Whose is the author of appeal which was first published in 1829 and startled many Americans with its call for a violent uprising to end slavery?

Two weeks before Christmas 1829, 60 copies of a book slipped off a ship at the port of Savannah and found their way to a local black preacher. Seeing what was inside, he turned them over to the police at once. They seized every copy.

The author, it turned out, was a free and educated black man named David Walker, a Boston activist and used-clothing dealer.

As its title suggested, the book was an “Appeal” to “The Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to those of the United States of America.” Yet appeal was a tame word for the prophecy smoldering between its covers, clearly directed towards the nation’s enslaved laborers. The police may have flipped to page 28: “It is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” Page 35 argued that owners denied slaves education because it would reveal their right to “cut his devlish throat from ear to ear, and well do slave-holders know it.”

Perhaps the police clapped the book shut after page 42, startled when it aimed at whites directly: “Unless you speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone!!!!!! For God Almighty will tear up the very face of the earth!!!”

Shortly after this seizure, 20 more copies appeared in Georgia’s capital, then another 30 in Virginia. More materialized in New Orleans and Charleston two months later. Before the end of the year, more than 200 had breached the Carolinas. Police scrambled but failed to confiscate most copies, despite in some instances sending undercover agents into black communities. In certain parts of the South, evidence emerged that the book was in fact spreading via networks of runaways. Whites began to panic. Frederick Douglass later reflected that the Appeal “startled the land like a trump of coming judgment.”

Hoping to stanch the book’s flow, state officials called emergency sessions and passed legislation with astounding swiftness. In the words of historian Lacy K. Ford, Jr., “the security furor triggered by the appearance of David Walker's pamphlet was without precedent.” In Georgia, legislators convened on December 21 and passed new laws before the end of the year. Georgia and North Carolina banned black sailors from entering their ports and outlawed the circulation of questionable literature, punishable by death in the former. Louisiana and Virginia strengthened codes that banned free blacks from entering the state or outlawed literacy instruction for slaves.

The day after the Appeal first appeared in the South, the mayor of Savannah wrote to the mayor of Boston, Harrison Gray Otis, requesting that Mr. Walker be punished for the distribution of his “highly inflammatory work.” Otis conceded that the book was “extremely bad,” but it was not strictly illegal according to any Massachusetts law. He could neither confiscate it nor punish Walker lawfully.

This was more than a failure to harmonize Southern and Northern law; it was a symptom of what Abraham Lincoln would later call a “house divided against itself” on fundamental definitions of property rights versus human rights. The “right to tamper with this species of property belongs to no man, and no body of men, but their owners,” one Georgia journalist wrote in response to the Appeal –  this was “the point of delicacy, and the sanctum sanctorum of Southern feeling.”

Otis did send men to question Walker, perhaps hoping that some pressure from the mayor’s office would unnerve him. To their surprise, Walker not only openly claimed the Appeal as his handiwork, but made plain his intention to circulate more copies at his own expense – also perfectly legal in Massachusetts. Otis could do little besides warn New England ship captains about the book and urge his southern countrymen to remain calm. Otis pointed to “the insignificance of the writer, the extravagance of his sanguinary fanaticism” as evidence that everything would blow over if everyone kept their heads.

But in reality, more than any book in American history, the Appeal forced a choice between peace of mind and owning slaves.

Was Walker, as Otis said, an extravagant fanatic, not worth their panic?

He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1796. His father, a slave, died before his birth. His mother, free, passed her freedom on to him as the law allowed. Walker nonetheless despised his birthplace, a “bloody land ... where I must hear slaves’ chains continually.” He left for the North, and it seems no coincidence that he sent 200 copies of the Appeal to his hometown alone, nearly double the amount that he had sent elsewhere.

Walker plugged into nearly all the major networks of antebellum black activism. He was a leader in AME Church communities in Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston –  all cities with organized free black communities – and was active in Boston’s Prince Hall Freemasonry, where he also helped found the Massachusetts General Coloured Association. In addition to composing his own antislavery writings and speeches, he was even a sales agent for Freedom's Journal, America's first black newspaper. Walker was welcome company among the organized black North.

