David Walker's Appeal

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses enslavement and racism.

One of the most important themes in Walker’s Appeal is how slavery contradicts the United States’s professed founding principles of justice and equality. Walker describes the United States as a Christian nation and repeatedly illustrates how the country’s treatment of African Americans undermines both Christian and democratic principles. Walker argues that, despite being an “enlightened” nation, white Americans behave like “devils” and make a “mockery” of their nation’s founding principles by holding enslaved African Americans in the worse “wretchedness” and degradation of any historically oppressed demographic.

From a religious standpoint, Africans were long considered to be descended from Noah’s cursed son, Ham, and that curse was used as justification for enslavement. However, Walker argues that there are no Biblical grounds to support this interpretation. The Bible makes “no distinction on account of men's colour” (68); on the contrary, it calls on believers to spread God’s word to “all nations.” Slavery stands in “open violation of the Bible” (61), and Walker calls out hypocritical “pretend preachers” who hold African Americans “in the most abject slavery and wretchedness” (62) even while sending out missionaries to convert “heathens” in far corners of the globe.