Content Warning: This section refers to enslavement, racism, and discrimination.

The Garies and Their Friends is a social problem novel that addresses the challenges faced by Black Americans and their allies in the 19th-century US prior to the Civil War. A social problem novel is a genre of fiction popular in the mid-19th century that dramatizes the effects of a social issue and shows its impacts on the characters in the novel. The social problem novel attempts to raise public attention about an issue and encourages efforts to solve it. A classic American example of a social problem novel is Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which addresses the inhumanity and moral degradation of the enslavement of Black Americans. Published only five years later and with the support of Harriet Beecher Stowe herself (xxii), The Garies and Their Friends is written along a similar model, except with a focus on discrimination against free Black Americans in the North.

In the antebellum (pre-Civil War) United States, Black Americans were held in bondage in the South. In the North, Black Americans were not enslaved but nevertheless faced incredible discrimination in education, employment, and treatment. As shown in the novel, Black Americans in the North in the mid-19th century were largely barred from white-collar professions, forced into segregated accommodations, and subjected to white mob violence. Many abolitionists at this time, both white and Black, advocated both for the liberation of enslaved Black Americans and for equality of treatment in the North. In the 1850s, debate between abolitionists and pro-enslavement advocates was particularly fierce, and the specter of civil war over the issue was on the horizon. This tension is frequently alluded to in the text, wherein white people sympathetic to the challenges faced by the Garies and their friends nevertheless insist that they are not abolitionists (which is to say, radicals). The conflict between abolitionists and pro-enslavement advocates came to a head in 1861 after the election of abolitionist President Abraham Lincoln and the Southern states’ declaration of secession from the Union in order to preserve enslavement.