***** Before I proceed any further, I solicit your notice, brethren, to the foregoing part of [an advocate of the colonization plan] Mr. [Henry] Clay's speech, in which he says, ..."and if, instead of the evils and sufferings, which we had been the innocent cause of inflicting," &c. -- What this very learned statesman could have been thinking about, when he said in his speech, "we had been the innocent cause of inflicting," &c., I have never been able to conceive. Are Mr. Clay and the rest of Americans, innocent of the blood and groans of our fathers and us, their children? -- Every individual may plead innocence, if he pleases, but God will, before long, separate the innocent from the guilty, unless something is speedily done -- which I suppose will hardly be, so that their destruction may be sure. Oh Americans! let me tell you, in the name of the Lord, it will be good for you, if you listen to the voice of the Holy Ghost, but if you do not, you are ruined!!! Some of you are good men; but the will of my God must be done. Those avaricious and ungodly tyrants among you, I am awfully afraid will drag down the vengeance of God upon you. When God Almighty commences his battle on the continent of America, for the oppression of his people, tyrants will wish they never were born....
...Surely, the Americans must think that we are brutes, as some of them have represented us to be. They think that we do not feel for our brethren, whom they are murdering by the inches, but they are dreadfully deceived. I acknowledge that there are some deceitful and hypocritical wretches among us, who will tell us one thing while they mean another, and thus they go on aiding our enemies to oppress themselves and us. But I declare this day before my Lord and Master, that I believe there are some true-hearted sons of Africa, in this land of oppression, but pretended _liberty!!!!!_ -- who do in reality feel for their suffering brethren, who are held in bondage by tyrants....
...[W]ill you wait until we shall, under God, obtain our liberty by the crushing arm of power? Will it not be dreadful for you? I speak Americans for your good. We must and shall be free I say, in spite of you. You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery, to enrich you and your children; but God will deliver us from under you. And wo, wo, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting....Americans, I declare to you, while you keep us and our children in bondage, and treat us like brutes, to make us support you and your families, we cannot be your friends....Treat us then like men, and we will be your friends....
...I count my life not dear unto me, but I am ready to be offered at any moment. For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead. But remember, Americans, that as miserable, wretched, degraded and abject as you have made us in preceding, and in this generation, to support you and your families, that some of you, (whites) on this continent of America, will yet curse the day that you ever were born. You want slaves, and want us for your slaves!!! My colour will yet, root some of you out of the very face of the earth!!!!! You may doubt it if you please. I know that thousands will doubt -- they think they have us so well secured in wretchedness, to them and their children, that it is impossible for such things to occur....So did the Romans doubt, many of them were really so ignorant, that they thought the whole of mankind were made to be slaves to them; just as many of the Americans think now, of my colour....
(_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 of the Unites States of America_, Rev. ed., Intro. Sean Wilentz, NY: Hill and Wang, 1995, pp. 46-7, 68-70, 72-73) *****
You get the drift. According to Sean Wilentz' introduction, "Within weeks of being printed, copies of the first edition were discovered circulating among the blacks of Savannah, Georgia. At about the same time, and over succeeding months, authorities seized additional copies in ports of call from Virginia to Louisiana" (p. vii). Apparently, Walker had a network of free black sailors who smuggled copies of his _Appeal_ everywhere they sailed, as well as various contacts in the South. Attempts to suppress _Appeal_ came swiftly. "Legislators in Georgia and Louisiana became so alarmed that they enacted harsh new laws restricting black literacy, including a ban on the distribution of antislavery literature....Horrified Northern journalists joined in denouncing what a Boston editor called 'one of the most wicked and inflammatory productions ever issued from the press'" (p. vii).
***** With its call for revolts and insurrection, David Walker's Appeal was a strong statement against slavery, even in the eyes of radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In the second issue of his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, Garrison denounced Walker's Appeal. "Believing, as we do," Garrison wrote, "that a good end does not justify wicked means. . . , we deprecate [disapprove of] the spirit and tendency of this Appeal." Garrison did, however, qualify his denouncement. He continued, "Nevertheless, it is not for the American people, as a nation, to denounce it as bloody or monstrous." And it was not the slaves or the abolitionists who were responsible for Walker's call for violence, but slaveholders and other slavery proponents. "Every sentence they write -- every word they speak -- every resistance they make. . .," Garrison said, "is a call upon their slaves to destroy them."
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2929.html> *****
Both _David Walker's Appeal_ and Garrison's response to it have things to teach us (in the department of literary and sociological imagination), and I hope you'll have an occasion to read them in their entirety. -- Yoshie
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