In 1829, decades before the start of the Civil War, David Walker self-published a fiery pamphlet that repurposed the Declaration of Independence for the anti-slavery cause.
Walker was a prominent Black Boston merchant, civic leader, and abolitionist. His pamphlet, titled Walker’s Appeal … to the Colored Citizens of the World, was an attack on anti-Black racism and the institution of slavery in the United States. Walker’s text contains radical calls to action that were unprecedented in print when he first published the pamphlet. In particular, Walker urges both free and enslaved Black audiences to rise up and overthrow American slavery—by force, if necessary.
Walker ends the Appeal by confronting white readers with the plain text of the Declaration itself. Here, he contrasts the Declaration’s soaring rhetoric of equality with the realities of slavery and racism throughout the United States.
Walker’s invocation of the Declaration made a clear point: the grievances of white American colonists under British rule had once justified armed rebellion. Wouldn’t the even more fundamental grievances of both free and enslaved Black populations in nineteenth-century America therefore warrant the same?
Black In Boston
In the early nineteenth century, the north slope of Beacon Hill was home to one of the city’s largest free Black neighborhoods.
David Walker lived at 4 Belknap Street (today 81 Joy Street), worshipped nearby at what became the Revere Street Methodist Church, and distributed copies of Freedom’s Journal throughout his neighborhood.
For the five years Walker lived in Boston, he was part of a vibrant community that was actively pressing on questions about what it meant and could mean to be Black in the United States.
What might Walker have overheard as he moved through this neighborhood? What might you overhear there today?
Walker’s Declarations
Walker concludes the Appeal by quoting the Declaration of Independence at length. He directs his final paragraph to white Americans: “I ask you candidly, was your suffering under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?”
Walker’s writing is persuasive on its own, but he further intensifies his message with emphatic punctuation and manicules ( ☞ typographical marks of hands with a pointed finger). He visually insists readers pay attention to the text and heed his words.
How do Walker’s graphic choices compare to the copies of the Declaration on display? How does he visually establish his own authority and create a sense of urgency?
Getting the Appeal Out
David Walker worked to circulate his Appeal in slaveholding states. He asked sailors traveling south to share copies and even sewed the Appeal into the linings of clothes he sold.
White southern leaders, already fearful that enslaved people would rise up in rebellion against an unjust system, used Walker’s Appeal as evidence to justify legislation making it illegal for Black people to learn to read and to write.
Most slaveholding states also banned, confiscated, and destroyed as many copies of the Appeal as they could find. This made copies of the first edition, like the one shown here, extremely rare.
South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana passed legislation calling for the death penalty for anyone who possessed or distributed a copy of the Appeal. While similar legislation was not proposed in the North, white Boston politicians and journalists expressed sympathy with Southern politicians in letters and articles.
But the censorship of Walker’s text failed to suppress his message.
When does a call for freedom become “dangerous”?
Walker’s Legacy
David Walker published three editions of the Appeal before he died in 1830. In 1848, the formerly enslaved abolitionist Henry Highland Garnett republished the Appeal, appending one of his own speeches, and adding a biography of Walker. Both men recognized that violence could be warranted in the goal of ending slavery in the United States.
Frederick Douglass later wrote that Walker’s Appeal “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement,” while W.E.B. Du Bois called it the first “program of organized opposition to the action and attitude of the dominant white group.”
Whose messages of rebellion are celebrated and whose are forgotten?