Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World

Overview

A ninety-page pamphlet in four articles published in Boston in 1829 by a free Black clothing dealer born in North Carolina. Walker argues that American slavery is the cruellest in history, that it is sustained by enforced ignorance, by a corrupted Christianity and by the colonisation scheme to remove free Blacks to Africa, and that God will punish the nation for it.

He calls on enslaved people to resist, by force if necessary, and quotes the Declaration of Independence against its authors. Southern states banned it and put a price on his head; he died in 1830.

What happens

The preamble. Walker addresses the coloured citizens of the world, and especially of the United States, declares that they are the most wretched, degraded and abject people who ever lived, and promises to show the causes.

Slavery. The first article argues that American slavery is worse than any in history, because the Egyptians, Romans and Spaniards never denied their slaves were men, and answers Jefferson’s speculation in the Notes on Virginia that Blacks are inferior by nature, urging his readers to refute it with their own achievements.

Ignorance. The second article shows how the enslaved are kept from reading and from knowledge of their own condition, and rebukes free Blacks who are content with servile trades, calling on them to learn and to teach.

Religion. The third article attacks the preachers who teach slaves obedience from the Bible, and the Christians who hold slaves while sending missionaries abroad, and predicts that God, who is just, will avenge the oppressed.

Colonisation. The fourth article attacks the American Colonization Society’s plan to send free Blacks to Africa, quoting Henry Clay and others to show that its purpose is to make slavery safer, and insists that America is the Black man’s country, bought with his blood.

The close. Walker prints the Declaration of Independence and asks Americans to read it against their own conduct, warns that if the enslaved must fight they will, and that their deliverance is coming whether or not the nation repents.

How to read it

Read the pamphlet’s history, printed in Boston, sewn into sailors’ coats, banned in the South with a price on the author’s head, as evidence of what it was understood to be.

Pay close attention to the reply to Jefferson, and to how Walker takes the most respected American voice on Black inferiority and answers it point by point.

Notice the four-article structure, each on one support of slavery, and read the pamphlet as an analysis and not only an outcry.

Consider the quotation of the Declaration against its authors, and trace the mode of argument forward through Douglass and King.

Read this pamphlet alongside Douglass’s Narrative to compare the call to resistance written by a free man in Boston with the account of resistance by one who had been enslaved and fought back.

Questions it raises

• Is the call to resist by force, if necessary, a strategy or a warning, and how did readers on each side of the slave line take it?
• Why does Walker answer Jefferson at such length, and what does it mean to argue with the author of the Declaration in the Declaration’s own terms?
• How does the attack on colonisation change what abolition meant, and why was removal so attractive to whites who opposed slavery?
• What is the role of God’s judgment in the pamphlet, and does the prophetic voice strengthen the argument or take it out of the reader’s hands?
• What did Walker’s death within a year of publication, whether or not it was murder, do to the pamphlet’s meaning?
• Does the Appeal describe the pillars of slavery accurately, and which of ignorance, corrupted religion and colonisation has the longest afterlife?