TY - JOUR
AU - Duquette, Elizabeth
AB - Abstract Locating the Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World within a tradition of antityranny writing from antiquity through the Declaration of Independence, this article traces David Walker’s precise redefinition of the relationship between tyranny and slavery. Rejecting the longstanding idea that enslavement is a social, rather than a political, institution, Walker points to the pernicious effects of representing tyranny as a kind of enslavement, particularly when coupled with the denial that slavery is a form of tyranny. In tandem with its vehement denunciations, the Appeal offers a nuanced argument that American slavery is nothing other than tyranny; those suffering under its abuses have both a right and a duty to rebel against its abuses. “[W]anton Tyranny” and “Fair Freedom” square off in Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 poem “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” (73, 74). With “lawless hand” and “iron chain,” Tyranny had “meant t’ enslave the land,” but the welcome arrival of “Freedom,” a “Goddess long desir’d,” and her champion Dartmouth, newly appointed principal secretary, liberates “America” from both “dread” and countless potential “grievance[s] unredress’d” (74). Tyranny here is an allegorical personification, haunting the American imagination with the possibility of political enslavement. But neither tyranny nor slavery are exclusively allegorical problems in Wheatley’s poem. Shifting tonal registers, the speaker goes on to explain that her “wishes for the common good” originate in a deeply personal fact—as a child she “[w]as snatch’d” from her African home. While critics have stumbled over the equivocation Wheatley voices about “Afric’s fancy’d happy seat,” no ambiguity whatsoever is evident in the concern she expresses for her parent’s certain sorrow: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? Where the “dread” associated with the threat of “Tyranny” anticipates a future that has not yet come to pass, the “pangs” and “sorrows” felt by the speaker’s father are realized and “excruciating,” enduring from the past of her childhood into his imagined present as the affective impact of slavery’s “tyrannic sway” supplants those threatened by “Tyranny.” In both stanzas, Wheatley conjoins “sway” and “race”: first by pairing the colonists’ freedom from dread with an expansive sentiment of “hope” (“Elate with hope her race no longer mourns / Each soul expands, each graceful bosom burns”) and then by linking actual misery with the “labour,” confined in her “parent’s breast” (74–75). The precision of these inverted experiences clarifies the two forms of tyranny in Wheatley’s poem: one an allegorical antagonist that represents the potential degradation of political actors into something akin to slavery, the other the grim affective reality of chattel slavery, unmediated, and located in kin structures.1 Wheatley’s precise differentiation between these two different understandings of tyranny underscores a constitutive lapse in the history of thinking about freedom and its antagonists. As Neil Roberts reminds us, “[t]he use of slavery as metaphor is ubiquitous in Western thought, ancient and modern,” and its conceptual opposite—freedom—has become “the supreme value of the Western world” (18, 28).2 But our readings of these central concepts for Western culture—freedom and enslavement—are incomplete when we forget that freedom has multiple opposites, connoting different forms of unfreedom. If we return to the foundational works of political thought from classical antiquity, we see that tyranny and enslavement are both said to be modes of unfreedom, albeit associated with different spheres of influence: the former, a political system, circumscribes the potential and behavior of elite actors while the latter, characterized as a domestic arrangement, is associated with the organization of households and economic relations. According to this tradition, when a tyrant dominates over citizens, curtailing their ability to act in the political arena, he treats them as if they were enslaved; he does not literally enslave them. Put differently, there are, and have long been, two related ways to theorize and enact domination—tyranny and enslavement—and each has literal as well as figural connotations. Given Thomas Jefferson’s notorious attack on Wheatley’s genius in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), there is a delicious irony to using her poem to demonstrate the imprecision and insufficiency of his thought. According to Jefferson, “[t]he whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other” (288). A careful reader of Aristotle, Jefferson surely knew that the philosopher held that family’s hierarchy was best likened to a monarchy, not a tyranny. His subsequent concern with the moral health of the family suggests that he does indeed understand what his own change of Aristotle’s schema entails as he complains that [o]ur children see [the whole commerce between master and slave], and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal… . From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do… . The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. Where Wheatley had imagined the feelings of her Black parent, Jefferson worries about what “our” (white) children will imitate (an Aristotelian nod), counseling parents to adopt a restraint he fears they too infrequently display. Across different stages of maturity—“nursed, educated, and daily exercised”—the child learns to enjoy the pleasure of an unrestrained will; only a “prodigy” will emerge from such an education untouched. Most children’s characters will be permanently “stamped” with tyranny’s “odious peculiarities” and forms of depravity, rendering them unfit for participation in the republic. Even as Jefferson draws a parallel with a “statesman” who would attract “execration” for thus dividing his citizens—transforming some into “enemies,” the others “despots”—the analogy keeps, if imperfectly, the different ways of thinking about the relationship between tyranny and enslavement separate. Wheatley and Jefferson provide a quick introduction to the ubiquitous invocation of tyranny in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about enslavement, most notably in African American literature and antislavery argument (although slavery’s apologists were quick to spy tyranny in any attempt to curtail the institution). References to tyranny were used in numerous ways: to characterize an individual, to explain the practice of slavery, to depict the nation and laws. As Mary Nyquist notes, “the tyrannous slaveholder who cruelly abuses those under his power is an omnipresent figure” in “Anglo-American antislavery literature” (4). While there are countless references to tyranny in US antislavery writing, none are as carefully argued or as decisive as David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). In its preamble, Walker describes the pamphlet as “giving a superficial exposition of our miseries, and exposing tyrants” (4). Neither Walker’s modesty nor his sometimes extravagant exposition should prevent readers from recognizing what the sentence’s uncomfortable grammar, especially the wrenching polyptoton on expose (“exposition” and “exposing”), powerfully communicates: the Appeal seeks to make the face of US tyranny visible to the entire world, an exposure that should serve as preamble to its overthrow. The insistent fact of tyranny shapes Walker’s diction, correlates the topics he considers in the text, including the enumeration of Black suffering, the emphasis on education, and the repudiation of colonization, and organizes the kind of argument he presents, one which draws on established conventions of antityranny writing.3 In the Appeal, Walker contends that the presence of slavery, and the grotesque abuses it encourages, means—literally, not figuratively—that tyranny is the political organization of the US. On every page, he unfolds the parameters of American tyranny, from the early apposition “slave-holders or tyrants” (4) to the closing query: “Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?” (79). Here, Walker moves between literal (the pronounced suffering of enslaved persons) and figural (the attenuated unfreedoms associated with political domination) definitions at his argument’s culmination: tyranny perverts the US government, opening it to morally necessary and politically justified challenge. Walker’s ironic use of the Declaration of Independence recognizes that it is both a foundational text for the nation and an important antityranny document; his revisions rely on the Declaration’s definition of