David Walker's Appeal

In the fall of 1829 David Walker wrote Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker circulated this scathing pamphlet throughout the South in late 1829 and 1830, especially in the coastal regions. Relying on his knowledge of the covert communication networks of African Americans in the South, among whom he had spent his youth, Walker tapped the energies of mariners, runaways, itinerants, preachers, settled free blacks, and slaves to craft a strategy of distribution remarkable for its geographical reach. He aspired to place his pamphlet in the hands of people who shared his convictions and would disseminate its words broadly.

“Walker's Appeal,” frontispiece—with the words “Libertas justitia” appearing in the sky—and title page of an edition published in 1848. Garnet (1815–1882), who provided a short biography and whose own militant “Address” is also included, was a notable African American clergyman and abolitionist.

Library of Congress.

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From its opening sentences, Walker's Appeal indicted American slavery and all its deepest assumptions of black racial inferiority:

"We Coloured People of these United States, are, the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, down to the present day, and, that, the white Christians of America, who hold us in slavery, (or, more properly speaking, pretenders to Christianity,) treat us more cruel and barbarous than any Heathen nation did any people whom it had subjected."

(p. 2) Walker feared that racial prejudice had so pervaded American society by the late 1820s that African Americans, North and South, were becoming overwhelmed by its insidious principles and were coming to accept the degraded station assigned to them exclusively by the mass of white Americans. He encapsulated the force of these principles by highlighting one of the nation's most eminent proponents of them, Thomas Jefferson, who had expounded in the 1780s that “blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Walker grimly challenged his black audience: “Unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.”

Walker envisioned the Appeal as a bold antidote to all such malignant formulations. In the pamphlet he testified to blacks' physical and psychological suffering and to his great fear that they might acquiesce to their relentless overlords. Yet he also heralded their rich and noble heritage as a people of African descent and their ample capacity to surmount their afflictions as a race particularly beloved by God. The Appeal is infused with an evangelical summons to all African Americans to submit only to God, who abominated their enslavement and degradation and called to them to destroy those great evils once and for all. Remember, Walker proclaimed, “that your full glory and happiness, as well as all other coloured people under Heaven, shall never be fully consummated, but with the entire emancipation of your enslaved brethren all over the world.” The widespread trumpeting of the Appeal would be a prime instrument in advancing that divine mission.

The pamphlet first surfaced in Savannah, Georgia, in December 1829, where a white ship steward delivered sixty copies to a prominent local black Baptist preacher, Henry Cunningham, who promptly carried all of them to the local police. In Milledgeville, Georgia, Walker sent twenty requested copies to a local white newspaper editor, Elijah Burritt, who then passed a few on to friends. In early 1830 in Richmond, Virginia, a free black courier introduced at least ten copies into the black population, and later, in Charleston, South Carolina, a white mariner gave at least seven copies to black stevedores. Four blacks were arrested for circulating numerous copies in New Orleans in March 1830. Two of them were slaves, and two were free blacks, including a successful local shopkeeper named Robert Smith.

Walker's efforts were particularly successful in his native North Carolina. Sometime in early August 1830 Wilmington authorities were alerted that the pamphlet was circulating in the town. An investigation soon determined that Jacob Cowan, a local slave, had received two hundred copies from Walker with instructions to distribute them throughout the state. Cowan's owner had allowed him to keep a tavern of sorts in town, which he used as a center for distribution. A local black Baptist preacher and cooper named John Spaulding had a copy of the book, and he loaned it to others, whom whites observed reading it. Soon alarmed, whites aggressively investigated the matter. Spaulding was promptly transported to New York in chains, and Jacob Cowan was sold deep into Alabama.

Cowan and others in Wilmington must have had connections with local runaways, for evidence exists that runaways from settled encampments near the town were in part responsible for carrying the book to other areas of North Carolina. In early November 1830 the wife of a jailer in coastal New Bern overheard a captured runaway, Moses, describe an extensive network of slaves and runaways who were conspiring throughout eastern North Carolina. One branch of this system connected with Wilmington through “a fellow named Derry” who had “brought some of those pamphlets” to New Bern and possibly as far north as Elizabeth City. The men stated that a number of captains had been selected and that runners or messengers “carried word” between Wilmington, New Bern, and Elizabeth City, and reported any doings to the captains.

