instead of digging up those already planted,” called into question all emigrationist (and colonizationist) projects.⁹ Here and elsewhere, Douglass, an exponent of temperance reform during the 1840s and 1850s, celebrates the heroic, oppositional, and reformative nature of black economic activity in America; a shared sense of the heroism and urgency of working toward black elevation in America informs Webb's representations of Philadelphia's temperate black capitalists.

Garies' blacks, it should be noted at the outset, are not portrayed as temperance reformers: There are no scenes of inebriated blacks giving up the bottle, no discussions of temperance. In Webb's novel, it is the whites, not the blacks, who are in dire need of temperance reform, as the blacks generally are presented as industrious bourgeois capitalists. For this reason, perhaps, Garies, the second novel to be published by an African American writer, has not been much admired by the few critics who have read it. In his magisterial A History of Afro-American Literature, Blyden Jackson condemns Webb for perniciously preaching a gospel of self-help and money-making that is naive and selfish: “His plot declares that Negroes need, above all, in America to get rich.”¹⁰ Even admirers of the novel have been troubled by what they take as Webb's uncritical adoption of Franklinian ideals of industry and temperance as a panacea for the black population. Though Addison Gayle, Jr., views the novel, in formal terms, as “the finest production by a black writer between 1853 and 1900,” he remains distressed by its informing ideology. Garies, he declares, is at bottom “nothing so much as the Poor Richard's Almanack of the black middle class,” a novel that regards hopes for preserving a sense of black heritage and racial unity in the United States “to be little more than the romantic hopes of foolish men.”¹¹

Webb's putative lack of racial unity and commitment to his black heritage has been adduced, by some commentators, not only from his novel, but from what little we know of his biography. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her preface to Garies, refers to Webb as “a coloured young man, born and reared in the city of Philadelphia.”¹² The book, Webb's only novel, is dedicated to Lady Noel Byron and includes, in addition to Stowe's preface, another preface by the well-known abolitionist Lord Brougham. Given the novel's London publication, and the somewhat glamorous circle of white reformers associated with it, one might be tempted to posit that Webb, in entering the rarefied world of upper-class British reformism, had lost a sense of connectedness with America's free and enslaved blacks.

From this perspective, to turn now to Webb's novel, I suspect that some readers would be immediately alienated by the opening chapter, which has the Stowe-like ironically understated title “In which the Reader is introduced to a Family of peculiar Construction.”¹³ The family, the Garies of Savannah, is “constructed” of Mr. Garie, a slaveholder, his mistress Emily, a mulatto and former slave, and their two children, Clary and Emily, who look white to the eye. An abundance of food predominates: baskets are heaped with a variety of cakes and fruits, doused in syrups, sugar, and brandy. Perhaps Webb is criticizing the luxury that the slave plantation makes available to the owner and his family. Yet social criticism on the part of the narrator seems lacking. Garie is presented as a kindhearted patriarch whose act of purchasing Emily for two thousand dollars served both of their interests. As the narrator remarks, “[A]s time developed the goodness of her heart, and her mind enlarged through the instructions he assiduously gave her, he found the connection that might have been productive of many evils, had proved a boon” (p. 2). The implication here is that Emily would not have “developed” had she remained within the plantation's slave community.

A similar denial of the value of black community comes across in the account in the same chapter of Emily's cousin George Winston, who had recently “passed” as a white among high society in the North. The “offspring of a mulatto field-hand by her master” (p. 8)—the end product of white patriarchal violation, a fact that seems obliterated from his consciousness—Winston as a boy had been separated from his mother and purchased by a kindly cotton broker of New Orleans. Like Emily, George is “improved” by his master. After being taught to read and write, the grateful Winston is given a job at the brokerage house and the opportunity to rise within it. While he had once refused a picayune, because, as he put it, “If it won't buy mammy, I don't want it” (p. 9), he now eagerly embraces the capitalistic world of the enslavers. Industrious and temperate young man that he is, George rises “through all the grades from errand-boy up to chief clerk” (p. 10) and is eventually “rewarded” with his freedom. The man with picayunes in his pocket, who had forgotten to redeem his mother from slavery before she died, subsequently travels North to explore business possibilities. As he now recounts to the Garie family, he had encountered a number of economically successful blacks in Philadelphia, and had considered working and residing among them. But he rejects this possibility, the narrator reveals in the summation that ends the chapter, because “whilst … 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 … embarrassments” (p. 14).

I spend some time on the opening chapter because it so troublingly raises the issue of Webb's moral vision in the novel. What are we to make of blacks who remain indebted to whites for their “improvement”? Of the failure of these characters, particularly Winston, to turn to other black characters for edification, love, and community? Of a black seemingly unaware of the relationship of his cotton-trading job to black exploitation? Are racism and slavery merely “embarrassments” to blacks, or something to struggle against? Moral questions such as these become less fuzzy when the narrative shifts from Savannah to Philadelphia, and we are introduced to the African American Ellis family—the family at the center of the somewhat oddly titled The Garies and Their Friends—who, unlike the emigrating Winston, have decided to “struggle for success” in America at the risk of great “embarrassments.”

To meet the Ellises, “a highly respectable and industrious coloured family” (p. 16), is to enter the world of temperate middle-class industry envisioned by the American Moral Reform Society. The father, Charles Ellis, a friend from George Winston's days back on the Savannah plantation, is a “thrifty” (p. 26) carpenter who has managed to purchase his own house, “ground and all” (p. 49). His wife and two daughters—Esther and Caddy—sew clothes and do other odd jobs in their spare time, while his son, Charlie, attends school. In addition to working hard for their personal economic well-being, the Ellises have made a significant commitment to Philadelphia's black middle-class community and its attending institutions. Mr. Ellis, when first introduced to the reader, is not at home; he is attending a “vestry meeting” (p. 18). When Winston later visits the Ellises, he is surprised to learn that Esther and Caddy will be attending a lecture at a library. As Ellis explains to the uncomprehending Winston, “This association they speak of is entirely composed of people of colour. They have a fine library, a debating club, chemical apparatus, collections of minerals, & c.” (p. 48). Winston's assertion that the Ellises must be an exception to the rule of black urban misery elicits Ellis's vociferous response that Winston has been misled by Southern and colonizationist propaganda. “Badly off, and in want, indeed! Why, my dear sir,” Ellis remarks, “we not only support our own poor, but [by paying property taxes] assist the whites to support theirs” (p. 49). In short, Ellis declares, because of their commitment to hard work and mental cultivation, Philadelphia's blacks are “in advance of the whites in wealth and general intelligence” (p. 50).¹⁴

Though Winston (who subsequently disappears from the novel) refuses to live in Philadelphia with the social stigma that would keep him at a distance from the fashionable whites he so envies, it is his positive report on the situation of the blacks in Philadelphia that prompts the Garies to move North. For as we soon learn, Emily Garie is hardly enamored of the plantations' luxury, in large part because the luxury masks the central truth that in the eyes of the law she and her children are slaves. Relenting to her request to transplant themselves to Philadelphia, Garie warns her that Northern racism may expose them “to great inconveniences” (p. 57). But when they arrive in Philadelphia such warnings seem beside the point: Emily is beguiled by the city's “bright and fresh-looking” (p. 116) cleanliness; Garie is astonished to see black schoolchildren “skipping merrily along with their bags of books on their arms” (p. 120). And perhaps most impressive of all is the man who helps them find housing: the “jet-black” (p. 121) Mr. Walters, a real-estate mogul with holdings of approximately a half-million dollars.