tyranny, reframed to stress American complicity with usurpation and abuse.4 In form and content both the Appeal relentlessly pursues its argument. The pamphlet’s “graphic appearance,” its use of exclamation points, manicules, and complicated typography, vividly presents the argument to readers and auditors (Dinius 56). As scholars have made clear, the Appeal was intended to engage both literate and illiterate audiences. Even the use of the term appeal, Melvin Rogers explains, communicates “an expansive vision of political power” (217). Walker’s deft manipulation of the “petitionary genre,” as well as the text’s organization into four articles introduced by a preamble, an echo of the US Constitution, “affirms the political standing” of both author and audience (Rogers 215, 220).5 Even the hymn appended to the end of the Appeal advances the text’s analysis, while reaching the audience in yet another way. The final verse of Psalm X—not included in but anticipated by the treatise—reads “Thou in thy righteous judgment weigh’st / the fatherless and poor; / That so the tyrants of the earth / may persecute no more” (Brady and Tate 19).6 From start to finish, the Appeal presents a comprehensive indictment of “the tyrants of the earth,” “but in particular, and very expressly,” those residing in the US. Not only does Walker assert that it is incoherent to equate the cruelty of figural tyranny with the documented miseries of actual tyranny, he insists that slavery is tyranny. While many antislavery writers linked the two concepts, Walker argues forcefully for their sameness: the Appeal [T]he Appeal presents a powerful argument against the tyranny of slavery, rejecting an organizing assumption from much antityranny writing that political domination could be understood as a kind of enslavement. presents a powerful argument against the tyranny of slavery, rejecting an organizing assumption from much antityranny writing that political domination could be understood as a kind of enslavement.7 In Walker’s trenchant account, such arguments are pernicious and false: failure to recognize tyrants for what they are, no matter where they may be found, allows them to perpetuate their merciless and arbitrary domination. Equally important, arguments that differentiate between slavery and tyranny build from a faulty premise, namely that slavery is a social, rather than a political, institution. By tracing Walker’s antityranny approach to the fact of US enslavement, a position that posits the political status of slavery, this article complements other work on Black political philosophy.8 His emphasis on the Black community as a group or nation and his embrace of rebellion as a duty and a right are key components of the argument, aligning the Appeal with established arguments that the execution of a tyrant was lawful and just.9 Walker’s expression is often impassioned, but the “fever heat” of his prose should neither obscure the argument being presented nor overshadow how he develops his position through a precise navigation of existing claims about tyranny and its repudiation (Wall 41). If, as David Kazanjian has claimed, “Walker’s work is figurative work in the strongest sense of the term” in that it “seizes on the discursive and material ambiguity of words and bodies to disarticulate and rearticulate relationships among race, nation, and equality,” it is also literal in the strongest sense of that term, rejecting the ease and ambiguity of figural formulations (26). In Walker’s account, slavery and tyranny must both be understood literally and, when they are, the refusal of transitivity—tyranny is slavery but slavery is not tyranny—is revealed as rank and disqualifying hypocrisy.10 Given the stirring celebration of “self-evident” “truths”—the “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—with which it begins, it is easy enough to forget that much of the Declaration of Independence details the intolerable tyranny of King George III of England, who is charged with seeking, as his “direct object,” “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Offering 27 “Facts” so “a candid world” may judge the abuse the colonies have suffered, the document systematically explains why the king of England must be deemed a tyrant: he neglected the “public good”; acted in an unregulated manner (“abolishing our most valuable Laws”) while establishing laws that curtailed the rights of his subjects; selected judges who would obey “his Will alone”; deployed military personnel to intimidate and eventually destroy the colonists; and encouraged “domestic insurrections” that would lead to the slaughter of persons of “all ages, sexes and conditions” (Allen 28–30). More like a pirate than a king, “[h]e has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people” (29). Remaining silent in response to the “repeated Petitions” submitted to him, George III made his American subjects unsafe, opening them to attack by foreign powers and “domestic” enemies, both Indigenous peoples and enslaved persons.11 The Declaration therefore argues that “[a] Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people” (30). Both descriptive and prescriptive, the portrait of the tyrant drawn by the Declaration presents the colonists’ case to the world for adjudication. The document’s authors were confident that their portrait would be immediately familiar to the readership whose assent they sought because the Atlantic world’s intellectual traditions were suffused with tyrants, real and imagined.12 From classical antiquity through the Enlightenment, writers explored the contours of tyranny, recounting the abuses perpetrated by these moral monsters and listing the perversions they introduced into the polities where it emerged. In antityranny writing from the Greeks onward, thinkers depicted “the tyrant’s subjects as figuratively enslaved—enslavement that seeks to dishonor and disenfranchise citizens who are meant to be ‘free’” (Nyquist 1).13 That such figural “enslavement” often existed simultaneously with actual enslavement presented no problem to writers opposed to tyranny, instead providing potent evidence for the truth of the claims being presented and adding force to their comparisons. Although explicitly a political concept, denoting the cruel and arbitrary rule of a person or group governed by passions rather than laws, tyranny could also communicate a moral deficit—the tyranny of pleasure, for example, as in the writings of Augustine or David Hume—an argumentative move that further contributed to the portrait of the tyrant as a desiring monster of uncontrolled and capacious ambition, usurping authority to rule brutally and capriciously. Drawing on the works of early modern writers, as well as the Greco-Roman and biblical traditions these thinkers extensively read, reworked, translated, and adapted, the founders painted the picture of a tyrant that would leave few in doubt of what they suffered. Walker’s engagement with the Declaration of Independence thus positions him in two intellectual traditions simultaneously—antislavery activism and antityrannicism.14 Black writers, like James Forten and many others, were quick to use the Declaration of Independence in their assaults on slavery, and there is no doubt that Walker was keenly aware of their arguments. Given that he was known to be “hurtfully indefatigable in his studies,” he was surely familiar with the antityranny tradition as well, as the works he cites in the Appeal indicate (qtd. in McHenry 32).15 In his reading and research, he likely encountered texts like Jonathan Mayhew’s “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers.”16 Mayhew preached “Unlimited Submission” at the Old West Church in Boston in January 1750; publication followed the same year. Through its multiple editions—there were several in the decades before the war and its ongoing popularity warranted a new Boston edition in 1818—the sermon was “read and reread into the lexicon of protest,” warning readers of tyranny’s dangers (Ferguson 8). It was “read by everybody,” an elderly John Adams wrote in an 1818 letter, “celebrated by friends, and abused by enemies,” making it a popular (and readily available in the early nineteenth century) representative of US antityranny thinking before the Declaration of Independence (288).17 The sermon takes Romans 13:1–8 as its scriptural occasion, verses in which Paul insists that civil power must be obeyed, a position that has generated a long, contested history.18 Its opening imperative—“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”—communicates Paul’s belief that Christianity’s “negative equalitarianism” made earthly inequality unimportant (Davis, Revolution 43). Resistance to established