To a colored man belongs the high honor of having been the courier avant of the slavery agitation.  This man was David Walker, who lived in Boston, and who published in 1829 a religio-political discussion of the status of the negroes of the United States in four articles.  The wretchedness of the blacks in consequence of slavery he depicted in dark and bitter language.  Theodore Parker, many years afterward, said that the negro was deficient in vengeance, the lowest form of justice.  “Walker’s Appeal” evinced no deficiency in this respect in its author.  The pamphlet found its way South, and was the cause of no little commotion among the master-class.  It was looked upon as an instigation to servile insurrection.  The “Appeal” was proscribed, and a price put upon the head of the author.  Garrison deprecated the sanguinary character of the book.  For he himself was the very reverse of Walker.  Garrison was a full believer in the literal doctrine of non-resistance as enunciated by Jesus.  He abhorred all war, and physical collisions of every description, as wicked and inhuman.  He sang to the slave: 

  “Not by the sword shall your deliverance be;
  Not by the shedding of your master’s blood,
  Not by rebellion—­or foul treachery,
  Upspringing suddenly, like swelling flood;
  Revenge and rapine ne’er did bring forth good. 
  God’s time is best!—­nor will it long delay;
  Even now your barren cause begins to bud,
  And glorious shall the fruit be!—­watch and pray,
  For lo! the kindling dawn that ushers in the day.”

He considered “Walker’s Appeal” “a most injudicious publication, yet warranted by the creed of an independent people.”  He saw in our Fourth-of-July demonstrations, in our glorification of force as an instrument for achieving liberty, a constant incentive to the slaves to go and do likewise.  If it was right for the men of 1776 to rise in rebellion against their mother-country, it surely could not be wrong were the slaves to revolt against their oppressors, and strike for their freedom.  It certainly did not lie in the mouth of a people, who apotheosized force, to condemn them.  What was sauce for the white man’s goose was sauce for the black man’s gander.

The South could not distinguish between this sort of reasoning, and an express and positive appeal to the slaves to cut the throats of their masters.  The contents of the Liberator were quite as likely to produce a slave insurrection as was “Walker’s Appeal,” if the paper was allowed to circulate freely among the slave population.  It was, in fact, more dangerous to the lives and interests of slaveholders by virtue of the pictorial representation of the barbarism and abomination of the peculiar institution, introduced as a feature of the Liberator in its seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves are chattels, and classed with “horses and other cattle,” and where the tortures of