David Walker, author of the publication Walker’s Appeal, is one of the greatest civil rights figures in early American history. However, it’s quite likely you’ve never heard of David Walker. Today we explore his story.
Walker was a free African American who lived from 1796 to 1830. He was born in North Carolina to a free mother and an enslaved father. By the 1820s he had moved to Boston and owned a clothing store. From there, he contributed to one of the first known African-American newspapers in the country, Freedom’s Journal, published in New York City.
By the 1820s he had gained a name as one of the nation’s bitterest opponents of slavery. From his home in Boston, he published angry appeals to the people of the United States over the injustice of slavery. The pamphlet known as Walker’s Appeal is the most famous of these.
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Reaction to David Walker
If the US had a hotbed of abolitionist ideas in the 1820s and 1830s, it was probably Boston. That city was home to many of the nation’s prominent abolitionist figures like William Lloyd Garrison. From Boston, Walker disseminated his publication throughout the nation. He even had sailors smuggle copies of his pamphlet to the South through Boston’s port.
The content of Walker’s Appeal was incendiary. Walker urged slaves to rise up. He condemned both gradual emancipation and compensated emancipation. Likewise, he dismissed the idea of colonizing slaves to Africa, pointing out that they’d worked much harder to build the US than those who enslaved them had. He wrote in language familiar to any literate American of that era, speaking of equality, the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, and all the other political rhetoric of the day. He then shoved these ideas in the face of white America as a mark of hypocrisy.
This earned Walker the undying hatred of Southerners. Modest as the circulation of Walker’s ideas were in the South, anything was too much for slaveholders to stomach. So, they put a bounty on Walker’s life—$3,000 for his head, $10,000 for bringing him alive to the South. Friends told him to leave the country, but Walker declined. He’s reported to have said, “Somebody must die in this cause. . . . I may be doomed to the stake and the fire, or to the scaffold tree, but it is not in me to falter if I can promote the work of emancipation.”
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Why David Walker was Revolutionary
Prior to Walker’s Appeal, the abolitionist movement was a rather cautious one. Gradual emancipation or colonization in Africa were both popular ideas. Many Northern states had adopted gradual emancipation after the American Revolution. Sometimes gradual was pathetically gradual. (New York freed its last slave in 1827.) Nonetheless, many people saw this as the proper path for the whole nation.
But not David Walker. He believed that slaves and free blacks had every right to full citizenship, and that they deserved this improved status right now. Some historians of slavery and the abolitionist movement credit Walker and Walker’s Appeal as the true beginning of the abolitionist movement in the United States.
Why Haven’t I Heard of Him?
For those of you asking why you’ve never heard of David Walker before, well, that’s a good question. More often, people like William Lloyd Garrison get credit for originating the movement. (Garrison published the famous anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator for more than thirty years.)
Sad to say, some racism and paternalism may be to blame. What narrative fits the American ideal of progress better? One featuring well-meaning white people gradually awakening the rest of the nation to the need to end slavery, or one of angry, discontented black people demanding better treatment and pointing out white hypocrisy? Does the arc of American history look better when featuring benevolent white people gradually but steadily moving toward the ideals of the American Revolution, or should it feature black people actively pushing whites in that direction while whites drag their feet?
The length of Walker’s life may also have something to do with his relative obscurity. He died the year after Walker’s Appeal went into print. He was found dead in his house in 1830, and the exact cause of death is uncertain. Most scholarship points toward death from illness, with tuberculosis a likely killer. However, given that he had a bounty on his head and the US featured plenty of people with few scruples of how to get rich, especially if that meant killing an African American, others naturally suspect murder, with murder by poison a popular viewpoint.
However he died, David Walker deserves to be remembered. He deserves mention along with the other important abolitionist figures of American history. If you agree, please follow my blog for more scholarship about people like David Walker and recommend it to others who want to learn new things about history.
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