A free Black man from North Carolina who settled in Boston, David Walker published in 1829 an Appeal that indicted American slavery and racism in the language of scripture and the Declaration of Independence and told enslaved people they had the right to resist. Smuggled into Southern ports, the pamphlet drove legislatures to ban antislavery literature, restrict Black sailors, and outlaw teaching enslaved people to write. Walker died less than a year later, but his Appeal marked the turn toward a more militant, Black-led abolitionism.
At a Glance
- Born
- c. 1796 (date uncertain), Wilmington, North Carolina
- Died
- 6 August 1830, Boston, Massachusetts
- Known for
- Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829; third edition 1830); Massachusetts General Colored Association
- Fields
- Abolition · Literature · Organizing
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Walker was born in or near Wilmington, North Carolina, to a free mother and an enslaved father; under Southern law a child took the status of the mother, so he was born free. His birth year is uncertain. Older accounts gave 1785, but the historian Peter P. Hinks, drawing on later records of Walker’s age, concluded that he was born around 1796 or 1797, and the North Carolina historical marker in Wilmington follows that dating.
Almost nothing is documented about his youth. He learned to read and write, and he grew up in a port town where free and enslaved Black people lived under steadily tightening laws. In the Appeal he later described traveling widely through the slave states and witnessing their cruelty. Hinks has argued that he probably spent time in Charleston, South Carolina, in the years around the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, but that connection rests on circumstantial evidence rather than direct record.
Life and Work
By 1825 Walker had settled in Boston, where he opened a used-clothing shop on Brattle Street near the waterfront, a business that dealt regularly with sailors. In 1826 he married Eliza Butler. He joined the May Street Methodist Church and the African Lodge of Prince Hall Freemasons, and he helped found the Massachusetts General Colored Association in 1826, an organization the National Park Service describes as the first Black abolitionist organization. He also served as the principal Boston agent for Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper in the United States, which began publication in New York in 1827.
In December 1828 Walker addressed the General Colored Association, calling on Black Americans to organize across state lines for their own advancement; Freedom’s Journal printed the speech. Nine months later, in a pamphlet dated 28 September 1829, he published Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Its four articles attributed Black suffering to slavery, to ignorance, to preachers of a proslavery Christianity, and to the American Colonization Society’s plan to send free Black people to Africa. Walker rejected colonization outright, insisted that Black Americans were entitled to the country they had built, and warned white Americans that continued oppression would bring divine judgment. He took direct aim at Thomas Jefferson’s speculations about Black inferiority in Notes on the State of Virginia, urging every Black man who could to buy a copy for his son so that Black writers, not only sympathetic whites, would answer it. He closed by quoting the Declaration of Independence back to its heirs, setting its promise that all men are created equal against the practice of the nation. He issued revised second and third editions in 1830, each with new material, and the third edition added passages responding to the alarm the first had caused in the South.
Walker used his trade connections to send the pamphlet south, and Black sailors reportedly carried copies sewn into the linings of their clothing. In December 1829 police in Savannah, Georgia, seized sixty copies that had arrived by ship. Georgia responded with laws against circulating incendiary publications and with a quarantine on Black sailors entering its ports. In North Carolina, after copies turned up in Wilmington, Governor John Owen sent the pamphlet to the legislature, which in 1830 and 1831 restricted antislavery literature, prohibited teaching enslaved people to read or write, and required quarantine of Black people arriving by ship. Virginia also enacted restrictive legislation. Southern officials treated a seventy-odd-page pamphlet written by a Boston shopkeeper as a threat to public order, a measure of how seriously they took the prospect of literate Black resistance.
“America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our blood and tears.”
Legacy
Walker died in Boston on 6 August 1830, days after his infant daughter; the official cause for both was consumption, or tuberculosis. Because rumors had circulated that Southerners had offered rewards for his death, a belief that he was poisoned took hold and persists, but there is no documentary evidence for it. He was buried in an unmarked grave in South Boston. His son, Edward Garrison Walker, born after his death, became a lawyer and in 1866 was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, among the first Black men elected to that body.
The Appeal shaped the movement that followed. William Lloyd Garrison, who launched The Liberator in January 1831, disapproved of its call to violence but conceded that it “breathes the most impassioned and determined spirit.” In 1848 Henry Highland Garnet reprinted it with a biographical sketch alongside his own “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” which drew on Walker’s ideas. Historians now read the Appeal as the founding text of Black radical abolitionism: a direct address to Black readers, enslaved and free, that treated them as political actors rather than objects of white benevolence.
Words can threaten unjust power: Walker’s Appeal so alarmed slaveholding states that they rewrote their laws to stop it from spreading. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- c. 1796 Born free in or near Wilmington, North Carolina.
- By 1825 Settles in Boston and opens a used-clothing shop on Brattle Street.
- 1826 Marries Eliza Butler; helps found the Massachusetts General Colored Association.
- 1827 – 1829 Serves as Boston agent for Freedom’s Journal.
- December 1828 Addresses the General Colored Association on the need for Black unity.
- 28 September 1829 Dates the first edition of Walker’s Appeal in Boston.
- December 1829 Police in Savannah, Georgia, seize sixty copies of the Appeal.
- 1830 Publishes revised second and third editions; North Carolina begins passing restrictive laws.
- 6 August 1830 Dies in Boston; the recorded cause is consumption.
Sources and Further Reading
- David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 3rd ed. (Boston: David Walker, 1830). Link
- Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
- National Park Service, “David Walker,” Boston African American National Historic Site. Link
- North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, “David Walker, ca. 1796–1830 (D-105).” Link
- NCpedia, “Walker, David.” Link
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