In 1829, the year State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin famously declared in North Carolina v. Mann that “the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect,” David Walker, a free African American who sold used clothing, called for a general slave revolt if changes were not made.32 In his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, an incendiary seventy-six-page pamphlet distributed across the North and South, Walker wrote that it would take a “God of justice and armies” to bring about the destruction of the slave system. While two years earlier Freedom’s Journal, a short-lived black newspaper, advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, the Appeal called, in the most militant language yet, for an armed insurrection toward that end.33 More importantly still, Walker was making an appeal to unite free, fugitive, and enslaved African Americans into a joint movement. It was the opening shot by a new generation of black leaders who, within a decade, would enter the political arena via independent politics in the battle to end slavery.
Walker used to great effect the nation’s commercial networks, as well as those that slaves and free blacks had been developing since the Revolutionary War, to disseminate the pamphlet into the Deep South. Black seamen from Boston took copies sewn into the insides of their coats on trips to Charleston; from there African Americans passed along copies as far south as Savannah and New Orleans. Southern politicians desperately tried to have the Appeal suppressed, while white vigilantes attacked free African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina, who had copies of the pamphlet, and four black men were arrested in New Orleans for carrying copies. Fearing the spread of Walker’s views, Southern legislatures enacted laws prohibiting the dissemination of antislavery literature and the teaching of reading or writing to slaves and free black men and women. Southern plantation owners offered a bounty of three thousand dollars to anyone who would kill Walker. Within a year, the black abolitionist was found dead at the doorstep of his home.34
In 1831, as if in response to Walker’s pamphlet, one of the largest slave revolts prior to the Civil War erupted in Southampton County, Virginia, propelling militant abolitionism. Nat Turner, born in the same week of Prosser’s planned conspiracy, was a slave-prophet who for months had been secretly preaching and organizing African Americans throughout southern Virginia. The insurrection was planned for the Fourth of July, 1831, but had to be delayed due to his falling ill. Six weeks later, he led a bloody rebellion involving up to seventy slaves. Fifty-seven white men, women, and children were killed in the attacks. With swift and massive white militia forces brought in, Turner and his armed band were captured or killed.35
Turner himself evaded capture until October 30. In all, Virginia would execute fifty-five African Americans and banish others. In addition, some two hundred black men and women, including dozens who had had nothing to do with the rebellion, were killed by white mobs. Turner was tried in Southampton County Court and sentenced to execution. On November 11, he was not only hanged but subsequently skinned. So fearful were white Virginians of another slave rebellion on par with, or greater than, Turner’s that the state legislature’s house came close to passing an act of gradual abolition. In a razor-thin vote, representatives decided against abolishing slavery, opting instead to implement even more repressive policies against the black population, both free and enslaved.36
While most slave rebellions were contained, they could not be prevented from continuing to erupt in the United States or elsewhere in the hemisphere. Soon, slaves in Jamaica would rebel, on a scale dozens of times larger than the revolt in Virginia. The “Christmas Uprising” of 1831–32, led by Samuel Sharpe, which involved as many as sixty thousand slaves, would drive members of Parliament to emancipate slaves in the British Empire. The Slavery Abolition Act, which became effective in 1834, while it included a debilitating “apprentice” period for newly emancipated slaves, was, in turn, used to galvanize the abolitionist movement in the United States. Abolitionists across the Atlantic invited their American counterparts into their homes, schools, and churches in sympathy with their cause, and over the next generation a dozen black abolitionist leaders took the month-long sea journey to England, helping to generate international support for the movement at home.37
Back in the United States, many of the same transportation and communication networks that helped to spread the abolitionist message reinforced Northern and Southern commercial ties. Railroads, waterways, and roadways linked the two regions as interdependent economic entities resting on the ongoing exploitation of black labor. As James Brewer Stewart notes, “The cotton revolution that swept the Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia frontier stimulated textile manufacturing and shipping in the Northeast. In the Northwest, yet another economic boom took shape as businessmen and farmers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois developed lucrative relationships with the eastern seaboard, and the populations of Northern cities grew apace, led by a rapidly expanding, wage-earning working class.”38 Among the wage-earning workers in the Northeast, and to a lesser extent in the West (modern Midwest), were free African Americans. In the 1820s, despite being legally free, this group did not have the same legal rights and privileges as their white counterparts.
According to the U.S. Census, by 1830 there were nearly three hundred and twenty thousand free African Americans in the nation compared to over two million slaves. While hundreds of free African Americans voted in local elections in the North during the early to mid-nineteenth century, their rights were increasingly called into question by legislators and then curtailed. The State Department refused to grant passports to free African Americans, issuing certificates instead. The department claimed the issuance of passports was tantamount to recognition of black citizenship, which it was unwilling to provide.39 The mobilization of the free black population, combined with the actions of slaves, however, led to an explosion of antislavery initiatives in the 1830s.
African Americans began using a range of tactics in the 1830s, including petitioning, pamphleteering, and violence, in a more concentrated and coordinated fashion than the earlier Revolutionary-era wave of abolitionists. Meanwhile, large slaveholding interests in South Carolina threatened secession from the Union. Southern white planters, through their Democratic Party representatives in Congress, demanded that they be allowed either to nullify the federal tariff or to secede from the Union. Beneath these demands, however, lay deep fears of militant black actions and the possibility of the federal government curtailing white planters’ “freedom” to exploit black labor.40 The dramatic actions of two African Americans, David Walker and Nat Turner, the former advocating slave rebellion, the latter carrying out such a rebellion, would compel many Northern white reformers to take a visible stance against slavery. Other black abolitionists understood the importance of building biracial alliances in a white-dominated society and supporting the development of individual white leaders who could act on behalf of the antislavery cause. Toward this end, black abolitionists would help to launch the careers of some of the most notable white abolitionists of the era.41
William Lloyd Garrison, who became the best-known white abolitionist of the nineteenth century, established his Boston-based newspaper, the Liberator, in January of 1831 with the support of the free black community. James Vashon, a black barber, provided Garrison critical advances of funding, while James Forten, the black sailmaker and businessman who had been active in the antiemigration black conventions