Walker's Appeal Research Articles

The Textual Effects of David Walker's Appeal: Print-Based Activism against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829–1851 by Marcy J. Dinius (review)

The Textual Effects of David Walker's Appeal: Print-Based Activism against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829–1851 by Marcy J. Dinius (review)

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

Demanding The Impossible: Scales of Apocalypse and Abolition Time in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth

Demanding The Impossible:Scales of Apocalypse and Abolition Time in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Jesse A. Goldberg (bio) As writer and educator Erica Meiners suggests: "Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design." It's time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible. —Mariame Kaba1 This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say "the world has ended," it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. —N. K. Jemisin2 The prologue of The Fifth Season, the first novel in N. K. JEMISIN'S Broken Earth trilogy, begins with the end of the world. Or, to be more accurate, it invokes "the end of the world" across repetition and revision through shifting frameworks of scale. "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?" the unnamed narrator asks. The reader then encounters multiple endings. First, the reader [End Page 625] witnesses a woman's world end when she sees her dead son, obviously killed by her husband. Next, they witness an unnamed man wielding unfathomable power literally crack the earth's surface. Then the narrative gaze scans upward, from ground to sky, only to be brought crashing back down to revisit the first ending and introduce the protagonist Essun's name. This repetition and revision of the world's end establishes apocalypse as a governing logic of the ensuing narrative economy and as a concept mappable across shifting scales of time and space. There is more than one world in/on the planet, and these worlds happen at different scales of time and space, including the individual body and personal lifespan, the borders of nations and empires and the historical time of Civilization, and the epochal scale of geologic, planetary time. And yet, these worlds overlap, such that apocalypse becomes at once "relative," because it happens to different worlds at different scales, and paradigmatic, because if you place these many scales appositionally you are faced with CHRISTINA SHARPE'S question about catastrophe: "How, after all, to split time?"3 Through shifting scales, The Fifth Season's prologue opens the "event" of apocalypse to unbounded time; that is, it eschews framing the end of the world as a singular moment with a discernible beginning and ending. This essay examines how this opening of apocalypse beyond bounded event-time through such shifting scales orients Broken Earth within what I call "abolition time" and thereby trains readers toward abolitionist thought through the literary emplotment of apocalyptic imagination. I understand abolition as a long tradition of liberatory work grounded in Black radical thought and resistance from the eras of chattel slavery to the present, and here I focus on how abolitionist thought is a kind of apocalypticism. Whether it be the Christian rhetoric of David Walker's Appeal, Angela Davis's imperative to "act as if it were possible to radically [End Page 626] transform the world," or George Jackson's fiery demand for the dissolution of the entire regime of property itself in Blood in my Eye, the abolitionist project carries the demand to, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore's words, "change everything."4 What Mariame Kaba calls "the horizon of abolition" requires a "jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible."5 It envisions a world where carceral regimes of violence and control are rendered obsolete by networks of care and accountability currently unimaginable within the horizon of the law's imagination of retributive justice.6 Abolition is thus a refusal of inherited terms of the possible and a demand for the impossible: to bring a different world into being. In this way, it is both a utopian and a world-ending project. And since, as Sami Schalk writes, speculative fiction can "open up for us new ways of being in the world that may not yet exist, but could," I follow her lead here to ask what Jemisin's Afrofuturist novels can open up for us as we jailbreak our imaginations.7 Broken Earth tells its story through...

William Lloyd Garrison Apprentices as a Printer's Devil at the Newburyport Herald, 1818, and: David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World Goes South, 1829, and: The Year Garrison Issued the Call in the Liberator, 1831, and: Frederick Douglass Publishes the First Issue of the North Star, 1847, and: William Wells Brown Compiles, Publishes, and Performs from the

William Lloyd Garrison Apprentices as a Printer's Devil at the Newburyport Herald, 1818, and: David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World Goes South, 1829, and: The Year Garrison Issued the Call in the Liberator, 1831, and: Frederick Douglass Publishes the First Issue of the North Star, 1847, and: William Wells Brown Compiles, Publishes, and Performs from the

