Mar 20 at 10:30 AM - Sale 2697 -

Sale 2697 - Lot 8

Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
(ABOLITION.) David Walker. Walker's Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World. 88 pages. Octavo, 8½ x 5¼ inches, original printed front wrapper, disbound; moderate foxing; early owner's signature on front wrapper. Boston, 1830
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Additional Details

"Third and Last Edition," expanded and corrected from the 1829 first edition.

David Walker (1796-1830) was born to a free Black woman in Wilmington, NC and made his way to Boston by 1825. There he operated a clothing store and served as a subscription agent for Freedom's Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper. In 1829, he self-published Walker's Appeal, widely considered one of the most radical and uncompromising calls for Black self-determination. Some historians have speculated that Nat Turner's Rebellion in October 1831 was inspired in part by Walker's Appeal.

"The whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us. As true as the sun ever shone in its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them out of the very face of the earth" (page 23).

We find numerous efforts to suppress the distribution of this pamphlet in the newspapers of 1830 and 1831. For example, in New Orleans, "four persons of color (free men) were arrested March 8th on charge of circulating Walker's Appeal, alias 'the diabolical Boston Pamphlet'" (Philadelphia Inquirer, 31 March 1830). In Charleston, SC, one James Smith was arrested and fined $1000 plus a year-long jail sentence for "circulating inflammatory and seditious tracts known by the title of Walker's Appeal" (Charleston Mercury, 24 May 1830). In Wilmington, NC, "great excitement . . . in consequence of the discovery of the circulation among the blacks of a seditious pamphlet entitled Walker's Appeal. A number of arrests had been made" (Fall River Monitor, 21 August 1830).

A new edition, with a biography of Walker by Henry Highland Garnet, was published in 1848 with the support of none other than John Brown. "One of the most radical protests against the condition of Blacks in America. . . . Stirred the South as no other anti-slavery pamphlet up to that time had done. . . . Changes were made in the second and third editions making the appeal more radical. . . . Authorities throughout the land ordered their charges to burn all copies"--Blockson, One Hundred and One 21.

Provenance: the original owner was presumably the same Philip Lacy who was active in the New York African Society for Mutual Relief (National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 March 1846); was listed in the 1857 New York directory as a whitewasher, colored; was a member of the Boyer Lodge of the Prince Hall Freemasons, and died in New York at the age of 60 (New York Tribune, 7 December 1859). His effects (perhaps including this pamphlet) were sold at a public administrator's auction on 16 December (New York Sun, 15 December 1859).

Afro-Americana 10889 (this edition); Blockson 10203 (this edition); Sabin 101039. None of any edition traced since a Swann sale, 17 August 1978, lot 282.

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