David Walker
© University of Virginia Library
David Walker incited frenzy in the South when he published and circulated his Appeal in Four
Articles in 1830. The Appeal called on enslaved blacks to violently overthrow their oppressors.
Walker was born a free man in North Carolina but witnessed the horrors of slavery. He moved
to Boston in 1825 and wrote the first edition of his Appeal in 1829.
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David Walker was born September 27, 1796 in Wilmington, North Carolina to a free
mother and enslaved father who died before his birth. Though not enslaved, Walker
witnessed the cruelty and brutality of slavery: as a child he had watched an enslaved boy
forced to whip his mother to death.
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. (Garnet vi)
By 1825, Walker was living in Boston, Massachusetts. A year later he married Eliza Butler, a
black woman from a prominent black family. Walker came to own a used clothing store and
used most of his earnings to aide newly arriving former slaves (Garnet vii).
In 1829, Walker became a national figure when he published Walker’s Appeal in Four
Articles. Walker is scathingly unapologetic in his analysis of slavery and the people who are
sympathetic or apathetic to its cruelty. Unlike most abolitionists, his appeal was written
directly to enslaved blacks and urged them to violently rebel against their masters.
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…I call upon the
professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very
tyrant himself, to show me a page of history either sacred or profane, on
which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the
insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they
were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they
not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their
feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or OrangOutangs? (Walker 4,12)
Records suggest that Walker smuggled copies of his appeal on ships bound for the South.
He shipped them to his native North Carolina first, then to neighboring Virginia and the rest
of the South (Aptheker 47). When Southern slave owners finally read Walker’s Appeal,
chaos and panic spread throughout the South. In August, 1830 an enslaved man named
Jacob Cowan was arrested and sold to Alabama for circulating Walker’s Appeal. Slave
owners throughout the South petitioned their Governors to send protection from their
“uncontrollable” slaves. The North Carolina legislature passed laws that worsened the
consequences for anyone teaching an enslaved person to read and write. They also
tightened the laws on manumission and restricted the already limited mobility that blacks,
enslaved or free, had in the state, and mandated that all blacks manumitted after 1830 had
to leave the state within ninety days.
Walker died on June 28, 1830, just three months after publishing the third and final edition
of his Appeal. His only child, Edward G. Walker, was born after his death and became the
first black person elected to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1866.
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Works Cited & Further Reading
Aptheker, Herbert. One Continual Cry: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the
Worlds, 1829-1830, its Setting & its Meaning. New York: Humanities Press, 1965.
Garnet, Henry Highland. Walker’s Appeal, With a Brief Sketch of His Life and Also Garnet’s
Address to the Slaves of the United States of America. New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848.
Walker, David. 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 in the United
States of America. Boston: Revised and Published by David Walker, 1830.
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