Robinson Woodward-Burns - School of Arts & Sciences

Violence and Moral Suasion in David Walker’s Appeal
Robinson Woodward-Burns
David Walker’s Appeal, an 1829 antislavery pamphlet, calls for abolition through
both violent slave revolt and persuasion of slaveholders. Insurrectionism and
suasionism were conflicting schools of abolition in Walker’s time, but Walker
asserts that violence is a type of persuasion. He claims slaveholders intuit that
blacks are human, but given slaves’ subservience, slaveholders have no evidence
to confirm this intuition. Revolt proves to whites that backs are not natural slaves.
Since Walker’s argument for resistance relies on convincing whites slaveholders,
Walker merges suasionism and insurrection.
David Walker’s 1829 Appeal was an incendiary call for violent abolition of slavery. The
pamphlet shifted black abolitionism from suasion and negotiation with slaveholders to radical
insurrectionism, pushing the nation to war. Puzzlingly, the pamphlet merged moderate moral
suasion with insurrectionism, asserting violence was a kind of suasion. Despite its importance,
the pamphlet has received little scholarly appeal. The aim of this essay is to elucidate Walker’s
claim slave insurrection is will persuade a rational audience that slavery is wrong.
Given Walker’s obscurity, some background is helpful. Born a free African American in
1796 or 1797, Walker was raised in Wilmington, North Carolina. Little is known of Walker’s
boyhood, but he was likely raised among Wilmington’s slaves (Hinks, 20). Wilmington’s slave
community had a history of resistance, aiding the British in sacking the city in 1781, and forming
a raiding posse of runaways the year before Walker’s birth. Around 1820 Walker moved to
Charleston, South Carolina, the third-largest community of Southern free blacks, where he
worshipped with slaves in the African Methodist Episcopal church. The congregation was “A
glaring symbol of black resistance to white hegemony…a constant reminder to all blacks of how
they might seek out freedom together” (Hinks, 28). Sermons on biblical deliverance from slavery
riled whites, forcing the church underground. At this time Denmark Vesey also organized local

clandestine meetings to agitate slave revolt. Vesey, once discovered, made a public appeal for
revolt that foreshadowed Walker’s own (Wilentz, ix-x; Hinks, 29-30). Walker moved to Boston
by 1825, where he joined black intellectual and church communities and biracial abolitionist
circles. He backed the first black abolitionist periodical, Freedom’s Journal, contributing several
articles before publishing the 1829 Appeal. He died suddenly in 1830 after releasing a third
edition of the pamphlet.
The Appeal demands slave revolt. Walker opens with the conviction “we, (coloured
people of these United States,) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject beings that ever lived
since the world began” (Walker, 1). He traces blacks’ misery to four causes, each addressed in a
separate article of the pamphlet. First is slavery, buttressed by Jefferson’s assertion blacks are
innately inferior. Second is blacks’ ignorance in accepting Jefferson’s claim that slavery is their
natural station. Third are preachers who teach slaves servitude is a Christian virtue, and fourth
are colonization societies that deport free blacks to Haiti or Liberia. In each case, blacks’
wretchedness reflects their circumstances, not their nature, which Walker asserts is nearly
identical to that of whites. The Appeal calls on blacks to prove this equality through education
and social uplift. So ingrained is servitude in the black mind that Walker doubts education will
succeed. He asserts violent resistance will prove to blacks and whites that the races are equal.
The Appeal polarized America. Walker encouraged the Appeal’s spread in the South,
where he felt it most needed, to the irritation of Southern legislatures. The pamphlet changed
hands between black sailors, issuing from ports in tidewater Virginia, Wilmington, Charleston,
Savannah, and New Orleans. Louisiana, grappling with a series of slave revolts, banned printing
incendiary slave literature, and New Orleans police seized the pamphlet and its distributors.
Police in Wilmington and Charleston did the same. At the order of the Georgia state legislature,

