David Walker

Personal Statement:

My name is David Walker and I’m a free African American. I was born in Wilmington, North Carolina to a free mother and a slave father; who past away before I was born. Despite the free status I inherited from my mother I lived a stifled life in the South, which through the years developed in me a strong hatred of the institution. Not being able to take anymore of the South, I left for, "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." Upon leaving the South I traveled extensively throughout the country and in 1827 finally settled in Boston where I established a profitable second hand clothing business. I gained a reputation in Boston as a generous man for I helped the poor, needy and runaway slaves. My good actions soon rewarded me when in 1828 I married my to this day wife, Emily. In the same year of 1828, I also began to associate myself with some fellow black activists, joined various institutions that denounced slavery in the South and discrimination in the North. I as well involved myself in the nation’s first African American newspaper to which I contributed constantly. By the end of 1828 I had become Boston’s leading spokesmen against slavery.

Issue:

My objective was nothing short of revolutionary. I arose slaves of the South into rebelling against their masters and would do so with the aid of my pamphlet “Appeal.” A piece of writing that has been described "for a brief and terrifying moment..., the most notorious document in America." Published in 1829 my pamphlet was aimed at a specific audience (the enslaved men and women of the South), thus I had to rely on the help of sailors and ship officers who were sympathetic to the cause, to transfer my pamphlet to the Southern ports and when that wasn't enough, I also began to sew pieces of the pamphlet onto the lining of the sailors' clothing. Once the pamphlet reached the South it would then be distributed throughout the region. “Appeal” made a grand impression in the South, with both slaves and slaveholders. The slaves were fueled with a striving hope and pride, which was my intended purpose. The slaveholders on the other hand were not as pleased with my work, for they began to make laws that prohibited the blacks learning to read and banned the distribution of anti-slavery literature. So much anger arose towards me from this pamphlet that Southern whites put a price on my head that said $10,000 if brought to the South alive and even with my friends and family fearing for my life and insisting I move to Canada, I stayed and said to them, "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." As devout Christian, I believe that abolition is a "glorious and heavenly cause."

Solution(s):

I sought an insurrection of the enslaved towards their masters as the solution to ending slavery and went about it by stirring up hope in the Southern slaves and making them see it as chance for freedom. My solution can be seen in the Civil War itself even if it wasn't the slaves who rebelled you still have a violent solution to the abolition of slavery. The war saw the deaths of nearly one million Americans from both the South and North and a collect debt of $5 billion between the states as means of deciding. I was successful in my idea for the North won over the South and it was decided to free the slaves and once and for all abolish slavery in the U.S. Even though my ideas were put into action one way or another, there are those who disliked my methods, such as fellow anti-slavery voices, Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison who criticized my pamphlet due to its menacing tone, vision of massacre and my overtly racist characterization of white people as “an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood thirsty set of beings always seeking after power and authority...,” as well as for having called the Constitution, “... a murderous government...”