And if his Appeal was peppered plentifully with prophecy and exclamation marks, its core argument was simple and unnerving. He began with the common premise that slavery defied God’s law because it usurped God’s authority. (“Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone?” he posed plainly.) As such, slavery was destined to end either peacefully or violently. Those who defended it, he argued, “forget that God rules in the armies of heaven.”

But even slave owners like Thomas Jefferson had acknowledged as much years earlier. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he famously brooded, wondering if a revolution was coming for America’s slave economy. 

Walker terrified readers by unfolding this premise a step further, from passive apocalypticism to active holy war: if slavery defied God’s law, so did obedient slaves. Rebellious slaves, therefore, were God’s warriors.

“The man who would not fight … in the glorious and heavenly cause of freedom and of God – to be delivered from the most wretched, abject and servile slavery,” he wrote, “ought to be kept … in chains, to be butchered by his cruel enemies.” Echoing the American Revolution, Walker transformed God’s law into battle lines, Providence into a call-to-arms. This combination of militant prophecy and straightforward reasoning was precisely what whites feared would rouse slaves.

The Appeal came in the wake of bloody slave rebellions that had already practiced what Walker preached. Though it came nearly a century earlier, people still told stories about the Stono Rebellion of 1731, while revolts only increased after the revolutions in America, France, and Haiti. The conspiracy of Gabriel “Prosser” in 1800, the German Coast Uprising of 1811, and Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy in 1822 – just seven years before the Appeal – all put muscle behind Walker’s prophecy. When Nat Turner staged the country’s largest and deadliest slave rebellion the year after the Appeal’s initial appearance, many slaveholders found their worst fears confirmed.

Walker’s pamphlet was arguably more terrifying than these rebellions, precisely because it could spread a precise, persuasive message much further and faster than the charismatic leadership that catalyzed these revolts. Two months after Walker sent his 200 copies of the Appeal to North Carolina, for instance, white residents overheard talk of a plot circulating among a broad network of slaves. If former slave rebellions had been scarier instances of real violence, they were also restricted to local phenomena. Walker’s Appeal was the first instance in which revolt haunted the South as a whole. “None of these insurrections,” in the words of Ford, “generated the breadth of alarm” as the circulation of the Appeal, whose call for slaves “to throw off the chains of slavery, struck raw nerves on a broader scale.”

The Appeal even encouraged some efforts to diminish slavery’s presence in the South. Georgia, for instance, introduced a partial ban on the importation of slaves, and its governor pushed for a full ban, while the Appeal re-energized the Colonizationist movement in Mississippi.

After Nat Turner’s rebellion, this brief outburst of antislavery animus faded just as full-throated defenses of slavery arose from apologists like John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh. Then Walker died in August 1830, a short year after the Appeal’s appearance. (Some suspected a proslavery assassination plot, but it was likely tuberculosis.)

If Walker failed to scare America straight, his prophecy came true in another sense. He believed that God, as a “just and holy Being,” would “one day appear fully in behalf of the oppressed” – through either the revolt of the oppressed or the self-destruction of the oppressors, “caus[ing] them to rise up one against another.” Had he lived to witness the eruption of the Civil War 30 years later, Walker may have found both prophecies fulfilled.

American abolitionist

David Walker

Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S.

Boston, Massachusetts

David Walker (September 28, 1796 – August 6, 1830)[a] was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,[4] a call for black unity and a fight against slavery.

The Appeal brought attention to the abuses and inequities of slavery and the responsibility of individuals to act according to religious and political principles. At the time, some people were aghast and fearful of the reaction that the pamphlet would provoke. Southern citizens were particularly upset with Walker's viewpoints and as a result there were laws banning circulation of "seditious publications" and North Carolina's "legislature enacted the most repressive measures ever passed in North Carolina to control slaves and free blacks".[5]

His son, Edward G. Walker, was an attorney and in 1866, was one of the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature.

