Go There To Know There

Perhaps one of the most intrepid and inflammatory anti-slavery documents ever written, David Walker's Appeal (1830) has been largely overlooked by historians, but lauded for its self-affirming, no-nonsense confrontation with white power structures over the issue of chattel slavery. Walker's act of open protest was, in many ways, one that was characteristic of an age of uprising, as Walker's words mirrored the courageous acts of other early civil rights martyrs such as Nat Turner, who led the historical slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, the following year. Walker, the self-proclaimed "restless disturber of the peace" (Gates et al., 227) models his document after the United States Constitution, by presenting a preamble in which he decries the abhorrent state of his people. From the preamble Walker addresses the wrongs done to the colored people of the U.S. in articles and sections, denounces U.S. slavery as the most wretched manifestation of huma...

As our text indicates, David Walker's Appeal was published in three editions between 1829 and 1830, and with each subsequent edition, Walker's tone and language increases in stridency and intensity--an audacious display of militancy that was in direct contradiction to the expectations of blacks during the early nineteenth century, especially. In this pamphlet, Walker decries the institution of slavery for its inhumanity, and assails white Christians for their hypocritical interpretation Scripture's divine justification of slavery. Concurrent with the publication of Walker's pamphlet, white Evangelical church organizations advocated the ownership of slaves as a Christian duty and slavery as a burdensome, but necessary evil. Without it, it was argued, the integrity of the social structure in the South would be undermined, and there would be chaos, as slavery was then considered necessary to mollify the "savage" characteristic of African slaves. Walker's...