Savannah port authorities quarantined vessels manned by blacks and threatened black sailors
with arrest for going ashore (Easton, 327-330). Still, the pamphlet snaked inland with runaways
and itinerant preachers. The latter particularly concerned North Carolina’s governor, John Floyd,
who blamed the pamphlet for the region’s slave resistance (Hinks, 116-172). Confirming his
fears, suspected resistance conspirators were found in North Carolina with the essay. Growing
fear of slave revolts, exacerbated by the pamphlet, united white yeomen and plantation barons
alike against Walker and abolitionists (Wilentz, xx).
Abolitionists warmed to the Appeal gradually. Even Boston abolitionists initially doubted
Walker, favoring persuasion of slaveholders – called moral suasion – or at least compensated
emancipation. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, criticized Walker’s radicalism. Yet Garrison
defended Walker against charges of plagiarism, and eventually adopted Walker’s call for
immediate abolition, hoping to ingratiate himself to Boston blacks (Aptheker, 50-52; Hinks, 112-
113). Garrison’s Liberator articles popularized Walker’s radicalism among white abolitionists,
while black abolitionists like Henry Highland Garnet spread his message of revolution through
the free black communities of the northwest. Walker’s pamphlet marks a turn from the moderate
abolitionism of the early-1800’s to the confrontational tone of antebellum antislavery (Crockett,
305-307). Walker’s Appeal so aggravated the divide over slavery, historian Sean Wilentz credits
it as a primary cause of the Civil War (Wilentz, xxii-xxiii).
Given Walker catalyzed the Civil War, there is a surprising dearth of scholarship on his
pamphlet. Work on Walker is limited to several books and a dozen articles. Most Walker
scholarship is historical, recounting Walker’s life, the distribution of his pamphlet, and the
reaction among slaveholders and moderate and radical abolitionists. Few analyze Walker’s text –
Herbert Aptheker, Peter Hinks, and Rufus Burrow give admirable exegeses – and only Darryl

Scriven approaches Walker as a philosopher. However, even Scriven takes the conventional view
of Walker as an anti-suasionist, missing Walker’s provocative combination of violence and moral
suasion.
This essay expounds Walker’s claim that violence and persuasion are compatible. In
doing so, the essay makes three contributions. First, it poses Walker as a political thinker, adding
to the Walker literature. Second, it resolves an apparent tension between Walker’s advocacy of
abolition through both violent insurrection and through moral persuasion of slaveholders. Third,
in showing the two approaches are compatible, the essay questions the traditional tension
between these two schools of abolitionism.
The paper proceeds in three steps. First it recounts Walker objection to Jefferson’s
argument of natural black inferiority. In the second section, Walker demonstrates violence is the
only way blacks can refute Jefferson. Finally, the paper shows why violent resistance is a kind of
moral suasion. Slaveholders intuit that if slaves are human, they will resist their bondage.
Resistance confirms whites’ intuition, and it is this appeal to intuition that makes Walker’s
argument a type of suasion.
I. Walker and Jefferson on Race
The Appeal contests Jefferson’s claim blacks are innately inferior, so it is worth
interrogating Jefferson on race. In Query XIV of Jefferson’s 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia,
Jefferson digresses on potential post-colonial legal reforms in Virginia, including a bill for
deportation of emancipated slaves. He justifies this colonization plan by asserting coexistence of
blacks and whites, given mutual resentment, would “produce convulsions which will probably
never end but in the extermination of one or the other race” (Jefferson, 264). This would be
exacerbated by “the real distinctions which nature has made” between the races – blacks’

physiological and intellectual inferiority. Jefferson asserts blacks lack whites’ physiological
blessings, “the flowing hair [and] symmetry of form” of whites, revealed by blacks’ “own
judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference for them, as uniformly as is the
preference of the Oranootan for the black woman over those of his own species” (Ibid, 265).
Jefferson’s point is not to link blacks and orangutans, but to place blacks in a hierarchy of
species, below whites and above apes (Scriven, 44). This hierarchy assumes physical differences
between races are innate, not merely environmental.
Jefferson posits two arguments on why blacks’ intellectual inferiority is also innate. First,
African Americans, living in proximity to whites for nearly two centuries, could have developed
arts and sciences akin to those of whites. He sees no evidence of this. Even thoroughly-educated
black intellectuals reveal their inferiority: Phyllis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho are “wild and
extravagant” in their prose; the latter “escapes incessantly every restraint of reason and taste.”
That black intellectuals tend to poetry and music, rather than the sciences, shows their
disposition to “sensation [rather] than reflection.” Indians, however, in frequent contact with
whites, can reason, abstracting from a natural object to an artistic representation of the object.
Presumably, they stand higher on the ladder of human species. Second, Jefferson lauds the
intellectual achievements of Roman slaves. He claims “the condition of [these] slaves was much
more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America,” as Roman slaves were
segregated by gender and could be easily tortured or put to death. Yet Roman slaves excelled in
the arts and sciences. The luminaries “Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they
were of the race of whites” (Jefferson, 267-268). Whites’ nature trumps environment.
Jefferson allows a caveat. Among black slaves he sees the propensity to steal goods from
their master, which he admits is fair, given they have so little. This “must be ascribed to their

situation, and not to any depravity of the moral sense” (Ibid, 269). Unlike blacks’ outward
physiology, their intellectual and moral character is difficult to observe, and complicated by such
counterexamples. Lacking systematic study of blacks, Jefferson is thus reluctant to “degrade a
whole race of men from the rank of the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have
given them…I advance it as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race,
or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites” (emphasis added, Ibid,
270). Lacking adequate evidence, Jefferson invites falsification of his theory.
The first and pivotal article of Walker’s Appeal refutes Jefferson by asserting blacks’
inferiority reflects their environment, not their nature. Walker never questions blacks’ inferiority,
but in tracing blacks’ wretchedness to slavery, he excuses blacks of their shortcomings. Walker
attacks Jefferson’s physiological argument on two grounds. First, he rejects blacks descend
“originally from tribes of Moneys or Orang-Outangs” (Walker, 10). Though Walker that
misreads Jefferson as asserting blacks evolve from apes, such ideas were common in antebellum
American, and Walker is correct that Jefferson places blacks closer to apes than whites (Scriven,
43-44). Walker answers Jefferson’s contrast between whites and blacks is “like putting one wild
deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the same, then let it
go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast as the one at liberty;” Jefferson’s argument
requires one ignore blacks’ environment. Second, Walker offers a more explicitly physiological
argument. Jefferson lists blacks’ physical differences from whites, including their skin, hair, and
sweatiness. Walker responds these are superficial, given essential similarities across races: “God
has been pleased to give us two eyes, two hands, two feet, and some sense in our heads as well as
they” (Walker, 11n). Walker’s point is not merely that the races are physically similar, but that to
degrade a race of men is to degrade the rank and design which, in Jefferson’s words “their

Creator may perhaps have given them.” Walker’s theology and Jefferson’s deism overlap here:
both are reluctant to damn the craftsmanship of God. Walker reiterates the point: whites and
blacks face the same bodily infirmities and the same death. “I ask you, O my brethren! Are we
MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves? Are [whites] not
dying worms as well as we...Have we any other master but Jesus Christ alone? Is he not their
Master as well as ours? – What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but
Himself?” (Ibid, 16). Noting God made men to suffer alike, Walker affirms Jefferson’s
skepticism that God created different ranks of men.
Walker asserts intellect is not innate, but shaped by environment. Black slaves, Walker
asserts, face greater hurdles than their white Roman and Spartan counterparts, explaining black’s
cultural shortcomings. Unlike Spartan helots, black slaves are split from their families and traded
as commodities. Similarly, “slavery as it existed among the Romans…was, comparatively
speaking, not more than a cypher, when compared to ours under the Americans” (Ibid, 14).
Roman slaves could buy their freedom, mix with the free population, and even serve in office.
Walker cites laws against compensated emancipation for blacks, and Virginia and North Carolina
statutes against black office-holding. The harshness of American slavery explains African
Americans’ intellectual shortcomings relative to the Romans and Spartans. Free Africans,
however, thrived. Walker cites the Egyptians’ engineering and Hannibal’s military exploits,
concluding: “the sons of Africa or of Ham, among whom learning originated, and was carried
thence into Greece, where it was improved upon and refined. Thence among the Romans, and all
over the then enlightened parts of the world” (Ibid, 19).
II. Proving Equality through Violent Resistance

