David Walker Appeal

David Walker appeal was mainly appealing to colored citizens of the world mainly in the United States. After traveling the world and observing the conditions slaves were put in David Walker, who denounced slavery urged slaves who lived a life of fear and misery to fight for their freedom and they should rise up in rebellion against their oppressors. Walker was trying to appeal to them that things did not have to continue to exist the way they were because they had just as much freedom to life as their masters did. David Walker talks about the cruelties the African American slaves suffered at the hands of their white masters saying that Slavery had made African Americans into “the most wretched degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world begun.” The suffering of the slaves were compared to the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots on Sparta and the Roman slaves. David Walker claim was that “White Americans having reduced us to the wretched state of slavery treat us in that condition more cruel (they being an enlightened and Christian people,) than any heathen nation did any people whom it had reduced to our condition.

By this claim David Walker refers back to the Israelites in Egypt under pharaoh and his people who were oppressed through forced labor such as building Pithom and Rameses, which were cities, built for pharaoh. Walker said that he made this extract to show “how much lower we are held, and how much more cruel we are treated by the Americans, than the children of Jacob, by the Egyptians.” Another claim that David Walker makes is that all the inhabitants of this earth except for the sons of Africa are called men, and he believed that they should have been free. But according to the American people they ought to be slaves to the people of America and their descendants forever. Even though Walker believed that everyone should be treated equally and that there is only one master who is Jesus Christ, Walker had concerns about whites thinking that blacks were not pleased with God for making them black just as the whites was pleased with God for making them white. Walker said “They think because they hold us in their infernal chains of slavery, that we wish to be white, or of their color-but they are dreadfully deceived –we wish to be just as it pleased our creator to have made us.”

Walker was also concerned about judgment day, he ask the question “Have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to answer for the deeds done in the body, as well as we?” Walker was referring to the cruel treatment that they stored upon men of color. Another one of Walker’s concerns was man of color being able to buy land and keep it in peace without it being taken from him by a white man. Walker talks about a man of color who worked day and night to earn a little money and having acquired it he brought a small piece of land with it, having paid it off he was cheated out of his property by a white man. Walker talks about how we as blacks and whites were created equally by our savior Jesus Christ, because God except everyone whites have no more rights to hold us as blacks in slavery than we have to hold them in slavery, we all have equal rights in Gods eyesight. I believe that Walker was very effective because Gods mercy spreads equally amongst us all, and I truly believe in the saying treat others as you would like to be treated, because everyone will have stand before God on his own and answer for deeds done on earth come judgment day.