Early life and education

Although the year of his birth is debated by historians, Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. His mother was free. His father, who had died before his birth, had been enslaved. Since American law embraced the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, literally "that which is brought forth follows the womb", Walker inherited his mother's status as a free person.[6]

Walker found the oppression of fellow blacks unbearable. "If I remain in this bloody land," he later recalled thinking, "I will not live long... I cannot remain where I must hear slaves' chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers."[5] Consequently, as a young adult, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a Mecca for upwardly mobile, free blacks. He became affiliated with a strong African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church) community of activists, members of the first black denomination in the United States.[7] He later visited and likely lived in Philadelphia, a shipbuilding center and location of an active black community, where the AME Church was founded.[7]

Marriage and children

Walker settled in Boston by 1825;[8] slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts after the American Revolutionary War. He married February 23, 1826 Eliza Butler, the daughter of Jonas Butler. Her family was an established black family in Boston.[9] Their children were Lydia Ann Walker (who died July 31, 1830, of lung fever at the age of one year and nine months in Boston),[7] and Edward G. Walker (1831–1910).[10][b]

Career

He started a used clothing store in the City Market.[13] He next owned a clothing store on Brattle Street near the wharfs.[5][8] There were three used clothing merchants, including Walker, who went to trial in 1828 for selling stolen property. The results are unknown.[8]

He aided runaway slaves and helped the "poor and needy".[5] Walker took part in civic and religious organizations in Boston.[14] He was involved with Prince Hall Freemasonry, an organization formed in the 1780s that stood up against discriminatory treatment of blacks; became a founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which opposed colonization of free American Blacks to Africa; and was a member of Rev. Samuel Snowden's Methodist church.[15] Walker also spoke publicly against slavery and racism.[16]

Thomas Dalton and Walker oversaw the publication of John T. Hilton's An Address, Delivered Before the African Grand Lodge of Boston, No. 459, June 24, 1828, by John T. Hilton: On the Annual Festival, of St. John the Baptist (Boston, 1828).[17]

Although they were not free from racist hostility and discrimination, black families in Boston lived in relatively benign conditions in the 1820s. The level of black competency and activism in Boston was particularly high. As historian Peter Hinks documents: "The growth of black enclaves in various cities and towns was inseparable from the development of an educated and socially involved local black leadership."[18] By the end of 1828, Walker had become Boston's leading spokesman against slavery.[19]

Freedom's Journal

Walker served as a Boston subscription sales agent and a writer for New York City's short-lived but influential Freedom's Journal (1827–1829), the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans.[7][20][19]

Walker's Appeal

Publication history

In September 1829, Walker published his appeal to African Americans, entitled Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829. The first edition is quite rare;[21] a second and then a third edition appeared in 1830.[22] Walker's second edition, of 1830,[4] expressed his views even more strongly than the first edition.[5] Walker appealed to his readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, regardless of the risk, and to press white Americans to realize that slavery was morally and religiously repugnant.[5]

The Appeal was semi-forgotten by 1848; a great deal of other abolitionist writing, much inspired by Walker, had appeared in those 18 years. It received a new life with its reprinting in 1848 by the black minister Henry Highland Garnet, who in another 17 years would be the first African American ever to address the U.S. Congress.[23] Garnet included the first biography of David Walker, and a similarly-themed speech of his own, his 'Address to the Slaves of the United States of America.' which was perceived as so radical that it was rejected for publication when delivered, in 1843.[5] The most influential white abolitionist, John Brown, played a role in getting the volume of Garnet printed.[24]

Core issues

Racism

Walker challenged the racism of the early 19th century. He specifically targeted groups such as the American Colonization Society, which sought to deport all free and freed blacks from the United States to a colony in Africa (this was how Liberia was established).[5][25] He wrote against published assertions of black inferiority by the late President Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before Walker's pamphlet was published.[25] As Walker explained: "I say, that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them."[26]

He rejected the white assumption in the United States that dark skin was a sign of inferiority and lesser humanity. He challenged critics to show him "a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family", referring to the period when they were enslaved in Egypt.[27]

Equal rights

By the 1820s and '30s, individuals and groups had emerged with degrees of commitment to equal rights for black men and women, but no national anti-slavery movement existed at the time Walker's Appeal was published.[28] As historian Herbert Aptheker wrote:

To be an Abolitionist was not for the faint-hearted. The slaveholders represented for the first half of the nineteenth century the most closely knit and most important single economic unit in the nation, their millions of bondsmen and millions of acres of land comprising an investment of billions of dollars. This economic might had its counterpart in political power, given its possessors dominance within the nation and predominance within the South.[29]

Aptheker was referring to the provision in the Constitution that counted three-fifths of the slave population toward the total of any state, for purposes of apportionment of Congressional seats and the electoral college. This gave the white voters in the South power in electoral office much greater than their numbers represented; neither slaves nor free blacks could vote. It resulted in Southern politicians having enormous power and to the election of Southerners as president.