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall

Reviewed by: On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall Jesse McCarthy Cheryl A. Wall. On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2018. 288 pp. $29.95. This review was completed and submitted to the journal before I learned of Cheryl Wall's passing on April 4, 2020. Like so many in the field, I owe an enormous debt to her pioneering scholarship and institutional leadership. As we mourn the loss of her warmth, generosity, and guidance, we are also reminded that Dr. Wall's intellectual legacy will always be with us. Through her works she extended our vision and changed our words, indelibly enriching the historical and theoretical study of the tradition. —JM Toni Morrison once described the precious and vulnerable space in which we attempt to read and write as "a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war." That state of peace, she observed, is paradoxically one of solitude and communion, "the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one," as she put it with characteristic elegance. Cheryl A. Wall's On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay, reminds us that Morrison is not an outlier so much as a consummate example of a self-fashioning essayistic tradition deeply rooted in African American literary history. Yet systematic and dedicated scholarly treatments of the essay as a black literary practice have been surprisingly rare. Indeed, until now only two full monographs published a decade apart, Gerald Early's pioneering study, Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Context (Ecco, 1993), and Cheryl Butler's The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence (Routledge, 2003), have been devoted to the subject. Given this paucity, Wall's book remedies a terrible lack and also inevitably sets a new benchmark, one that will hopefully spur a wave of studies and renewed specialist interest while providing instructors with an essential and much-needed pedagogical resource. Historically speaking, the essay has tended to be democratic in its ambitions but typically aristocratic in its rhetorical assumptions as well as the material conditions that underwrite its appearance. Montaigne's celebrated Essais, his "attempts" at capturing an ordinary experience that could speak to the common life of others, drew on a humanistic culture that flourished among the European elite and eventually became a privileged instrument and vehicle of Enlightenment thought. In the United States, the essay received an original impress and a new mandate from Emerson, who spoke of the individual sovereignty of the American scholar at Harvard in 1837. But across the Charles in the section of Boston's Beacon Hill known then as "Nigger Hill," David Walker was also radically revising the form, although his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World emphasized not the grandeur of encompassing all knowledge within the self, but the horrors of mass ignorance and the collective abjection of his fellow black Americans. Like Emerson and the other luminaries of New England, Walker was keen to use the unruly freedom and individuated [End Page 145] voice of the essay to impart new vigor to society, to establish new relations among mankind, to make the essay a revolutionary instrument of consciousness: they have fed different, if also overlapping, rhetorical and literary traditions in the U. S. ever since. Emerson justly remains a touchstone for all readers interested in the essay. But how often do we hear about Walker's contributions to the form? What happened, we might ask, when the American essay was invested with the voices of persons whose very humanity was deemed suspect at best, and all too often simply denied outright? From Walker's Appeal and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" in the hands of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, gathered in Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider or Alice Walker's In Search...

Recirculating Black Militancy in Word and Image: Henry Highland Garnet's "Volume of Fire"

This article foregrounds materiality in examining Henry Highland Garnet's 1848 volume, which includes two texts of black militancy—a reprint of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829, 1830) and Garnet's Address to the Slaves (1843). My argument situates Garnet's Address within the volume in which it appeared, considers Garnet's role as compiler, and recognizes the book's role in the further circulation of black militancy. A focus on Garnet's volume illuminates antebellum black militant print's survival, malleability, and cachet. Garnet's volume precipitated subsequent circulation not only of Walker's and Garnet's texts but also of an image of a black Moses from Garnet's book. The most striking iteration appeared in a modified form as the frontispiece of Hollis Read's The Negro Problem Solved (1864). The similarity of the images throws into sharp relief the contrast marking the books: Read's advocacy of colonization is far different from Garnet's and Walker's assertions of black citizenship, even as Read's book fabricates affiliation with Garnet. Ultimately, my focus on materiality reveals a range of motives at work in the dissemination of antebellum black militancy—in text and image—and demonstrates that black militant print could paradoxically circulate while becoming unrecognizable.

Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic by Sandra M. Gustafson (review)

Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. By Sandra M. Gustafson. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 271. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Katherine HenryMichael Sandel has advanced a cogent critique of the liberal ideal of the unencumbered self - the fiction that citizens can bracket certain fundamental differences and participate in civic life on terms of abstract equality.1 In her important new book Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic, Sandra Gustafson offers a rich and provocative account of what we might call the encumbered selves who fashioned practices of deliberation in the early nineteenthcentury United States. Her interest is in precisely those moments when the deliberative ideal seems to have reached its limits: both when such encumbrances as religious conviction or habits of discrimination would seem to preclude compromise, and when such legislation as the Compromise of 1850 seems to reveal the inadequacy of compromise as a means of civic resolution. Gustafson's prior work has already established her reputation as a broadly interdisciplinary scholar of early America with a talent for bringing literary and archival material together in surprising and original ways. Imagining Deliberative Democracy enhances that reputation and expands her reach further into the field of American civic culture.One of the fundamental questions underlying theories of public discourse - from Plato's critique of the sophists to American Pragmatism to Jurgen Habermas - is whether truth is imagined intersubjectively or as existing independently. Rather than approach it as a theoretical question, Gustafson examines the effects of a belief in transcendent truth both on the process of civic deliberation and on particular rhetorical forms. For one thing, the belief in a truth that transcends deliberation gives rise to suspicion of silver-tongued orators and the powers of eloquence - a suspicion that Gustafson describes in rich detail, from Edward Tyrrel Channing's 1817 essay warning of the dangers of false excitement and corrupt eloquence, to Daniel Webster's sophisticated critique of extravagant or excessive language, to the anti-intellectualism of David Crockett's frontier style (23, 104). And, in an illuminating discus- sion of twentieth-century accounts of U. S. deliberative democracy, she suggests that such critics as Walter Lippmann and Noam Chomsky can usefully be situated in this longer tradition of anxiety that the deliberative process can be manipulated.But if a belief in transcendent truth can cast doubt on the delibera- tive model of civic engagement, it can also give rise to particularly powerful rhetorical forms. One such form is what Gustafson calls pro- phetic rhetoric, or the rhetoric of the jeremiad, frequently appro- priated by abolitionists. David Walker's Appeal, for example, engaged the deliberative practices of Walker's contemporaries while putting for- ward a position that embodied metaphysical truth claims that chal- lenged deliberative ideals (141). In Gustafson's reading, Walker rejected deliberative exchange in part because of the inability of the deliberative model to address the continued existence of slavery. And it is Webster who most strikingly embodies that inability. Webster, writes Gustafson, espoused a model of deliberative discourse that privileged civility and process and avoided rhetorical excess. Legisla- tors should embrace these ideals, he believed, because they fostered good legislation and helped build consensus (103). Whether one saw Webster's support of the Compromise of 1850 as consensus-building or apostasy revealed much about one's conception of the nature and viability of the deliberative process. …

Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (review)

Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and Challenge of History, 1794-1861. By John Ernest. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 426. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $21.95.)Writing within debilitating confines of the state (4) and what Charles Mills terms racial contract (4), antebellum African American historians, according to John Ernest, self-consciously intervened in of historical writing, demonstrating dogged determination to deconstruct misconceptions and misrepresentations of mainstream American historiography. Ernest urges reenvisioning theatre of to acknowledge historical authority and authenticity of a wide range of (36) by African American writers and activists aimed at promoting liberating application of past. These antebellum black authors and leaders-David Walker, James W. C. Pennington, James Theodore Holly, Absalom Jones, Richard Alien, Hosea Easton, Frederick Douglass, Henry Garnet, Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, William C. Nell, and Robert Lewis-produced critical historical works and performances that hitherto were either ignored or caricatured as lacking in historical substance. Through this conscious intervention, Ernest argues, these African Americans inaugurated tradition of liberation directed at liberating blacks from an other-defined and providing them with in self-determined understanding of (18).Ernest argues strongly and passionately for acknowledging historical worth of antebellum African American protest literatures and traditions. These writings, he contends, were directed at deconstructing mainstream white supremacist historiography and reversing its debilitating and destructive impacts. In response to mainstream historiography that either denied historicity of black experience or portrayed experience and history as negative and marginal, African American historians and protest leaders constructed and offered counter-hegemonic conception of history and community, producing self-empowered community united by liberating conception of identity.With such publications as David Walker's Appeal (1830), William Wells Brown's The Black Man (1863), Narrative (1847), and The Rising Son (1874), William C. Nell's Colored Patriots (1855), Robert Lewis's Light and Truth (1844), and many others, black writers sought to recover and redeem lost and maligned past. Theirs was an exercise in intellectual defiance, driven largely by determination to authenticate and validate African and African American historical experiences and heritage. They challenged Baricroftization (98) of American history, and sought integration of black experience into national narrative of history. In pursuit and actualization of this objective, Ernest argues, black writers and activists produced and performed works/acts of critical historical worth and relevance. These works and performances combined both secular and spiritual values, reflecting authors' sociohistorical and religious experiences and worldviews. Such history also offered basis both for collective moral identity and agency and for moral indictment of white society.Fundamentally, underlying dynamics of antebellum African Americans' quest for historical understanding arid community construction, Ernest suggests, was need to both provide moral authority and inspire moral responsibility that would propel black community toward social activism. he underlines following key features of this historiography: it sought to rehabilitate and redeem African American experience from historical oblivion; wherever possible, it illuminated contributions of blacks to American history and national development; it corrected and revised errors and fallacies of mainstream historiography. This revision entailed reinterpreting existing documents to include African American experience and establish its authenticity and worth. …