power was resistance to the “ordinance of God” (Rom. 13:2), so the faithful should “[r]ender therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour” (Rom. 13:7). Despite Paul’s seeming clarity, Mayhew’s exegesis stresses the impossibility of interpreting these verses literally: submission could not be the proper course of action when political or religious power was obviously and systematically misused, he insisted. According to Mayhew, the “sole end of government” is the promotion of “the happiness of society”; if a ruler abdicates a fundamental commitment to “good works,” he forfeits the cooperation of citizens or subjects (390, 387). When the sovereign “turns tyrant, and makes his subjects his prey to devour and to destroy, instead of his charge to defend and cherish, we are bound to throw off our allegiance to him, and to resist,” Mayhew argues (403). No one should be expected to submit to a government that promotes evil works. “[T]hat unhappy prince, King Charles I” provides Mayhew with his historical example (411).19 While “the tyranny and oppression of his reign” might appear remote, the “warmth and zeal” his cause continued to inspire convinced Mayhew that Charles still posed a threat to “all the principles of liberty, whether civil or religious,” dangers that could “introduce the most abject slavery . . . in church and state” (411). “anniversary” celebrations of Charles’s 1649 execution provide the occasion for “Unlimited Submission” (411). Where the tyrant in the Declaration of Independence primarily infringed on the colonists’ political liberties, Mayhew’s tyrant instituted religious and political domination, a reminder that anglophone antityranny from the mid seventeenth century forward often conjoined the sacred and the secular. As would his readers 25 years later, Mayhew lists the king’s tyrannical acts—15 are enumerated with “many more of the same tenor” implied (413)—all of which support the contention that Charles I “governed in a perfectly wild and arbitrary manner,” replacing the rule of law with “mere humor and caprice, which are no rule at all” (411, 415). In “Unlimited Submission,” moral necessity joins political obligation as a justification for active resistance: Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality along with it. It degrades men from their just rank, into the class of brutes… . It extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it. It makes naturally-strong and great minds, feeble and little; and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity. This is true of tyranny in every shape. There can be nothing great and good, where its influence reaches. For which reason it becomes every friend to truth and human kind; every lover of God and the christian religion, to bear a part in opposing this hateful monster. (382) Under a tyrant “nothing great and good” can flourish; art and justice, intellectual curiosity and kindness are eliminated when a people is “enslaved,” reduced to “the class of brutes.” Degradation is a chief effect of tyranny “in every shape” as it proscribes “noble” pursuits. “For a nation thus abused to arise unanimously . . . is not criminal,” Mayhew continues, because in so doing the people are “making use of the means, and the only means, which God has put into their power, for mutual and self-defence”: It would be stupid tameness, and unaccountable folly, for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man, to wanton and riot in their misery. And in such a case it would, of the two, be more rational to suppose, that they did NOT resist, then that they who did, would receive to themselves damnation. (410) Even while presenting revolution as “rational,” Mayhew’s position is uncompromising, his language impassioned: it would be “perfectly ridiculous to call resistance to such a tyrant, by the name of rebellion,” he concludes, for it is always lawful and necessary to “preserve the nation from slavery, misery, and ruin” (410, 414). Still, for Mayhew, the actions of a British monarch in the previous century were more germane to the colonial situation than the rebellions of enslaved persons in New York and South Carolina the previous decade.20 Not only does he represent the important coordination of religion and politics, Mayhew, like Jefferson after him, also fails to extend the right of revolution to persons enslaved in the American colonies, a position in no way exclusive to the firebrand minister. “In denouncing tyranny’s lawlessness,” Nyquist notes, “those who are threatened with ‘slavery’ do not call attention to the vulnerable, legally unprotected condition of chattel slaves.” To the contrary, she continues, their denunciations “polemically signal the values cherished in and by means of the political arena,” the “equality associated with law’s rule” and “freedom,” identifying them as the specific rights of particular agents (5). In other words, despite their seeming similarities and regular association, tyranny and slavery carried forward the divergent implications that classical texts, especially Aristotle’s Politics, had established: that tyranny is a form of unfreedom that pertains to elite men, forestalling the basic conditions necessary for them to flourish as members of a polis. It could be—and regularly was—likened to slavery, but primarily in its rhetorical form. Without any seeming acknowledgment of inconsistency or hypocrisy, Mayhew, and the countless others who used slavery as a trope to decry the unfreedom of political domination, insisted that it was “directly contrary to common sense . . . to suppose that millions of people should be subjected to the arbitrary, precarious pleasure of one single man” while overlooking the many people suffering under exactly these conditions (406). In sum, while tyranny was widely understood to be a form of enslavement, the inverse—that chattel slavery was tyranny—did not inspire broad agreement. Despite the obvious contradiction (and just bad logic) of this assumption, tyranny in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was understood primarily as a form of unfreedom that afflicted white men (and sometimes women). This proved true even when tyranny was used loosely, as a shorthand for injustice. While a handful of thinkers, like Jean Bodin and Montesquieu, recognized the inconsistency, the inability to identify the forms of domination so intolerable in tyranny as constitutive of slavery was an ongoing (and enabling) form of disavowal. Of course, the extent to which conflations like the one in Mayhew’s sermon effaced the reality endured by enslaved persons did not go unnoticed. Black writers and antislavery activists were quick to challenge the “symbolism of the American Revolution, describing the patriots as tyrants and oppressors” (Sinha 153); many of them cited the Declaration of Independence as evidence that the new nation needed to embrace change to live up to its ideals.21 Samuel Hopkins, for example, noted that the “important, noble struggle for liberty” needed to include the “more than half a million of persons” suffering “under . . . oppression and tyranny” (549). Because the specific tyrant who threatened the American colonists—George III—was defeated, it is easy to assume that tyranny receded as a concern for American thinkers after the revolutionary era. This is incorrect. Young readers learned to dread tyranny as they celebrated the virtues of liberty, prompted by books like The Columbian Orator (1797), or to fear its appearance in the form of debt, as Benjamin Franklin counseled. Tyranny cast its menacing shadow over key moments in the early history of the republic, including the Constitutional debates—both Federalists and Anti-Federalists spied tyranny in the outcome—and the fraught arguments over the admission of Missouri into the Union, which drew cries of tyranny from all sides. John Taylor’s 1822 Tyranny Unmasked provides an especially overwrought example, comparing the harm suffered from the tyrannical expansion of federal authority to that experienced during a whipping. The “transfer from industry that portion of its profits by which the most agreeable gratifications can . . . be purchased, to the augmentation of another’s capital” is “more tyrannical than [the power] which prescribes to . . . slaves what they shall eat, drink, or wear,” he writes: “Is not this a cat, not of nine tails only, but of nine thousand; by which individuals and whole States, may be as well lashed as the maddest despotism can desire?” he luridly asks in conclusion (59–60).22 Generalized fears about governmental tyranny also materialized in specific individuals, like Napoleon Bonaparte or Andrew Jackson. Walker’s Appeal intervenes decisively in the ongoing debate