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 period, said:  “We were stolen from our mother country and brought here.  We have tilled the ground and made fortunes for thousands, and still they are not weary of our services. But they who stay to till the ground must be slaves.  Is there not land enough in America, or ’corn enough in Egypt’?  Why should they send us into a far country to die?  See the thousands of foreigners emigrating to America every year:  and if there be ground sufficient for them to cultivate, and bread for them to eat, why would they wish to send the first tillers of the land away?  Africans have made fortunes for thousands, who are yet unwilling to part with their services; but the free must be sent away, and those who remain must be slaves.  I have no doubt that there are many good men who do not see as I do, and who are sending us to Liberia; but they have not duly considered the subject—­they are not men of color.  This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free."[1] This point of view received popular expression in a song which bore the cumbersome title, “The Colored Man’s Opinion of Colonization,” and which was sung to the tune of “Home, Sweet Home.”  The first stanza was as follows: 

[Footnote 1:  Freedom’s Journal, November 2, 1827, quoted by Walker.]

  Great God, if the humble and weak are as dear
  To thy love as the proud, to thy children give ear! 
  Our brethren would drive us in deserts to roam;
  Forgive them, O Father, and keep us at home. 
  Home, sweet home! 
  We have no other; this, this is our home.[1]