on enriching the Christians with their
blood and groans. What our brethren could have been thinking about, who
have left their native land and gone away to Africa, I am unable to
say.... The Americans may say or do as they please, but they have to
raise us from the condition of brutes to that of respectable men, and to
make a national acknowledgment to us for the wrongs they have inflicted
on us.... You may doubt it, if you please. I know that thousands will
doubt--they think they have us so well secured in wretchedness, to them
and their children, that it is impossible for such things to occur. So
did the antediluvians doubt Noah, until the day in which the flood came
and swept them away. So did the Sodomites doubt, until Lot had got out
of the city, and God rained down fire and brimstone from heaven upon
them and burnt them up. So did the king of Egypt doubt the very
existence of God, saying, 'Who is the Lord, that I should let Israel
go?' ... So did the Romans doubt.... But they got dreadfully deceived."

This document created the greatest consternation in the South. The Mayor
of Savannah wrote to Mayor Otis of Boston, demanding that Walker be
punished. Otis, in a widely published letter, replied expressing his
disapproval of the pamphlet, but saying that the author had done nothing
that made him "amenable" to the laws. In Virginia the legislature
considered passing an "extraordinary bill," not only forbidding the
circulation of such seditious publications but forbidding the education
of free Negroes. The bill passed the House of Delegates, but failed in
the Senate. The _Appeal_ even found its way to Louisiana, where there
were already rumors of an insurrection, and immediately a law was passed
expelling all free Negroes who had come to the state since 1825.

_2. The Convention Movement_

As may be inferred from Walker's attitude, the representative men of the
race were almost a unit in their opposition to colonization. They were
not always opposed to colonization itself, for some looked favorably
upon settlement in Canada, and a few hundred made their way to the West
Indies. They did object, however, to the plan offered by the American
Colonization Society, which more and more impressed them as a device on
the part of slaveholders to get free Negroes out of the country in order
that slave labor might be more valuable. Richard Allen, bishop of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the foremost Negro of the