More than any other character, Walters has presented a stumbling block to sympathetic readers of Webb's novel. Bernard Bell, for example, writes with respect to Walters, “Instead of Christian charity or black power, Webb's answer to racial discrimination is green power.”¹⁵ Rich and successful as he is, however, Walters seems guided primarily by conscience and a sense of obligation to Philadelphia's black community. It is significant, therefore, as Garie observes during a visit, that he displays on the wall of his parlor a portrait, not of Ben Franklin, but of the hero of San Domingo, Toussaint l'Ouverture. In the spirit of Toussaint, Walters preaches the values of hard work and industry, not simply as a way of acquiring goods but, more importantly, as a way of acquiring independence from whites who want to keep blacks in subordinate positions. Thus he counsels the Ellises against permitting their son Charlie to work as a servant for the aristocratic Thomases. Like Frederick Douglass, who warned that “free negroes must learn trades, or die,”¹⁶ Walters argues that once a servant, always a servant, as such jobs break the spirit of the blacks who take them while reinforcing the stereotype of the “happy” black servant so central to whites' conception of blacks. As he rhetorically puts it to Mrs. Ellis (an admirer and former employee of the Thomases), “Where would I or Ellis have been had we been hired out all our lives at so much a month? It begets a feeling of dependence to place a boy in such a situation; and rely upon it, if he stays there long, it will spoil him for anything better all his days” (p. 63). Despite these warnings, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis convince Charlie to work part-time for the Thomases, though as Walters had anticipated, Charlie is too educated and ambitious to be kept in his “place.” In a nice series of comic scenes, Charlie deliberately embarrasses Mrs. Thomas by “accidentally” doing his work improperly—lifting off her wig before a guest, for example—and is fired from his job.

That Charlie has the integrity to rebel against the Thomases is consistent with Webb's depiction of the pride and determination predominating among the black middle and upper classes in Philadelphia circa 1840. An approximate dating of the novel, it should be noted, can be determined in at least two ways: by the fact that at the novel's conclusion there is a generational leap forward to the present, circa mid-1850s, thereby suggesting an early 1840s setting; and by Webb's suggestive historicism. Though Webb nowhere in the novel gives us a date or particular event that would enable us precisely to determine the historical setting, his overall portrayal of the Ellises' situation—their hopes and aspirations, the pressures that will impinge upon them and their friends—allows us to hypothesize a setting in the range of 1838-42. The most serious outbreak of violence against Philadelphia's black community, as I will discuss in more detail, occurred in a major race riot of 1842—the sort of extreme violence that the characters, in their relatively upbeat relation to work and community, seem not yet to have experienced. Yet there are clear indications that racism is a feature of Philadelphia's social landscape. The Ellises, for example, “are not permitted to ride in the omnibuses or other public conveyances” (p. 64). The inclusion of this, among other details, encourages a post-1838 contextualization, in that 1838 was the year the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, in expanding the vote to nonpropertied citizens, made it legally the case that only whites could vote.¹⁷ For those of the black middle class who were paying property taxes, their disenfranchisement, in favor of the enfranchisement of poorer whites (recall that Ellis had remarked to Winston that blacks were supporting poor whites) sent the clear signal of their marginal status within the community, and thus of an even greater need for programs of self-help and self-elevation.

The constitutional changes of 1838 legally ratified the emergent Jim Crow practices of a city that at least through the early 1830s had prided itself on its relatively progressive attitudes on race. Or, to put it another way, 1838 and the years immediately following may be taken as a moment when white authorities attempted to firm up boundaries they perceived as in danger of breaking down. Webb studies the psychopathology of such efforts in a variety of ways, focusing especially, in historicist fashion, on the heightening anti-amalgamation mood of late 1830s and 1840s Philadelphia. Thus he portrays the difficulties the Garies face, shortly after their glorious arrival in Philadelphia, in getting married. “I do not believe in the propriety of amalgamation” (p. 137), announces a minister who refuses to marry them; and the minister's words speak to larger tensions in the white community about blacks' presence in “their” workplaces and neighborhoods. As Lapsansky observes, “Nineteenth-century urban heterogeneity placed black Philadelphians house-to-house with their white contemporaries, many of whom were openly and effectively hostile to Afroamericans' achievements.”¹⁸ In Webb's novel, no one is more “hostile” than the Garies' obsessively anti-amalgamationist neighbor George Stevens, a “pettifogging attorney” known as “Slippery George” (p. 124), and no one is more intemperate.

Introduced about a third of the way into the novel, Stevens at first seems little more than a melodramatically conceived villain with the purely allegorical function of representing the evil racist. Webb corporealizes that evil, describing Stevens's efforts to cover up his spreading bald spot, for example, as producing a scalp that seems “decorated with a pair of horns” (p. 124). Such allegorical details should not obscure the fact, however, that there is a powerful social realism at work in the portrayal of Stevens. Webb presents his racism as a pathology of envy and status anxieties, and links that racism to the larger institutional power structure of antebellum Philadelphia. When he and his wife realize, for example, that an “amalgamated” family lives near them, their fears of amalgamation extend to the schools: they use their money and connections to force the Garie children out of the private school that their own children attend.¹⁹ The plottings of Stevens and his wife anticipate the more malignant plottings of Stevens and his business associates to expel blacks from their neighborhoods—plottings that are presented as driven by Stevens's uncontrollable appetite for money and power. It is appropriate, then, that Webb should bring temperance as a motif and social issue back into prominence as Stevens's racist money-making scheme begins to command the novel's center stage.

In an attempt to extend his influence and dramatically increase his wealth, Stevens has enlisted working-class drinkers, predominantly Irish, in a plot to gain financial control of a Southern district of Philadelphia populated mainly by blacks. The central pawn in his plan is one McCloskey, who, while drunk, had killed another Irishman with a “slung shot” (p. 163). As McCloskey's counsel, Stevens pays off the one witness to the crime, the tavern owner Whitticar, and then, with Whitticar in his pocket, attempts to blackmail McCloskey into doing his dirty work. What he wants him to do is lead a mob of his fellow workers and drinkers into the district of home-owning blacks and intimidate them into selling their property at low prices. Whereupon Stevens and his fellow investors will, in Stevens's words, “reestablish order and quiet, and sell again at an immense advantage” (p. 166). As secretive speculators, Stevens and his coconspirators can display themselves as model citizens in complete control of appetite. Webb makes clear, though, that similar problems of loss of self-control and social deviancy characterize the drunkard and speculator.²⁰ Surreptitiously mixing with the drunks hanging out at Whitticar's tavern, Stevens, because of his intemperate desire for money, displays a similar, or analogous, lack of self-control; and like Whitticar himself, who peddles drink to these “forlorn-looking wretches” (p. 173), Stevens, in peddling his influence and payoffs to gang leaders, has sacrificed conscience to profit. As Whitticar remarks on the “conscience,” “it's a thing with very little use in the rumselling business; it interferes with trade” (p. 174).

