“Not intended exclusively for the slave states”: Antebellum Recirculation of David Walker’s Appeal

Examinations of David Walker’s Appeal (1829–1830), including Peter Hinks’s foremost study, primarily focus on commentaries on the pamphlet appearing in William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston-based Liberator and the response the pamphlet elicited as it circulated in Southern states.¹ In addition to the US postal service, Walker relied on sympathetic sailors to transport copies from his used clothing store in Boston to Southern port cities, the pamphlet’s movements recorded by Southern newspapers.² This narrative of Boston-to-the-South, however, obscures the pamphlet’s broader movement, in part by failing to recognize its after-life. To be sure, besides Walker’s three Boston editions, the Appeal took other forms, ranging from a reprinting of the second edition by African American abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet (1848) to the lengthiest of appropriations in fellow abolitionists’ texts, including those that failed to identify Walker as the author, to the briefest of excerpts and references in periodicals.³ With a focus on two newspapers during 1830—the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Evening Post—this article calls attention to the role of periodicals in circulating the Appeal beyond Boston and the South. While antebellum newspapers did not print the entirety of the Appeal and only infrequently printed lengthy portions, they did reference, discuss, and print brief excerpts of it. By bringing these fragmentary forms of recirculation into focus, I illuminate the ways in which periodicals set the terms in which the Appeal would recirculate in the period’s fiction, attending to Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) as a case in point, a novel that stages the dissemination of abolitionist print. Periodical recirculation, in other words, propelled the Appeal’s recirculation and repurposing in fiction.

Facilitated by periodical recirculation, Walker’s Appeal serves as a touchstone, often obliquely referenced, in antebellum fiction that engages slavery and abolition. In the case of Bird’s novel, the Appeal functions as an intertext: without explicitly identifying Walker’s pamphlet, Sheppard Lee evokes it to enter debates, spurred by the Appeal’s circulation, about the relationship of authorial intention to abolitionist print, ultimately collapsing distinctions between different stripes of abolitionist rhetoric. Specifically, Sheppard Lee’s handling of an abolitionist pamphlet responds to the ways in which the Appeal’s content and circulation were reported on in New York and Philadelphia newspapers. As the abolitionist movement became more organized and visible in the 1830s, white commentators across the country sought to assess the threat abolitionist texts posed for igniting social unrest, whether spurring slave revolt or galvanizing Northern free black communities. Determining a particular author’s stance on collective violent resistance became central to these discussions. Thus, attention to authorial intention characterizes antebellum debates about the danger of abolitionist texts. Bird’s novel, however, lampoons the notion that authorial intent matters in the face of abolitionist content, widespread circulation, and rogue reading by black readers. In staging the swiftness with which an abolitionist text discovered by slaves on a Virginia plantation catalyzes a revolt, Sheppard Lee includes a pamphlet that resembles the Appeal but, addressed to the slaveholding class, frames itself as not incendiary. The novel thus participates in antebellum debates about abolitionist print by underscoring that circulation outstrips authorial intention, for abolitionist print of any kind, regardless of intended audience, carried the potential to spark collective black action. In this way, the novel turns to the Appeal to comment more broadly on antebellum debates about authorial intention and abolitionist print, reflecting the centrality of Walker’s pamphlet to antebellum debates about authorship, textual circulation, and agency.

Newspaper commentaries on Walker’s pamphlet not only reveal an interest in assessing abolitionist print according to authorial intention but also formulate black radical authorship differently from twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship, the more recent formulations having had significant implications for literary history.⁴ Perhaps surprisingly, antebellum commentators recognized Walker’s agency within the print sphere in ways largely lacking in subsequent scholarship. While worried about the potential that Walker’s pamphlet posed for inciting revolt, white antebellum commentators underscored Walker’s agency...