David Walker's Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World (review)

Abstract

188CIVIL WAR HISTORY has produced a sound study of the characteristics and behavior of the group as a whole. In all instances his findings add depth, substance, or corrective to the generalizations of earlier students of slavery. Professor Scarborough's findings are, in brief, that the great majority of the plantation overseers were native southerners of the yeoman farmer class; that they were men of average competence, humaneness, and conscientiousness; and that they exercised a vital function in the running of the plantations. The author sharpens the effect of his conclusions by presenting them as a countertheme to the Simon Legree tradition about overseers. Unquestionably the overseer has shared with the slave trader the villains role in the abolitionist script of the slavery tragedy; and even as sympathetic a student of the institution as Professor U. B. Phillips described the overseers as being "crude in manner, barely literate, commonplace in capacity, capable only of ruling slaves by severity." Professor Scarborough convincingly challenges this sweeping characterization. Yet, the present book is not so much a ground breaker as it is a cultivator and fertilizer in its reappraisal of the overseer's nature; for many recent students of slavery have reached comparable, if tentative, conclusions. The Overseer is not a sparkling work at any point; and here and there the literary style falls into a pedantic exposition on sources of information and methods of analysis and presentation. But the book is the product of thorough research, and it closes a serious gap in the literature on the Old South. It will probably long remain the definitive monograph on the subject. „, , ...Charles P. Roland lulane University David Walker's Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Edited by Charles M. Wiltse. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965. Pp. xii, 78. $1.25.) The timeliness of this work, which first appeared in 1829, is attested to by the fact that two editions of it appeared in 1965 and by the further fact that its author is better known today than he was a century ago. Those who today insist on "freedom now at any and all costs" are the direct spiritual descendants of the North Carolina free Negro who became a secondhand clothes dealer in Boston and the author of one of the most incendiary antislavery tracts published before the Civil War. Indeed, according to the editor, the publication of Walker's Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World did as much as "any single event to trigger the Negro revolt." David Walker was a fiery, uncompromising enemy of slavery; and it would appear that he spent more time attacking slavery—through speeches, newspaper articles, and other writings—than in dealing in used clothing and sailors' gear. Walker's Appeal may well be regarded as a significant turning point in antislavery writings—from the rather mild antislavery remonstrances by the Quakers to the strident voices raised by Garrison and his fellow crusaders. BOOK REVIEWS189 His was an "ungentle probing that first laid bare the deepseated schizophrenia of the South, where the right hand held the Bible and the left hand the bull whip." The Appeal went through three editions in 1829 and 1830; and when Walker was found dead in June 1850, in the doorway of his shop, few doubted that this eloquent voice in the battle for Negro freedom had been violently stilled. Already there was a price on his head in several southern states where even the possession of the Appeal had become a crime against the state. Thirty years ago, in the Journal of Southern History, Clement Eaton described Walker's Appeal as "A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South" and indicated that its appearance created extreme fear and apprehension among the southern leaders. In North Carolina the governor wrote to the police of the principal towns and to the senators of thirty-two eastern counties urging them to guard against any unfortunate consequences of the pamphlet's circulation. The next session of the General Assembly passed "An Act to Prevent the Circulation of Seditious Publications." Walker's Appeal was indeed seditious and incendiary. The editor says that it "decries hypocrisy, repudiates...