The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (37 page)

David Walker’s famous and radical
Appeal To the Coloured Citizens of the World,
published in 1829, would seem to have come from a different world than Sarah Grimké’s
Address.
Calling on the colored population of the world to unite and resist slavery and racial oppression, by violence if necessary, Walker’s
Appeal
was smuggled into the slaveholding South where it evoked a sense of panic and defensive legislation and was blamed, along with other “inflammatory” works, for helping to incite
Nat Turner’s insurrection of 1831. But as we shall see, Walker and Grimké shared many of the same central concerns and values, including a passionate desire to solve the problems of black dehumanization and white racism, a religious aspiration to uplift the black population, and the goal of finally integrating blacks and whites as equal human beings in a democratic republic.

Walker, who was born to a free mother and slave father in
Wilmington, North Carolina, grew up surrounded by slaves and a few other free blacks.
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Like Sarah Grimké, as a Southerner he had the opportunity to view slavery “at its very worst,” especially as he traveled around the South and lived for some years in Charleston, South Carolina, where he probably had some contact with
Denmark
Vesey’s
conspiracy of 1822. Even as a child Walker managed to receive a highly exceptional education, no doubt related to black religious
organizations, with which he remained in contact when he moved to Boston in the mid-1820s. In
Wilmington and
Charleston,
Walker interacted with
free
blacks who were highly skilled and well educated and he developed a deep devotion to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the
Appeal,
Walker pays passionate tribute to
Philadelphia’s bishop Richard Allen, even quoting a long letter from Allen attacking the
colonization movement and declaring that “we are an unlettered people, brought up in ignorance, not one in a hundred can read or write, not one in a thousand has a liberal education; is there any fitness for such to be sent into a far country, among heathens, to convert or civilize them, when they themselves are neither civilized or Christianized?”
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Like other free blacks in the anticolonization and emerging antislavery movement, Walker expressed pride in the Haitian Revolution, which blacks in Boston began celebrating in the mid-1820s, and was keenly aware of a tradition of rebellion that extended from the American slave conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 to
Denmark Vesey.

In Boston, Walker started a used clothing store, a business blacks were beginning to dominate. He married in 1826, and by 1830, a year after the publication of his
Appeal,
had three children. In August 1830, the Boston Index of Deaths reported that Walker had died of consumption at the age of thirty-three, shortly after the
death of a daughter from the same illness. Various stories immediately emerged, however, claiming that he had been murdered by Southern bounty hunters or other enemies.
³⁴
By 1830 there were some 1,875 free blacks in Boston and Walker lived and worked next to self-employed barbers, tailors, bootblacks, and other small businessmen. As a rising member of Boston’s
African Lodge of Prince Hall Masonry, Walker also gained access to many of the most prominent men in the city’s black community, including a few ministers, teachers, and lawyers. Black Freemason lodges, extending to
New York, Philadelphia,
Baltimore,
Washington, and even
Alexandria, Virginia, were part of the urban networks that enabled a systematic correspondence among black leaders and helped create a black abolitionist movement, which, based on fervent opposition to the
ACS, revolutionized white abolitionism by the early 1830s. This development was also aided by two other institutions to which David Walker had close connections: the
Massachusetts General Colored Association and the first black newspaper,
Freedom’s Journal.

Black opposition to being colonized in Africa coincided, as we have seen, with rising and virulent white racism and discrimination. Thus the efforts of blacks like Walker to unite and change the world around them were in part a response to daily threats and insults and to the ridicule in animalizing cartoons and posters that declared them unfit for freedom. Historian
Peter Hinks is surely right when he argues that Walker and other black reformers, from
Maria Stewart to the
Negro Convention Movement of the 1830s, were not kowtowing to whites when they set the highest priority on black uplift and moral improvement. When they called for
education, industry,
temperance, self-confidence, ambition, regular work habits, and Protestant religion, they were seeking black
empowerment
—equipping blacks to compete and succeed in a society based on those values. Walker “knew full well that an integral part of white America’s oppression of blacks was to deprive them of the opportunity to acquire knowledge” and to discourage behavior, such as diligence, enterprise, and temperance, that generated individual and collective respect.
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Although
Sarah Grimké and the antislavery women approached the subject from a different angle than Walker died, they all agreed on the need to counter racism and discrimination by uplifting and empowering the free black population. Both black and white reformers were themselves empowered and motivated by a broad
evangelical movement, the so-called
Second Great Awakening, that nourished reforms ranging from public schools to temperance, universal male suffrage, and slave emancipation. However, as Hinks points out when considering divisions in the black community, many of Boston’s African Americans “were neither church-going nor temperate, and they were not committed to study and displayed little interest in adopting the reformers’ prescriptions for self-improvement.”
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Grimké’s
Address
and Walker’s
Appeal
differ dramatically in style and approach. Unlike Grimké, Walker was appealing to slaves as well as to the literate free black minority who, he clearly hopes, would read his passionate words to their illiterate brethren. As he seeks to arouse and unite the entire black population, even outside the United States, he becomes highly emotional, in what amounts to a stream-of-consciousness sermon and at times seems close to losing control. Walker’s pamphlet evoked much condemnation from white readers, and even the pioneer
abolitionist
Benjamin Lundy wrote that Walker “indulges himself in the wildest strain of fanaticism” and censured
his “attempt to rouse the worst passions of human nature.”
³⁷
Yet
Walker and
Grimké share the same central concerns, assumptions, and even hopes and ideals. Both focus on “slavery at its worst,” and Walker devotes many pages to the passionate argument that black slavery in the Americas is by far the worst form of oppression known in human history, worse even than that suffered by the ancient Israelites, Sparta’s Helots, and slaves of the Romans. For Walker it is this fact, coupled with the intransigence of white racism, that justifies violent resistance—though he hopes for other possibilities.