about US tyranny, rejecting the metaphorical slippage on which Taylor (and many others) relied. Across the Appeal, Walker denies the possibility that there is any one tyrant to blame, whether defined as an individual or the federal government; he finds “unrelenting tyrants” everywhere he looks in the US (24). Walker’s pamphlet is, in other words, an uncompromising treatise about American tyranny and, like Mayhew’s “Unlimited Submission,” the Declaration of Independence, or even Taylor’s Tyranny Unmasked, insists that its spread in the US must be stopped. Walker recognized the tyrant’s portrait painted by the Declaration of Independence—although he discerned in its contours an American, not a British, image.23 His keen understanding of history, conveyed through explicit references to historical works or authors (Oliver Goldsmith’s The History of Greece [1821] and Frederick Butler’s A Complete History of the United States of America [1821], Plutarch and Josephus), coupled with his obvious familiarity with historical actors featured in unnamed texts (like the Roman emperor Tiberius, the tyrannical villain of Tacitus’s Annals) suggests that he at least agreed with Jefferson in thinking “the purpose of history was the prevention of tyranny” (Richard 85).24 Where Jefferson hoped that the “Georges and Napoleons” of this world would suffer the “everlasting infamy” history may confer (Richard 88), Walker countered that Jefferson himself had already received his judgment “at the bar of God, for the deeds done in his body while living” (16). A comparably severe assessment awaited “all the Americans this side of eternity” if the Appeal fulfilled its chief aim—inspiring Black readers to think, judge, and act in their collective interest (17). “[L]et no one of us suppose,” he writes, “that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough—they are whites—we are blacks.”25 In the Appeal, Walker reorganizes antityranny argument to forward an explicitly antislavery position. Rejecting the correlation between tyranny and the figure of slavery, he also attacks the premise that enslavement is a domestic or social institution rather than a political one. To do so, Walker systematically takes apart the assumptions on which the idea of domestic slavery, a phrase he cites at the beginning of Article IV when he refers to “Dr. Torrey’s Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States,” relies (47). Jesse Torrey did not invent the phrase domestic slavery—it appears regularly across the antebellum period, both as a way to denote slavery within the US (as opposed to slavery in other nations) and as a means of characterizing enslavement itself—for the convention of referring to chattel slavery as domestic flags its difference from the forms of political domination elites might have to endure, situating the institution in an intellectual tradition that dates back to antiquity.26 According to this line of thought, slavery is domestic because it is related to, indeed defined by, the household; the enslaved are enclosed in “a polity’s structural institutions,” Roberts explains, but as persons without political standing, their status has no bearing on political (or legal) institutions (17). From its title address to readers around the world, the Appeal rejects the limitations and obscurities of circumscribing slavery in the social. Walker instead insists that enslavement in the US cannot only be a domestic concern, offering it up for universal judgment and publicly claiming the right of political redress. To appreciate Walker’s argument, it is necessary to detour briefly through Aristotle for, although never cited directly, the Appeal addresses the ongoing implications of Politics; the rejection of this work’s assumptions about enslavement is central to Walker’s argument.27 Politics details the various means of distributing power in polities, yet it begins with an overview of the composition and management of the “complete household” which “consists of slaves and freemen” (14).28 In Aristotle’s view, it is “not only necessary, but expedient” that “some should rule and others be ruled” (16).29 Thus Politics begins with—on a strong reading is predicated on—enslavement, which Aristotle claims is basic to “household management,” “the art of getting wealth” (20). Occupied with the menial tasks necessary to life, the enslaved make it possible for freemen to enjoy their freedom, finding personal satisfaction through public political interaction. As Hannah Arendt notes, “it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendour” (281). Domestic organization may start Politics but neither it, nor the people for whom it is said to be sufficient, are germane to the work’s aim, “consider[ing] what form of political community [polis] is best of all for those who are most able to realize their ideal of life” (30). The household falls within the political organization of the city but is not political.30 Slavery’s constitutive domesticity, its complete circumscription within the household, meant that it could provide an analogue for political organization—Aristotle likens the household to a monarchy (19)—but was not itself political. Aristotle “was certain,” David Brion Davis concludes, “that slavery had a rational basis that differentiated it from tyranny” (Western Culture 69). Described by one critic as a “weapon for a revitalized black politics” (Newman 196), the Appeal focuses attention on enslavement as “an inhuman system” overtly associated with political domination (5). In so doing, it joins Torrey, who opens the Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States (1817) with the observation that plantations are “kingdoms in miniature,” where the “king” has “legitimate power . . . to exercise the most unlimited and tyrannical despotism” over “his subjects” (10).31 Walker identifies nothing legitimate about the power enslavers exercise. Indeed, “slavery and oppression . . . have carried” the nation “to the brink of a precipice,” he argues, and the dangers thus caused can only be corrected through national forms of redress, shifting the institution of slavery from a private to public frame of reference: “national acknowledgement to us for the wrongs . . . inflicted on us,” the end of slavery, changes to laws restricting education and property ownership, and the repudiation of all schemes concerning forced deportation (the colonizing “trick” [70]) (41, 73). “Tyrants may think they are so skillful in State affairs is the reason that the government is preserved,” he writes, but events will soon disabuse them of that false notion (69). There are those who will say the discord will have an external cause—“political usurpers, tyrants, oppressors, &c.” (5–6)—but Walker counters that any potential strife is internal to the nation because of the reality of tyranny. Domestic slavery does not just affect households, in other words; it rots the nation itself. While the institution retains its economic implications, Walker stresses that such concerns are domestic only to the extent they refer to the nation. “The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears,” Walker notes, even if white Americans prefer to believe differently (67). “Whether tyrants believe it or not,” he asserts, such conditions will not long endure (24).32 Walker’s reorientation of antislavery argument to an antityranny frame also enables the sharp rebuttal to an established justification for slavery: the contention that slavery finds its origin in war. Here too he counters the association of enslavement with social, not political, structures. As Orlando Patterson explains, “throughout history, captivity in warfare has been one of the major means by which persons have been reduced to slavery” (106). The war slavery doctrine, to borrow Nyquist’s useful phrase, “locates slavery’s origins in warfare, specifically in the captor’s decision to save—that is, enslave—rather than kill the vanquished” (7).33 This principle appears in countless texts across the centuries: Henry Maine, like many others, identifies it with Roman law (135), but war slavery is widespread in Greek thought; Aristotle, for example, observes that there is a convention, or “sort of agreement,” “by which whatever is taken in war is supposed to belong to the victors,” including people (17). For US thinkers, the most influential restatement of this hoary precept is found in John Locke’s Second Treatise (1689), where he writes that slavery “is nothing else, but the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour and a Captive” (284). Even if it was not always clear how to understand what should count as war, consensus coalesced around this justification for enslavement, from the Greco-Roman