Effects of slavery

The Appeal described the pernicious effects of both slavery and the subservience of and discrimination against free blacks. Those outside of slavery were said to need special regulation "because they could not be relied on to regulate themselves and because they might overstep the boundaries society had placed around them."[30]

Call to action

Resist oppression

In his Appeal Walker implored the black community to take action against slavery and discrimination. "What gives unity to Walker's polemic," historian Paul Goodman has argued, "is the argument for racial equality and the active part to be taken by black people in achieving it."[31] Literary scholar Chris Apap has echoed these sentiments. The Appeal, Apap has asserted, rejected the notion that the black community should do nothing more than pray for its liberation. Apap has drawn particular attention to a passage of the Appeal in which Walker encourages blacks to "[n]ever make an attempt to gain freedom or natural right, from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your ways clear; when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed."[32] Apap has interpreted Walker's words as a play on the Biblical injunction to "be not afraid or dismayed." As he points out, "'be not afraid or dismayed' is a direct quote from 2 Chronicles 20.15, where the Israelites are told to 'be not afraid or dismayed' because God would fight the battle for them and save them from their enemies without their having to lift a finger."[33] In the Bible, all the Israelites are expected to do is pray, but Walker asserts that the black community must "move."[32] Apap insists that in prompting his readers to "move", Walker rejected the notion that the blacks should "sit idly by and wait for God to fight their battles — they must (and implicit in Walker's language is the assumption that they will) take action and move to claim what is rightfully and morally theirs."[33]

[W]e colored people of these United States are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, and I pray God, that none like us ever may live until time shall be no more. They tell us of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots in Sparta, and of the Roman slaves ...whose sufferings under those ancient and heathen nations, were, in comparison with ours, under this enlightened and Christian nation, no more than a cypher. Or in other words, those heathen nations of antiquity had but little more among them than the name and form of slavery; while wretchedness and endless miseries were reserved, apparently in a phial, to be poured out upon our fathers, ourselves, and our children by Christian Americans.

— Walker's Appeal, page 1 (lightly edited)

Walker's Appeal argued that blacks had to assume responsibility for themselves if they wanted to overcome oppression.[5][34] According to historian Peter Hinks, Walker believed that the "key to the uplift of the race was a zealous commitment to the tenets of individual moral improvement: education, temperance, protestant religious practice, regular work habits, and self-regulation."[34]

"America," Walker argued, "is more our country, than it is the whites — we have enriched it with our blood and tears."[35]

Education and religion

Education and religion were especially important to Walker. Black knowledge, he argued, would not only undermine the assertion that blacks were inherently inferior; it would terrify whites. "The bare name of educating the colored people," he wrote, "scares our cruel oppressors almost to death."[36] Those who were educated, Walker argued, had a special obligation to teach their brethren, and literate blacks were urged to read his pamphlet to those who could not.[37] As he explained: "[i]t is expected that all colored men, women and children, of every nation, language and tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them."[38]

Regarding religion, Walker excoriated the hypocrisy of "pretended preachers of the gospel of my Master, who not only held us as their natural inheritance, but treated us with as much rigor as any Infidel or Deist in the world — just as though they were intent only on taking our blood and groans to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ."[39] It fell upon blacks, he argued, to reject the notion that the Bible sanctioned slavery and urge whites to repent before God could punish them for their wickedness. As historian Sean Wilentz has maintained, Walker, in his Appeal, "offered a version of Christianity that was purged of racist heresies, one which held that God was a God of justice to all His creatures."[40]

There is great work for you to do... You have to prove to the Americans and the world that we are men, and not brutes, as we have been represented, and by millions treated. Remember, to let the aim of your labours among your brethren, and particularly the youths, be the dissemination of education and religion.