The Impact Of Walker's AppealOn Northern And Southern Conceptions Of Free SpeechIn The Nineteenth Century

The antislavery pamphlet Walker's Appeal helped shape the debates about limits on free speech more than three decades before the Civil War and the subsequent ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The pamphlet, by David Walker, influenced discussions about incendiary writing and expression and more general discussions about the value of free speech in the nineteenth century. This article explores the tension between political speech and perceived threats of violence against both citizens and the state in the context of Walker's Appeal. The experiences of abolitionist writers like Walker show that in the late 1820s and early 1830s the power to suppress speech still clearly remained with the states. But this article suggests that at the time public opinion was ahead of the law. A broad support of the value of free speech in the North helped protect abolitionists from Northern state suppression of their speech.

The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (review)

Reviewed by: The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays Margaret T. Gunderson The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Todd Vogel. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 257 pp. Illus. Index. $59.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. Most scholars who study the diverse black press as an aggregate entity apply a narrowly framed methodology well suited to the size of the subject. Such studies as Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson's A History of the Black Press (1997) and Roland E. Wolseley's standard in the field, The Black Press, U.S.A. (1971 and 1990), use a chronological framework to interrogate the purpose of the black press. These studies reveal a twofold editorial policy of racial politics that seeks either to inform and instigate the masses or to promote the advancement of the middle class. However, a recent collection of essays breaks the traditional focus on the role of the black press. In The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, editor Todd Vogel proclaims the contributors' findings are steeped in cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts. Though the collection anchors itself to tradition in its chronological organization, an historical framework is not the central focus of the text. Rather, several essays in the collection break new ground with a methodology that examines the black press as a "cultural production" (2) that moves within and outside the binary of white mainstream and the black margin. This new approach should prove helpful to scholars interested in examining race from an intercultural perspective. The strongest essays examine various ways in which the black press engaged in intercultural discourse with other marginalized communities rather than mainstream white culture exclusively. The chronology of the collection's four parts makes it particularly useful to historians and literary and mass media scholars seeking a period-based view of the black press. The four essays in Part I focus upon the racial agenda of major periodicals during the antebellum period. Robert S. Levine's opening essay about David Walker's Appeal immediately sets the cultural context of the collection. It emphasizes Walker's conscious creation of a link between his theory of black nationalism (if not Pan Africanism) to the circulation of his serial through "Authorized Agents." Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Carla L. Peterson embark on a similar theoretical task as they explore ways in which Frederick Douglass's rhetoric appropriated, then subverted, terms of the mainstream discourse, thus entering a conversation with it. Although they do not develop an intercultural perspective, the remaining two essays about black labor's insistence on equality in the workplace and Douglass's conflict with William Lloyd Garrison, by Vogel and Robert Fanuzzi, respectively, offer significant historical insights. [End Page 282] The two essays in Part II, the post bellum section, are not as clearly marked by subject and time period as those in the first section. Wendy Wagner's subject is Mrs. A. E. Johnson, an author known for her Sunday school novels, but less known for her articles about racial issues in the black press. Wagner discusses Johnson's choice to isolate herself from intercultural interchange by espousing black separatism. Returning to the collection's featured intercultural task, Hannah Gourgey examines the shifting relationship between the black press and Native Americans beginning in 1870. Part III contains the two most salient essays in the collection, ones that emphasize the polyphonic cultural discourse of the black press that this collection privileges. With a focus on the Harlem Renaissance era, Adam McKible studies a series in The Messenger covering each U.S. state and featuring a discursive "African-American experience in terms of community, state, and citizenship" (127). Instead of a focus upon domestic discourse, Michael Thurston examines Langston Hughes's Spanish Civil War reporting, illustrating the transnational connection between Spanish Republicans and black Americans. In her discussion of how The Chicago Defender addresses Japanese internment camps in the U.S., C. K. Doreski's essay opens Part IV, echoing the intercultural discourse examined by Gourgey and McKible. These final six essays begin in the World War II era and move to the present day. James C. Hall and Maren Stange focus on the...

