Like a Trump of Coming Judgement (episode 190)

Transcript

Intro

Music

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome To Hub history, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe. This is episode 1 90 like a trump of coming judgment.
Hi, I’m Jake.
This week I’m revisiting a classic episode about the radical Black abolitionist David Walker.
Walker was a transplant to Boston, moving here after possibly being involved in Denmark. Vesey’s planned 18 22 slave insurrection in South Carolina at a time when very few whites spoke of ending slavery.
Frederick Douglass said that Walker’s book An Appeal To The Colored Citizens of the World startled the land like a trump of coming judgment.
He demanded an immediate into slavery, and he endorsed violence against white slave owners to bring about abolition.

[0:57] After the book helped inspire Nat Turner’s 18 30 uprising in Virginia, Southern slave states banned his book and offered a reward for anyone who would kill or kidnap Walker with a price on his head.
Many people believe that David Walker’s mysterious death in a Beacon Hill doorway just one year after his landmark book was published was an assassination.

[1:20] But before we talk about Walker’s radical Appeal, it’s time for this week’s Boston Book Club selection and our upcoming historical event.

Boston Book Club

[1:29] My pick for the Boston Book Club this week is the Boston Jazz Chronicles.
Faces Places and Nightlife 1937 to 1962 by Richard Vacca.

[1:40] We’ve used Vacca’s blog about jazz and jazz clubs in Boston for background on past episodes, especially I shows about the Coconut Grove Fire and the murder of mobster Charles Boston. Charlie Solomon.
Published in 2012. The Boston Jazz Chronicles capture a moment in time when jazz emerged from the world of race music and found widespread Appeal with white audiences.
It introduces the reader to the composers, musicians and nightclubs that provided the soundtrack for Boston’s wartime boom and our post war bust, the publisher says.
The Boston Jazz Chronicles, is the first book to document the birth and growth of the Boston jazz scene at mid century.
It describes the formative big band in wartime years and follows the scenes dramatic Postwar growth when Boston became a destination for young veterans and big band musicians seeking new direction.

[2:33] The Boston Jazz Chronicles is also a story of places now lost to time.
The jazz haunts are gone, replaced by offices, apartments and parking lots.
But through these years, there was music at the Savoy Cafe, the Ken Club, the high Hat, a stable and other rooms both rowdy and refined.

[2:54] Though the book rarely talks explicitly about race, it is by default, a book about the intersection of black and white worlds.
In an era when Boston, like much of the North, was still strongly segregated.
It’s illustrated with period photos, advertisements and maps, and it even includes a discography for readers who want to immerse themselves in Boston’s mid century jazz sound.

Upcoming Event

[3:17] And for upcoming event this week, we’re featuring a virtual tour of the Jackson homestead with past podcast guest Clara Silverstein.

[3:26] The Jackson homestead is a federal style home owned by Historic Newton, and the event is a collaboration between historic Newton and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

[3:36] Originally built in 18 09 on a farm, the Jackson family it owns in 16 46 the house remained in the family until 1949 leaving it very well preserved when the city started operating it as a museum.

[3:51] When it’s open for us to actually visit in person historic Newton advertises the Jackson Homestead Museum as,
AH Participatory Museum, with exhibits for Children and adults featuring exhibitions about the history of food, farming and family life, slavery and anti slavery and notable people in events in Newton.

[4:10] For this special virtual event, the MHS says this tour will focus specifically on the complex legacy of slavery and abolitionism at the homestead, including It’s History is a stop on the Underground Railroad.

[4:24] Your virtual tour begins at two PM on Friday, June 26th. There’s no charge for the event, but advanced registration is required.

[4:34] We also have a special bonus event geared especially toward people who interpret history for the public.
At 7 p.m. On Thursday, June 25th The History Project in the National Park Service Air Collaborating on an event called Find Your Pride, telling LGBT Q Plus history of Boston area National Park Service sites.

[4:54] Here’s how they describe the event. Join the History Project and Ranger Meghan Michael of the Longfellow House, Washington’s headquarters, National Historic Site,
and Ranger Meghan Linger of the National Parks of Boston for a presentation on Queer History.
Interpretation and inclusion in the National Park Service R S V. P through history project dot org’s and a link to the zoom will be sent out on the day of the event.

[5:21] For security purposes, zoom meetings require an authenticated zoom account, so please be sure to register for a free zoom account prior to the event.
We’ll have the details of both events and the links you need for each and this week’s show Notes at hub history dot com slash 190.

[5:39] Before I start this show, I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who supports Hub history on Patri on in an era when we seem to be living through history every day. It seems more important than ever to know the true history of our nation and our city.
Beyond the happy myths that we grew up with at Hub history, we do our best to bring you the good, the bad and the ugly from nearly 400 years of our city’s past.
Only when we know where we came from can we figure out where we’re going.
If you think we’re doing a decent job and you’d like to help us keep doing it, please consider supporting the show with $2.5 dollars or even $10 a month.
Doing so helps us offset the costs of making the podcast.
You can get started by going to patri on dot com slash hub history or visiting hub history dot com and clicking on the support link a big thank you to all our new and returning sponsors.

[6:37] And now it’s time for this week’s main topic. This episode originally aired in January 2019 as Episode 1 17.

David Walker’S Appeal

Jake And Nikki:
[6:48] In the mid 19th century, a lot could pass unnoticed in the inky shadows of the deep entryways of the houses in Boston’s West End and the north slope of Beacon Hill.
Surely many an illicit rendezvous was carried out in those dark doorways and occasionally a terrible crime.
So perhaps it was no surprise when daylight on August 6th, 18 30 revealed a dead body slumped face down on the stoop of a house along Bridge Street, today’s Anderson Street in Boston’s West End.

[7:15] Enquiries revealed that the body belonged to a young man named David Walker.
At 33 years old, Walker is call for the immediate abolition of slavery had made him a wanted man.
The abolitionist cause was it. It’s very nascent stages. In 18 30 the American Anti Slavery Society hadn’t been formed yet.
Frederick Douglass hadn’t liberated himself from slavery in Maryland, and William Lloyd Garrison had not even begun publishing the Liberator.
A few white voices in the North were just beginning to debate the concept of emancipation.
However, because of his formative years in the South, the question of abolition was an academic toe Walker.
It was an issue of pressing immediate urgency that justified any possible resistance by radical, even violent means.
The previous year, he’d published one of the nation’s first widely circulated abolitionist polemics, titled,
and Appeal in four articles, together with a preamble to the colored citizens of the world, but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America,
commonly known as an appeal to the colored citizens of the world or simply walkers Appeal.
This fairly brief tracked helped ignite the abolitionist movement in the North had lasting influence on civil rights activists for a century and 1/2 after Walker, Steph and landed like a grenade in the American South.
As the pamphlet was circulated among black readers in the South, Walker became a marked man.

[8:40] Between publication of the pamphlet in September of 18 29 and his death in August of 18 30 Walker said defiantly, I will stand my ground.
Somebody must die in this cause.
I may be doomed to the stake in the fire or to the scaffold tree, but is not in me to falter if I can promote the work of Emancipation Walker. Sphere of the Steak and Fire wasn’t entirely unfounded.
In some southern states, execution by fire remained illegal punishment for African Americans convicted of murder or insurrection.
At the time, the last known legal example of this cruel punishment was in South Carolina in May of 18 30 when an enslaved man was burned at the stake before a crowd of thousands of white onlookers.
It was not until three years later that South Carolina officially outlawed burning at the stake.
Of course, fire would be used in extrajudicial lynchings of black Americans well into the 20th century.

[9:39] The price on Walker’s head also made his neighbors in Boston’s west and suspicious of foul play.
They knew that the state of Georgia had put out a bounty of $1000.
Some rumors said as much as 3000. For anyone who would kill David Walker in Massachusetts,
the price rose to $10,000 for anyone who could bring him back to Georgia alive to stand trial and then, inevitably, to meet a date with the scaffold.
Henry Highland Garnet, a black abolitionist from a slightly younger generation, would give voice to those who believe Walker’s death had come at the hands of slavers, taking a bit of artistic license he wrote.
It was the opinion of many that he was hurried out of life by the means of poison.
He had many enemies, and not a few were his brethren, whose cause he espoused.
He died in 18 30 on Bridge Street at the hopeful and enthusiastic age of 33 years.
His ruling passion blazed up in the hour of his death and through an indescribable grandeur. Over the last dark scene, the young man passed away without a struggle.

[10:48] Was this mysterious death, the murder? Was it a bounty killing by means of poison, or was there a more innocuous explanation?
David Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on either Sept 28 17 96 or September 28 17 85 depending on the source.
Both of his parents were African Americans. His father, who was enslaved, died before David was born, but his mother was a free woman through a legal doctrine known as part is Sequitur Ventre.
Um, David Walker was born free as Herbert App thicker notes in a footnote to Henry Highland Garnets biographical sketch of Walker in accordance with the law in the slave states.
Therefore, David Walker was born free, since for Negroes, unlike whites, the law stated that their own condition would follow that of the mother, not of the father.
Generally, of course, where the parents were slave and free. The mother was a slave, and the father was a white man, often a slave owner who thus, in accordance with law, had both pleasure and profit.

[11:52] At the time, Wilmington was the largest city in the state of North Carolina, and the majority of the population was made up of African Americans.
While most of these people were enslaved, the city did have a significant and relatively prosperous free black community.
The people learn trades, developed businesses and even served in the militia.
Rights for this community, however, were sharply curtailed is compared to their white counterparts.

[12:18] Having witnessed all the cruelty and degradation of North Carolina’s peculiar institution, Walker made up his mind to leave the South when he was in his late teens or early twenties.
He would later write that he had thought, If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long as true as God reigns, I will be avenged for the sorrow which my people have suffered.
This is not the place for me. Oh no, I must leave this part of the country.
It will be a great trial for me to live on the same soil where so many men are in slavery.
Certainly I cannot remain where I must hear their chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical in slavers. Go, I must.
Walker likely made the right choice because conditions for free African Americans and Wilmington became much harsher after not Turner’s 18 30 uprising, which walkers writings may have helped to inspire.

[13:12] Even after the Civil war, local whites resented the success that black artisans and shopkeepers enjoyed under the protection of reconstruction.
In 18 98 they formed a militia overthrew the duly elected government of the city and went on a murderous rampage.
They burned down the offices of black owned newspapers, banished black and white members of the Republican Party from the city and murdered between 103 100 African American residents.
In the meantime, however, David Walker was long gone from Wilmington.
He made his way first to Charleston, South Carolina, another city with a large and fairly prosperous community of Freeman.
There he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the same church attended by Denmark Vessey.
Many writers believe that Walker was exposed to Bessie’s views at this time, and some believe the two men may have known each other.
Denmark, Vessey and 35 other African Americans would be executed in July of 18 22 as the leaders of a planned insurrection among Charleston’s enslaved population.
Walker, his biographer, Peter Hanks, speculated about the influence of Essie’s militancy on Walker’s evolving views on slavery.