— David Walker, Walker's Appeal in Four Articles[41]

White Americans

Opportunity for redemption

Despite Walker's criticism of the United States, his Appeal did not declare the nation irredeemable. He may have charged white Americans with the sin of turning "colored people of these United States" into "the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,",[42] but as historian Sean Wilentz has argued, "even in his bitterest passages Walker did not repudiate... republican principles, or his native country."[40] Walker suggested that white Americans only needed to consider their own purported values to see the error of their ways.[43]

Inappropriate benevolent attitudes

Walker asserted that whites did not deserve adulation for their willingness to free some slaves. As historian Peter Hinks has explained, Walker argued that "[w]hites gave nothing to blacks upon manumission except the right to exercise the liberty they had immorally prevented them from so doing in the past. They were not giving blacks a gift but rather returning what they had stolen from them and God. To pay respect to whites as the source of freedom was thus to blaspheme God by denying that he was the source of all virtues and the only one with whom one was justified in having a relationship of obligation and debt."[44]

Black nationalism

Walker has often been regarded as an abolitionist with Black nationalist views, in large measure because he envisioned a future for black Americans that included self-rule. As he wrote in the Appeal: "Our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves."[45]

Scholars such as historian Sterling Stuckey have remarked upon the connection between Walker's Appeal and black nationalism. In his 1972 study of The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, Stuckey suggested that Walker's Appeal "would become an ideological foundation... for Black Nationalist theory."[46] Though some historians have said that Stuckey overstated the extent to which Walker contributed to the creation of a black nation, Thabiti Asukile, in a 1999 article on "The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker's Appeal", defended Stuckey's interpretation. Asukile writes:

Though scholars may continue to debate this, it would seem hard to disprove that the later advocates of black nationalism in America, who advocated a separate nation-state based on geographical boundaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would not have been able to trace certain ideological concepts to Walker's writings. Stuckey's interpretation of the Appeal as a theoretical black nationalist document is a polemical crux for some scholars who aver that David Walker desired to live in a multicultural America. Those who share this view must consider that Stuckey does not limit his discourse on the Appeal to a black nationalism narrowly defined, but rather to a range of sentiments and concerns. Stuckey's concept of a black nationalist theory rooted in African slave folklore in America is an original and pioneering one, and his intellectual insights are valuable to a progressive rewriting of African-American history and culture.[47]

This country is as much ours as it is the whites, whether they will admit it now or not, they will see and believe it by and by.

— David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, Article IV[48]

Distribution

Walker distributed his pamphlet through black communication networks along the Atlantic coast, which included free and enslaved black civil rights activists, laborers, black church and revivalist networks, contacts with free black benevolent societies, and maroon communities.[49]

Reaction

Efforts to prevent distribution

Southern officials worked to prevent the Appeal from reaching its residents.[5][50] Blacks in Charleston and New Orleans were arrested for distributing the pamphlet, while authorities in Savannah, Georgia, instituted a ban on the disembarkation of black seamen (Negro Seamen Act).[50] This was because Southern governmental entities, particularly in port cities, were concerned about the arrival and dissemination of information that they wanted to keep from black people, both free and enslaved.[51] Various Southern governmental bodies labeled the Appeal seditious and imposed harsh penalties on those who circulated it.[5][52] Despite such efforts, Walker's pamphlet had circulated widely by early 1830. Having failed to contain the Appeal, Southern officials criticized both the pamphlet and its author. Newspapers like the Richmond Enquirer railed against what it called Walker's "monstrous slander" of the region.[53] Outrage over the Appeal even led Georgia to announce an award of $10,000 to anyone who could hand over Walker alive, and $1,000 if dead.[54]

Immediate significance

Walker's Appeal did not gain the favor of most abolitionists or free blacks because its message was considered too radical.[5]

That said, a handful of white antislavery advocates were radicalized by the pamphlet. The Boston Evening Transcript noted in 1830 that some blacks regarded the Appeal "as if it were a star in the east guiding them to freedom and emancipation."[55] White Southerners' fears about a black-led challenge to slavery—fears the Appeal stoked—came to pass just a year later in the Nat Turner Rebellion, which inspired them to adopt harsher laws in an attempt to subdue and control slaves and free blacks.

