Includes bibliographical references.

If any single event may be said to have triggered the Negro revolt, it is the publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in September, 1829. The slaveholding South saw in it only incitement to servile rebellion, and went to fantastic lengths to suppress it. Even in the North, where slavery was generally opposed in principle, moderates insisted that the time for abolition had not yet come and agreed that the pamphlet was inappropriate and incendiary. Incendiary it was, and is, if by that term we mean that it decries hypocrisy, repudiates injustice, calls for resistance to patent wrong. For Walker, writing with all the fervor, the power, the sense of mission of a Christian martyr (which he was all too soon to be) took dead aim at the argument used then to sanction slavery, and still invoked today, a century after abolition, to justify denial to the Negro for yet a few more years, or decades, or centuries, of the civil rights that are unquestioned heritage of every (white) American: the argument that the Negro is a different species, not quite human and therefore not to be confused with all those men who, according to the Declaration of Independence, were created equal. It was Walker's ungentle probing that first laid bare the deep-seated schizophrenia of the South, where the right hand held the Bile and the left the bullwhip. --,From Introduction by Charles M. Wiltse.

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