William Lloyd Garrison
January 8, 1831
The Liberator
Believing, as we do, that men should never do evil that good may come; that
a good end does not justify wicked means in the accomplishment of it; and that
we ought to suffer, as did our Lord and his apostles, unresistingly—knowing
that vengeance belongs to God, and he will certainly repay it where it is due;—believing
all this, and that the Almighty will deliver the oppressed in a way which whey
know not, we deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal. Nevertheless,
it is not for the American people, as a nation, to denounce it as bloody or
monstrous. Mr. Walker but pays them in their own coin, but follows their own
creed, but adopts their own language. We do not preach rebellion—no,
but submission and peace. Our enemies may accuse us of striving to stir up
the slaves to revenge but their accusations are false, and made only to excite
the prejudices of the whites, and to destroy our influence. We say, that the
possibility of a bloody insurrection at the south fills us with dismay; and
we avow, too, as plainly, that if any people were ever justified in throwing
off the yoke of their tyrants, the slaves are that people. It is not we, but
our guilty countrymen, who put arguments into the mouths, and swords into the
hands of the slaves. Every sentence that they write—every word that they
speak—every resistance that they make, against foreign oppression, is
a call upon their slaves to destroy them. Every Fourth of July celebration
must embitter and inflame the minds of the slaves. And the late dinners, and
illuminations, and orations, and shoutings, at the south, over the downfall
of the French tyrant, Charles the Tenth, furnish so many reasons to the slaves
why they should obtain their own rights by violence.
Some editors have affected to doubt where the deceased Walker wrote this pamphlet. —On
this point, skepticism need not stumble: the Appeal bears the strongest internal
evidence of having emanated from his own mind. No white man could have written
in language so natural and enthusiastic.