William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most influential American abolitionists, began publishing The Liberator in January 1831, not long after the Appeal was published. Garrison, who believed slaveowners would be punished by God, rejected the violence Walker advocated but recognized that slaveowners were courting disaster by refusing to free their slaves. "Every sentence that they write — every word that they speak — every resistance that they make, against foreign oppression, is a call upon their slaves to destroy them," Garrison wrote.[56]

Walker's Appeal and the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 struck fear into the hearts of slaveowners.[57] Though there is no evidence to suggest that the Appeal specifically informed or inspired Turner, it could have, since the two events were just a few years apart; whites were panicked about the possibility of future insurrections. Southern states passed laws restricting free blacks and slaves.[58] Many white people in Virginia and neighboring North Carolina believed that Turner was inspired by Walker's Appeal or other abolitionist literature.[59]

Lasting influence

Walker influenced Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, William Lloyd Garrison, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.[60] Echoes of his Appeal can be heard, for example, in Douglass's 1852 speech, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro":

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.[61]

Historian Herbert Aptheker has noted that

Walker's Appeal is the first sustained written assault upon slavery and racism to come from a black man in the United States. This was the main source of its overwhelming power in its own time; this is the source of the great relevance and enormous impact that remain in it, deep as we are in the twentieth century. Never before or since was there a more passionate denunciation of the hypocrisy of the nation as a whole — democratic and fraternal and equalitarian and all the other words. And Walker does this not as one who hates the country but rather as one who hates the institutions which disfigure it and make it a hissing in the world.[62]

Death

Just five years after he arrived in Boston, Walker died in the summer of 1830. Though rumors suggested that he had been poisoned,[5][7] most historians believe he died a natural death from tuberculosis, as listed in his death record. The disease was prevalent and Walker's only daughter, Lydia Ann, had died from it the week before Walker himself died.[63] Walker was buried in a South Boston cemetery for blacks. His probable grave site remains unmarked.[7]

When Walker died, his wife was unable to keep up the annual payments to George Parkman for the purchase of their house. She subsequently lost their home, an eventuality Walker himself had, in a sense, predicted in his Appeal:

But I must, really, observe that in this very city, when a man of color dies, if he owned any real estate it most generally falls into the hands of some white persons. The wife and children of the deceased may weep and lament if they please, but the estate will be kept snug enough of its white possessor.[64]

His son Edward G. Walker (also known as Edwin G. Walker) was born after Walker's death, and in 1866 would become the first black man elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature.[5]

Legacy

As noted from the numerous sources, historians consider David Walker a major abolitionist and inspirational figure in American history.

• The Library of Congress had an exhibit, Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period, which noted Walker's significance, along with that of other key black abolitionists: "Free people of color like Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, and Prince Hall earned national reputations for themselves by writing, speaking, organizing, and agitating on behalf of their enslaved compatriots."[65]
• The National Park Service has walking tours developed for the Boston African American National Historic Site, including the Black Beacon Hill community. The comprehensive narratives include discussion of David Walker, who was integral to the black neighborhood and city activists. An online version of the tour is also available.[66]

See also

• List of African-American abolitionists

Notes

1. ^ a b According to the Cape Fear Historical Institute, his date of birth is September 28, 1785.[1] Historians disagree about David Walker's date of birth. The Certificate of Death filed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is listed in the Registry of Births, Marriages, and Death, City of Boston Index of Death, 1801-1848, 300.
2. ^ His year of birth is also given as 1830[11] and 1835.[12] His date of death is also given as 1901.[11]

