Two weeks before Christmas 1829, 60 copies of a book slipped off a ship at the port of Savannah and found their way to a local black preacher. Seeing what was inside, he turned them over to the police at once. They seized every copy.

The author, it turned out, was a free and educated black man named David Walker, a Boston activist and used-clothing dealer.

As its title suggested, the book was an “Appeal” to “The Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to those of the United States of America.” Yet appeal was a tame word for the prophecy smoldering between its covers, clearly directed towards the nation’s enslaved laborers. The police may have flipped to page 28: “It is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” Page 35 argued that owners denied slaves education because it would reveal their right to “cut his devilish throat from ear to ear, and well do slave-holders know it.”