[14:30] David Walker may have had his first experience with organizing for revolt during the germination of the famous American slave plot.
There is a remarkable similarity between the rhetoric and ideas expressed by Walker and his Appeal and those expressed by Vessey in the trial transcripts pertaining to him.
What links their sentiments so forcefully is not only there yoking of religion with slavery, but also and more specifically,
there clear belief that God was the creator of natural rights and of the fundamental equality of all human beings.
For both Walker end Vessey, evangelical notions not only happen to correspond with the theory of natural rights, but were in fact internally bound together, working always to exult their ultimate source, the Christian deity,
Republicanism, was divinely ordained.
Both Vessey and Walker agreed that the oppress pursuit of holy righteousness might have to take on terrible forms.
Massacres of whites could be justified.

[15:36] The fact that Walker publicly took on this dangerous position that almost all contemporary black reformers shunned, espousing so openly suggests the influence of S E, especially because both grounded their use of violence in the Scripture.
Walker is threat that anyone not helping will receive his just recompense has a startling resemblance to Bessie’s threat that he would mark someone unwilling to perceive his oppression.
Neither was averse to applying biblical pressure on the hesitant.
Walker, like Jesse, had no illusions about what would be required to throw off their immensely powerful and ruthless opponent.
Like many other members of the A M E Church, David Walker left Charleston soon after the failure of disease rebellion,
there follows a period of his life that’s not well known, during which he may have made the extensive travels around the American south and West that he would later refer to in his Appeal.
Authors speculate about what the’s travels consisted off.
He may have visited Savannah or Alabama or the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, or maybe even western Pennsylvania, and he likely spend at least a few months in Philadelphia, home city of the A M E Church.

[16:50] The trail picks back up in Boston in 18 25 Peter Hanks wrote of the Date of Walkers arrival in Boston.
We could be much more certain He must have arrived there no later than the latter months of 18 24 because his name appears in the 18 25 Boston City directory AH, volume issued early each year.
He was also assessed a tax in 18 25 for his used clothing store in Dock Square.
Walker is not listed in any tax records for 18 24.
The fact that in both the Boston City directory and the tax book he is listed as a used clothing dealer points also to elite 18 24 Arrival as he would have needed time to locate a shop, gather inventory and settled himself domestically.

[17:35] In 18 25 Walker must have been largely concerned with establishing himself economically.
In Boston, tax records for this period regularly listed both the place of residents and employment.
But for Walker, only a shop is listed, indicating that he probably lived there during this transitional year.
The directory also places him only at the shop.
The source of the initial capital needed to start the shop is not clear. If he borrowed money, no records of the transaction remain.
The requisite startup money, however, was probably not that great. And he must have arrived in town with some money in hand.
The possibility that someone he was referred to our came to know soon after arrival helped to establish him in the business cannot be dismissed because he settled into the trade so soon after reaching Boston.

[18:23] By February 18 26 David Walker had married a local woman named Eliza.
Records are spotty, but she may have been ELISA Butler of a prominent local family.
As their fortunes improved, David and ELISA moved into a house at eight Belknap Street in 18 27 which is 81 Joy Street. Today, in 18 29 they moved to a new house on Bridge Street.

[18:47] An article written for the David Walker Memorial Project describes the connections he made as he settled down in Boston, David Walker played a prominent role in black civic institutions.
These included the Prince Hall Freemasonry, the Massachusetts General Colored Association and the Methodist Church of the Reverend Samuel Snowden, a strong anti slavery activist who had been a slave in the South.

[19:14] Walker also served as a writer key supporter in Boston, subscription agent for the New York based Freedom’s Journal.
The Journal was the country’s first African American owned and operated newspaper and an important source of information and ideas for Walker.

[19:32] About a decade after Walker left Charleston and immersed himself in the growing Black Liberation movement, he published his Appeal and four articles,
together with a preamble to the colored citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly to those of the United States of America.

[19:50] A note on the title page says that it was written in Boston in the state of Massachusetts September 28th 18 29 which may be symbolic as the 28th was Walker Zone Birthday Walker. Waste no time.
In the preamble to the third edition, he hits the ground running,
My dearly beloved brethren and fellow citizens, having traveled over a considerable portion of these United States and having in the course of my travels, taken the most accurate observations of things as they exist,
the results of my observations has warranted the full and unshaken conviction that we colored.
People of these United States are the most degraded wretched, an abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began.
And I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.

[20:46] They tell us of the Israel lights in Egypt. The hell it’s in Sparta, end of the Roman slaves,
which last were made up from almost every nation under heaven, whose sufferings under those ancient and he then nations, were in comparison with ours under this enlightened and Christian nation.
No more than a cipher or, in other words, those he even nations of antiquity had but little more among them than the name and form of slavery, while wretchedness and endless miseries were reserved,
to be poured out upon our fathers, ourselves and our Children by Christian Americans.

[21:24] In the four articles, he gives an overview of slaves and slavery in world history, attempts to sum up the current state of free and enslaved blacks and makes an argument for the inherent equality of the races.
He discusses the importance of education and attempts by whites to prevent the education of African Americans, and he makes a case that education’s importance is opening the door to Christianity.
He argues that if the enslaved population of America was well enough educated to understand the details of Christian teachings, that they would realize their right to self defense against their enslave hers.

