Nat Turner, David Walker, and the Fight for African American Freedom

Antebellum Idealism and Reform Impulses, 1820-1860 CHANGES TO SLAVERY A popular movement that advocated for the exodus of African Americans from the United States, usually to Africa, was known as colonization and was an early "reform to slavery. This objective led to the founding of the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America in 1816 (commonly known as the American Colonization Society, or ACS). Prominent leaders such as Thomas Jefferson supported colonization. Because ACS members did not think Black and White people could coexist peacefully, they planned to relocate the approximately 200,000 free Black Americans to Africa. After the ACS was founded, they campaigned Congress for funding and raised money for a number of years. They were successful in obtaining $100,000 from the federal government in 1819 to continue the colonization effort. The establishment of the colong of Liberia on Africa's west coast was greatly aided by the ACS. Monrovia, the nation's capital, bears President James Monroe's name. The ACS is a prime illustration of how White reformers approached the problem of slavery, particularly those who were well-off and influential. Their attempts to address slavery in the US are a sharp contrast to those of other reformers. While revolt may go beyond the purview of reform, violent overthrow of slavery was one possible alternative. One of the biggest slave revolts in American history, Nat Turner's Rebellion occurred in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. Nat Turner, like a lot of enslaved people, was motivated by the zeal for evangelical Protestantism that was sweeping the nation. He became known as a prophet among the other enslaved people in Southampton County, where he preached. He got them ready for insurrection and waited for the right moment to start, until an eclipse in August indicated that the timing was finally right. Turner killed about sixty-five persons, including the families of the enslaver's, along with up to seventy more enslaved individuals (Figure 13:15). Turner escaped until the end of October, when he was tried, executed by hanging, and then disemboweled and quartered. Fifty-six more people were executed in Virginia because it was thought that they had participated in the uprising. Panic raced through Virginia and the South, killing two hundred additional people with the help of organized militias and white vigilantes. A contentious debate about slavery was sparked in Virginia by Nat Turner's Rebellion. The state constitution was already being revised by the Virginia assembly, and some delegates pushed for a simpler manumission procedure. But the uprising made that change unfeasible. Slavery supporters in the South increasingly accused northerners of inciting the slaves to rebel, and Virginia and other slave states reaffirmed their commitment to the system of slavery. Black people with education and literacy, like David Walker, were also proponents of insurrection. In 1796, Walker was born in North Carolina as a free Black man. In the 1820s, he relocated to Boston, where he gave speeches against slavery and supported Freedom's Journal, the first African American newspaper. He urged Black people to vigorously oppose slavery and, if necessary, resort to violence. In his 1829 publication An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, he criticized the colonial plan and exhorted Black Americans to struggle for equality and combat bigotry. Walker passed away some months after his Appeal was published, and his cause of death is still up for discussion. A lot of people think he was killed. Walker came to represent both the terrors of reading, educated Black people to the slaveholders of the South and promise for freedom seeker's in the North.