Walker challenges blacks to refute Jefferson. The Appeal intones “Mr. Jefferson’s
remarks respecting us, have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of the whites.” Blame lies not
only with Jefferson, but also with subservient blacks “confirming him every day, by our
groveling submissions and treachery” (Ibid, 28). To prove to Americans, black and white, that
blacks are not subhuman, blacks must struggle for their natural rights. Is it “unfortunate for us
that our Creator has been pleased to make us black[?]” Walker asks. “We will not take
[Jefferson’s] say so, for the fact. The world will have an opportunity to see whether it is
unfortunate for us, that our Creator has made us darker than whites…we shall have to contend
for our lawful right; guaranteed to us by our Maker” (Ibid, 12).
Walker posits two ways blacks can prove themselves. First, blacks might educate
themselves. Granting the difficulty of this, he avers “our oppression ought not to hinder us from
acquiring all we can. For we will have a chance to develope [our talents] by and by.” Such
reform can only come gradually. Second, blacks can use violence. Suicide demonstrates blacks
would rather die than serve (Ibid, 14-15). Slave revolts are another proof. In reversing their
bondage, blacks can show submission is not in their nature. “How would [whites] like for us to
make slaves of, and hold them in cruel slavery, and murder them as they do us?” (Ibid, 12).
Walker later expounds “whites have had us under them for more than three centuries, murdering,
and treating us like brutes; and as Mr. Jefferson said, they have never found us out – they do not
know, indeed, there is an unconquerable disposition in the breast of the blacks,” only revealed
through rebellion (Ibid, 25).
It is worth considering education and revolt. Walker doubts education can dissuade blacks
of their inferiority. Access to education is difficult – Walker cites Virginia and Georgia statues
proscribing blacks, free and slave, from learning to read, write, or worship (Ibid, 53). Further,

many blacks think servility is their natural role, rejecting learning. Walker illustrates several
cases of this belief, which he dubs ignorance. He cites a rebellion of sixteen slaves being driven
through Kentucky. Having filed off their cuffs in secret, the slaves overpowered their drivers,
killing two and leaving the third for dead. However, a slave from the chain gang helped the
remaining driver mount his horse, draw a posse, and recapture the escapees. Walker rejects the
slave acted from charity or Christian love for the driver, but rather from her reluctance to seize
her freedom, and the violence and independence it entailed (Ibid, 23-25). In another case of
ignorance, Walker recalls meeting a free shoeshine who claimed he was glad merely to own his
labor. Walker understands this – he was grateful to own his small clothing store – but Walker
condemns him for not imagining more for himself or his race. He asks free blacks to look
forward “with thankful hearts to higher attainments than wielding the razor and cleaning boots
and shoes… your full glory and happiness as well as all other coloured people under Heaven,
shall never be fully consummated, but with the entire emancipation of your enslaved brethren all
over the world” (Ibid, 29). Lest one think such “higher attainments” include education in the arts
and sciences, Walker asserts the opposite. Education spawns egoism and avarice in the
individual, directing him to petty aims rather than his own uplift or that of the race. Walker
recalls a final example, meeting a black man who praised his son’s penmanship. Yet, on
interrogation, Walker found the son was ignorant of practical skills of grammar, bookkeeping,
and composition (Ibid, 31). Conventional education breeds egoism and cannot dissuade blacks of
their inferiority.
Revolt proves blacks’ equality in three ways. Foremost, violent resistance shows blacks
are human. To Jefferson’s conclusion blacks are submissive, Walker agrees: “how could Mr.
Jefferson but have given the world these remarks respecting us, when we are so submissive to

them, and so much servile deceit prevail among ourselves – when we so meanly submit to
murderous lashes, to which neither the Indians, nor any other people under heaven would
submit?” He adds: “what set of men can you point me to , in all the world, who are so abjectly
employed by their oppressors…how can those enemies [of blacks] but say we are children and
not of the HUMAN FAMILY” (Walker, 26-27). Humans are humans qua their power of violent
self-defense. Since no human would submit to such mistreatment without retaliation, blacks’
passivity implies they are not human (Scriven, 109).
Walker condones self-preservation as natural. Among whites Walker sees aggression,
self-preservation taken to an unnatural extreme. Whites are “an unjust, jealous, unmerciful,
avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.” Their
rapacity transcends environment: Greeks, Romans, the Spanish, and the British all sought
territory and slaves (Ibid, 16-17). Self-defense, however, is justifiable, a natural faculty common
to humans: “the man who will stand still and let another murder him, is worse than an infidel,
and if he has common sense, ought not to be pitied” (Ibid, 26). The Kentucky chain-gang slave
who aided her wounded driver refused her own preservation and her human common sense. One
might find her compassion admirable, but Walker shuns it. As Peter Hinks notes, “Walker
relentlessly attacked all notions that any family ties or structures of mutual obligation which
bound the master and slave together existed” (Hinks, 221).
This is not to take Walker as an individualist or atomist; rather, self-defense is an
obligation to one’s race. Walker reiterates blacks are bound to each other, and reserves his
strongest scorn is for those blacks who befriend and harbor runaways only to turn in their
kinsman for reward (Walker, 22). Darryl Scriven concludes Walker adopts Hobbesian self-
preservation, but strips it of its atomism: “Not that, for Walker, humans are essentially egoistic,

