David Walker (abolitionist) - Immediate Significance of The Appeal

Immediate Significance of The Appeal

The Appeal inspired blacks and whites in the abolitionist movement. Three months after Walker died, for instance, the Boston Evening Transcript noted that blacks regarded the Appeal "as if it were a star in the east guiding them to freedom and emancipation.” Whites, meanwhile, were radicalized by reading Walker's pamphlet. William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most influential American abolitionists, began publishing The Liberator in January 1831 not long after the appearance of the Appeal, and early weekly editions of Garrison's newspaper focused on Walker's pamphlet. Garrison, who believed slaveowners would be punished by God, rejected the violence Walker advocated but nevertheless recognized that slaveowners were courting disaster by refusing to free their slaves. "Every sentence that they write--every word that they speak--every resistance that they make, against foreign oppression, is a call upon their slaves to destroy them," Garrison wrote.

Together, moreover, the publication of Walker's pamphlet and the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, struck fear into the hearts of slaveowners. Though there is no evidence to suggest that the Appeal specifically informed or inspired Turner, the two events, which occurred just a few years apart, intensified white anxiety in the South about the potential for future insurrections and inaugurated the adoption of laws designed to strip free blacks of what little rights they enjoyed.