References

1. ^ David Walker: Black Wilmington Abolitionist Archived September 15, 2019, at the Wayback Machine. Cape Fear Historical Institute. Retrieved January 20, 2014.
2. ^ "Deaths" (PDF). Boston Courier. August 10, 1830. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 16, 2017. Retrieved June 7, 2012.
3. ^ "Deaths [upclose image of the death announcement]" (PDF). Boston Courier. August 10, 1830. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 13, 2017. Retrieved June 7, 2012.
4. ^ a b Walker, David (1830). "Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829". Boston: David Walker. Archived from the original on July 2, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n "David Walker, 1785-1830". University of North Carolina. Archived from the original on April 1, 2012. Retrieved June 7, 2012.
6. ^ "David Walker". Biography. Archived from the original on January 28, 2020. Retrieved January 31, 2020.
7. ^ a b c d e f Hinks, Peter (1997). To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. Penn State Press. pp. xx–xxii. ISBN 978-0-271-04274-9. Archived from the original on January 3, 2014. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
8. ^ a b c David Walker: Black Wilmington Abolitionist. Archived September 15, 2019, at the Wayback Machine Cape Fear Historical Institute. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
9. ^ Hinks, Peter P. (November 1, 2010). To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. Penn State Press. pp. 69, 269. ISBN 978-0-271-04274-9. Archived from the original on May 16, 2020. Retrieved January 31, 2020.
10. ^ Hornsby Jr, Alton (August 23, 2011). Black America: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia [2 volumes]: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-57356-976-7. Archived from the original on May 16, 2020. Retrieved January 31, 2020.
11. ^ a b Trotman, C. James (2002). Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities. Indiana University Press. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-253-21487-4.
12. ^ Davis, William Thomas (1895). Bench and Bar of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston History Company. pp. 278. Archived from the original on September 26, 2016. Retrieved March 18, 2020.
13. ^ "People of Color", Boston Directory, 1825
14. ^ Garnet, vi.
15. ^ Garnet, vii.
16. ^ Wilentz, xiii.
17. ^ Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 116.
18. ^ Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 94.
19. ^ a b "David Walker" Archived November 3, 2019, at the Wayback Machine, PBS, Africans in America Resource Bank. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
20. ^ "Freedom's Journal" Archived August 7, 2018, at the Wayback Machine, article on website for Stanley Nelson, The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords (documentary), PBS, 1998, accessed May 30, 2012.
21. ^ Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (2011). "Recent acquisitions". Archived from the original on September 26, 2012. Retrieved August 1, 2012.
22. ^ Hinks, introduction and editor's note, xlv.
23. ^ Garnet, Henry Highland (1865). A memorial discourse; by Henry Highland Garnet, delivered in the hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865. With an introduction, by James McCune Smith, M.D. Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson. Archived from the original on May 14, 2020. Retrieved September 8, 2019.
24. ^ Trodd, Zoe (Spring 2007). "Writ In Blood: John Brown's Charter of Humanity, The Tribunal of History, and the Thick Link of American Political Protest". Journal for the Study of Radicalism. 1 (1): 1–29, at p. 2. doi:10.1353/jsr.2008.0020. JSTOR 41887561. S2CID 145626910.
25. ^ a b Hinks, introduction and editor's note, xxvi-xxxi.
26. ^ Walker, 18.
27. ^ Walker, 12.
28. ^ See Aptheker, 1965, for discussion on this point.
29. ^ Aptheker, 18-19.
30. ^ Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 204.
31. ^ Goodman, 30.
32. ^ a b Walker, 22.
33. ^ a b Apap, 331.
34. ^ a b Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 85.
35. ^ Walker, 73.
36. ^ Walker, 37.
37. ^ Walker, 35.
38. ^ Walker, 2.
39. ^ Walker, 43.
40. ^ a b Wilentz, xvii.
41. ^ "David Walker, 1785-1830. Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829". docsouth.unc.edu. Archived from the original on February 27, 2020. Retrieved January 31, 2020.
42. ^ Walker, 3.
43. ^ Walker, 84–86.
44. ^ Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 220-221.
45. ^ Walker, 26.
46. ^ As quoted in Asukile, 19.
47. ^ Asukile, 22.
48. ^ "Walker's Appeal". utc.iath.virginia.edu. Archived from the original on November 17, 2019. Retrieved January 31, 2020.
49. ^ Wilentz, xiv-xv. For a persuasive discussion of maroon communities of self-emancipated people of African and Creole descent, see also the first chapter of Steven Hahn's The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom.
50. ^ a b Hinks, introduction and editor's note, xxxix.
51. ^ Hinks, pp. 139–140.
52. ^ Crockett, Hasan (2001). "The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker's Appeal In Georgia". The Journal of Negro History. 86 (3): 305–318. doi:10.2307/1562449. JSTOR 1562449. S2CID 150114867.
53. ^ Aptheker, 1.
54. ^ Zinn, 180.
55. ^ As quoted in McHenry, 36.
56. ^ Garrison, William Lloyd (January 8, 1831). "Walker's Appeal". The Liberator.
57. ^ Abzug, 18.
58. ^ Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 160-169.
59. ^ Alfred L. Brophy, "The Nat Turner Trials" Archived April 7, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, North Carolina Law Review (June 2013), volume 91: 1817-80.
60. ^ Finkelman, Paul (2006). The Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties: A - F, Index. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-94342-0.
61. ^ "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro: A speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852" (PDF). July 5, 1852. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 2, 2013. Retrieved October 15, 2012.
62. ^ Aptheker, 54.
63. ^ Index of Deaths and Interments in Boston, Massachusetts, 1810-1840, vol. P-Z, p. 139. MS.Massachusetts Archives, Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts.
64. ^ Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 77–.
65. ^ "Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period" Archived August 31, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, Library of Congress. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
66. ^ Boston African American National Historic Site Archived August 5, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, National Park Service.