ut humans are beings whose behavior consists primarily of two types of motions: vital and
voluntary. According to Hobbes, the vital motions are those actions humans perform without
intentional accessing of their thought or faculty of reason” (Scriven, 111). Self-defense is such a
motion. In sum, humans have a reflexive, natural tendency to defend themselves and their racial
kin. This is what Walker means when he claims most blacks are ignorant: they are not merely
unlearned or subservient, but they fail their human nature. Schoolroom education may teach
them petty arts, but it cannot repair such a deep fault. Blacks can only dispel their ignorance
through race revolt.
Through violent resistance, blacks prove to themselves that they are human. Frederick
Douglass demonstrates Walker’s point. In his 1845 autobiography, Douglass recalls attacking his
owner, Edward Covey, after a train of abuses. Grappling with Covey for hours, Douglass
eventually exhausts him, and Covey submits. Douglass remembers this as a revelation that he,
like his owner, was human:
This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It
rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of
my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again
with a determination to be free…the day had passed forever when I could be a
slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who
expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me (emphasis
added, Douglas 67-68).
Douglass, locked in struggle with his owner, neither able to overcome another, learns another
lesson: blacks and whites are physically comparable.
Second, violence shows blacks are physically equal to whites. Ignorance cows blacks
from violence. Recalling the Kentucky chain-gang slave, Walker laments: “It is just the way with
black men – eight white men can frighten fifty of them” (Ibid, 25). Yet, freed from ignorance,
blacks can challenge and equal whites in physical contest, and moreover, “if you can get the

courage into the blacks, I do declare it, that one good black man can put to death six white men.”
Walker is not the first to ground natural equality in violence. Hobbes and Locke take humans’
ability to kill each other, alone or with others’ aid, as a sign of humans’ equality in the state of
nature. For Walker and Locke, violence reverts parties the state of nature, and thus to natural
equality. However, Walker’s assertion has a few faults. He supports it with Jefferson’s claim
blacks are especially sensual, violent creatures, undermining his environmentalist idea of race.
This might suggest blacks are more animal than human, a point Walker lets slip: “Get the blacks
started, and if you do not have a gang of tigers and lions to deal with, I am a deceiver of blacks
and whites.”
Finally, violent resistance to slavery allows blacks to claim a cultural tradition to contest
that of whites. Rome, Jefferson’s exemplar of white civilization was bested by the African
Hannibal. Walker places contemporary slave revolt in the tradition of Hannibal’s conquest. “But
what need have I to refer to antiquity,” Walker asks, “when Hayti, the glory of blacks and terror
of tyrants, is enough to convince the most avaricious and stupid of wretches” (Ibid, 20-21).
Haiti’s slave revolt consequently inspired American slaves as far north as Virginia, inciting
slaveholders to segregate their slaves from incoming Haitian refugees. Gabriel’s Prosser’s 1800
conspiracy, for example, was inspired in part by Haiti’s revolt (Hinks, 47, 59). Walker
encourages American blacks to carry the mantle of both Hannibal and Haiti.
III. Violent Resistance and Moral Suasion
Resistance teaches Americans, black and white, that blacks are not innately inferior. It
convinces blacks they equal whites, as Frederick Douglass recounts, and it may debunk whites’
idea of black servility. However, slave revolt might not persuade white slaveholders of blacks’
humanity; rather, violence might make blacks seem brutish, aggressive, and subhuman, proving