era through the eighteenth century, with scholars and legal thinkers using this agreement to assert that the practice was inscribed in the jus gentium, the law of nations.34 (That this explanation had nothing to say about slavery in perpetuity is another issue.) An important complement to familiar arguments about sovereignty and the state of exception, the war slavery doctrine presupposed that the person defeated in combat “gave his life not for his own people but to the enemy” and thus, “a traitor to the cause,” deserved “[t]o live as a slave on the adversary’s turf” (Nyquist 9).35 Walker’s historical sources indicate that he was aware of the purported relationship between war and chattel slavery. Goldsmith’s History of Greece, which he mentions in a footnote to Article I, links the enslavement of the Helotes by the Spartans to defeat in battle: refusing to “acquiesce” to a “tribute” “imposed” on them, the Helotes “rose in rebellion to vindicate their rights.” In time, “the Helotes were subdued, and made prisoners of war. As a still greater punishment, they and their posterity were condemned to perpetual slavery; and, to increase their miseries still more, all other slaves were called by the general name of Helotes” (11).36 Spartan severity is mirrored in the “baseness and cruelty” which characterizes their treatment of the Helotes, who were, Goldsmith notes, “degraded by an unjust usurpation” (26, 27). Turning his attention to the Athenians, Goldsmith notes they had a “dread of slavery” for themselves, a fear that surely contributed to their eventual success in the Persian Wars (75). It did not, however, prevent them from enslaving others.37 Captured in this Athenian “dread” is a key tension inherent to the war slavery doctrine: enslavement is said to be felt more keenly by “citizens” who can enjoy the “improvements” that “ador[n] and civiliz[e] society” than by the actually enslaved persons in their households. Walker’s use of historical evidence in exploring the association of enslavement and war should not be misread as suggesting that the war slavery doctrine was only germane to the distant past. In an influential response to the Virginia legislative debates of 1831–32, Thomas R. Dew defended enslavement via its historical association with war.38 Working toward an affirmative defense of slavery, Dew leans heavily on the idea that slavery “mitigate[s] the horrors of war” (13). “[W]ith the institution of slavery,” he writes, “the cruelties of war begin to diminish. The chief finds it to his interest to make slaves of his captives, rather than put them to death” (13). It is “interest, and interest alone” that can “war against the fiercer passion of revenge,” a position he turns to the Iliad to support. Taking a broader view, though, Dew claims that “[i]f we look to the Republics of Greece and Rome, in the days of their glory and civilization, we shall find no one doubting the right to makes slaves of those taken in war” (16). The Appeal poses the following question to its audience: If war provides the explanation for slavery’s origin, what conclusion should be drawn if no conflict exists? “I have been for years troubling the pages of historians,” Walker writes, to find out what our fathers have done to the white Christians of America, to merit such condign punishment as they have inflicted on them, and do continue to inflict on us their children. But I must aver, that my researches have hitherto been to no effect. (16)39 Where Goldsmith could point to armed rebellion to explain how and why the Helotes were enslaved, Walker searches in vain for an explanation of the “punishment” inflicted on the enslaved people of the US. The only answer he can find has nothing to do with war—the avarice of white people: The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.—We view them all over the confederacy of Greece, where they were first known to be any thing, (in consequence of education) we see them there, cutting each other’s throats—trying to subject each other to wretchedness and misery—to effect which, they used all kinds of deceitful, unfair, and unmerciful means. We view them next in Rome, where the spirit of tyranny and deceit raged still higher. (19)40 Neither avarice nor “the spirit of tyranny,” which mounts even higher after the advent of Christianity (they become “ten times more cruel, avaricious and unmerciful” [19]), provides the basis for just war. What Walker’s research reveals is that whites have historically been an “unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings”—in other words, a collection of tyrants—who have waged war on one another, and later on Black people, to satisfy their monstrous desires. That love of money is regularly pointed to by philosophers as both a cause and an effect of tyranny—a source of the tyrant’s monstrous desire and the greatest tool for protecting his unlawful rule—lends the emphasis on avarice across the Appeal a sharper edge.41 In Greece, Rome, Gaul, Spain, Britain, “all over Europe,” as well as “scattered about in Asia and Africa,” the “spirit” is the same: tyranny (19). In Walker’s view, slavery is not the result of war—the desire to usurp the rights (and earning power) of others is its cause. Associated with the unjust desires that shape national destiny, slavery must be understood within a political context, Walker argues, because it is often a reason that nations decide to wage war: enslavement is the motivating cause, not an unfortunate but justifiable effect, of national conflict. With this observation, he exploits a fundamental tension in war slavery’s logic. An individual may give his or her life for a people, a nation, or a state, but war is not a private endeavor: it may be fought by people but is undertaken by groups. If slavery originates in war, in other words, its founding gesture is not apolitical—limited to the domestic world of the household—it is instead communal, collective, national. Because slavery’s domination is political, the Appeal proposes, it is properly associated with the political form of domination—tyranny—with all the conclusions that derive from this association, the most important of which is the right of revolution. Walker’s persistent use of plural pronouns—we, they, us—provides a formal correlate to the Appeal’s argument.42 He usually addresses his readers as a group—“Can our condition be any worse? . . . Can they get us any lower?” (4)—and encourages his audience to experience the Appeal communally by reading it aloud.43 With one notable exception, the story of the complicit woman, Walker avoids protracted anecdotes, generally preferring accounts presented in the conditional mood (what an “observer” might see, like “a son” “by the command of a tyrant” beating his mother “until she falls a victim to death in the road” [23–24]), aggregated experience (“fathers beating their sons, mothers their daughters, and children their parents, all to pacify the passions of unrelenting tyrants” [24]), or persons identified by position (a bootblack, for example). As in narratives by formerly enslaved persons, Walker relies on first person testimony—his emotional pain is uncompromising when he writes, for example, “Oh Heaven! I am full!!! I can hardly move my pen!!!!” (24)—but he does not offer eyewitness accounts of specific scenes of violence. His formal choices forestall the experience of slavery as a domestic institution. Despite its affective force, the Appeal’s logic thus diverges from that governing sentimental narratives. Even though he is eager to inspire conversion and uses affect to do so, his emphasis on the shared condition of Black Americans posits a unified group—a people—who can act in concert for political change in “the very moment of marking its apparent impossibility” (Best 8). Indeed, in his use of the appeal genre, Walker treats his readership as “capable of judging”; in this way, the Appeal “presupposes a relationship among equals,” creating a distinct group or people (Rogers 215, 220). But there isn’t just one group in the Appeal. With a few exceptions, white Americans are also represented communally. Where the Declaration of Independence paints a portrait of a single tyrant—George III—the Appeal insists that it is slavery, rather than particularly cruel individuals, that is being represented—and there are many tyrants to be revealed. The repetition of plural nouns forestalls both the claim that bad behavior can be attributed to a rogue actor, the idea that slavery as a practice was acceptable even if a few enslavers displayed tyrannical tendencies, and the transformation of enslavement into an abstract or allegorical antagonist (Slavery). At the Appeal’s core is a position basic to antityranny writing: the