142 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865narratives of writers like Douglass and Jacobs but also the polemic of such
African-Americans as David Walker (1785–1830) and Henry Highland Garnet
(1815–1882). Walker was born in North Carolina. His father was a slave but his
mother was a free black woman; and so, according to the slave laws of that time,
which stipulated that a child would follow the condition of their mother, Walker was
born free. In 1827 he became an agent for the newly established Freedom’s Journal.
Two years later, he published the work that made him famous, and put a price on his
head in the South: David 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. The elaborately formal title reflected Walker’s aim of
patterning the structure of his Appeal on the Constitution. But, while invoking
American political precedent for his argument – and taking time to denounce
Thomas Jefferson for suggesting that black people were inferior to whites – Walker
also identified himself with the biblical tradition of the prophet in the wilderness,
attacking the hypocrisy of contemporary religious practice and summoning up
divine punishment “in behalf of the oppressed.” “Are we MEN! – I ask you, O my
brethren! are we MEN?” Walker asked his readers. “Did our creator make us to be
slaves to dirt and ashes like ourselves? Are they not dying worms as well as we?” he
went on. “Have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of heaven, to
answer for their deeds done in the body as well as we?” That is the characteristic tone
of the Appeal. Beginning by pointing out that “we (the colored people of these
United States) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever
lived since the world began,” Walker rejects the moderate approach of moral
persuasion or an appeal to the religious sentiments of a white audience. Instead, he
mocks the hypocrisy of white liberals and of white Christianity, then devotes his
energies to making his black audience angry and proud. This militant document is,
in effect, the first printed declaration of black nationalism in the United States.
Walker described himself as a “restless disturber of the peace,” and his Appeal cer-
tainly created a disturbance. It went into three editions in the last two years of his life,
each edition increasingly urgent in its denunciation of racial injustice – and increas-
ingly insistent that black people should unite to take action, and be ready to kill or be
killed for the cause of freedom. Walker was not thoughtlessly militant. He argued for
a program of African-American educational, spiritual, and political renewal so that
constructive social change would follow black liberation. And his commitment to the
black community, and the idea of African-Americans freeing themselves, did not pre-
vent him from acknowledging a debt to white abolitionists. Nevertheless, he not only
struck fear into the hearts of white Southerners, he also perturbed some white
Northern abolitionists, who found the Appeal “injudicious.” And, given the prevail-
ing political climate of the time, it is easy to see why. Walker affirmed black citizen-
ship in the republic at a time when many white abolitionists were arguing for the
return of emancipated slaves to Africa. He insisted on black unity when many others
were talking in terms of assimilation. And he made no attempt to be moderate or
placatory in tone or gradualist in approach. The white South tried to suppress circu-
lation of the Appeal. It may have had a hand in its author’s death, since he died inGGray_c02.indd 142ray_c 02 .indd 142 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM