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)Google Scholar, reprinted in Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837, ed. Porter, Dorothy (Boston: Beacon, 1971), pp. 207, 241, 235, 236.Google Scholar

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

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

4. Lapsansky, Emma Jones, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 32 (1980): 57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar 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).Google Scholar

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.Google Scholar Similarly, Vernon Loggins writes about Webb, 's GariesGoogle Scholar: “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).Google Scholar And Elder, Arlene H. 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).Google Scholar

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

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

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

9. “Colored Citizens of Pennsylvania,” Frederick Douglass' Paper, 04 13, 1855, p. 2.Google Scholar 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.Google Scholar 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 Webb, Frank J., The Garies and Their Friends [1857; rept. New York: Arno, 1969], pp. viii, v).Google Scholar With Davis as its champion, it is no wonder that the book was allowed once again to go out of print!

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

12. Webb, , Garies, p. v.Google Scholar

13. Webb, , Garies, p. 1.Google Scholar 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. Taylor, George Rogers, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 93 (1969): 61.Google Scholar Foster's series of articles first appeared in the New York Tribune, 10 21, 1848 to February 15, 1849.Google Scholar

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

16. Douglass, Frederick, “Learn Trades or Starve!” Frederick Douglass' Paper, 03 4, 1853Google Scholar; reprinted in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. II: Pre-Civil War Decade, 1850–1860, ed. Foner, Philip S. (New York: International, 1950), p. 223.Google Scholar Martin R. Delany similarly warned his black readers of the degradation accompanying servile positions; see for example his essay “Domestic Economy,” North Star, 04 20, 1849, p. 2.Google Scholar

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

18. Lapsansky, , “Friends, Wives, and Strivings,” p. 22.Google Scholar Also emphasizing Philadelphia's heterogeneous housing patterns is Warner, Sam Bass Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: Univer sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), p. 50.Google Scholar 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 Blumin, Stuart M., “Residential Mobility Within the Nineteenth-Century City,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940, ed. Davis, Allen F. and Haller, Mark H. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), pp. 37–51Google Scholar; Hershberg, Theodore, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,”Google Scholar in Davis, and Haller, , Peoples of Philadelphia, pp. 111–33Google Scholar; and Laurie, Bruce, Working People of Philadelphia: 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 10–11.Google Scholar On white concerns about “amalgamation” in Garies, see Kinney, James, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), pp. 92–97, 100–1.Google Scholar

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 Silcox, Harry C., “Delay and Neglect: Negro Public Education in Antebellum Philadelphia, 1800–1860,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1973): 444–64.Google Scholar

20. Webb is also rhetorically aligned with Foster, George G., whose “Philadelphia in Slices” (pp. 48, 49)Google Scholar 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 relentlesss appetite implanted in the breast of man.”

21. See Winch, Julie, Philadelphia's Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 144–45.Google Scholar 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).Google Scholar On this and later race riots in antebellum Philadelphia, see also Warner, , Private City, pp. 125–57.Google Scholar

22. See Richards, Leonard L., “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).Google Scholar 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).Google Scholar

23. Douglass, Frederick, “Intemperance and Slavery,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews: Volume I: 1841–46, ed. Blassingame, John W. et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 57.Google Scholar 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. 148–50Google Scholar; and Warner, , Private City, pp. 140–41.Google Scholar

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

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

26. Laurie, , Working People, pp. 156–57.Google Scholar

27. Laurie, , Working People, p. 54.Google Scholar 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 Clark, Dennis J., “The Philadelphia Irish: Persistent Presence,” in Peoples of Philadelphia, pp. 135–54.Google Scholar 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)Google Scholar, Stevens wanders into a rival neighborhood, is taken as a member of “one of the well-known and hated faction” (p. 186)Google Scholar, 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).Google Scholar Needless to say, Stevens learns nothing from his painful experience.

28. Historian Gienapp, William E. 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).Google Scholar 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 Jeffrey, Edith, “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.Google Scholar

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

30. Laurie, , Working People, p. 125.Google Scholar

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

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

33. Peterson, , “Capitalism, Black (Under)development,” p. 578.Google Scholar 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).Google Scholar

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).Google Scholar

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

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

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

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 Weber, Donald, “Reconsidering the Hansen Thesis: Generational Metaphors and American Ethnic Studies,” American Quarterly 43 (1991): 320–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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)Google Scholar, 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 (01–02 1870).Google Scholar

41. Webb, F. J., “An Old Foe with a New Face,” New Era: A Colored American National Journal (02 10, 1870): 1.Google Scholar This piece has not been noted previously in any discussions of Webb's writings and is missing from the bibliography in Candela, Gregory L., “Frank J. Webb,” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 50: Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Harris, Trudier and Davis, Thadious M. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1986), pp. 242–45.Google Scholar