David Walker's Appeal

Walker begins the final article by discussing Henry Clay and Elias B. Cawell’s thoughts on the colonizing plan. In the face of the “unconquerable prejudices” facing free Black people in the United States, Clay suggested it was best “to drain them off” and return them to Africa (71). He proposed creating a new colony on the coast of Africa that could become an outpost “of the arts, civilization, and Christianity” (72). There was a “moral fitness” in returning African Americans to their homeland that Clay suggested would “extinguish a great portion of that moral debt” that the United States had accrued to redeem the suffering they “had been the innocent cause of inflicting” (72-73).

Walker takes great issue with this claim of innocence but believes that God will sort out issues of guilt and innocence and punish those he deems deserving. He returns to Clay, who assured enslavers that the colonizing plan did not include any talk of emancipation. In other words, Walker argues that Clay hoped to get rid of free African Americans to maintain the “ignorance” of enslaved people and avoid acquiring “bad habits” like the belief “that they are men” (74). Originally from Kentucky, Clay grew up orphaned and penniless.