Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends and the Struggle over Black Education in the Antebellum North

“Can you spell?” Miss Cass asks her sole black pupil, the young and mischievous Charlie Ellis, in a critical but often overlooked scene of Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends. Charlie, a proficient reader and writer, responds by theatrically stuttering through his speller, aware that his teacher has never entertained the possibility “that he could do more than spell” (248). Charlie exploits his teacher’s assumptions of black intellectual inferiority, engaging in a social critique of educational inequity that Webb masks as comic childhood rebellion. Black education as a means to uplift is a prominent concern for Webb; a meaningful part of his project is to expose the shortcomings of white-sponsored educational programs that assume white superiority. In Charlie, Webb creates both a student and an educator who asks well-intentioned white characters—as well as readers—to examine and transform their erroneous beliefs. Because Webb performs much of the novel’s political work through the character of a rebellious though highly intelligent child, he is able to advocate black solidarity and expose racial injustice while maintaining a white readership.

Focusing on Webb’s interest in education opens up the political possibilities of the novel, illuminating the complex position of a black community advocating for uplift in a culture of white supremacy. Ronald E. Butchart notes that “[e]ducation is always, everywhere, and inevitably political” (xix), a point clearly illustrated by Webb’s novel, where politics and education are inextricably linked. Thus, in order to understand Webb’s literary text as a meditation on the struggle for black community building, we must read education as central to the author’s vision of a free black America. The Garies and Their Friends points to the critical issues facing black leaders: How will the black community achieve independence? Who is best equipped to provide the education that will yield elevation? What are the benefits and limitations of different educational choices? While Webb’s text is clearly grounded in a specific moment of American education history, these questions have enduring relevance in struggles around educational equality and African American achievement, demonstrating the continued import of the novel and its author.

The first fictional account of color discrimination in the antebellum North and the second published novel by an African American—the first was William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853)—The Garies and Their Friends traces the intersecting lives of two families, the Garies and the Ellises, as they confront white supremacy in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. In order to marry his slave mistress and ensure the safety and education of their children, the white Clarence Garie relocates his family to Philadelphia where they are befriended by the African American Ellises and introduced to the city’s thriving black community but also to its virulent Northern racism. The violence of Northern white supremacy is illustrated in the novel’s central event, a race riot that kills Mr. and Mrs. Garie and permanently disables Mr. Ellis. The novel concludes with the death of the Garies’s son Clarence, enervated by his decision to pass for white, and the emergence of the Ellises’s son, Charlie, as a family and community leader. Despite Webb’s exposé of Northern racism, early critics dismissed the novel for its reliance on sentimental conventions and failure substantively to engage slavery.¹ Recent critics, however, have begun to appreciate The Garies and Their Friends as an astute portrayal of Northern black community life and a work of significant literary and political import.² Even so, Webb scholarship remains limited; there has been a failure to fully appreciate the radical aspects of Webb’s project.

Some scholars, unable to reconcile the novel’s shifts between black resistance to and acceptance of white aid or consideration of white opinion, have argued that a desire for whiteness motivates the actions of the characters, rather than an allegiance to the black community. As Gregg Crane notes, critics have been made uncomfortable by a perceived “capitulation to the cultural standards of the...