Jefferson’s point. For Walker’s argument to stand, he must show resistance will persuade whites
that blacks are human. This final section of the paper shows how Walker combines violence and
moral suasion.
Walker made this claim in conversation with antebellum abolitionists. Abolitionists
ranged from gradualists who favored converting slaveholders through moral suasion to those
who called for violent resistance. This divide between suasionists and radicals was thus a divide
over whether abolition could come by enlightening white slaveholders.
Walker straddles both camps. Several scholars place Walker squarely in the
insurrectionist tradition (Scriven, 104-116; Wilentz vii-xxiii; Crocket, 305-307). They do so with
good reason, as Walker was an early and infamous advocate of slave revolt. Yet, as Peter Hinks
notes, Walker favors discursive suasion of whites if possible, viewing revolt as a last resort
(Hinks, 246-247). Walker frequently claims that “every man who has a heart,” including whites,
can see black equality, suggesting that suasion of whites is possible and desirable (Walker, 5, 61).
One might think suasion and violence are separate for Walker, such that if suasion fails, then
violence is acceptable. However, close consideration suggests for Walker suasion is not always
verbal: sometimes suasion is violent. By taking arms against whites, blacks convince whites that
blacks are human. Unlike pure insurrectionists like Henry Highland Garnet, Walker does not
simply see violence as a means to abolition; rather, for Walker violence is useful because it
teaches black equality to whites.
Understanding how Walker fits violence with moral suasion requires a closer look at the
suasion movement. Emerging in the eighteenth century, suasionism reflected Quaker and
Scottish Enlightenment faith in human intuition and reason. Through peaceful methods like
conversation, one could awaken the intuition in one’s listener, guiding her to the morally correct

conclusion. American suasionists thus sought abolition through nonviolent persuasion of
slaveholders. When Walker published the appeal, suasionism was dominant among black and
white abolitionists. The first National Negro Convention in 1831 took a suasionist platform,
which Garrison adopted into his New-England Anti-Slavery Society the following year (Adeleke,
127). Whites mirrored blacks on abolition. Both the African American William Whipper and the
white Ralph Waldo Emerson equated intuition with the divine in humans, seeking to awaken the
intuition through their writings (Scriven, 93-98).
Blacks had drifted from moral suasion by the 1843 National Negro Convention.
Convention delegates offered a platform that eschewed persuasion of slaveholders for black self-
improvement through temperance, vocational education, journalism, and organized politics under
the Liberty Party (Bell, 247-252). Despite the efforts of dedicated suasionists like Frederick
Douglass, violent resistance also drew delegate support. Inspired by Walker, Henry Highland
Garnet made a rousing appeal for revolt that lost the Convention’s backing by a single vote.
Garnet tempered Walker’s radicalism – he viewed violence as more expedient than divinely
mandated – but so admired Walker’s pamphlet that he attached it to a printing of his speech it in
1848. Black abolitionists’ move toward party politics and armed resistance, rather than suasion,
predictably alienated white Garrisonians.
Though Walker seems closer to Garnet than Garrison, Walker repeatedly admits some
whites can be persuaded through discourse. This suggests Walker is not a pure or glad
insurrectionist. To sympathetic whites, he appeals
Now let us reason – I mean you of the United States, whom I believe God designs
to save from destruction, if you will hear. For I declare to you, whether you
believe it or not, that there are some on the continent of America, who will never
be able to repent. God will surely destroy them… Throw away your fears and
prejudices then, and enlighten us and treat us like men, and we will like you more

than we do now hate you…Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will
all live in peace and happiness together (Walker, 69-70).
In persuading whites to reform, Walker uses two suasionist tactics. First, Walker presents his
white readers with unflinching depictions of slavery, hoping to stir their sentiment. Traveling to
the American South or West, a white “if he is not a tyrant, but has the feelings of a human being,
who can feel for his fellow creature, he may see enough to make his very heart bleed” (Ibid, 21-
22). Walker depicts such scenes for his white readers, describing how sons are forced to whip
their mothers to death, husbands forced to beat their pregnant wives, and fathers forced to
throttle their children. As the suasionist Emerson noted, such vivid images lodged themselves in
readers’ minds, gradually coaxing a change in opinion, awakening the moral intuition.
Second, Walker appeals to whites’ reason. At the pamphlet’s conclusion, Walker quotes
the Declaration of Independence, noting that after “a long train of abuses and usurpations”
rebellion is justified. He expects whites accept this premise, and then draws its implication.
Earlier Walker gives “a very imperfect list of the cruelties inflicted on us,” echoing that of the
Declaration. Among the nineteen abuses: “[whites] will not suffer us to meet together to worship
the God who made us – they brand us with hot iron – they cram bolts of fire down our throats –
they cut us as they do horses, bulls, or hogs – they crop off our ears and sometimes cut off bits of
our tongues – they chain us and handcuff us” (Ibid, 65-66). These images are meant to rile
whites’ moral sentiment, but also to reason with whites. If whites reason consistently, their
support for colonists’ grievance must also lend support to black grievances. Walker continues:
“Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth
part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?” (Ibid, 74-75). Walker takes
the argument to its conclusion in rebellion. Elsewhere he exclaims: “millions of my wretched
brethren would meet death with glory – yea, more, would plunge into the very mouths of

