Although she was an African slave, Phillis Wheatley was one of the
best-known poets in prenineteenth-century America. Pampered in the
household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in
New England and England, with presses in both places publishing her
poems, and paraded before the new republic's political leadership and
the old empire's aristocracy, Phillis was the abolitionists'
illustrative testimony that blacks could be both artistic and
intellectual. Her name was a household word among literate colonists and
her achievements a catalyst for the fledgling antislavery movement.
Phillis was seized from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa, when she was about
seven years old. She was transported to the Boston docks with a
shipment of "refugee" slaves, who because of age or physical frailty
were unsuited for rigorous labor in the West Indian and Southern
colonies, the first ports of call after the Atlantic crossing. In the
month of August 1761, "in want of a domestic," Susanna Wheatley, wife of
prominent Boston tailor John Wheatley, purchased "a slender, frail
female child ... for a trifle" because the captain of the slave ship
believed that the waif was terminally ill, and he wanted to gain at
least a small profit before she died. A Wheatley relative later reported
that the family surmised the girl—who was "of slender frame and
evidently suffering from a change of climate," nearly naked, with "no
other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her"—to be "about
seven years old ... from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth."
After discovering the girl's precociousness, the Wheatleys,
including their son Nathaniel and their daughter Mary, did not entirely
excuse Phillis from her domestic duties but taught her to read and
write. Soon she was immersed in the Bible, astronomy, geography,
history, British literature (particularly
John Milton and
Alexander Pope), and the Greek and Latin classics of
Vergil,
Ovid, Terence, and Homer. In "To the University of Cambridge in New
England" (probably the first poem she wrote but not published until
1773) Phillis indicated that despite this exposure, rich and unusual for
an American slave, her spirit yearned for the intellectual challenge of
a more academic atmosphere.
Although scholars had generally believed that
An
Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent
Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield
... (1770) was Wheatley's first published poem, Carl Bridenbaugh
revealed in 1969 that thirteen-year-old Phillis—after hearing a
miraculous saga of survival at sea—wrote "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,"
a poem which was published on 21 December 1767 in the Newport, Rhode
Island,
Mercury. But it was the Whitefield elegy that brought
Wheatley national renown. Published as a broadside and a pamphlet in
Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, the poem was published with Ebenezer
Pemberton's funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, bringing
her international acclaim.
By the time she was eighteen,
Phillis had gathered a collection of twenty-eight poems for which she,
with the help of Mrs. Wheatley, ran advertisements for subscribers in
Boston newspapers in February 1772. When the colonists were apparently
unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys
turned in frustration to London for a publisher. Phillis had forwarded
the Whitefield poem to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, to whom
Whitefield had been chaplain. A wealthy supporter of evangelical and
abolitionist causes, the countess instructed bookseller Archibald Bell
to begin correspondence with Phillis in preparation for the book.
Phillis, suffering from a chronic asthma condition and accompanied by
Nathaniel, left for London on 8 May 1771. The now-celebrated poetess was
welcomed by several dignitaries: abolitionists' patron the Earl of
Dartmouth, poet and activist Baron George Lyttleton, Sir Brook Watson
(soon to be the Lord Mayor of London), philanthropist John Thorton, and
Benjamin Franklin.
While Phillis was recrossing the Atlantic to reach Mrs. Wheatley, who,
at the summer's end, had become seriously ill, Bell was circulating the
first edition of
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first volume of poetry by an American Negro published in modern times.
Poems on Various Subjects
revealed that Phillis's favorite poetic form was the couplet, both
iambic pentameter and heroic. More than one-third of her canon is
composed of elegies, poems on the deaths of noted persons, friends, or
even strangers whose loved ones employed the poet. The poems that best
demonstrate her abilities and are most often questioned by detractors
are those that employ classical themes as well as techniques. In her
epyllion "Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from
Ovid's
Metamorphoses , Book VI, and from a "View of the
Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson," she not only translates Ovid but adds
her own beautiful lines to extend the dramatic imagery. In "To Maecenas"
she transforms Horace's ode into a celebration of Christ."