[22:03] Christian themes pervade the pamphlet, and you can almost hear the cadence of a black Ministers sermon in his words on the topic of equality he wrote,
for You must remember that we airmen as well as they God has been pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet and some sense in their heads as well as they.
They have no more right to hold us in slavery than we have to hold them.
We have Justus much right in the sight of God to hold them and their Children and slavery and wretchedness as they have to hold us and no more.

[22:33] It’s a sermon not just on God’s judgment, but very specifically on God’s judgment of white America.
At the close of the first revolution in this country with Great Britain, there were but 13 states in the union.
Now there are 24 most of which your slaveholding states,
and the whites air drying us around and chains and in handcuffs to their new states and territories to work their minds and farms,
to enrich them and their Children, and millions of them believing firmly that we being a little darker than they were made by our creator to be an inheritance to them and their Children forever.
The same was a parcel of brutes.
Are we men? I ask you, Oh, my brother. And are we men?
Did our creator make us to be slaves to Dustin ashes like ourselves?
Are they not dying worms as well as we have they not to make their appearance before the Tribunal of Heaven to answer for the deeds done in the body as well as we did not God make us all, as it seemed best to himself.
What right then has one of us to despise another and to treat him cruel on account of his color, which none but the God who made it can. Also, can there be a greater absurdity in nature, and particularly in a free Republican country?

[23:44] But the Americans having introduced slavery among them, their hearts have become almost seared, as with a hot iron, and God is nearly given them up to believe a lie in preference to the truth.
And I am awfully afraid that pride, prejudice, Alvarez and Blood will before long proved the final ruin of this happy republic or land of liberty.
Can anything be a greater mockery of religion than the way in which is conducted by the Americans?
It appears as though they have been only on daring God Almighty.
To do his best, they chained and handcuffed us and our Children and drive us around the country like brutes and go into the House of God of justice and return thanks to him for having aided them there in vernal cruelties inflicted upon us.
Well, the Lord suffer this people to go on much longer, taking his holy name in vain.
Will they not stop them? Preachers in all oh, Americans, Americans, I call God. I call angels I call men toe Witness that your destruction is at hand and will be speedily Consummated unless you repent.

[24:46] Passages in the book are richness counter arguments to the public defenses of slavery put forth by politicians and statesmen from the South.
Walker spends pages arguing against Henry Clay and John Randolph and reserves special scorn for Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson had only been dead for about three years, and his notes on Virginia, published in 17 85 was one of the most broadly circulated pieces of slavery.
Apology. A Walker refutes the work point by point, for example,
the very learned and penetrating Mr Jefferson said when a master was murdered, all his slaves in the same house or within hearing were condemned to death.
Here, let me ask Mr Jefferson. But he has gone to answer at the Bar of God for the deeds done in his body while living.
I therefore ask the whole American people had I not rather die or be put to death than to be a slave to any tyrant who takes not only my own but my wife and Children’s lives by the inches.
Yea, would I meet death with avidity far, far in preference to such servile submission to the murderous hands of tyrants.

[26:02] This hints at another theme. Running through Walker’s work, the right of the enslaved to liberty and the justification of any means, even violent means to achieve it.
Now I ask you, how do you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant who takes the life of your mother, wife and dear little Children?
Look upon your mother, wife and Children and answer God Almighty and believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you, that it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.
That language of religion and resistance is also applied to the colonization movement. Ah, popular belief at that time that free African Americans and emancipated slaves should be returned to Africa.
Supporters of the idea believed that the outcome of this project would be preferable for both races. Walker was having none of it.

[27:01] Let no man of us budge one step and let slaveholders come to beat us from our country.
America is more our country than it is the whites. We have enriched it with our blood and our tears.
The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood in our tears.
And will they drive us from our property in homes which we have earned with our blood?
They must look sharp on this for this very thing will bring swift destruction upon them.
The Americans have got so fat on our blood and groans that they have almost forgotten the god of armies.

[27:38] Remember Americans that we must and shall be free and enlightened as you are.
Will 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 woe. Woe will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting.
Throw away your fears and prejudices then and in light in us and treat us like men.
And we will like you more than we do now. Hate you and tell us now know more about colonization for America is as much our country as it is yours.

[28:31] We encourage you to read the Appeal in its entirety. When I printed out the E book to browse through on a recent flight, it was only about 20 pages.
But the urgency of the cause, in the immediacy of the language, make the whole thing eminently readable and quotable.
To close the third edition, Walker turns America’s beloved Declaration of Independence Jefferson’s words of an unfulfilled promise.
Back in the White America’s face.

[28:58] See your declaration, Americans. Do you understand your own language here, Your language proclaimed to the world July 4th 17 76.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, but they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Compare your own language above extracted from your declaration of independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and Unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us,
men who have never given your father’s or you the least provocation,
here, your language further.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpation pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right.
It is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.
Now, Americans, I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain 1 1/100 part is cruel and tyrannical is you have rendered hours under you.
Some of you no doubt believe that we will never throw off your murderous government and provide new guards for our future security.
If Satan has made you believe it, will he not deceive you?

[30:14] The Lord has not taught the Americans that we will not some day or other throw off their chains and handcuffs from our hands and feet and their devilish lashes, which some of them shall have enough of yet from our backs.
This was the document that Walker wrote and began to distribute around cities in the American South.
In March of 18 30 white Bostonian named Edward Smith, who worked as a steward on the commercial ship Colombo, was arrested in Charleston.