Stevens, the metaphorical conscienceless tavern keeper, has for some time been preparing the ground for his speculative “trade,” aware that in promoting a riot he would be subjecting Philadelphia to nothing out of the ordinary. As the narrator remarks, Stevens plans on taking advantage of the fact that “already several disturbances had occured, in which a number of inoffensive coloured people had been injured in their persons and property” (p. 175). One of the great achievements of Webb's novel is to offer the reader a glimpse into the sociohistorical reality of the antiblack riots recurring in antebellum Philadelphia. Though he can be accused of melodramatic overkill in making Stevens the prime generator of the riot in Garies, and of “classism” in presenting the Irish workers as the pawns of moneyed whites, Webb, by linking Stevens to McCloskey, challenges reductive readings of Philadelphia's riots as simply the result of ethnic, or working-class, racism. For Webb, all sectors of white society are implicated; the apparent heavy-handedness of the plotting makes the more subtle point that only in a social-institutional context of total racism could the riots have occurred in the first place.

The climactic riot of Garies conflates the details of several major riots in Philadelphia during the 1834-49 period, a brief overview of which would be useful before turning to Webb's harrowing representation. The first major race riot occurred in 1834, when white gangs attacked a carousel on South Street, avowedly as an act of revenge against blacks believed to have stolen equipment from the neighborhood fire company; hostilities escalated to the point that black residences were attacked over a two-day period. But once the white rioters turned their attention to the destruction of black residences, they singled out not those of the poor and working classes but of the wealthy. The riot thus revealed the limitations of the black temperance ideals put forth at the 1837 convention of the American Moral Reform Society, which suggested that the existence of a group of successful blacks would undermine racial stereotypes, thereby contributing to black elevation. If anything, the successes of blacks exacerbated white resentments, and not just among the working classes. Though there would seem to have been a certain spontaneity in the flaring of violence during this riot, whites in the various wealthier districts under attack knowingly turned off the lights of their homes in order to inform the rioters that these were whites' residences, and thus should be spared the destructiveness (which the darkness of their homes implicitly acknowledged and approved) directed against the blacks.²¹

A riot of 1838 revealed a similar measure of complicity among all classes of whites, while highlighting as well white fears of “amalgamation” and miscegenation. Soon after the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society opened Pennsylvania Hall, rumors began to circulate about the “licentious” intermingling between whites and blacks behind its closed doors. Eventually the hall was attacked and burned down, with the considerable involvement of the “gentlemen of property and standing” whom Leonard Richards has argued were central participants in many of the antislavery riots of the 1830s.²² In this riot, working-class participation took the form of silent complicity: the fire companies refused to fight the fire.

The worst of the riots, and the most significant for interpretation of temperance themes and issues in Garies, occurred on August 1, 1842, when members of a black temperance society sought to celebrate West Indian emancipation and, relatedly, temperance ideals (the emancipation of the black body from the slavery of drink) by parading through Philadelphia. Temperance, it should be noted, had assumed special importance for blacks during the 1838-42 period, as it was seen by many as the best possible way to address the economic difficulties brought on by the Panic of 1837. James J. G. Bias, a physician and clergyman, emerged as the leading temperance advocate within the black community, the man chiefly responsible for spearheading the construction of a black temperance hall in 1840. That hall took on special significance during the 1842 riot. Frederick Douglass, in his address “Intemperance and Slavery” (1845), describes what happened that August 1st: “A large number of colored people in Philadelphia attempted to celebrate that day by forming themselves into a temperance procession, and walking through the streets, with appropriate banners, and thus to make a temperance impression on their fellow brethren who had not yet joined their ranks. They had also ‘freedom’ inscribed upon their banner. Well, such was the feeling in this slave-holding city, that the display of the banner brought upon these poor colored people an infuriated mob! Their houses were burnt down in different parts of the city, and their churches were burned to the earth, themselves turned out of the city, and the city authorities and police did nothing to prevent it!”²³

For Douglass, who alluded to this event numerous times during his British tour, the 1842 attack on the paraders and subsequent three-day assault on black residences revealed the hypocrisy of whites involved in the temperance movement. In Douglass's view, white temperance organizations, of which there were many, should have defended the blacks' right to march in Philadelphia; instead, so Douglass laments, they continued to be guided by their racist and proslavery proclivities. But the larger point that he makes in this and other comments on the riot, and the point that Webb will be emphasizing about the riot represented in Garies, is that to regard it simply as an expression of working-class whites' resentments of blacks during a period of economic depression fails to take into account the involvement of all classes of whites in the disturbance. Not only did authorities do nothing to stop the violence (a police force was never summoned), they in fact performed their own act of violence by ordering the blacks' temperance hall destroyed lest the riots spread there and threaten the surrounding white residences. This legal sanction to destroy a building of great symbolic importance to the black community, and the related act of a grand jury “officially” placing legal blame for the riot on “the provocative nature of the Negro processions,”²⁴ would suggest that there was good reason for Webb to have placed the lawyer Stevens at the center of the riot in Garies.

Because Webb focuses so intently on Stevens's ability to manipulate various forms of power—the newspapers, real estate markets, government agencies, political figures—it could seem that Webb in a sense is undercutting the notion that there exists an ethnic community (of Irish Americans, say) capable of thinking and acting on its own. Denying the Irish community the ability even to possess its own racial hatreds smacks of condescension and would be going against the conclusions of most historians of the period. Michael Feldberg observes, for example, that the Irish, in an effort to retain their cultural ideals and pride in the face of Protestant hostilities, took some consolation in feeling superior to blacks. Moreover, expressing hostility to blacks would be a way of identifying with the very hostilities that the Protestant middle class itself expressed toward blacks; racism was a form of Americanization.²⁵ Yet the initial scenes involving Stevens and McCloskey work against such a conception, as McCloskey and his pals seem merely to be doing Stevens's bidding under duress. Reporting to Stevens, McCloskey tells of how he and his friends have that past night stirred up the violence Stevens had demanded: “a nagur or two half killed,” McCloskey notes, “and one house set on fire and nearly burned up” (p. 176). But now Stevens wants McCloskey to do something even more audacious and much more risky: attack the Garie residence and shoot Garie himself, for which Stevens will pay him five thousand dollars. Initially resistant, McCloskey agrees to the plan for two main reasons: Stevens's threat to abandon him to the courts at the trial stage; and the news that Garie “lives with a nigger woman—and, what is more, he is married to her!” (p. 179).

As Webb well knew, central to many of the riots of 1834-49 were expressions, usually from the working class, of outrage at miscegenation. Most notably, in 1849 an Irish Catholic gang attacked California House, a black tavern and gambling hall. When the blacks resisted, the gang went on a rampage, burning at least thirty buildings and killing two blacks. California House was singled out for an attack, historian Bruce Laurie remarks, “because the proprietor, a Black man or mulatto, had recently married a white woman, presumably of Irish extraction. … The classic fantasy of racists, the interracial marriage was, to the Irish, sufficient cause for riot.”²⁶ As Laurie goes on to explain in his excellent account of ethnic working-class culture in antebellum Philadelphia, central locales for the creation of this culture, and its attendant racism, were the taverns and volunteer fire companies, where manliness, camaraderie, ethnic competition, antiblack racism, and “drinking and the social rituals surrounding it”²⁷ were all emphasized as social values.

These are values, of course, that Webb does not much admire. In this respect, it must be said that Webb suggests yet another reason for the Irish characters' willingness to attack Philadelphia's blacks: that the Irish are a people of the baser sort. Webb thus simultaneously taps into nativist anxieties (exacerbated by the Know-Nothings) about the dangers posed to the republic by drunken, antirepublican Irish,²⁸ while expressing his own hostility toward the ethnic group that, for a variety of complex sociohistorical reasons, was so openly hostile to the black community. Not for nothing had Webb earlier noted that the Jim Crow regulations on a passenger train had been enforced by “Irish brake-men” (p. 111). Their enthusiastic enforcement of segregationist practices looks forward to the Irish crowd's enthusiastic embrace of Stevens's invitation to inflict violence upon blacks.