Even more than Grimké, Walker expresses a deep concern over the way “slavery at its worst” has dehumanized American slaves and even many
free blacks. On the issue of “incapacity,” Walker anticipates Grimké in repeatedly emphasizing the word “ignorance” but then conveys fury over the slaves’ subservience and complicity in aiding slaveholders. In one of the most memorable passages in the
Appeal,
Walker stops on the street in Boston to talk to a free black “with a string of boots on his shoulders,” and remarks,

Walker then explains that he is not troubled by such low employments as a reality of life but by the thought that whites will conclude “our Creator made us to be an inheritance to them for ever, when they see that our greatest glory is centered in such mean and low objects … My objections are, to our glorying and being happy in such low employments.”
³⁸

Far worse for Walker was the way white oppression and dehumanization had led to submissiveness and even complicity on the part of black slaves. As
Hinks puts it, Walker became convinced of “some significant degree of internal assent within black individuals to the supposed naturalness of white dominion over blacks.”
³⁹
What had happened, as Hinks interprets Walker’s basic understanding, was that
blacks failed to see their own oppression since they had internalized the whites’ definition of their own identity and even felt a sense of duty and indebtedness to their more paternalistic masters. Walker provides numerous examples of slave docility and complicity, coupled with emotional outbursts:

We read of an American slave woman who, being led south for sale with some sixty other
slaves, enabled the white trader to recapture all the other blacks after they had escaped. Then we turn to the West Indies and South America, where “there are six or eight coloured persons for one white. Why do they not take possession of those places?…The fact is, they are too servile, they love to have Masters too well! !” In one passage, especially surprising in a supposedly revolutionary work, Walker claims that such evidence “shows at once, what the blacks are”:

In a number of such passages, Walker seems momentarily to doubt the innate equality of races or at least to accept the Stanley Elkins
view that the extreme oppression of American slavery had led to compliant and brainwashed “Sambos” who had internalized the aims and goals of the master class.
⁴²

Given these uncertainties,
Walker is understandably drawn to and becomes almost obsessed with Thomas Jefferson’s infamous lines on black inferiority in
Notes on the State of Virginia.
Walker tells his readers that Jefferson “was one of [the] great[est] characters as ever lived among the whites” and “a much greater philosopher the world never afforded.” As a result of his stature, Jefferson’s verdict on blacks “has in truth injured us more, and has been as great a barrier to our
emancipation as any thing that has ever been advanced against us.”
⁴³

Nevertheless, Walker leads up to Jefferson’s key statement with his own exclamation: “Oh! coloured people of these United States, I ask you, in the name of that God who made us, have we, in consequence of oppression, nearly lost the spirit of man, and in no very trifling degree, adopted that of brutes [i.e., become domesticated animals]? Do you answer, no?—I ask you, then, what set of men can you point me to, in all the world, who are so abjectly employed by their oppressors, as we are by our
natural enemies
?” After further examples of black dehumanization, Walker asks,

Having argued that the blacks’ dehumanized behavior had given Jefferson strong grounds for such a conclusion, Walker underscores the frightening implications of Jefferson’s crucial question, “ ‘What further is to be done with these people?’ ” Jefferson suggests that this question embarrasses many white advocates of emancipation who are then inclined to join “those who are actuated by sordid avarice only [in defending slavery].” And as a matter of fact, even late in the
Civil War proslavery Democrats continued to prod
Republicans with the
question, “What is to be done with the negroes who may be
freed?”
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Walker agrees with Jefferson, arguing that white abolitionists are constantly betrayed by “our treachery, wickedness, and deceit.”
Blacks cannot therefore count on their white friends but must take a lesson from Jefferson and realize that nothing will count until they unite and prove “that we are MEN.”
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If Walker’s own examination of black dehumanization could lead him, with tears in his eyes, to “exclaim to my God, ‘Lord didst thou make us to be slaves to our brethren, the whites?’ ” then it was all the more certain that “Mr. Jefferson’s remarks respecting us, have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of the whites, and never will be removed this side of eternity.” Walker must thus struggle with Jefferson’s words—even at one point cleverly turning them around, when he advances his “suspicion,” backed by historical evidence, whether whites are “
as good by nature
as we are or not.” But above all he responds by exhorting his fellow blacks, especially the more educated “men of sense,” to disprove Jefferson and resolve his own anxieties and doubts by overcoming the dehumanizing and bestializing effects of slavery and racial prejudice. It is primarily faith in God’s support and providence that leads Walker to proclaim, “You have to prove to the Americans and the world, that we are MEN, and not
brutes,
as we have been represented, and by millions treated.”
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