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To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance, by Peter P. Hinks. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. 301 pp. $45.00 cloth; $17.95 paper.
Two THEMES DOMINATE RECENT WRITING AND TEACHING about AfricanAmerican slavery: the overbearing oppression of the "peculiar institution" and the slaves' widespread resistance to their captivity. Innumerable texts document the former but scholars encounter more difficulty in researching, narrating, and interpreting the latter.
One text, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), a pamphlet that went into three printings in its day, has become a historical perennial of sorts. Historians cite David Walker's incendiary work regularly as the foremost political statement of antebellum black assertiveness, as a spark for slave revolt, and as a rallying cry for Southernwhite proslavery ideology and defensiveness on the slavery question. In his polemic, Walker wrote that American blacks were "the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began." Specifically, Walker challenged two basic assertions of his day held by whites: that blacks were a separate species from whites and that slavery was in keeping with God's teachings.
Scholars unfortunately know little about the author of this famous work and, according to Peter P. Hinks, have misunderstood its origins, meaning, and fall significance. In Hinks's opinion, "Walker's Appeal was one of the most important social and political documents to issue from America's antebellum era. It harkened dramatic change in AfricanAmerican culture by synthesizing traditional elements of that culture into novel and compelling alloys, by proclaiming realms of the African-American experience that had previously been left shuttered, and by offering a new, if demanding, way out of the painful political and existential conundrums confronting...