eBook David Walker's Appeal - Journal of Pan African Studies

They will not suffer us to meet together to worship the God who made us--they brand us with hot
iron--they cram bolts of fire down our throats--they cut us as they do horses, bulls, or hogs--they
crop our ears and sometimes cut off bits of our tongues--they chain and hand-cuff us, and while
in that miserable and wretched condition, beat us with cow-hides and clubs--they keep us half
naked and starve us sometimes nearly to death under their infernal whips or lashes (which some
of them shall have enough of yet)--They put on us fifty-sixes and chains, and make us work in
that cruel situation, and in sickness, under lashes to support them and their families.--They keep
us three or four hundred feet underground working in their mines, night and day to dig up gold
and silver to enrich them and their children.--They keep us in the most death-like ignorance by
keeping us from all source of information, and call us, who are free men and next to the Angels
of God, their property!!!!!! They make us fight and murder each other, many of us being
ignorant, not knowing any better.--They take us, (being ignorant,) and put us as drivers one over
the other, and make us afflict each other as bad as they themselves afflict us--and to crown the
whole of this catalogue of cruelties, they tell us that we the (blacks) are an inferior race of
beings! incapable of self government!!--We would be injurious to society and ourselves, if
tyrants should lose their unjust hold on us!!! That if we were free we would not work, but would
live on plunder or theft!!!! that we are the meanest and laziest set of beings in the world!!!!! That
they are obliged to keep us in bondage to do us good!!!!!!--That we are satisfied to rest in slavery
to them and their children!!!!!!--That we ought not to be set free in America, but ought to be sent
away to Africa!!!!!!!!--That if we were set free in America, we would involve the country in a
civil war, which assertion is altogether at variance with our feeling or design, for we ask them for
nothing but the rights of man, viz. for them to set us free, and treat us like men, and there will be
no danger, for we will love and respect them, and protect our country--but cannot
conscientiously do these things until they treat us like men.
How cunning slave-holders think they are!!!--How much like the king of Egypt who, after he
saw plainly that God was determined to bring out his people, in spite of him and his, as powerful
as they were. He was willing that Moses, Aaron and the Elders of Israel, but not all the people
should go and serve the Lord. But God deceived him as he will Christian Americans, unless they
are very cautious how they move. What would have become of the United States of America,
was it not for those among the whites, who not in words barely, but in truth and in deed, love and
fear the Lord?--Our Lord and Master said: (see St. Matthew's Gospel, chap. xviii. 6).
"Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a
millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." But the
Americans with this very threatening of the Lord's, not only beat his little ones among the
Africans, but many of them they put to death or murder. Now the avaricious Americans, think
that the Lord Jesus Christ will let them off, because his words are no more than the words of a
man!!!
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David Walker’s Appeal by David Walker
The Journal of Pan African Studies 2009 eBook