degradation tyrants inflict on others, the ways they twist the norms of ethics and religion, authorizes rebellion when two peoples are in conflict. Where texts that focus on slavery call for abolition, Walker’s turn to tyranny offers an alternative history and outcome, one with a long, storied, and sometimes violent history. The Appeal thus redraws the portrait of tyranny the Declaration of Independence had presented to the world, giving it American faces. Tyrants in the Appeal limit access to education and religion, keeping people ignorant in order to protect their power; they humiliate the people under their vicious sway, disrupting the ties of affection and duty that bind a society together; they prevent freedom of movement, of assembly, and of religious or political participation, guaranteeing that people will be unable to act in self-defense; and they establish laws that will protect their own interests, rather than the common good. The picture that emerges echoes Mayhew’s sermon and the Declaration of Independence, but also classical accounts of tyrants. Walker’s knowledge of Plutarch exposed him to an array of Greek and Roman tyrants, whose traits helped him to bring the features of their many American counterparts into sharper relief.44 Excessive in all things, American tyrants (like tyrants through history) object to any limitation to the satisfaction of their whims and pleasures (chief amongst which is avarice). In ancient Greece, as in the nineteenth-century US, tyrants want “to be at liberty to do what [they] please in the state—to kill, to exile, and to follow [their] own pleasure in every act” (Plato 252). Not only do tyrants devastate communities, they are themselves savage and monstrous, an important inversion of the dehumanization upon which chattel slavery in the US had come to rely. In sum, Walker insists that tyranny’s perversions are inherent to the nation, upsetting its identification as the “Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!” (5). According to Walker, the fact of US tyranny presents Black Americans with a stark choice: “wor[k] for the salvation of our whole body” or “join in with tyrants” to win the illusion of comfort (32). Still, while advocates of colonization worried that slavery’s abolition would lead to civil war, Walker argues the opposite: the continuation of American tyranny will necessarily culminate in war, for there can be no peace when one’s opponents are monsters. Despite the outrageous usurpations they have endured, Walker nevertheless posits that Black Americans “ask [whites] for nothing but the rights of man, viz. for them to set us free, and treat us like men” (69). Should these basic conditions be met, “there will be no danger, for we will love and respect them, and protect our country—but we cannot conscientiously do these things until they treat us like men.” (69). The ability to defuse the threat of war is entirely within the power of white Americans, he explains, for it is their behavior that made them the “natural enemies” of Black Americans (as Jefferson predicted in Notes) (25).45 Inverting the history of war slavery, Walker argues that enslavement means Black Americans must arm for “battle” as he alternately celebrates the “unconquerable disposition” of Black men (27) and excoriates “[t]he man who would not fight . . . to be delivered from the most wretched, abject and servile slavery” (14). Should white people not change their ways, Black people will have no choice but to throw off the yoke of tyranny, a situation that portends “wo, wo” (73): millions of my wretched brethren would meet death with glory—yea, more, would plunge into the very mouths of cannons and be torn into particles as minute as the atoms which compose the elements of the earth, in preference to a mean submission to the lash of tyrants. (30) Despite his emphasis on the historical (and almost innate) tendency of white people to embrace avarice, a clear inversion of the frequent reference to innate incapacity as a justification for slavery, Walker limits the enmity between Black and white Americans to current conditions: “treat us like men, and we will like you more than we do now hate you” (73). Promising friendship where once enmity ruled (“[t]reat us then like men, and we will be your friends”), Walker imagines “the whole of the past will be sunk into oblivion,” replaced by a present and future of liberty for all. Once tyranny has been overthrown, the nation, finally united, will be at peace, not war. There is a final benefit of approaching the Appeal through its argument against tyranny: it provides a different perspective on what is arguably the text’s most difficult aspect—the emphasis on degradation. “[W]e, (coloured people of these United States) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” Walker writes early in the Appeal (3).46 This conclusion is true regardless of status—any belief that a distinction exists between enslaved and free Blacks is illusory, Walker explains—for all are debased by the tyrants who oppress them. “Do any of you say that you and your family are free and happy, and what have you to do with the wretched slaves and other people,” he muses (30). As someone who enjoys modest liberties, Walker can promise that they “are of the very lowest kind—they are the very dregs!” (31). There are two things to stress. First, degradation is a key element of the lexicon of antityranny writing, as Mayhew’s sermon made clear (tyranny carries ignorance and brutality in its wake), perhaps explaining some of Walker’s insistence on this point. Second, Walker’s erasure of distinctions between free and enslaved Black Americans stresses a further dimension of tyranny: it perverts equality. While Americans like to celebrate equality, treating it as an inherent good, Walker reminds us instead that equality is a structure of relation that can have negative implications. A more compelling source of tyranny than slavery, Aristotle would have agreed; he defines a common feature of the tyrant as “govern[ing] all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to [the tyrant’s] own advantage” (106). Not only can equality be applied unevenly, in other words, there are forms of equality that are malevolent. This is what Walker establishes with his opening position: the ugly and uncomfortable reality is that Black Americans are equal to one another, but in their case equality is not a positive good, for they are equally miserable, equally degraded by the efforts of American tyrants. “We are,” he insists, “levelled by them” (11). Any attempt to win small alleviations or fleeting benefits fuels this debased equality. This makes the model of equality the Appeal offers, predicated on the “horizontal” operations of judgment, so important. “To appeal does not refer to a social practice of supplication,” Rogers notes, but through the solicitation of reflection and response, creates the conditions of equality associated with “long-lasting social and political transformation” (220, 221). One final point about Walker’s depiction of the seeming servility, and sometimes complicity, of Black Americans, likewise associated with the antityranny tradition, needs to be made. As the definition of war slavery hinted, it was easy to align slavery’s origin in war with the presumption of choice, the suggestion that captives might opt for enslavement rather than battlefield death. This is how Herodotus, a significant source for Goldsmith, explained the Ionians’ behavior during the Persian Wars: they preferred enslavement to the hard work of defending their city (327–28).47 The conceptual step between identifying the origin of slavery in war and claiming that there are persons for whom enslavement is natural was short. Walker’s representation of communal degradation thus has a complicated relationship to antityranny argumentation. Because dishonor and degradation are effects of tyranny but are also associated with enslavement, Walker’s argument here is both political and identarian, countering arguments about slavery’s necessity and using the experience of degradation as evidence of the pressing need to overthrow tyranny. Here we also find crucial context for Walker’s engagement with racist essentialism, which he approaches most directly through Query XIV of Notes on the State of Virginia.48 Where Jefferson seeks cover for the expression of a racist opinion in evasion, “advanc[ing] it therefore as a suspicion only” (qtd. in Walker 29), Walker rejects both equivocation and the position it seeks to soften: An “abject submission to the lash of tyrants, we see plainly … [is] not the natural element[] of the blacks, as the Americans try to make us believe” (23). When we look carefully, he