[30:42] The grand Juries were in indictment, charged him with,
falsely and maliciously contriving and intending to disturb the peace and security of this state and to move a sedition among the slaves of the people of the state with force and arms.
At Charleston, in the district of Charleston, a force said on the 28th day of March in the year of our Lord 1830,
did bring into the state circulate and published a certain false, seditious and scandalous libel,
in the form of a printed pamphlet entitled Walkers Appeal in four articles, together with a preamble to the colored citizens of the world, but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America.

[31:27] He testified that back in Boston, an African American man who he believed to be a bookseller or a minister had come on board the Colombo while it was docked in Boston Harbor.
The man gave Smith six copies of the pamphlet and asked him to distribute them among the black population of Charleston.
He did so, but the Charleston authorities got wind of his activities, and they had a captain of the Guard watching when Smith handed the last copy over to a black man.
Smith would testify that he hadn’t read the pamphlets, had no idea what they were about,
and was simply trying to keep his word, which he had given to the man in Boston who he described as a decent looking black man who was very genteelly dressed for his crime.
Smith was find $1000 spent a year in a South Carolina prison.

[32:19] The decent looking, genteelly dressed man who called on Smith on the Colombo was almost certainly David Walker himself, illustrating one of the main ways he was able to get his book into the hands of free and enslaved African Americans in the South.
It’s not clear how many copies were created in the first printing somewhere between a few 100 a few 1000 but it appears that he was distributing it by October of 18 29.
At first, he gave copies to friends and acquaintances who were traveling south and mailed a few, though that was more risky.

[32:56] To increase the reach of his Appeal, Walker had to get creative as his work became known.
He could rely on a growing network of itinerant preachers, migrant labourers and traveling salesman, a copy or two in the pockets of a preacher heading to the Carolinas.
And Walker could be assured that his words would reach the black population of the South.
Not only is the pamphlets passed hand a hand, but as his white couriers read them aloud in churches and in the so called runaway camps deep in the forests and swamps of eastern North Carolina.
As the example of Edward Smith points out, he also enlisted both white and black sailors to carry the Appeal into the slave states.
Some, like Smith, were aware that there are being used as carriers.
A letter from Walker to one of his agents seized by the authorities in Richmond, shows his instructions to men like Smith.
Having written an appeal to the colored citizens of the world, it is now ready to be submitted for inspection off which I hear with send you 30 which, sir, your honor will please to sell among the colored people.
The price of these books is 12 cents per book to those who can pay for them. And if there any who cannot pay for a book, give them books for nothing.

[34:06] Other sailors had no idea that they’ve been recruited into the cause.
Walker shop was at 42 Brattle Street, where Government Center is today.
It was just up the hill and through the markets from Long Worf at the epicentre of Boston’s commercial waterfront.
His shop advertised a great variety of new and second hand clothing kept constantly on hand for sale.
Some accounts say that he would buy the garments that broke. Sailors bartered for one last drink, clean them and then so copies of his Appeal into the linings before reselling them to sailors who might be traveling south,
in hopes that they would again trade their coats for booze and allow the Appeal to be discovered by someone who would benefit from it.

[34:45] Whether or not the specifics of that are true, most sources say that he did so the Appeal into the linings of clothes as an easy way to smuggle it into the southern states, whether through the mail, in the lining of a coat or in the pocket of a traveling preacher.
The Appeal spread throughout the south in just a few months between its first publication in October 18 29 and Walker’s death in August of 18 30 The Appeal went through three printings.
In that time, at least 200 copies were shipped to David Walker’s hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. That’s about twice the number most cities got.
In December of 18 29 police in Savannah, Georgia, discovered a cache of 60 copies of the Appeal.
White authorities immediately recognised its potential power,
writing in 1965 Charles Wilt said, If any single event may be said to have triggered the Negro revolt, it is the publication of David Walker’s appeal to the Colored Citizens of the world.
The slaveholding South saw in it on Lee incitement to servile rebellion and went to fantastic lengths to suppress it.

[35:55] Hassan Crockett concurred with that assessment. In a 2000 and one article.
When the pamphlet reached the South, it represented one of the slave owners greatest fears blacks, not whites, writing and reading about abolition.
As a result, southern governments reacted swiftly. Toe walkers Appeal.
South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana immediately passed harsh laws, some requiring the death penalty against possession or distribution of walkers, Appeal or similar materials.

[36:31] The discovery of the Appeal immediately through Georgia into a state of panic.
Though the legislative session was supposed to end on December 21st Governor Gilmer kept them in special session long enough to pass laws suppressing the pamphlet and preventing more copies from being brought into the state.
It was meant to bar ships with any black crew members from docking at a Georgia port,
to keep enslave people from any other state from being imported into the state and to impose very specific penalties on any free or enslaved black person who read the Appeal.
It resolved that if any slave negro or free person of color or any other person,
shall circulate, bring or caused to be circulated or brought into the state or aid or assist in any manner concerned any printed or written pamphlet, paper or circular,
for the purposes of exciting to insurrection, conspiracy or resistance among the slaves, Nero’s or free persons of color of this state,
against their owners or the citizens of this state, the said person or persons offending against this section of this act shall be punished with death.

[37:43] While you would think that such extreme, inhuman measures would be revolting to the population of unenlightened city like Boston, you might be giving us too much credit.
An article in Boston’s Colombian Sentinel attempted to rationalize executing someone for possessing a book by calling on white fears of black insurrection.
This act appears at first blush, violent and sanguinary on nearer approach, however, it appears necessary to the immediate safety of whites.
We have seen the pamphlet, which is doubtless here, alluded to and do not hesitate to pronounce it one of the most wicked and inflammatory productions that ever issued from the press.
It’s character is entirely mischievous without one redeeming quality,
and we should judge from the drift that the writer, whatever, maybe his exterior complexion, there’s a heart as dark and cruel as the great friend of pandemonium,
it reveals a disposition that would exist to see the white people slaughtered in their beds.

