RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The University of Virginia has acquired a rare first edition of an 1829 anti-slavery manifesto that was considered a rallying cry for black Americans and a major threat to Southern leaders, who worked vigorously to ban it.
The copy of abolitionist David 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" is one of seven known to still exist. The
pamphlet is on display at U.Va.'s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections
Library.
A private endowment for U.Va.'s special collections
recently acquired it from a New Jersey rare-book dealer for $95,000, university
officials said Thursday.
"Scholars have rightly termed the Appeal a
declaration of independence for black Americans and linked it to the long
tradition of political dissent and pamphleteering, as well as to the beginnings
of American abolitionism," said Deborah McDowell, director of U.Va.'s
Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.
In the 76-page, 8½-inch-by-5-inch pamphlet, Walker
urged slaves to rise up against their owners, and argued for the abolition of
slavery on moral and Christian theological grounds.
"It really was the very first document in the
United States to call for the immediate, uncompensated abolition of
slavery," said Harry L. Watson, director of the University of North
Carolina's Center for the Study of the American South.
A free black man's direct incitement to slave
revolt was "highly explosive and highly illegal," Watson said.
"Now, I ask you, had you not rather be killed
than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife, and
dear little children?" Walker wrote. "Look upon your mother, wife and
children, and answer God Almighty; and believe this, that it is no more harm
for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a
drink of water when thirsty; in fact, the man who will stand still and let
another murder him, is worse than an infidel, and, if he has common sense,
ought not to be pitied."
Walker was born in Wilmington, N.C., to a slave
father and a free mother. He moved to Boston during the 1820s and ran a
secondhand clothing store patronized by free black sailors. It's believed that
the "Appeal" was sewn into their garments' linings and smuggled into
the South, Watson said.
"They'd stop at ports such as Richmond,
Petersburg, Charleston, and Wilmington," Watson said. "Then they'd
slip out into the black community and locate people who knew how to read and
slip them this pamphlet. Of course, the pamphlets were discovered, and there
was widespread panic in state governments."
The tract's circulation alarmed slaveowners and
Southern politicians, and cash rewards were offered for Walker's death. The
pamphlet was a major factor behind the passage of legislation aimed at
controlling slaves and free blacks, including laws penalizing anyone who taught
black people how to read as well as banning the distribution of anti-slavery
writings.
"Appeal in Four Articles" also singled
out the third president and Declaration of Independence author Thomas
Jefferson, who died three years before the pamphlet's initial publication.
Walker criticized Jefferson's assertion that black people were inferior to
whites, and said that such statements posed a threat to true American
democracy.
"I say that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson's
arguments respecting us, we will only establish them," Walker wrote.
Walker published two subsequent editions of the
"Appeal in Four Articles," but died suddenly in 1830. Some thought he
was a victim of poisoning, but other scholars say he succumbed to tuberculosis.
Many of the pamphlet's ideas endured, and its
themes were carried forward by abolitionists and 20th-century civil-rights
leaders alike.
Copyright
2011 The Associated Press.
(AP
Photo/The University of Virginia Library)
