In part this was. due to a document which issued from Boston followed by an act which took place at Southampton County, Virginia, both of which alarmed and angered the Southerners, causing themto close ranks. The disquieting document bore a lengthy title, generally shortened to David Walker's Appeal.21 Its self-taught author was a tall, slender, dark-skinned dealer in clothes, new and secondhand, who had left Wilmington, North Carolina, to settle in Boston. Here he had become a rising figure in the Negro community; he was the local agent for the Rights of All; he had been second marshal at a public dinner, held at the African Masonic Hall, for Prince Abdul Rahaman of Footah Jallo; and he had subscribed to the fund to purchase the free- dom of George Horton of North Carolina,28 the most celebrated slave poet since Phillis Wheatley. Walker was a member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, founded in 1826 for racial betterment and slave abolition.
Walker's Appeal, a seventy-six-page pamphlet that ran into three editions in 1829 and 1830, was a call to militant action. It bore the marks of careful reflection, and its phrasing was often eloquent, although not free of faulty sentence structure and punctuation. Above all, Walker minced no words: "Remember Americans, that we must and shall be free and en- lightened as you are, will you wait until we shall, under God, obtain our liberty by the crushing arm of power? Will it not be dreadful for you? I speak Americans for your own good."
Walker's pamphlet "alarmed society not a little," wrote Harriet Martineau. The greatest of the turn-of-the-century anti- slavery workers, the Quaker, Benjamin Lundy, called it the most inflammatory publication in history, disavowing it as an injury to the cause. Walker's Appeal led Georgia and North Carolina to enact laws against incendiary publications and prompted the mayor of Savannah, William T. Williams, and the governor of Georgia, George R. Gilmer, to send letters of protest to the mayor of Boston, Harrison Gray Otis. In February 1830 four Negroes were arrested in New Orleans on the charge of circulating it. Walker's death in 1830 did not diminish the influence of his Appeal, Negroes regarding it as "an inspired work" and Southern whites viewing it as "the diabolical Boston Pamphlet." Both would have agreed with their contemporary, Samuel J. May, that "the excitement which had become so general and so furious against the Abolitionists throughout the slaveholding States was owing in no small measure to . . . David Walker."
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