counters, we can see that centuries of mistreatment may have created behaviors that self-serving actors can interpret as servile, but they are learned, not innate. Recognizing the causes for seeming abjection and shaking off the habituation to servility are preconditions of revolutionary possibility, for the antityranny tradition in general and in the Appeal’s exceptional contribution to it. In his 1848 edition of the Appeal, Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet wrote that Walker’s “little book produced more commotion among slaveholders than any volume of its size that was ever issued from an American press. . . . When the fame of this book reached the South, the poor, cowardly, pusillanimous tyrants, grew pale behind their cotton bags, and armed themselves to the teeth” (vi). Importantly, it was not only the Appeal’s “fame” that “reached the South,” as Walker made careful arrangements to disseminate the pamphlet; copies were seized in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia (Ford 332–35). Already unsettled by the Appeal’s contents, Southern anxiety skyrocketed in the wake of the Turner rebellion of 1831, which surely seemed to some the revolution Walker had threatened. In the wake of Nat Turner’s action, the Virginia legislature debated the commonwealth’s position on slavery—and these debates can be read as a reflection on Walker’s political philosophy. Indeed, although the House of Delegates eventually concluded that it was “inexpedient for the present to make any legislative enactments for the abolition of slavery,” the mere fact of the debates underscores the importance of attacking slavery as a political, as well as a social, fact (qtd. in Root). White avarice ruled the day, as Dew’s essay on the debates makes clear. Beginning from the position that the aim of government is the protection of property (not the common good that Walker, and Mayhew before him, took as axiomatic), Dew argued that the arbitrary, and thus tyrannical, prohibition of certain categories of property would make white “freemen” into victims of “fearful anxiety,” awaiting the outcome of a “capricious edict” that would rob them of years of industry and effort (68).49 Here, again, is a version of Tyranny, threatening white elites with future affective pain. Abolition would be a tyrannical assault on white Southerners, circumscribing their freedom in a way consistent with the tradition of interpreting tyranny as any form of elite limitation. Going further, Dew denied enslaved people the right to rebellion: The true theory of the right of revolution we conceive to be the following: no men, or set of men, are justifiable in attempting a revolution which must certainly fail; or, if successful, must produce necessarily a much worse state of things than the pre-existent order. We have not the right to plunge the dagger into the monarch’s bosom merely because he is a monarch—we must be sure it is the only means of dethroning a tyrant and giving peace and happiness to an aggrieved and suffering people. (104) In Dew’s self-interested account, revolution is only justified by pragmatic calculation—its likely success—not a right in itself. That such calculations will always end with the same outcome is the argument’s basic premise, as is the impossibility of comparing “the hellish plots and massacres of Dessalines, Gabriel, and Nat Turner” to the “noble deeds and devoted patriotism of Lafayette, Kosciusko, and Schrynecki” (104). Scholars have been eager to stress Walker’s optimism—his putatively hopeful outlook about white Americans and his fundamental commitment to US institutions—but, as Robert Levine asks, “if that is so, why does Walker repeatedly offer such denunciations,” firm and unrelenting, of the nation and its citizens (102)? Walker’s knowledge—and skilled use—of antityranny argument taught him that power, once seized, is rarely relinquished without a fight: tyrants, so monstrous as to defy categorization as human, must be violently overthrown. To fail to honor this dimension of Walker’s thought, or to overlook the Appeal’s commitment to argument and the process of judgment, is to domesticate his ideas, their signal contribution to American intellectual history, and their thorough radicalism. Endnotes 1 See also Wheatley’s 1774 letter to Samson Occom (176–77). John Levi Barnard notes that Wheatley associates “the struggle of American revolutionaries against ‘political slavery’ with the plight of enslaved people in America” (26). On Wheatley as a “representative of an emerging African American antislavery critique,” see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause (2016), p. 31. 2 As Paul Gilroy explains, “[t]he moral and political problem of slavery loomed large not least because it was once recognised as internal to the structure of western civilisation” (9). 3 The scholarship on Walker pays scant attention to the Appeal’s sustained focus on tyranny. There are two exceptions: Ian Finseth’s observation that “[t]he text itself is a syllogism, born of the propositions of theoretical liberty and actual tyranny” (337) and Herbert Aptheker’s introduction to a 1965 edition of the Appeal, where he notes that “American slavery was a fierce form of tyranny” (7). 4 As David Kazanjian notes, “[b]y organizing his own text into ‘Four Articles,’ Walker mimics the very legal and governmental speech acts—such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—that expressed such co-mingling, the very speech acts that made such an articulation articulate, or clear and self-evident” (9). See as well John Ernest, Liberation Historiography (2004), p. 86. 5 On the Appeal’s relationship to the Constitution, see Finseth; Kazanjian; and Stephen Marshall, The City on the Hill from Below (2011). 6 Scholars have previously been unable to identify this verse because Walker cites a translation that is not included in the Book of Common Prayer. I am grateful to Claudia Stokes for tracking down the Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate version. 7 Frederick Douglass is an obvious example for tyranny is a regular theme across many of his works, especially beginning in the 1850s. 8 See in particular Rogers; Roberts; Gene Jarrett, Representing the Race (2011); Marshall; and Eddie Glaude Jr., Exodus! (2000). 9 In stressing the importance of the right of revolution to Walker’s argument, I disagree with Marshall, who links discussions of this right to the work of John Locke or Thomas Hobbes (51). 10 In pointing to the importance of tyranny, and the complications it introduces to understandings of unfreedom, my work thus complements the renewed interest in republicanism as well as new readings of freedom, especially Roberts’s work on marronage. 11 See further Sinha, p. 40. 12 “Steeped in a literature whose perpetual theme was the steady encroachment of tyranny on liberty, the founders became virtually obsessed with spotting its approach, so that they might avoid the fate of their classical heroes” (Richard 118). The intellectual heritage of the founders has been exhaustively studied, but Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) continues to be a key text. 13 Classicists, especially Kurt Raaflaub, are important sources for Nyquist’s analysis of antityranny thought. Given the importance of Black classicism in the US, these sources are important for the understanding of American literary history. 14 See, for example, Peter Thompson, “David Walker’s Nationalism—and Thomas Jefferson’s,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 37, no. 1, 2017, pp. 47–80, esp. p. 50. 15 This characterization of Walker’s reading, from William Lloyd Garrison, responds to the skepticism of readers, including Black Americans, that he could have acquired the erudition to write the Appeal (McHenry 32). Scholars have traced possible influences on Walker’s thought, including Sallust and Plato (Marshall) and Emer de Vattel (Thompson). 16 For an incisive reading of Mayhew, particularly as his sermon “made it all too easy for American revolutionaries to fold an antipathy toward the excesses of democracy into their vocabulary and their political structures after 1776,” see Paul Downes, pp. 125–6. 17 Adams’s 13 Feb. 1818 letter to H. Niles explains that the “Revolution was effected before the war commenced,” as a change “in the minds and hearts of the people” (282). 18 Other verses used to defend enslavement include Colossians 3, Ephesians 6, and the Epistle to Philemon. 