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal. An African American Anthology

Part 1 Foundations - slavery and abolitionism: the interesting nature of the life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789 the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Richard Allen David Walker's appeal, 1829-1830 the statement of Nat Turner, 1831 slaves are prohibited to read and write by law, 1831 what if I am a woman?, 1833, Maria W. Stewart a slave denied the right to marry, 1834 Solomon Northrup describes a New Orleans slave auction, 1841 let your motto be resistance!, 1843, Henry Highland Garnet arOnt I a woman?, 1851, Sojourner Truth Frederick Douglass - what to the slave is the Fourth of July, 1852 the spirituals - go down Moses and didn't my Lord deliver Daniel. Part 2 Reconstruction and reaction - the aftermath of slavery and the dawn of segregration, 1861-1915: Frederick Douglass - what the black man wants, 1865 black urban workers during reconstruction pioneering black feminist, Frances Ellen Watkins Edward Wilmot Blyden and African diaspora the national association of coloured women - Mary Church Terell and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin Paul Laurence Dunbar - I don't know why the caged bird sings Booker T. Washington and the politics of accommodation crusader for justice, Ida B. Wells-Barnett The Niagra movement, 1905, William Edward Burdghardt Du Bois The Brownsville affair, 1907. Part 3 From plantation to ghetto - the great migration, Harlem renaissance and world war, 1915-1954: black conflict over World War I black bolsheviks -Cyril V. Briggs and Claude McKay Langston Hughes and the Harlem renaissance the negro woman and the ballot, 1927, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson Harlem in the 1920s, James Weldon Johnson black workers in the Great Depression the Scottsboro trials, 1930 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and the fight for black employment in Harlem black women workers during the Great Depression southern negro youth conference, 1939 A. Philip Randolph and the negro march on Washington movement, 1941 Paul Robeson - the negro artist looks ahead the Brown decision and the struggle for school desegregation, Thurgood Marshall.

David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy

For scholars of early African-American literature, question of influence can be particularly vexing. American writing about Africa and Africans preceded emergence of first African-American writers by a century or more. On basis of this written record, old historicists could claim that religion made a Phillis Wheatley; only belief in artistic genius or a commitment to of resistance prevents new historicists from saying same, not only about Wheatley but about eighteenth-century Black poet Jupiter Hammon as well. [1] The origins of Black political discourses have proven similarly resistant to historicist unraveling. When did Africans in America begin to describe themselves as a people? How did geographical formulations such as Africa, Ethiopia, and become keywords and conceptual touchstones of early Black nationalism? Robert Alexander Young's Ethiopian Manifesto (1827) and David Walker's Appeal to Colored Citizens of World (1829) are generally acknowledged as primary print instances of Black nationalism or literary Ethiopianism, but intellectual prehistories of Manifesto and Appeal remain subject of speculation and debate. W. E. B. Du Bois claimed that the tale of Ethiopia Shadowy and Egypt Sphinx was a remnant of Egyptian and ideas preserved by diaspora's scattered tribes. [2] Following Du Bois, some scholars continue to affirm veiled origins of Black nationalism, Ethiopianism. and Egyptophilia as products of instinct, ideology, or experi ence. Others have attempted to specify textual sources for these traditions. St. Clair Drake emphasized influence of Biblical proof texts on development of Ethiopianism. More recently, it has been suggested that African-Americans first got idea of a glorious African past from eighteenth-century excerpted in American Colonization Society's African Repository and reprinted in Freed om's Journal (1827-1828) (Dain 146-47). Three lately republished and repopularized eighteenth-century speeches--John Marrant's Sermon to African Lodge of Honourable Society of Free and Accepted Masons (1789) and Prince Hall's Charges to Lodge at Charlestown (1792) and Metonomy (1797)--suggest a more extensive and complex history for Ethiopianism. [4] Prince Hall established African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston in 1780s and invited celebrity evangelist John Marrant to serve as its chaplain. In Sermon and Charges, Marrant and Hall expostulated a vital and portentous genealogy of African America. Their public claims to a common Black history and destiny--to legacy of Ancient Egypt and prophetic future of Ethiopia--prefigure and precede similar claims by David Walker and Robert Alexander Young. These three speeches document an early and little understood chapter in Black intellectual history, and they posit a much earlier point of inception for literary Ethiopianism than that generally agreed upon by scholars of th e discourse. Marrant's Sermon and Hall's Charges also reveal influence of early American mysticism on development of Ethiopianist tradition. Prince Hall's initiation into Freemasonry in 1775 admitted him to a parallel universe where Hermeticism, Egyptophilia, and Kabbalism flourished alongside, if not intertwined with, Enlightenment rationalism. [5] By time he invited John Marrant to give 1789 Sermon to African Lodge, Hall had spent fourteen years wending his way through fraternal networks and dusty bookshelves of New England Freemasonry. His researches in mystical vernacular prepared him to compose an unnatural history of African America, a counternarrative to eighteenth-century empiricisms and natural histories which classified Africa as a cipher, perpetually primitive and unintelligible. [6] More than an archival resource, Freemasonry was also a venue for exercise of cultural authority. …