[38:49] Within weeks, Savannah Mayor William T. Williams wrote to Boston Mayor Harrison Gray Otis to demand walkers arrest.
In his reply, Otis walks a fine line.
He seems ready to condemn the radicalism in abolitionism of walkers mission, but he stopped short of assenting to his arrest, saying that while walkers views were extremely bad, they were not actually unlawful.
In Massachusetts, I peruse it carefully in order to ascertain whether the writer had made himself amenable to our laws.
But notwithstanding the extremely bad and inflammatory tendency of the publication, he does not seem to have violated any of these laws.
It is written by a free black man whose true name it bears.
I also hear that he declares his intention to be to circulate his pamphlets by mail at his own expense, and he cannot otherwise affect his object.
But we have no power to control the purpose of the author, and without it we think that any public notice of him or his book would make matters worse.
We’ve been determined, however, to publish a general caution to captains and others against exposing themselves to the consequences of transporting incendiary writings into your and the other southern states.

[40:03] Otis was also forced to respond to Virginia Governor William Branch. Giles had written to the mayor with his own concerns about Walker’s Appeal.
Again, he disparages walkers radicalism without making any promises of trying to silence the writer.

[40:18] You may be assured that you’re good people cannot hold in mawr absolute detestation the sentiments of the writer than do the people of this city.
And, as I verily believe, the mass of the New England population.
The only difference is that the insignificance of the writer, the extravagance of his sanguinary fanaticism, tending to discussed all persons of common humanity with his object and the very partial circulation of this book prevent the affair from being a subject of excitement,
and hardly of serious attention.

[40:48] This time, though, his claims go even one step further. Not only do good white Bostonians to test Walker sentiments, but I have reason to believe the book is disapproved of by the decent portion of even the free colored population in this place.
It would be a cause of deep regret to me and, I believe, toe all my well disposed fellow citizens.
If a publication of this character and emanating from such a source should be thought to be countenanced by any of their number, Governor Giles responded to the Boston mayor.
And in this letter toe Otis, you can hear a dire warning that northerners should make no attempt to disrupt the system of slave power in the American South for their own good and for the good of the enslaved.

[41:33] I beg you, sir, to believe that the assurances given in your letter of the feelings and sentiments of absolute detestation entertained by yourself and the good people of Boston in general,
against the fanatical and sanguinary sentiments of the writer of that pamphlet have been received by myself,
and I am sure by the General Assembly and good people of this state with much satisfaction and grateful Acknowledgment.
Be assured, sir, that I never for one moment entertained a suspicion that sentiments so diabolical and mischievous as those avowed and put into circulation by the sanguinary fanatic,
could have received the approbation or countenance either of yourself or of the good people of Massachusetts. Generally.
Permit me, sir, however, to observe that I see with the most profound sorrow and regret,
fanatics of a much higher order than this despicable colored man are industriously inter meddling by wild and impractical projects to ameliorate the conditions of slaves in this state,
when they are profoundly ignorant of the particular subject of their inter medal ings and sensibilities of the incalculable mischief so that they are doing to society generally end to the slave population, particularly.

[42:54] In one continual cry, Herbert Apt Occur reports how the people of Georgia were willing to take that veiled threat of violence and make it explicit.
He describes a hunger strike by prominent Georgians who were enraged by Boston’s refusal to jail Walker, vowing that they would eat as little as possible until they had killed the author.
They offered a reward of $1000 for a dead Walker and $10,000 for him alive.
This bounty was reportedly matched by a similar one from the Georgia Legislature.

[43:29] Copies were found in Richmond, Virginia, in January of 18 30 in New Orleans in February.
Two white missionaries to the Cherokee tribes were maltreated and imprisoned in late 18 29 or 18 30 for possessing the book.
Across the South, searches, arrests and even torture were employed to try and root out the source of the pamphlet, as it was widely distributed around Walker’s home state of North Carolina.
A network of paid spies gathered intelligence on who might be circulating the controversial tome.

[44:05] Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia and Mississippi all passed new laws meant to suppress the Appeal and similar works.
Learning to read and write, disseminating abolitionist tracks and publicly assembling were forbidden to enslaved and, in some cases, free black people.
In most of those states, some also passed measures forcing formerly enslave people who have been recently released to leave the state or preventing enslaved and free people of color from living together.
Walker’s Appeal revealed the fault lines in the nation abolition movement.
Later, black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet with largely embrace and adopt the language of radical immediate abolition.
For at least another decade. However, white abolitionists were more interested in a gradual form of abolition.
In the Liberator. Volume One issue one dated January 1st 18 31 William Lloyd Garrison wrote,
The South may be reasonably alarmed at the circulation of Mr Walker’s Appeal for a better promoter of insurrection was never sent forth to an oppressed people.
We have already publicly deprecate its spirit.

[45:17] In the next weekly edition, he continued, believing as we do that men should never do evil, that good may come,
that a good end does not justify wicked means in the accomplishment of it, and that we ought to suffer, as did our Lord and his apostles unresisting Lee, knowing that vengeance belongs to God and he will certainly repay it where it is due.
Believing all this and that the Almighty will deliver the oppressed in a way which they know not we deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal.
Nevertheless, it is not for the American people as a nation to denounce it as bloodier, monstrous Mr Walker, but pays them in their own coin but follows their own creed but adopts their own language.
We do not preach rebellion. No, but submission and peace.