The two chapters on the riot at the heart of the novel are among the most disturbing (and spectacular) accounts of violence in antebellum literature. As readers, we are situated with the various black characters as they confront the white onslaught, and thus have a participatory relation to the self-defensive, and actually rather aggressive and heroic, actions that the blacks take to preserve their lives and community. Webb seeks to present his readers with representations of black heroism that undermine the white community's racialist stereotypes of blacks' Sambo-like passivity or unfettered (unthinking) violence. Just as the whites carefully coordinate their offense, the blacks, after having presented evidence of an impending riot to Philadelphia's unresponsive mayor, carefully tend to their own defense. Walters, the admirer of Toussaint L'Ouverture, assumes the role of guardian of his people, turning his house into a “fortress” (p. 203) and taking in the Ellis family and several other blacks. As Carla L. Peterson remarks, “The defense of Walters's house—the bastion of black capitalism—during the riot emblematizes black community interdependence as men and women of all social classes come together to protect it.”²⁹ Playing a key role in the defense is Esther Ellis, who emerges, like her biblical progenitor, as a heroic defender of her people. As the group awaits the arrival of the mob, Walters teaches her how to shoot pistols, exclaiming at her determination to face down the whites: “You are a brave one, after my own heart” (p. 205). She initially reveals her bravery by retrieving a piece of ignited wood that lands near their arsenal of gun powder. After being saved by Esther from a possible conflagration of their own making, the assembled group looks out the window to see that the “whole of the lower part of the city appears to be in a blaze” (p. 211).

As in Hawthorne's Revolutionary tales of the 1830s, riot is presented as a form of intemperance, a manifestation of the social body out of control. Webb makes this clear both by analogy—McCloskey is drunk on alcohol one night and drunk on malign violence the next—and by more literal representations of the rioters as intoxicated by drink. Before we actually view the rioters close up, however, all we see, from our vantage in Walters's house, is a raging crowd that appears at the house “like a torrent” (p. 211). Yet there is clearly a method to the depersonalized mob's rioting. News has reached Walters's group that the mob attempted to “fire one of the coloured churches” (p. 208), a deliberate effort at destroying a building of symbolic importance to the black community, and now the mob has singled out for destruction the home of Walters, the city's wealthiest black. “Kill the niggers!” the crowd cries. “Down with the Abolitionists!” (p. 212). Then rocks begin to break through Walters's windows.

During the 1842 riot, a mob chased blacks into a ghetto, whereupon some of the blacks, as Laurie notes, “retreated to a house on Bradford's Alley, where they held off their assailants with musket fire.”³⁰ Though Walters lives outside of a ghetto area, the congregated blacks' defense of Walters's home would appear to be drawing on this well-documented incident of resistance. Under Walters's direction, his compatriots return stone for stone, and then, with Esther loading the guns, they fire upon the crowd. Webb's account of the violent struggle is exciting and brutal, reminiscent, in a revisionary twist, of the best of Cooper's accounts of vulnerable whites fighting off the “savage” hoards. In Garies, the white hoards are at their most savage when they hunt down a defenseless black, the admirable Mr. Ellis, who had left the relatively secure space of Walters's home in order to warn Garie of the crowd's intent to attack him. Spotted by the rioters on his way to the Garies', Ellis runs to the end of a dead-end street, climbs onto the roof of a building, and then realizes he is trapped. Webb keeps the point of view focused on Ellis so that the reader, along with Ellis, feels equally trapped by white savages. As Ellis desperately clings to the roof's edge, someone strikes at his hand with a hatchet, “severing two of the fingers from one hand and deeply mangling the other” (p. 219). Leaving Ellis for dead after he plummets from the roof, the mob moves on to confront Garie at his home, and eventually someone (Stevens) shoots him at close range through the head. Webb reports on the subsequent actions of the “mob of demons” (p. 222): “For two long hours they ransacked the house, breaking all they could not carry off, drinking the wine in Mr. Garie's cellar, and shouting and screaming like so many fiends” (p. 223). As they do so, Emily Garie, hiding with her children in a freezing woodshed, dies while giving birth to a stillborn child; the children are later found by sympathetic neighbors. A subsequent coroner's inquest, we are told at the end of the chapter, fails to reveal the true cause of Emily's and her baby's deaths; Stevens served as a member of the panel.

In the immediate wake of the 1842 antiblack riot, Robert Purvis, in a letter of August 22, 1842, to the abolitionist Henry C. Wright, lamented the hopelessness of the blacks' situation in Philadelphia: “Press, Church, Magistrates, Clergymen and Devils—are against us. The measure of our suffering is full.” He therefore concluded, “I am convinced of our utter and complete nothingness in public estimation.”³¹ Purvis's response is in some ways representative of the despair experienced among the black elite, for the riots “had undercut the elite's entire program of community improvement.”³² Not surprisingly, then, some blacks fled Philadelphia. Yet for various reasons—racist housing practices in surrounding neighborhoods, a burgeoning sense of black solidarity in the face of white racism, a continued commitment to the goals of black elevation—a significant number of blacks remained where they were.

The historical tensions between despair and hope, flight and solidarity, are addressed by Webb in his representation of the black community's response to the riot's aftermath. On one side is Clary Garie, scarred by his experiences with the Stevenses and their network of racist intimidators, who, shortly after learning of his parents' deaths, accepts an arrangement worked out for him by the family lawyer, Balch, to travel to Sudbury and attempt to “pass” for white. On the other side are Charlie Ellis and Walters, who persist in their efforts to “elevate” Philadelphia's black community. Walters may declare that “I am almost tempted to curse the destiny that made me what I am” (p. 275), but he never does make that curse, and instead attempts to live up to the responsibilities of his wealth by offering aid to the devastated Ellis family (a synecdoche for the devastated black middle class). In choosing to help the Ellises, Walters articulates a self-conscious commitment to black community that cuts across class lines: “God has blessed me with abundance, and to what better use can it be appropriated than the relief of my friends?” (p. 239). Thus, like a number of blacks in the novel, he continues to “attend to the collectivity,” as Peterson puts it, “returning surplus value to the community.”³³

Black solidarity and a redoubled commitment to the temperance values of industry and restraint comes across as well in the account of Charlie Ellis's response to his family's plight. Charlie, to fill in some of the plot details, had gone to live with the benevolent (and white) Mrs. Bird in order to recuperate from a broken arm and further his education. When he learns about his father's injuries, he immediately realizes, unlike the confused Clary (or George Winston), that he cannot separate his personal fate from the fate of his family. With his father's hands mere stumps, Charlie, his arm now healed, attempts to do for his family what his father, in one of his few lucid moments, urges him to do, “take care of them” (p. 272). But he will do so in a world in effect redefined by the antiblack riots, a world in which subtle forms of racist discrimination must be viewed on a continuum with more direct acts of racist violence. It is a world that his father's mad ravings again and again chillingly unmask: “run home quick, little boy! and tell your mother they're coming, thousands of them; they've guns, and swords, and clubs. Hush! There they come—there they come!” (p. 267).