19 Like Walker, Mayhew manipulates his text’s graphic elements for emphasis; reading the Appeal in the tradition of antityranny provides new perspective on its remarkable typography, importantly explored by Dinius. If we juxtapose Walker’s text with a mock epitaph of George III, for example, we can see that “[i]ncreasingly hyperbolic denunciations of tyranny in eighteenth-century America tend to demonize or bestialize the King,” “suggest[ing] that his colonial subjects are being ruled by something inhuman” (Downes 136). 20 On insurrections by enslaved persons in the American colonies before 1750, see Apetheker, pp. 162–96 and Davis, Revolution, pp. 138–39. 21 Forten begins Letters from a Man of Colour by asserting that the Declaration’s claims include all men, not just white ones. The letters were reprinted in Freedom’s Journal, 22 Feb. 1828 to 21 Mar. 1828. For more on Forten, see Robert Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), pp. 91–93. 22 In the pamphlet, Taylor is especially agitated by trade policy and the Supreme Court’s 1819 decision in McColluch v. Maryland. On Taylor, see Robert Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath (2007), pp. 21, 154. 23 For a reading that locates the Appeal in the “traditions of the black sermon” (44), see Cheryl Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn (2018), pp. 40–53. On Walker’s education, see Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren (1997), pp. 13–15, 19. 24 I am not the first scholar to stress Walker’s use of history. See, in particular, Jarrett, p. 42 and Ernest, p. 49. Walker’s extensive knowledge has been the subject of debate since 1831, when “Leo” wrote to the Liberator that “the matter brought forward in [the Appeal] is the result of more reading than could have fallen to the lot of that man” (qtd. in Aptheker 50). His sources make clear that he was fully conversant with the materials. 25 Walker’s position echoes that expressed in the first issue of Freedom’s Journal, where editors John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish wrote, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us” (qtd. in Wall 39); devoted reader, agent, and sometimes contributor for the newspaper, Walker was familiar with its contents. 26 The references are too extensive to list. But the term does appear in antislavery publications, like Genius of Universal Emancipation, as well as proslavery texts. See editions of Genius of Universal Emancipation from 14 Jan. 1826, 5 May 1827, and 6 Oct. 1827, for examples, contemporary to Walker. 27 Aristotle’s account of tyranny is the “most enduring” analysis from classical antiquity, so the odds that Walker encountered it—directly or indirectly—are high (Boesche 49). Indeed, given the importance of Aristotle to Jefferson’s thought—the reference to man as an “imitative animal” from the Notes passage cited earlier is a clear example—it’s easy to assume that Aristotelian paradigms were part of Walker’s impressive intellectual repertoire. 28 The three forms of household relation (“master and slave, husband and wife, father and children” [Aristotle 14]) are hierarchical, with the same person dominating, an arrangement Aristotle assumes is appropriate and natural. Although all three relations are important, he lingers longest with the first, the one created by chattel slavery, breezing past the counterclaim that “the distinction between slave and freeman exists by convention only, and not by nature,” a position that would render enslavement “unjust” (15). The circumscription of some forms of existence within the context of the oikos is fundamental to Giorgio Agamben’s definitions of bare life and the state of exception. 29 That he struggles to find a definition of slavery that warrants the force associated with expedient necessity is evident at several points across the text, particularly the attempt to solve the problem of the morally excellent slave. There is an extensive literature on Aristotle’s position on slavery and its importance to subsequent thinkers. See, in particular, Davis, Revolution, pp. 70–71. 30 As Orlando Patterson more recently explains, because enslaved persons are defined by the household’s head, it is impossible for them to realize an ideal of their own, having “no social existence outside of [their] master” (38). 31 Torrey’s odd emphasis derives from a technicality; despotisms were often defined as legitimate forms of government. 32 Walker’s invocation of God’s wrath has been associated with the jeremiad tradition; for explorations of the prophetic tradition in the Appeal, see Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (2016); Glaude; Kevin Pelletier, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism (2015); and Marshall. 33 Nyquist coins the phrase war slavery doctrine to bring together a set of broadly shared ideas. She goes on to note that this doctrine is “often conflated with the power of life and death held by the slave master, a power to which it is in any case usually related” (7). 34 Patterson indicates that the practice of kidnapping could often be the reason for “so-called wars” (119). 35 It demands, she explains, a revision to Michel Foucault’s and Agamben’s readings of the “mechanisms and technologies of biopower” (7). 36 Goldsmith’s source for much of this section of his history seems to be Plutarch’s chapter on Lycurgus, which Walker also references, albeit more generally. For a contemporary reading of the status of the Helotes, which was both more and less severe than Goldsmith suggests, see Peter Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (1998), pp. 13–16. 37 Goldsmith provides details to support the Athenian worry: the Persian army “was provided with a sufficient supply of chains and fetters for binding the conquered nations” (75). 38 Dew’s work first appeared in American Quarterly Review in 1832, before its reissue as a pamphlet; it was later included in The Pro-slavery Argument, as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (1852). I cannot find that Dew references the Appeal or its author. 39 In the preamble, Walker demonstrates a knowledge of the rise of the Roman Empire (the period of transition from republic to empire), which he could have acquired from either Roman historians, like Tacitus or Suetonius, or from later writers, including Edward Gibbon or Goldsmith (who also wrote a history of Rome). 40 On avarice, see Sterling Stuckey, pp. 119–20. 41 In Republic, Plato outlines the relationship between money and tyranny, but the idea can be found, as well, in Aristotle and, among the Romans, Tacitus. 42 My emphasis on plural pronouns echoes Hinks’s assertion that the Appeal offers a communal appeal: “Never is stress placed on using abilities and knowledge merely for individual advancement” (88). 43 See Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers (2002), p. 34 and Hinks, p. 193. 44 The chapters on Dion of Syracuse and Timoleon of Corinth have historically been key sources on tyranny. Plutarch’s representation was importantly shaped by Plato, particularly Republic and Gorgias (Mossé 193). For an overview of Plato and tyranny, see Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyranny from Plato to Arendt (1996), pp. 26–47. 45 White Americans used much of the same language to different ends. In 1830, a Georgia man wrote, “No southern Man doubts our ability to put down any servile war which can happen amongst us. … The Blood it will cost is the only dread” (qtd. in Ford 338). 46 On the difference between Walker’s emphasis on the unique suffering of Black Americans and Martin Delany’s repudiation of their unique oppression, see Gilroy, p. 28. 47 On the relationship between war and honor in Greek historical writing, see Hunt. 48 On Jefferson’s knowledge of Aristotle, see Richard, p. 97. 49 Dew is representative, not exceptional. For another expression of white property rights, see Ford, p. 334. Works Cited Adams John. Letter to H. Niles. 13 Feb. 1818 . 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Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Author notes Elizabeth Duquette is a professor of English at Gettysburg College and the author of Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America (2010), an assortment of articles, as well as the coeditor of The Gates Ajar (2019) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (2014). She is completing a book about tyranny, ubiquity, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s nineteenth-century American empire. With Stacey Margolis, she edits J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Tyranny in America, or, the Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
JO - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajaa035
DA - 2021-02-22
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/tyranny-in-america-or-the-appeal-to-the-coloured-citizens-of-the-world-H1kM2fxbzD
SP - 1
EP - 28
VL - 33
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -