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Will the Lord suffer this people to go on much longer, taking his holy name in vain? Will he not stop them, preachers and all? O Americans! Americans!! I call God—I call angels—I call men to witness that your destruction is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you repent."

The words of David Walker, the Bostonian son of a free mother and slave father, were as much a threat as they were a jeremiad. His 76-page pamphlet, Walker's Appeal … to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), marked the beginnings of a new abolitionism—and the beginnings of a rift between white and black antislavery movements.

"They want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us," Walker wrote of southern slaveholders. "Therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed … and believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty; in fact the man who will stand still and let another man murder him is worse than an infidel."

Walker had never been a slave, but having been born in Wilmington, North Carolina, he knew its horrors. He had once seen a son forced to whip his mother to death. As a devout Baptist with a deep knowledge of the Bible, he believed the Old Testament God who violently freed the Israelites would free "the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived."

The Boston clothier was also fluent in the rhetoric of the American Revolution, quoting Thomas Jefferson at length. For Walker, the Declaration of Independence, which affirmed the right of revolution, justified blacks' rising against their oppressors. Thus they could act confidently:

"Never make an attempt to gain our freedom or natural right, from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your way clear—when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed; for be you assured that Jesus Christ the king of heaven and of earth who is the God of justice and of armies, will surely go before you. And those enemies who have for hundreds of years stolen our rights and kept us ignorant of him and his divine worship, he will remove."

Southern whites were horrified by "the diabolical Boston Pamphlet." They passed laws forbidding blacks to read, banned the distribution of all antislavery literature, and offered rewards of up to $10,000 for Walker's arrest.

More importantly, however, Walker's Appeal also worried white abolitionists. "A more bold, daring, inflammatory publication, perhaps, never issued from the press of any country," wrote Quaker Benjamin Lundy, the most famous abolitionist of the day. "I can do no less than set the broadest seal of condemnation on it."

Quakers and others had been arguing against slavery since colonial times, but their antislavery sentiments were patient. They believed "an abhorrence of slavery would gradually work its way" in the south, just as it had in the north, and that "it was the duty of [slavery opponents] patiently to wait the event."

But whites in the movement failed to see how pervasive racism was in their own ranks. In fact, one black newspaper editor suggested that many whites joined the antislavery cause because it allowed them to judge the South without confronting their own bigotry. Many in New England had never even seen an African American, and most societies forbade the admittance of blacks.

"Until abolitionists eradicate prejudice from their own hearts," opined one antislavery editor, "they can never receive the unwavering confidence of the people of color."

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