Frank publicly and independently spoke out in favor of black emigration and martial training. Nearly everywhere, however, the Webbs faced racial restrictions and condescension. Through May 1856, she performed from Washington, D.C., to Cleveland, Ohio.

John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others commended her efforts. She gained encouragement and training assistance from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who dramatized selections from Uncle Tom's Cabin precisely for Mary. Before Frank and Mary launched their artistic careers, the Webbs' Philadelphia cloth and clothing designing business failed in 1854, despite winning prizes in Philadelphia for its products in the early 1850s.Įarly in the spring of 1855 Mary set out to become a dramatic reader with Frank as her manager. In 1845 Webb married Mary E., the similarly educated daughter of a fugitive Virginia slave and reputed Spanish nobleman.

His proud, striving family apparently provided a classical education. All these dainties, mingling their various odours with the aroma of the tea and fine old java that came steaming forth from the richly chased silver pots, could not fail to produce a very appetising effect.Novelist, newspaperman, and educator Frank Johnson Webb was named after an internationally popular black orchestra leader in Philadelphia. A silver basket filled with a variety of cakes was in close proximity to a plate of corn-flappers, which were piled upon it like a mountain, and from the brown tops of which trickled tiny rivulets of butter. Opposite, and as if to divert the gaze from lingering too long over their luscious beauty, was a dish of peaches preserved in brandy, a never-failing article in a Southern matron's catalogues of sweets. Geeche limes, almost drowned in their own rich syrup, temptingly displayed their bronze-coloured forms just above the rim of the glass that contained them. In the centre stood a dish of ripe strawberries, their plump red sides peeping through the covering of white sugar that had been plentifully sprinkled over them.

In which the Reader is introduced to a Family of peculiar Construction.It was at the close of an afternoon in May, that a party might have been seen gathered around a table covered with all those delicacies that, in the household of a rich Southern planter, are regarded as almost necessaries of life.

Frank webb the garies and their friends