[46:04] In April of 18 30 Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy published a review of Walkers Appeal in his own newsletter, the genius of Universal Emancipation, Um, or bold, daring inflammatory publication, perhaps never issued from the press.
In any country, I can do no less than set the broadest seal of condemnation upon it.
Such things can have no other earthly effect in to injure our cause.
The writer indulges himself in the wildest strain of reckless fanaticism.
He makes a great parade of technical phrase ology purporting to be religious, but religion has nothing at all to do with it.
It is a laboured attempt to rouse the worst passions of human nature and inflame the minds of those to whom it is addressed.

[46:49] Asked in 18 83 whether Garrison or Lundy had been the founder of American abolitionism, Frederick Douglass would say,
David Walker, a colored man who’s Appeal against slavery, startled the land like a trump of coming judgment was before either Mr Garrison or Mr Lundy because of its moral clarity and call for immediate action walkers.
Appeal has influenced radical abolitionists, black nationalists and civil rights leaders since it was published.
If Southern leaders believe that the danger of the Appeal died with its author, that notion was short lived.
On August 21st 18 31 a group of about 70 enslaved African Americans, led by not Turner, began going from plantation to plantation in southeastern Virginia, killing white people and liberating their chattel slaves.
It was the insurrection the slave ocracy have been dreading and local militias quickly suppressed the rebellion.
A 2010 master’s thesis by Te’o Davis sums up the possibility that Walker’s Appeal directly influenced Nat Turner’s revolt.

[47:56] Many past and recent scholars have believed the walkers Appeal directly influenced, not Turner, because of the similarities of thought and the timing of Turner’s rebellion.
Shortly after the distribution of walkers pamphlet, James Floyd, Virginia’s governor during the time of Turner’s rebellion, discovered evidence such as letters from the North claiming this relationship existed,
reports from law enforcement at the time and other evidence to point to a connection.
Governor Floyd went to his grave, convinced of the relationship.
Others, such as Albert Bushnell, Heart, Hillary A. Herbert, William Lloyd Garrison and Benjamin Lundy all believed that Turner saw walkers pamphlet.
Professor Hanks stated his opinion that indeed, the Appeal probably played such a critical role in the extensive conspiracy in Wilmington.
In September of 18 31 nearly a century after Walker’s Appeal was published,
the N Double A CP imitated walkers direct language as well as echoing his title in an anti lynching pamphlet published in 1920 that was titled An Appeal to the Conscience of the World.

[49:11] The directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People feel constrained to publish to the world certain facts with regard to the treatment of Negroes in the United States.
Despite appeals to civil authorities in public opinion, barbarous excesses continue to be practised against colored Americans.
In the year 1919 84 persons were murdered by mobs or lynched, of whom 78 were Negroes and 11 were publicly burned alive.

[49:41] In the 30 years of 18 89 to 1918 lynching mobs murdered 3224 persons in the United States,
of whom 2522 were Negroes and 702 were white persons.
Of the Negro victims, 50 were women.
The following record, it is hoped, will make its Appeal to those persons everywhere to whom civilization is something more than a name.
In 1947 the n Double a CP presented an appeal to the world, a statement on the denial of human rights to minorities in the case of citizens of Negro descent in the United States of America and an appeal to the United Nations for redress.

[50:25] It was authored by W. E. B. Dubois, who took up not only Walker sense of urgency but also his attempt at universal Appeal for Dubois.
As for Walker, the rights of black Americans weren’t a case of special pleading but a matter of fundamental universal human rights, W. E. B. Dubois wrote.
After the first World War, we were alienated from the proposed League of Nations because of sympathy for imperialism,
and because of race antipathy to Japan and because we objected to the compulsory protection of minorities in Europe, which might lead to similar demands upon the United States.
We joined Great Britain in determined refusal to recognise the quality of races and nations.
But today the paradox again looms after the Second World War.
We have record essence of race, hate and cast restrictions in the United States and of these dangerous tendencies not simply for the United States itself but for all nations.

[51:22] When will nations learn that their enemies air quite as often within their own countries without it is not Russia that threatens the United States? So much is Mississippi, not Stalin and Molotov, but Bilbo in Rankin.
Internal injustice done the ones Brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression of strangers from abroad.

[51:41] The question then, which is without doubt primarily an internal and national question, becomes inevitably an international question and will, in the future become more and more international.
Is the nation’s draw together in this great attempt to find common ground in to maintain peace.
It is therefore fitting and proper that 13 million American citizens of Negro descent should appeal to the United Nations and ask that organization in the proper way to take cognizance of a situation which deprives this group their rights as men and citizens,
and by doing so makes the functioning of the United Nations more difficult, if not in many cases, impossible.

[52:19] The United Nations Charlie will not forget that the population of this group makes in its size one of the considerable nations of the world.
We number as many as the inhabitants of Argentina or Czechoslovakia or the whole of Scandinavia, including Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
We are very nearly the size of Egypt. Romania and Yugoslavia were larger than Canada, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Hungary or the Netherlands.
We have twice as many persons as Australia or Switzerland and more than the whole union of South Africa.
We have more people than Portugal or Peru, twice as many as Greece and nearly as many as Turkey.
We have more people by far than Belgium and half a Zeman IUs Spain.
In sheer numbers, then we’re a group which has a right to be heard.
And while we rejoice that other smaller nations can stand and make their once known in the United Nations, we maintain equally that our voice should not be suppressed or ignored.