Runaways proliferated in this swampy and forested region and had plagued authorities and slaveholders for decades. Conspirators were known to congregate at retreats near New Bern that were familiar to all runaways in the district. Advertisements for their apprehension attest to their regular movement between such towns as Wilmington, Fayetteville, and New Bern and their hinterlands and usually with the assistance of their fellow slaves, especially those working the region's innumerable rivers and tributaries.

Many of these runaways had attempted escape more than once, were deeply disaffected with slavery, and found it extremely difficult to manufacture even a veneer of submission to it. They were very familiar with the underground world of runaways and with the network binding them together throughout coastal North Carolina. One of them, Tom Abner, was a skilled artisan who may also have been literate and able to read the Appeal to others. The existence of this handful of literate African Americans in the state who were also very rebellious was vital to the dissemination of the pamphlet and its message. Very possibly Abner's exposure to the Appeal transformed him from a mere irritant to local slaveholders into a committed ideologue who sought to organize a cadre of similarly motivated runaways to threaten the institution of slavery regionally. Runaways in 1830 found boldness in their numbers and security and mobility in the numerous and interconnected refuges that ran throughout southeastern and coastal North Carolina.

As the holidays approached in December 1830, with the accompanying relaxation of regulations, apprehension mounted in New Bern and the central coastal area. A white Quaker was discovered preaching to a group of blacks in language similar to Walker's. A slave who claimed to be from South Carolina but had a suspicious pass was arrested in New Bern in late 1830 after he made it appear necessary for him to be traveling around Christmas, the time when slaves had the greatest latitude and he could best communicate to them his business. According to newspaper reports on or about 25 December 1830, sixty armed slaves had assembled in a swamp near New Bern and had selected Christmas morning as the time to commence a rebellion. The local militia, however, were alerted, surrounded the swamp, and killed the whole party.

Disturbances also ensued in the Wilmington region, where it was reported that “there has been much shooting of negroes in this neighborhood recently, in consequence of symptoms of liberty having been discovered among them.” James Barbadoes, a friend of Walker's in Boston, repeated in theLiberator in February 1831 that sixty slaves had been killed in New Bern on the past Christmas and that it was “owing to Walker's inflammatory pamphlet.” Employing a variety of individuals and avenues, Walker's innovative strategy illuminated how informal, yet surprisingly effective channels of communication had grown among southern slaves as their numbers and dispersion and mobility extended in the early nineteenth century and as African Americans became more fired with the democratic idealism then sweeping the Atlantic world.

Walker's Appeal never did ignite a major social conflagration. It did, however, strike real terror in authorities throughout the coastal South and spurred them to reinforce laws against slave literacy and the circulation of any inflammatory literature. Laws newly written in Wilmington and Savannah—modeled after one passed in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1822 after the failed conspiracy led by Denmark Vesey—required that any free black mariners from the North entering either of these southeastern ports be confined to jails during the term of their ship's presence there. This measure, local authorities hoped, would eliminate contact and exchanges between northern free blacks and local African Americans.

Southern authorities were rightly concerned about the ability of Walker to place his pamphlet in the hands of those who were knowledgeable about the numerous covert communication systems existing among southern slaves. They knew all too well that southern blacks had used similar networks effectively during the Vesey conspiracy as well as the conspiracy led by the slave Gabriel in Virginia. However, Walker expanded on these local and regional applications and used the structures throughout the coastal South to deliver his message of black strength, dignity, freedom, and Christian mission to as many slaves as possible. He envisioned a plan of black empowerment and mobilization that was the most sophisticated and extensive articulated in antebellum America. Walker's influence reverberated throughout the United States and beyond. Some contemporaries even speculated that the evangelical Appeal helped spur Nat Turner to his bloody judgments in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831.

Bibliography

Eaton, Clement. A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South. Journal of Southern History 2 (August 1936): 323–334.
Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Talmadge, John E. The Burritt Mystery: Partisan Journalism in Antebellum Georgia. Georgia Review 8 (Fall 1954): 332–341.
Walker, David. David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Edited with a new introduction by Peter P. Hinks. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

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