Southern Abolitionists (Part 4) - David Walker

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In the first three parts of this series, I wrote about three Southern men who calmly and rationally called for the abolition of slavery and the integration of the freed slaves into American society on the basis of equal rights. These men were Charles Osborn, John Rankin and Levi Coffin, and they began their crusades in the 1810s and 1820s, well before William Lloyd Garrison gained international renown for advocating those same doctrines. In this fourth part of the series I'm going to introduce yet another pre-Garrisonian Southern abolitionist. But unlike the first three, this man's voice was anything but calm; in fact it was urgent and anguished. Also unlike the first three, this man was black.

His name was David Walker and he was born in North Carolina in the late 18th century (the exact year is disputed). He was the son of a slave father and a free mother, and thus by Southern law was born free. But he saw enough of slavery as a free Southerner living in both North and South Carolina to come to a conclusion about it: "If I remain in this bloody land, 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."

By 1825 he had moved to Boston, where he ran a used clothing store and became active with Boston's abolitionist community. In 1826 he co-founded the Massachusetts General Colored Association, of which he said:

The primary object of this institution, is, to unite the colored population, so far, through the United States of America, as may be practicable and expedient; forming societies, opening, extending, and keeping up correspondences, and not withholding any thing which may have the least tendency to meliorate our miserable condition - with the restriction, however, of not infringing on the articles of its constitution, or that of the United States of America.

He was also an agent and contributor to the nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal.

But where Walker really left his mark was in a series of 4 pamphlets he published in 1829, called An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Unlike the previous works of his fellow Southerners Charles Osborn and John Rankin, which were calm and conciliatory and largely ignored by slaveholders, Walker's Appeal literally oozed frustration and anguish in every one of its 76 exclamation-point-laden pages. And it most definitely was not ignored.

Walker's Appeal was circulated primarily in the African American community, and copies of it were smuggled into the South. There's some suggestion that Walker himself might have sewn copies of it into the clothing he sold at his shop. But when it came to the attention of slaveholders, the effect was electric. He was broadly accused of fomenting servile insurrection. South Carolina's governor wrote to the governor of Massachusetts, Harrison Gray Otis, asking that Walker be jailed - a request that Otis, although sympathetic with the South Carolina governor, denied based on the simple fact that Walker had broken no laws. There were also rumors of bounties placed on Walker's head by slaveholders throughout the South.

Walker himself anticipated this, writing in the preamble of his Appeal:

I am fully aware, in making this appeal to my much afflicted and suffering brethren, that I shall not only be assailed by those whose greatest earthly desires are, to keep us in abject ignorance and wretchedness, and who are of the firm conviction that Heaven has designed us and our children to be slaves and beasts of burden to them and their children. I say, I do not only expect to be held up to the public as an ignorant, impudent and restless disturber of the public peace, by such avaricious creatures, as well as a mover of insubordination - and perhaps put in prison or to death, for giving a superficial exposition of our miseries, and exposing tyrants.

Even William Lloyd Garrison, who as we have seen earlier in this series praised Charles Osborn and John Rankin for their works, professed to "deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal" and called it a "promoter of insurrection". But he also called it "one of the most remarkable productions of the age", and to those who questioned its authorship, he replied that "no white man could have written in language so natural and enthusiastic."

In fact Garrison was clearly influenced by Walker, and perhaps even more so than he had been by Osborn or Rankin. Less than two years after the Appeal's publication, he published the first issue of his own newspaper, The Liberator, in which he promised "to examine" Walker's Appeal. And that he did. Reviews and articles about Walker's Appeal, some quite lengthy, would appear in his first six issues. And despite his deprecation of the "spirit and tendency" of the Appeal, Garrison's own tone in the Liberator over the next three decades would be much closer to that of Walker than to the calm tone of Osborn or Rankin. But Garrison vowed that "I will be heard", and Walker may have shown him the key.

Walker's prediction about being put "to death" for his publication may have been prescient, for within a year of its publication he was found dead in the doorway of his home. Since he was only in his early 30s, it's natural to question whether he was assassinated (some say poisoned) by pro-slavery advocates. But it's also true that his young daughter had died of "consumption" (tuberculosis), which was quite contagious and prevalent in Boston during that time period, just a week earlier. The debate continues to this date and will likely never be resolved.

On a happier note, Walker's son, Edwin Garrison Walker, was born a few month's after his father's death, and would go on to become the first African American to be elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1866.

In the remainder of this thread I'll post some excerpts from Walker's Appeal. Questions and comments are welcome!

Sources:

Timothy Patrick McCarthy, "To Plead Our Own Cause: Black Print Culture and the Origins of American Abolitionism", Prophets of Protest

David Walker, Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America, 3rd edition.

The Liberator, Volume 1

http://www.davidwalkermemorial.org/david-walker/david-walkers-life

http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/bio.html
 
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