[53:16] While he didn’t use walkers. Language of violence Martin Luther King Junior’s I Have a Dream Speech echoes the fearsome urgency of justice and walkers Appeal.

[53:27] So come to this hallowed spot.

[53:31] Remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

[53:37] This is no time when days in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug.

[53:52] Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy, bringing things full circle.
What do we know about the death of David Walker? Was he assassinated?
Certainly that’s what people, especially black Bostonians, thought at the time.
An article in the January 22nd 18 31 issue of The Liberator, attributed to a colored citizen of Boston, said,
The most I can learn is that someone or other recently from the South spread a report in this city that a reward of $3000 was offered by Southern planters to anyone who would take the life of Walker.
The report is believed by many of our population who have no higher source of intelligence to be true, many well informed persons of color.
There are, however, who have a strong suspicion that Walker came to his end otherwise and by a usual visitation of the Providence of God.
Modern historians seem to be divided on the topic. Crockett’s 2001 article shows how those who are willing to consider Orel histories are open to the possibility of murder.

[55:01] The controversy over his death continues to the state. David Jacobs states that there is no real evidence of foul play, and until such appears, historians are on firmer ground. Assuming his death was due to natural causes.
However, most historians agree with Charles M. Welts conclusions.
The true circumstances have never been ascertained. But poison seemed the most likely cause of death, and few doubted at the time that the most eloquent voice in the battle for Negro Freedom had been violently stilled.
Henry Highland Garnet concurs. He writes in 18 48.
It was the opinion of many that he was hurried out of life by means of poison.

[55:42] Writers who rely strictly on documentary evidence have an alternate, less violent theory.
Writing in 1997 biographer Peter Hanks lays out the evidence that consumption or tuberculosis killed David Walker.
The Boston Index of Deaths lists Walker is dying on August 6th, 18 30 of consumption at the age of 33 the Dayton cause air repeated in the Boston Daily Courier.
Nowhere is foul. Play suggested he died a week after his daughter, at a time when pulmonary afflictions were numerous in the city.
At least seven people have died of lung complications in the last week, lending credibility to that cause.

[56:23] The daughter died was Lydia and Walker, aged one year, nine months. The first child of Walker Analyze a butler.
She died on July 31st.
Eliza was pregnant with their second child at the time of David’s death.
As you can imagine, the family’s fortunes changed drastically in a way that the Appeal seems to have foretold.
An article. One of the Appeal, Walker wrote, Can a man of color by a piece of land and keep it peaceably?
Well, not some white man and try to get it from him, even if it is in a mudhole.
I need not comment any further on a subject which all both black and white will readily admit.
But I must really observe that in this very city. Boston, when a man of color dyes if he owned any real estate, it most generally falls into the hands of some white person.
The wife and Children of the deceased may weep in limit if they please, but the estate will be kept snug enough by its white possessor.

[57:21] In an ultimate irony, after David Walker died, his widow, Eliza, was unable to keep up with their mortgage payments.
The mortgage holder was George Parkman, whose gruesome murder was the subject of our 24th episode.
As we said at the time, Parkman was a man who relished collecting on a debt, walking the streets each day to visit his borrowers and collect their payments.
So, of course, when ELISA Walker couldn’t make the mortgage payments apartment foreclosed on the family, seizing the House and fulfilling David Walker’s prophecy.

[57:56] After this reversal, David analyzes second child Edward was born. Later, in 18 30 he would go on to be an abolitionist activist in his father’s footsteps.
Unlike David, Edward Walker lived in a time when abolitionism was becoming more common in Boston.
He was part of the mob that successfully rescued Shad rack Lincoln’s from the courthouse after Mickens was accused of being a free sleeve and got him onto a boat bound for Canada.
After studying law, Edward was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 18 66 alongside Charles Mitchell.
They were the first to African American legislators elected in Massachusetts, prompting this rude response in the Diary of White Bostonian Claude August Cromelin Onley.
The election of two colored men as representatives in the state legislature made some noise here and gave sufficient matter for conversation, as this is the first election of its kind.
Misters Mitchell on Walker are the first of the despised race who are called to a post such as this one.

[59:04] We’ll leave the last word on the memory of David Walker toe black abolitionist Maria Stewart in an address at Boston’s African Masonic Hall in 18 33 she lionized him.
Many will suffer for pleading the cause of repressed Africa,
and I shall glory in being one of her martyrs, for I am firmly persuaded that the God in whom I trust is able to protect me from the rage and malice of mine enemies and from them that will rise up against me.
And if there is no other way for me to escape, he is able to take me to himself, as he did the most noble, fearless and undaunted David Walker.

[59:45] But where is the man that has distinguished himself in these modern days by acting holy and defensive, African rights and liberty?
There was one. Although he sleeps, his memory lives.

Wrap Up

Jake:
[59:59] To learn more about David Walker and his radical Appeal, check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 190,
We’ll have the full text of the Appeal links to each of the books and articles we quoted from and maps showing the location of David Walker’s homes on the street layout of the 18 thirties.
We’ll also have copies of the correspondence between Harrison Gray Otis and Southern political leaders, and we’ll link to coverage of the Appeal in the Liberator.

[1:00:28] And of course, we’ll have links to information about our upcoming event. And The Boston Jazz Chronicles this week’s Bustin Book Club pick.

[1:00:37] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email us at Podcast, a hub history dot com.
We’re hub history on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, where you can goto hub history dot com and click on the Contact US link while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode.
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Music

Jake:
[1:01:07] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.