In such a world of ever-present violence, a continued advocacy of temperate self-help could be taken as rather naive. Or, and this is where I think Webb locates himself, such an advocacy and commitment could be taken as simultaneously pragmatic and political, for it asserts to the white community, as Frederick Douglass was asserting during the 1850s, that blacks continue to lay claim to America's material resources and political ideals. Although Charlie will eventually find a job with the help of whites sympathetic to his situation (and appreciative of his talents), much more weight is given to portraying his determined resistance to white racism. A gracefully written letter of inquiry gets him an interview for a position as an office “boy,” but his color proves to be, in the words of the manager who rejects him, “a fatal objection” (p. 293). Unlike Clary, or perhaps more significantly, unlike George Winston, Charlie, in response to this rejection, has an even stronger sense of his racial identity and pride, asserting to his equally prideful sister Esther, “I shouldn't care to be white if I knew I would not have a dear old Ess like you for a sister” (p. 293). Applying next for a job as a bank-note engraver, he is rebuffed in this pursuit as well, for the large reason that the other craftsmen and journeymen proclaim to their initially receptive boss, who happens to be an abolitionist, “No nigger apprentices!” (p. 297).³⁴ But in a Stowe-like scene, Mr. Burrell, a friend of the “abolitionist,” describes Charlie's travails to his wife, whose transracial sympathy prompts her to charge her husband with hiring Charlie to work at his new business (p. 302), which he does. We then take leave of Charlie and his friends for what the narrator terms a “few years” (p. 308).

Actually, we leave them for a number of years—approximately fifteen—as Webb makes a historical leap forward to the present, the mid-1850s. From this new vantage point, Stevens's “intemperate” greed and quest for power can now be more literally represented in corporeal terms: he is portrayed rather conventionally, along the lines of the drunken father in T. S. Arthur's great temperance best-seller Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1855), as a drunk whose body and moral principles have, over the years, wasted away. In order to assess what Webb is up to in his portrayal of Stevens's decline, we need to recall where we left Stevens before the leap forward, and to rehearse the scattered evidence of genealogical entanglement that both influenced his desire to murder Garie and contributed to his dissolution. For we learn near the end of the novel that, in attacking the Garies, Stevens attacked his own family. (So much for inviolable boundaries!) The key facts are embedded early in the narrative, when Garie, just before moving to Philadelphia, learns that his uncle's sister years ago had “made a very low marriage” (p. 102) to a “drunken and vicious” (p. 102) carpenter from New York, and was subsequently cut off from the family by her father. Though the sister eventually died, rumor has it that their son survives. That Stevens may well be that son is hinted at just prior to his act of instructing McCloskey and his companions to attack the Garies: After his coconspirator Morton informs him that Garie's Uncle John had died, leaving to Garie—because no one knows the whereabouts of the sister's son—over ＄100,000, Stevens soliloquizes on his desire for the Garies' wealth, “I'll have it, if I———” (p. 168), and then gazes in a mirror and declares: “I look like a murderer already” (p. 168). His words and secret actions implicitly confirm that he is indeed the “drunken and vicious” carpenter's lost son; but only after the inquest on the Garies that he helped to fix does he reveal himself as the missing heir. Despite the fact that Walters and the lawyer Balch possess evidence of Stevens's role in the death of Garie, such is Stevens's influence within the community that they can only work out a deal whereby they agree to withhold the evidence in return for ＄12,000 of the ＄150,000 inheritance for Garie's children.

The fifteen-year jump from this corrupt bargain to Stevens's dissolution makes explicit the connection between greed and drink, power and intemperance, central to Webb's thematics. In his resplendent New York City apartment on Fifth Avenue, Stevens, referred to in George Lippardian antiaristocratic terms as one of New York's “upper ten thousand” (p. 309), is revealed as a drunken wreck of a man, the fitting heir to the father's putative depravities. True to the model of generational transmission informing Arthur's temperance narratives,³⁵ Stevens's son, George, introduced earlier in the novel as a boy who enjoys torturing flies (p. 127), is an irresponsible dandy who is “often fearfully intoxicated” (p. 358). As is typical of Arthur, virtue remains the repository of the daughter, in this case Lizzie, who as a girl rescued flies from her brother's tortures, and now, as a young woman, acts as Stevens's moral guardian. When her father “lifts his hand to pour out another glass of liquor from the decanter at his side, … his daughter lays her hand upon it, and looks appealingly in his face” (p. 310).

The setup here—inebriate father, virtuous daughter—is ripe for melodrama, which is what we get when McCloskey, “a shabbily dressed man, bearing a strong odour of rum about him” (p. 312), enters the scene. But though melodramatic, the encounter between the two inebriates neatly summarizes the relationship that has developed between the men over the years, and points to one of the novel's key concerns as well—the dangerous connections between speculation and intemperance in a capitalist economy. Stevens may well be wasting away, but such is his addiction to gain that he continues his economic speculations. Driven by similar economic desires, McCloskey has been blackmailing Stevens for years, and has come to New York to demand additional money in exchange for his silence about Stevens's murder of Garie. Consistent with Webb's connection of intemperance to the desire spawned by the pursuit of capital, both men drink brandy as they conduct their negotiations. Eventually, McCloskey agrees to accept Stevens's offer of four thousand dollars, while unbeknownst to Stevens, Lizzie, who has been eavesdropping on the scene, faints away. When she revives, the faithful virtuous daughter journeys to Philadelphia with the intention of confronting McCloskey, but she arrives too late. The intemperate McCloskey had spent all of his money gambling and drinking, and, following “an awful attack of delirium tremens” (p. 362), had died of typhus fever. Just before he died, however, he gained a measure of peace of mind by revealing to legal authorities the truth about the murder of Garie, the news of which prompts Lizzie to hurry back to New York, where she once again is too late: Seeking to escape the warrant for his arrest, Stevens leaps to his death from his apartment window.

His legacy lives on, however, in his inebriated son, whose inheritance of his father's antimiscegenationist zeal leads him to wreak havoc on Clary Gary by exposing his “blackness.” Years after agreeing to Balch's advice to separate himself from his family, Clary is about to reap the benefits of “passing” in the form of a marriage to the socially prominent Anne Bates. In order to protect his interests, he has for nearly a year refused to visit with his sister. Like Winston, he has become a moral coward who has fallen in love with whiteness. After his secret past is (inevitably) revealed by George Stevens and the marriage is broken off by Anne's parents, he begins making secret visits to the Bates's home so he can look in at Anne's window. “There she stood in the moonlight,” he tells Charlie Ellis, “gazing upward at the sky, so pale, so calm and holy looking, in her pure white dress, that I should not have thought it strange if the heavens had opened” (p. 385). The very traditionalism of the whiteness—purity association so central to his conception here suggests the extent to which he has bought into the symbology of the racial class that does everything it can to expel him.

Clary's pathetic fate in attempting to pass for white and ending up nowhere—he dies of a broken heart—is counterpointed against Webb's larger celebration of the African American characters prospering in 1850s Philadelphia. Addison Gayle, Jr., writes that the novel's apparently happy ending expresses Webb's sense that “individuality must take preference over racial unity.”³⁶ Yet the most visible signs of triumphant individuality depicted at the end of the novel—the continued economic power of Walters, Charlie Ellis's burgeoning career—are all predicated on the belief that the individual's hard work assumes its significance only in relation to family and friends. If there is an “individualist” at the novel's end, it is Clary, who clearly has not earned the narrator's admiration. As opposed to the kind of high-status marriage Clary was pursuing, the marriages culminating the novel—of Walters and Esther Ellis, and then of Charlie Ellis and Emily Garie—signify these characters' commitments to forging bonds that will further strengthen their community. Though white in appearance, Emily conceives of herself as a black in white society, and so she embraces her upcoming marriage to Charlie as a sign of her commitment to her fellow marginalized African Americans. As she had earlier written Clary, who had been urging her to break her ties to Philadelphia's black community: “You walk on the side of the oppressor—I, thank God, am with the oppressed” (p. 336). In putting her commitments on the side of the oppressed, she gains a family. After her marriage to Charlie, the narrator remarks, “she no longer felt herself an orphan” (p. 375).

The penultimate chapter of the novel describes the opulent festivities following Charlie and Emily's marriage ceremony. Wine and sherry are consumed at the reception, and the wedding feast itself is nothing short of luxurious (and excessive): boneless turkeys, stewed terrapin, “oysters in every variety” (p. 376), “jellies, blancmange, chocolate cream” (p. 376) are served, along with “champagne, Rhine wine, sparkling catawba, liquors” (p. 376). There is even “a man in the corner making sherry cobblers of wondrous flavor” (pp. 376-77). How can these African Americans celebrate so excessively, so intemperately, we might ask, given what they have been through, and given their continuing efforts to struggle economically in a racist society? But surely Webb's point here, in the novel's only mention of black drinking, is that a central aspect of the community's strength lies precisely in its ability and willingness, even with all of its hardships, to celebrate an event worth celebrating, and to do so in a fully corporeal fashion. It does so as well in an interracial fashion, as this utopianistic picture of happiness and good cheer includes some of the whites who, in helping the Garies and their friends, challenged the strictures of their culture. “What a happy time they had!” (p. 377) the narrator concludes. Yet even as the narrator takes pride in the ability of this group to carve out a niche of happiness amidst racist Philadelphia, Webb is hardly naive about the larger problems that continue to face the black community. Within the larger context of the novel, the elder Ellis, mad and “paranoid,” looms as the group's most prescient realist. “There they come! there they come!” (p. 342) he regularly declares from within his visionary prison. Amidst the wedding's plenty and festivity, he sees just “another mob” (p. 372).

Despite the elder Ellis's warnings, though, the happiness and economic rejuvenation of the Ellises and their friends provide the novel with a relatively happy ending, and a sense, as in Emily's self-conscious declarations of her alliance with the oppressed, that that happiness has a political dimension. But all of this is not to deny that the novel is rife with contradictions, particularly as concerns the linked issues of temperance and capitalism. One might certainly wonder, for example, about the excesses of the final wedding celebration, as the feasting and drinking can seem, when compared with the novel's opening presentation of the similarly excessive afternoon tea at the Garies' slave plantation, as portentous signs of the encroachment of luxury on the novel's black community. From this perspective, one could argue that the marginalized and oppressed black celebrants seem all too ready to enter the comfortable world of their oppressors. Yet to my mind the parallels between the novel's opening and closing feasts are deliberately intended by Webb to suggest difference more than similarity, the key difference being precisely what Emily says it is: that the blacks, despite the celebration, remain oppressed. Moreover, in portraying the blacks as drinking lustily at the celebration, Webb distances himself from the puritanical and Franklinian strain of the black temperance movement—the world, say, of the American Moral Reform Society. At the novel's conclusion, Charlie Ellis's sister, Caddy, stands as the sole representative of this extreme commitment to frugality and self-restraint, as she and her husband have a “wonderful little girl, who, instead of buying candy and cake with her sixpences, as other children did, gravely invested them in miniature wash-boards and dust-brushes, and was saving up her money to purchase a tiny stove with a full set of cooking utensils” (p. 392). In a final act of narrative mockery, Webb remarks, “Caddy declares her a child worth having” (p. 392). Clearly, from Webb's perspective, temperate self-regulation for the mere sake of temperate self-regulation will fail to do much of anything to strengthen and elevate the African American community.

But contradictions remain. For even if we read the parallel between the Garies' opening feast and the closing wedding feast as pointing to difference, what are we to make of the picture of upwardly aspiring black capitalists in relation to the picture of the intemperate Stevens? His intemperance, as we have seen, has an analogue in his rapacious capitalistic desires. Though Webb's melodramatic characterizations permit us to conceive of a relatively easy dichotomy between Stevens and the capitalists of the black community, we may nonetheless discern an ideological conflict or confusion on Webb's part. For the question that is deflected (or avoided) throughout the novel is, to put it bluntly, how to separate the good from the bad capitalists? That is to say, if participation in the marketplace is central to black self-elevation, and money is central to the ability to have lavish, sensuous feasts, how does one ensure that the pursuit of wealth does not involve the pursuer in the forms of power and intemperance typified by Stevens? Like Stevens, Walters, for example, is a speculator in real estate; and like Stevens and his business associates, Charlie Ellis proclaims that he wants money principally to provide for his family. In this respect, a sentimental aspect of the novel is Webb's seeming insistence that blacks can gain moral stature from participation in a marketplace that is otherwise shown to elicit, indeed depend upon, “intemperate” desires and actions.

This leads to a final and even larger ideological conundrum of the novel: What about the problem of slavery in America? And what about the slaves? Given that slavery remains a central reality of American cultural life, it is a troubling fact of the novel's conclusion that the black Philadelphia community seems to be working rather narrowly for its own survival. Gayle thus remarks, “Not with the slave … lies the sympathy of this middle-class novelist, but with those who, through hard work and initiative, seek to travel light-years from their brothers.”³⁷ While there is no evidence in the novel to suggest that characters like Walters and Charlie Ellis want to travel “light-years from their brothers” (and sisters), there is every sense that they want to travel light-years from being enslaved, and therefore can seem self-absorbed in their quest for economic independence. In their defense, we could say that the characters clearly have enough problems of their own without having to take onto their shoulders the plight of the slaves. We could also say that in obtaining economic power, and in developing their own cultural institutions—such as the reading societies that the Ellis daughters attend at the novel's opening—the black characters are in their own ways furthering the elevation of blacks in America (and for all we know slavery was the central focus of these reading societies). In the spirit of the black temperance movement, which argued that black material success would refute proslavery ideology, Webb most likely regards the fortunes of Philadelphia's blacks as very much linked to the fates of the Southern slaves. That said, it must be conceded that none of the major characters explicitly participates in antislavery actions, though Walters's reverence for Toussaint l'Ouverture does suggest that he conceives of his economic pursuits in an antislavery context.³⁸

In Garies, then, the issue of black elevation takes weight over antislavery, which can help to explain a rather chilling blind spot in the text. An important aspect of the novel's “happy” ending is that McCloskey's confession and Stevens's death allow the lawyer Balch to recover for the Garie children some of their father's legacy. Central to that legacy, we have to assume, is the money earned from his slave plantation. Have Emily and Charlie in effect received the blood money of slaveholders as their inheritance? We need to recall that when the Garies went North early in the novel, Winston, as is typical of his lack of political consciousness, urges Garie to leave behind on the plantation a trustworthy overseer, whose services Garie indeed secures. At no point while in Philadelphia does Garie order the slaves sold or freed, which means that when he died they constituted part of his legacy. When financial matters are sorted out in the end, therefore, the children, by the Northern law under which Balch is operating, are entitled to their property, which means they can now claim the slaves, or, more likely, given that slavery is still the law of the land, the money obtained by Stevens in selling them to other slaveholders. I take Webb's failure to confront these matters directly less as a sign of his lack of sympathy for antislavery, or the slaves, than as a sign of the way in which his emphasis on the Philadelphia blacks' efforts to achieve middle-class American identity leads him to fall into a trap of a number of ethnic writers with “assimilationist” aspirations: to want to make origins relatively invisible, as if origins, for those aspiring to just such an “American” identity, threaten to become shameful.³⁹