cannons and be torn into particles as minute as the atoms with compose the elements of the earth,
in preference to a mean submission to the lash of tyrants” (Ibid, 28). To whites who will reason
with him, he demonstrates a legitimate grounding for black resistance. At the end of his list of
abuses, Walker takes a moderate line: “we ask for nothing but the rights of man.”
Walker knew some whites would not accept this reasoning. “I hope that the Americans
may hear,” he pleads, “but I am afraid that they have done us so much injury, and are so firm in
their belief…[that this] language is perhaps too harsh for the American’s delicate ears” (Ibid, 40).
Jefferson is the exemplar of this American hypocrisy, accepting the premises of the Declaration,
but refusing to extend them to blacks. Here we see Walker’s ambivalence on Jefferson: “Mr.
Jefferson, a much greater philosopher the world has never afforded, has in truth injured us more,
and has been as great a barrier to emancipation as anything” (Ibid, 27-28). Jefferson acts as a
proxy for American opinion in this quote and elsewhere (Ibid, 14), suggesting Jefferson’s
insights and flaws are those of America. As Herbert Aptheker asserts, in Jefferson Walker saw
the flaws and promise of America (Aptheker, 55).
Since some whites will reject suasion through discourse, Walker also advocates suasion
through violence. Thus Walker does not merely combine suasion and insurrection by arguing
both simulatenously; rather, he asserts the former is a subset of the latter. How? The force of
arms, he claims, is blacks’ only means to convince hostile whites of blacks’ humanity. This is not
to say that these whites lack moral intuition, but rather that greed has overwhelmed their
intuition. As Scriven notes, this distinguishes Walker from a mainstream suasionist like Whipper
who believed discourse could awaken slaveholders’ intuition. Following Whipper, “Walker, too,
held slavemasters as having moral capabilities but [Walker] saw avarice and hackneyed
familiarity with black suffering to have quenched most of the propensity for group repentance”

(Scriven, 114). Scriven portrays Walker correctly here, for Walker frequently claims even the
harshest slaveholders have moral intuition beneath their avarice. Walker asserts “every man who
has a heart” can see the evil of slavery. Later, he claims “Any man who is curious to see the full
force of ignorance developed among the coloured people” needs merely the right kind of appeal
(emphasis added, Ibid, 5, 21).
The corollary to this, which Scriven does not expound, is that violence can awaken
slaveholders’ atrophied moral capabilities. Walker explains this in a pivotal passage. Depicting
the abuses slaveholders force on blacks, Walker avers:
They (the whites) know well, if we are men – and there is a secret monitor in their
hearts which tells them we are – they know, I say, if we are men, and see them
treating us in the manner they do, that there can be nothing in our heart but death
alone, for them…Man, in all ages and nations of the earth, is the same. Man is a
peculiar creature – he is the image of his God, though he may be subjected to the
most wretched condition upon the earth, yet the spirit and feeling which constitute
the creature, man, can never be entirely erased from his breast, because the God
who made it after his own image, planted it in the heart; he cannot get rid of it.
The whites knowing this, they do not know what to do; they know…that we will
retaliate (Ibid, 61).
As shown earlier, God grants man the reflexive tendency to defend himself. Whites have in their
heart the intuition, the “secret monitor,” that asserts that if and only if blacks are human, then
they will defend themselves. When whites see blacks defending themselves, whites’ intuition of
blacks’ humanity is confirmed. Since the aim of resistance is to awaken this intuition, Walker
makes a suasionist argument for insurrection.
There are two objections to Walker’s argument. First, rejects Walker’s claim “if we
[blacks] are men…there can be nothing but death in our hearts for whites.” For the argument to
stand, humanity and self-defense must be identical; that is, a being defends itself if and only if
that being is human. This is suspect, as it is possible for a being to defend itself and not be
human: self-defense is natural to many animals. Skeptical whites could assert blacks’ self-