Sources

• Abzug, Robert H. (January 1970). "The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists' Fears of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1829-40". The Journal of Negro History. 55 (55): 15–26. doi:10.2307/2716541. JSTOR 2716541. S2CID 149609151.
• Apap, Chris (June 2011). "'Let no man of us budge one step': David Walker and the Rhetoric African American Emplacement". Early American Literature. 46 (2): 319–350. doi:10.1353/eal.2011.0011. S2CID 161478007.
• Aptheker, Herbert (1965). "One Continual Cry": David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829–1830): Its Setting and Its Meaning. Humanities Press.
• Asukile, Thabiti (1999). "The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker's Appeal". The Black Scholar. 29 (4): 16–24. doi:10.1080/00064246.1999.11430981.
• Crockett, Hasan (2001). The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker's Appeal in Georgia. The Journal of Negro History (86): 305–318.
• Eaton, Clement (August 1936). "A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South". Journal of Southern History (2): 512–534.
• Garnet, Henry Highland (1848). Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life. New York: J.H. Tobitt.
• Goodman, Paul (1998). Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Hahn, Steven (2009). The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Harding, Vincent (1981). There Is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Vintage Books.
• Harris, Leonard (1999), "Honor and Insurrection or A Short Story about why John Brown (with David Walker's Spirit) was right and Frederick Douglass (with Benjamin Banneker's Spirit) was Wrong", in Bill Lawson; Frank Kirkland (eds.), Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 227–242
• Hinks, Peter P., ed. (2000), "Introduction and editor's note", David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. xi–xliv, ISBN 0271019948
• Hinks, Peter P. (1996). To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-01578-1.
• Horne, Gerald; Bedell, Madelon; Dodson, Howard, eds. (1988). Thinking and Rethinking U.S. History. New York: Council on Interracial Books for Children.
• Horton, James Oliver (June 1976). "Generations of Protest: Black Families and Social Reform in Ante-Bellum Boston". The New England Quarterly. 49 (2): 242–256. doi:10.2307/364501. JSTOR 364501.
• Horton, James Oliver; Horton, Lois E. (1997). In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860. Oxford University Press.
• Horton, James Oliver, ed. (2006). Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American History. New York: The New Press.
• Johnson, Charles; Smith, Patricia; WGBH Series Research Team (1998). Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
• Mayer, Henry (1998). All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and The Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312187408.
• McHenry, Elizabeth (2002). Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
• Mitchell, Verner (2002), "David Walker, African Rights, and Liberty", in Trotman, James C. (ed.), Multiculturalism: Roots and Reality, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press
• Sesay, Chernoh Momodu (2006). Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black Freemasonry, 1770—1807 (Thesis). Northwestern University.
• Wilentz, Sean (1995), "Introduction", David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. vii–xxiii
• Zinn, Howard (2003). A People's History of the American States: 1492 to the Present. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Further reading

• Dinius, Marcy J. (2022). The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal". University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-9839-0.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to David Walker (abolitionist).

• Walker's Appeal, at Documenting the American South
• David Walker’s Appeal in Virginia, at Virginia Memory
• Works by David Walker at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about David Walker at Internet Archive
• Works by David Walker at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
  
• WGBH, Africans in America documentary
• Walker, David (1829). Walker's appeal, in four articles, together with a preamble to the colored citizens of the world, but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America. Boston: Printed for the author.
• Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, ... (Boston, 1830) (online pdf facsimile)

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