As compelling as is Webb's portrayal of black middle-class life in antebellum Philadelphia, and as complex as is his treatment of the dissolving boundaries between temperate self-control and capitalist exploitation, the sense that Webb, in too uncritically aligning himself with temperance and capitalist values, has forgotten (or is shamed by) the slaves no doubt has contributed, as the various adduced comments by Bell, Jackson, and Gayle suggest, to the novel's neglect. Webb's reputation has also not been helped by the fact that his two other extant fictional works, the short stories “Two Wolves and a Lamb” and “Marvin Hayle,” which appeared in 1870 issues of New Era: A Colored National Journal, focus on white aristocratic characters in London and Paris and thus seem oblivious to blacks' continuing struggles in America.⁴⁰

And yet in the issue of New Era immediately following the final installment of “Two Wolves and a Lamb,” there appeared a front-page editorial by Webb in which he addresses the debate on Reconstruction in terms that can help us to tease out a utopian dimension of Garies and a possible explanation of its blind spots. After accusing the Democrats in particular of a fundamental racism that keeps them “fighting now, as they fought then [before the Civil War] … any movement that is calculated to elevate [the African American] to his proper position and maintain him there,” Webb addresses his black (male) readers on the possible end results of such elevation. “Colored men of the South,” he proclaims, “what are the rash innovations, the institutions of the country have lately experienced—they are colored voters, walking manfully to the polls, depositing an intelligent vote for that party whose friendship for us has been tried. They are the governance of southern cities, by men who dared not walk their streets at night without a pass. They are colored men as state legislators, making the law by which white men are governed. They are happy-faced colored children on their way to mixed schools.”⁴¹ We should recall that when Garie first arrived in Philadelphia and saw black children on their way to school, he remarked to himself that Philadelphia “don't much resemble Georgia” (p. 120), only to learn, in his final moments, that Philadelphia in fact does resemble Georgia. Webb's dream in Garies and in this post-Civil War piece, similar to the dream informing Frederick Douglass's writings, is of an egalitarian, biracial America in which there are differences between slavery and freedom. In post-Civil War America, which he hopes will not resemble pre-Civil War America, the participation of blacks and whites in democratic institutions will dissolve boundaries between the races, providing opportunities for those who energetically pursue them. Among the opportunities for blacks would be the right to assert governance over whites. That such a right, along with unrestricted access to the market economy, would mean that blacks would have the potential to become as corrupt and intemperate as most of the whites we meet in Garies is a problem that, for both the visionary-utopianist and the liberal-pragmatist sides of Webb, can be addressed at such a time when these epochal changes in American society have truly occurred.

Notes

1. Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the American Moral Reform Society: Held at Philadelphia in the Presbyterian Church in Seventh Street, below Shippen, from the 14th to the 19th of August, 1837 (1837), reprinted in Early Negro Writing, 1760-1837, ed. Dorothy Porter (Boston: Beacon, 1971), pp. 207, 241, 235, 236.

2. On black temperance, see Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 91-100; and Donald Yacovone, “The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement, 1827-1854: An Interpretation,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (1988): 281-97. The seminal study of black elevation is Frederick Cooper, “Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-50,” American Quarterly 24 (1972): 604-25. See also Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974). On the antebellum temperance movement generally, see Ian R. Tyrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800-1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979); and W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

3. Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 221.

4. Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 32 (1980): 57. Blacks viewed the pursuit of wealth as a way of challenging white racialist notions of black indolence. As Lapsansky remarks in another fine article, black Philadelphians of the middle and upper classes were “molded together by a self-conscious belief that its successes and behaviors could significantly effect the life-chances of all Afroamericans” (“Friends, Wives, and Strivings: Networks and Community Values Among Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia Afroamerican Elites,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 [1984]: 4).

5. Blyden Jackson, for example, terms the book “pedestrian and hackneyed,” “the stuff of melodrama.” See his A History of Afro-American Literature. Volume I: The Long Beginning, 1746-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 344. Similarly, Vernon Loggins writes about Webb's Garies: “There is power in his story, but it is all but lost in melodrama and sentimentality” (The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 [1931; rept. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1964], p. 251). And Arlene H. Elder maintains that Webb “found light touches with the satirist's brush unsatisfying and reached for the muckraker's hammer instead” (The “Hindered Hand”: Cultural Implications of Early African-American Fiction [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978], p. 47).

6. See Carla L. Peterson's excellent “Capitalism, Black (Under)development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s,” American Literary History 4 (1992): 577-79.

7. Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 58. See also the discussion of the minority hybrid text's enactment of “repetition with a difference” (p. 567) in Peterson's “Capitalism, Black (Under)development.”

8. The best account of the emigration movement and debate may be found in Floyd J. Miller's The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). See also Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, pp. 251-78.

9. “Colored Citizens of Pennsylvania,” Frederick Douglass' Paper, April 13, 1855, p. 2. The column is anonymous, though it appears in the spot in the newspaper where Douglass usually printed his own editorials.

10. Jackson, History of Afro-American Literature, p. 348. Arthur P. Davis, the editor of a 1969 facsimile reprinting of Garies, similarly criticizes the novel's “highly contrived plot, its purple patches, its tear-jerking scenes, and its deathbed repentances.” Though he argues that the book looks forward to important tropes and themes in later 19th- and 20th-Century African American writing, he terms the novel a “typical 19th-century melodrama” which uncritically portrays middle class blacks for whom “money is all important” (Introduction to Frank J. Webb, The Garies and Their Friends [1857; rept. New York: Arno, 1969], pp. viii, v). With Davis as its champion, it is no wonder that the book was allowed once again to go out of print!

11. Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor, 1975), pp. 11, 13, 14. Robert Bone also sees the “dominant tone of Webb's novel” to be, somewhat inappropriately, “that of the conventional success story” (The Negro Novel in America [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965], p. 31).

12. Webb, Garies, p. v.

13. Webb, Garies, p. 1. All further page references to Webb's novel will be cited parenthetically in the text.

14. The sensationalistic urban journalist George G. Foster observed of Philadelphia's blacks in the 1840s, “The better class of colored men and women in Philadelphia are as virtuous, as cleanly, as industrious, as intelligent and in every way as worthy as the corresponding class of whites. In point of sobriety and economy they are at least equal to their white brethren.” See “‘Philadelphia in Slices,’ by George G. Foster,” ed. George Rogers Taylor, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 93 (1969): 61. Foster's series of articles first appeared in the New York Tribune, October 21, 1848 to February 15, 1849.

15. Bernard Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 43.

16. Frederick Douglass, “Learn Trades or Starve!” Frederick Douglass' Paper, March 4, 1853; reprinted in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. II: Pre-Civil War Decade, 1850-1860, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International, 1950), p. 223. Martin R. Delany similarly warned his black readers of the degradation accompanying servile positions; see for example his essay “Domestic Economy,” North Star, April 20, 1849, p. 2.

17. See Elizabeth M. Geffen, “Violence in Philadelphia in the 1840's and 1850's,” Pennsylvania History 36 (1969): 386-87.

18. Lapsansky, “Friends, Wives, and Strivings,” p. 22. Also emphasizing Philadelphia's heterogeneous housing patterns is Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), p. 50. Other historians have argued that, despite the apparent heterogeneity, stratification by race and class was beginning to dominate housing patterns during the 1840-60 period. For interesting discussions of these developments, see Stuart M. Blumin, “Residential Mobility Within the Nineteenth-Century City,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), pp. 37-51; Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,” in Davis and Haller, Peoples of Philadelphia, pp. 111-33; and Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia: 1800-1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 10-11. On white concerns about “amalgamation” in Garies, see James Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), pp. 92-97, 100-1.

19. By showing how racism can undermine blacks' efforts to gain an education, Webb makes clear that whites understood just how important education was to black efforts at self-elevation. Though Clary and Em attend a private school, what is true for that school is also true for Philadelphia's public schools: that whites for the most part successfully resist black participation. At the approximate historical period in which the bulk of Garies is set—the early 1840s—only 3 percent of the total public school population was white. See Harry C. Silcox, “Delay and Neglect: Negro Public Education in Antebellum Philadelphia, 1800-1860,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1973): 444-64.

20. Webb is also rhetorically aligned with George G. Foster, whose “Philadelphia in Slices” (pp. 48, 49) presented the gambling houses as “vile, filthy dens” of alcoholic consumption, wherein “lawyers, merchants, gentlemen of refined taste and cultivated understanding, here meet unabashed to gratify the most cruel and relentless appetite implanted in the breast of man.”

21. See Julie Winch, Philadelphia's Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787-1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 144-45. As Lapsansky notes, the blacks most bitterly resented by whites were those who “represented economic and social ‘success’ and ‘respectability’” (“Since They Got Those Separate Churches,” p. 64). On this and later race riots in antebellum Philadelphia, see also Warner, Private City, pp. 125-57.

22. See Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Winch remarks on the origin of the 1838 riot in rumor: “Robert Purvis was seen accompanying his darker-skinned wife, Harriet, to a meeting of the female antislavery convention. On this occasion, as on others, Purvis was mistakenly thought to be white” (Philadelphia's Black Elite, pp. 146-47).

23. Frederick Douglass, “Intemperance and Slavery,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews: Volume I: 1841-46, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 57. The banner of “freedom” that Douglass referred to pictured a black slave breaking out of his chains against a backdrop of what appeared to be flames. Many whites regarded the banner as an overly assertive representation of black independence and power. In a classic case of blaming the victim, whites therefore talked of the banner as having “caused” the riot. See Winch, Philadelphia's Black Elite, pp. 148-50; and Warner, Private City, pp. 140-41.

24. Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 102.

25. See Michael Feldberg, “The Crowd in Philadelphia History: A Comparative Perspective,” in American Workingclass Culture: Explorations in American Labor and Social History, ed. Milton Cantor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), p. 89.

26. Laurie, Working People, pp. 156-57.

27. Laurie, Working People, p. 54. On the role of the fire companies in helping the Irish to maintain a sense of pride and identity in the face of nativist hostility, see also Dennis J. Clark, “The Philadelphia Irish: Persistent Presence,” in Peoples of Philadelphia, pp. 135-54. In an interesting and powerful scene, Webb challenges the paternalistic reading of the working class informing most of the novel by depicting Stevens venturing into the ethnic pockets of Philadelphia and becoming the victim of the very forces he attempts to marshal. Unaware that he is wearing the clothes “in the rowdy style … of a notorious fire company” (p. 186), Stevens wanders into a rival neighborhood, is taken as a member of “one of the well-known and hated faction” (p. 186), the Rangers, and is viciously beaten by a gang (presumably consisting of members of that neighborhood's fire company) while others in the community look on. In the context of his own plottings, he has become a metaphorical “black,” a metaphor that the gang attempts to literalize by tarring his face: “Oh! don't he look like a nigger!” (p. 188). Needless to say, Stevens learns nothing from his painful experience.

28. Historian William E. Gienapp observes, “For both Know Nothings and temperance crusaders, besotted Irish Catholics functioned as their primary negative reference group” (The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 98). In portraying the Irish so unsympathetically as intractable drinkers, Webb ignores the fact that many of Philadelphia's Irish Catholics, like many of Philadelphia's African Americans, embraced temperance as a social program of elevation during economic hard times. Father Mathew's preachings had a trans-Atlantic influence on the Irish community; the tavern culture of some Irish was not the culture of all. By 1841 there were approximately 3,000 members of the Catholic Total Abstinence Society; and in 1842, the year of the black temperance parade, approximately 8,000 Irish Catholics marched in their own temperance parade. For information on temperance in Philadelphia's Irish community, I am indebted to Edith Jeffrey, “Reform, Renewal, and Vindication: Irish Immigrants and the Catholic Total Abstinence Movement in Antebellum Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112 (1988): 407-31.

29. Peterson, “Capitalism, Black (Under)development,” p. 579.

30. Laurie, Working People, p. 125.

31. Cited in Winch, Philadelphia's Black Elite, p. 150.

32. Winch, Philadelphia's Black Elite, p. 151.

33. Peterson, “Capitalism, Black (Under)development,” p. 578. Thus I think Bernard Bell is mistaken when he writes of Garies: “Class values … displace color in Webb's narrative” (Afro-American Novel, p. 44).

34. Historians of the period have observed that segregation in the work force was sharply on the rise during the 1840-60 period; in fact, as Hershberg notes, by “1847 less than one-half of 1 percent of the black male work force was employed in factories” (“Free Blacks,” p. 117).

35. See especially the transmission of moral and corporeal qualities from the tavern owner to his son in T. S. Arthur, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1855; rept. New York: Odyssey, 1960).

36. Gayle, Way of the New World, p. 14.

37. Gayle, Way of the New World, p. 14.

38. Interestingly, the only explicitly antislavery activity of the novel is displayed by poorer, working-class blacks—waiters at a fancy hotel who declare to Southern guests their love for slavery only to turn over their additional tips to the underground railroad. Winston, who is outraged by their fawning servility, fails to see through their ruse (pp. 40-41).

39. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Donald Weber, “Reconsidering the Hansen Thesis: Generational Metaphors and American Ethnic Studies,” American Quarterly 43 (1991): 320-32.

40. “Two Wolves and a Lamb,” for example, tells the story of a “wolfish” woman who (perhaps accidentally) kills the woman engaged to the man she loves, one Mr. Walton; the tale builds to a rather ludicrous scene in which Walton takes revenge against the “wolf” by covering her with snakes in a remote island cabin. Why offer up such a Poe-like Gothic tale of white aristocrats to an audience of African American readers during the time of Reconstruction? No doubt an ingenious reader could discover in the story an allegorical critique of white inbreeding and depravity; but with its placement on the page in New Era regularly devoted to “lighter” fare (p. 4), it would not be inappropriate to set ingenuity aside and conclude that Webb was simply out to entertain, and was doing so, after years abroad in predominately white circles, in somewhat decadent fashion. See New Era: A Colored American National Journal 1 (January-February 1870).

41. F. J. Webb, “An Old Foe with a New Face,” New Era: A Colored American National Journal (February 10, 1870): 1. This piece has not been noted previously in any discussions of Webb's writings and is missing from the bibliography in Gregory L. Candela, “Frank J. Webb,” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 50: Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986), pp. 242-45.