defense reflects their animal, not human nature. Walker successfully rebuts this by saying “man
is peculiar creature” because he has a “spirit and feeling” that spurs resistance. While cattle
reflectively defend themselves if attacked, one cannot claim they have a spirit of resistance
against their bondage in the sense that African American slaves did. A second fault remains: one
might simply reject the moral intuition on which Walker’s argument rests. Walker takes intuition
as a theological given, offering no arguments for its existence. Unless we read Walker charitably,
we might assume white slaveholders will ignore blacks’ suffering.
There is a second, stronger argument insurrection appeals to whites’ intuitions. Adam
Smith’s idea of the spectator is helpful here. Smith’s spectator, observing another suffering,
intuits how he would feel in the other’s place. When the spectator’s imagined feelings coincide
with the sufferer’s apparent feelings, the spectator identifies with the sufferer. Smith concludes
that a “man who resents the injuries that have been done to me, and observes that I resent them
precisely as he does, necessarily approves of my resentment” (Smith, 13). According to Walker,
slaveholders intuit that if they were enslaved, they would revolt. Since blacks are docile,
slaveholders cannot sympathize with them, and assume servility is natural to blacks. Slave
resistance disproves this, earning slaveholders’ grudging recognition of blacks’ humanity. Thus
Walker’s claim “how could Mr. Jefferson but have given these remarks respecting us, when we
are so submissive to [slaveholders]…[whites] are waiting for us to prove to them ourselves, that
we are MEN, before they will be willing to admit the fact” (Walker, 27). This is a type of suasion
in that it appeals to whites’ intuitions of natural human behavior. The resemblance between
Smith and Walker is unsurprising, as American suasionists drew heavily on the Scottish
Enlightenment. However, since Walker never quotes Smith, the affinity between the two is more
conceptual than historical.

Finally, one might respond that persuasion comes only through discourse, and that
violence is coercion, not persuasion. For Walker, this was the frustrating argument of the white
moderate or preacher who feared confrontation (Ibid, 39). Walker answers that violence could
awaken whites’ moral intuition in a way that is more visceral than speech. Walker’s claim his
words are “too harsh for the American’s delicate ears” speaks to the weakness of discourse in
convincing the skeptic.
In conclusion, Walker rejects Jefferson’s claim blacks are innately inferior. Slave
resistance, he asserts disproves this assertion. Finally, Walker asserts this insurrection is a type of
suasion in that confirms whites’ intuition that blacks are human. Walker’s argument shows moral
suasion did not rely on discursive negotiation with slaveholders, but could be achieved through
violence.
Bibliography
Adeleke, Tunde. “Afro-Americans and Moral Suasion: The Debate in the 1830’s.” The Journal
of Negro History 83.2 (1998): 127–142. JSTOR. Web. 15 Mar. 2013.
Aptheker, Herbert, and David Walker. One Continual Cry: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored
Citizens of the World (1829-1830) ; Together with the Full Text of the Third and Last
Edition of the “Appeal”. Published for A.I.M.S.by Humanities Press, 1965. Print.
Bell, Howard H. “National Negro Conventions of the Middle 1840’s: Moral Suasion Vs. Political
Action.” The Journal of Negro History 42.4 (1957): 247–260. JSTOR. Web. 15 Mar. 2013.
Burrow, Rufus. God and Human Responsibility: David Walker and Ethical Prophecy. Mercer
University Press, 2003. Print.
Crockett, Hasan. “The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia.” The Journal of
Negro History 86.3 (2001): 305–318. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by
Himself. [With] Appendix. London: H.G. Collins, 1851. Print.
Eaton, Clement. “A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South.” The Journal of Southern History 2.3
(1936): 323–334. JSTOR. Web. 10 Mar. 2013.

Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of American
Slave Resistance. Penn State Press, 1997. Print.
Jefferson, Thomas. “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. Literary
Classics of the U.S., 1984. Print.
Scriven, Darryl. A Dealer of Old Clothes: Philosophical Conversations with David Walker.
Lexington Books, 2007. Print.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004.
Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal. Hill and Wang, 1995. Print.
Wilentz, Sean “Introduction: The Mysteries of David Walker.” David Walker’s Appeal. Hill and
Wang, 1995. Print.