The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker's Appeal

(1999). The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker's Appeal. The Black Scholar: Vol. 29, Black Issues: 2000, pp. 16-24.

Charles Follen's search for nationality and freedom: Germany and America, 1796-1840

Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America, 1796-1840. By Edmund Spevack. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. viii, 312. $39.95.) Charles Follen presents several difficult challenges to the biographer. The first twenty-eight years of his life, immersed in the Napoleonic Wars and radical German protest against the reaction that followed peace, took place in a setting markedly different from the sixteen years that followed his emigration to the United States, and separate scholarly literatures frame analysis of the distinct phases of his career. For neither period are sources abundant. While in Europe, Follen destroyed personal papers that police might have used against him or his associates. His American letters and diaries furnished material for a lengthy biography by his widow, but diligent research has uncovered relatively few manuscripts. The most extensive contemporary descriptions of him-the police files generated to prosecute him as a subversive and the abolitionist memoirs designed to celebrate him as a hero-both incorporate complex ideological filters as well as a variety of highly charged personal relationships with Follen. Edmund Spevack meets these challenges with impressive determination and erudition. He divides his study evenly between Follen's years in Germany and the United States. In the first three chapters, Spevack situates Follen within movements by students and intellectuals to realize German nationalism. He suggests that Follen's faction contributed significantly to the proclamation of a liberal constitution in HesseDarmstadt in 1820, but he also emphasizes that Follen's endorsement of violent tactics slowed reform momentum by alienating moderate allies and attracting effective suppression. The final three chapters discuss Follen's initiatives in America as a conduit of German culture, a Unitarian minister, and an abolitionist. Spevack sees a strong continuity in this transatlantic transition despite Follen's abandonment of his original plan to found a German enclave and his eventual conclusion that he could never return to participate in European politics. Fourteen years after applauding-and perhaps inciting-the murder of playwright and journalist August von Kotzebue, Follen experienced a conversion to abolitionism upon reading David Walker's Appeal for a black uprising against slavery. Too blunt, rigid, and committed to his cause to cooperate with fellow German nationalists, Follen similarly offended the Harvard administration and his Unitarian congregation with his abolitionism and was at the time of his death, as Spevack observes with nice symmetry, once again in a kind of exile. Apart from its detailed attention to political and personal relationships among German activist groups, Spevack's method is primarily an intellectual history that draws on careful reading of key texts. Follen's draft constitution for a united Germany, his nationalist poetry, his lectures as professor of German language and literature at Harvard, and his theological and antislavery essays come in for close scrutiny, as do many other works by Follen and thinkers he read. For the American chapters, this strategy works especially well in addressing Follen's role in introducing German culture to the United States. Beginning with Follen's German Reader (1826), Spevack traces the construction of a vastly influential canon shaped by Follen's political views and his sense of the potential relationship between Germany and the United States. …

The underside of slavery: The internal economy, self‐hire, and quasi‐freedom in Virginia, 1780–1865

From the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars have shown an keen interest in various aspects of black life in Virginia. In 1902, J. C. Ballagh published A History of Slavery in Virginia in. Johns Hopkins Press series on race and slavery; and between 19t),; and 1930, Beverley Munford, Charles Ambler, John Russell, and Theodore Whitfield wrote on such subjects as the anti-slavery movement, the origin and legal status of free blacks, and the political crises following the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Nat Turner's slave revolt. During the 1930s and 1940s, black scholars Luther Porter Jackson and James. Hugo Johnston analyzed the economic, religious, social, and cultural condition of slaves and free Negroes in the state. Jackson's study, Free Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830-1860, culminated more than twenty years of research. In the past quarter-century, historians have explored such topics as slave rebelliousness, industrial slavery, free black slave owners, emigration, and the criminal justice system, among others.

Walker's Appeal Comes to Charleston: A Note and Documents

Walker's <i>Appeal</i> Comes to Charleston: A Note and Documents

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

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...