In
addition to classical and neoclassical techniques, Wheatley applied
biblical symbolism to evangelize and to comment on slavery. For
instance, "
On Being Brought from Africa to America,"
the best-known Wheatley poem, chides the Great Awakening audience to
remember that Africans must be included in the Christian stream:
"Remember,
Christians, Negroes, black as
Cain, /May be
refin'd and join th' angelic train." The remainder of Wheatley's themes
can be classified as celebrations of America. She was the first to
applaud this nation as glorious "Columbia" and that in a letter to no
less than the first president of the United States, George Washington,
with whom she had corresponded and whom she was later privileged to
meet. Her love of virgin America as well as her religious fervor is
further suggested by the names of those colonial leaders who signed the
attestation that appeared in some copies of
Poems on Various Subjects
to authenticate and support her work: Thomas Hutchinson, governor of
Massachusetts; John Hancock; Andrew Oliver, lieutenant governor; James
Bowdoin; and Reverend Mather Byles. Another fervent Wheatley supporter
was Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence.
Phillis was manumitted some three months before
Mrs. Wheatley died on 3 March 1774. Although many British editorials
castigated the Wheatleys for keeping Phillis in slavery while presenting
her to London as the African genius, the family had provided an
ambiguous haven for the poet. Phillis was kept in a servant's place--a
respectable arm's length from the Wheatleys' genteel circles--but she
had experienced neither slavery's treacherous demands nor the harsh
economic exclusions pervasive in a free-black existence. With the death
of her benefactor, Phillis slipped toward this tenuous life. Mary
Wheatley and her father died in 1778; Nathaniel, who had married and
moved to England, died in 1783. Throughout the lean years of the war and
the following depression, the assault of these racial realities was
more than her sickly body or aesthetic soul could withstand.
On 1 April 1778, despite the skepticism and disapproval of some of her
closest friends, Phillis married John Peters, whom she had known for
some five years. A free black, Peters evidently aspired to
entrepreneurial and professional greatness. He is purported in various
historical records to have called himself Dr. Peters, to have practiced
law (perhaps as a free-lance advocate for hapless blacks), kept a
grocery in Court Street, exchanged trade as a baker and a barber, and
applied for a liquor license for a bar. Described by Merle A. Richmond
as "a man of very handsome person and manners," who "wore a wig, carried
a cane, and quite acted out 'the gentleman,'" Peters was also called "a
remarkable specimen of his race, being a fluent writer, a ready
speaker." Peters's ambitions cast him as "shiftless," arrogant, and
proud in the eyes of some reporters, but as a black man in an era that
valued only his brawn, Peters's business acumen was simply not salable.
Like many others who scattered throughout the Northeast to avoid the
fighting during the Revolutionary War, the Peterses moved temporarily
from Boston to Wilmington, Massachusetts, shortly after their marriage.
Merle A. Richmond points out that economic conditions in the colonies
during and after the war were harsh, particularly for free blacks, who
were unprepared to compete with whites in a stringent job market. These
societal factors, rather than any refusal to work on Peters's part, were
perhaps most responsible for the newfound poverty that Phillis suffered
in Wilmington and Boston, after they later returned there. Between 1779
and 1783, the couple had three children (all of whom died as toddlers),
and Peters drifted further into penury, often leaving Phillis to fend
for herself and the children by working as a charwoman while he dodged
creditors and tried to find employment.
During the first six
weeks after their return to Boston, Phillis and the children stayed with
one of Mrs. Wheatley's nieces in a bombed-out mansion that was
converted to a day school after the war. Peters then moved them into an
apartment in a rundown section of Boston, where other Wheatley relatives
soon found Phillis sick and destitute. As Margaretta Matilda Odell
recalls, "Two of her children were dead, and the third was sick unto
death. She was herself suffering for want of attention, for many
comforts, and that greatest of all comforts in sickness--cleanliness.
She was reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe.... In a filthy
apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis, lay dying the mother,
and the wasting child. The woman who had stood honored and respected in
the presence of the wise and good ... was numbering the last hours of
life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems
of a squalid poverty!"
Yet throughout these lean years,
Phillis continued to write and publish her poems and to maintain, though
on a much more limited scale, her international correspondence. She
also felt that despite the poor economy, her American audience and
certainly her evangelical friends would support a second volume of
poetry. Between 30 October and 18 December 1779, with at least the
partial motive of raising funds for her family, she ran six
advertisements soliciting subscribers for "300 pages in Octavo," a
volume "Dedicated to the Right Hon. Benjamin Franklin, Esq.: One of the
Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France," that would
include thirty-three poems and thirteen letters. As with
Poems on Various Subjects,
however, the American populace would not support one of its most noted
poets. (The first American edition of this book was not published until
two years after her death.) During the year of her death (1784), she was
able to publish, under the name Phillis Peters, a masterful
sixty-four-line poem in a pamphlet entitled
Liberty and Peace , which hailed America as
"Columbia"
victorious over "Britannia Law." Proud of her nation's intense struggle
for freedom that, to her, bespoke an eternal spiritual greatness,
Phillis ended the poem with a triumphant ring:
Britannia owns her Independent Reign,
Hibernia, Scotia, and the Realms of Spain;
And Great Germania's ample Coast admires
The generous Spirit that Columbia fires.
Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav'ring Gales,
Where e'er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:
To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,
And Heavenly Freedom spread her gold Ray.
On 2 January of that same year, she published
An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper,
just a few days after the death of the Brattle Street church's pastor.
And, sadly, in September the "Poetical Essays" section of
The Boston Magazine
carried "To Mr. and Mrs.________, on the Death of their Infant Son,"
which probably was a lamentation for the death of one of her own
children and which certainly foreshadowed her death three months later."
Phillis Wheatley died, uncared for and alone. As Richmond
concludes, with ample evidence, when Phillis expired on 5 December 1784,
John Peters was incarcerated, "forced to relieve himself of debt by an
imprisonment in the county jail." Their last surviving child died in
time to be buried with his mother, and, as Odell recalled, "A grandniece
of Phillis' benefactress, passing up Court Street, met the funeral of
an adult and a child: a bystander informed her that they were bearing
Phillis Wheatley to that silent mansion...."
Recent
scholarship shows that Phillis Wheatley wrote perhaps 145 poems (most of
which would have been published if the encouragers she begged for had
come forth to support the second volume), but this artistic heritage is
now lost, probably abandoned during Peters's quest for subsistence after
her death. Of the numerous letters she wrote to national and
international political and religious leaders, some two dozen notes and
letters are extant. As an exhibition of African intelligence,
exploitable by members of the enlightenment movement, by evangelical
Christians, and by other abolitionists, she was perhaps recognized even
more in England and Europe than in America. Early twentieth-century
critics of Black American literature were not very kind to Wheatley
because of her supposed lack of concern about slavery. Wheatley,
however, did have a statement to make about the institution of slavery,
and she made it to the most influential segment of eighteenth-century
society--the institutional church. Two of the greatest influences on
Phillis Wheatley's thought and poetry were the Bible and
eighteenth-century evangelical Christianity; but until fairly recently
Wheatley's critics did not consider her use of biblical allusion nor its
symbolic application as a statement against slavery. She often spoke in
explicit biblical language designed to move church members to decisive
action. For instance, these bold lines in her poetic eulogy to General
David Wooster castigate patriots who confess Christianity yet oppress
her people:
But how presumptuous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind
While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race
Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers
Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.
And in an outspoken letter to the Reverend Samson Occom,
written after Wheatley was free and published repeatedly in Boston
newspapers in 1774, she equates American slaveholding to that of pagan
Egypt in ancient times: "Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been
less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian Slavery: I don't say
they would have been contented without it, by no Means, for in every
human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of
freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and
by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert that the same
Principle lives in us."
In the past ten years, Wheatley
scholars have uncovered poems, letters, and more facts about her life
and her association with eighteenth-century black abolitionists. They
have also charted her notable use of classicism and have explicated the
sociological intent of her biblical allusions. All this research and
interpretation has proven Wheatley's disdain for the institution of
slavery and her use of art to undermine its practice. Before the end of
this century the full aesthetic, political, and religious implications
of Wheatley's art and even more salient facts about her life and works
will surely be known and celebrated by all who study the eighteenth
century and by all who revere this woman, a most important poet in the
American literary canon.
— Sondra A. O'Neale, Emory University
Further Reading
William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley: A Bio-Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981).
Margaretta Matilda Odell, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Boston: Light, 1834).
B. B. Thatcher, Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (Boston: G. W. Light/New York: Moore & Payne, 1834).
Benjamin Griffith Brawley, Note on Wheatley, in Early Negro American Writers: Selections with Biographical and Critical Introductions, edited by Brawley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 31-55.
Brawley, Negro Builders and Heroes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937).
Shirley Graham, The Story of Phillis Wheatley (New York: J. Messner, 1949).
Martha Bacon, Puritan Promenade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).
Sidney Kaplan, "Phillis Wheatley," in The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 150-170.
Merle A. Richmond, Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on
the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) and George Moses
Horton (ca. 1799-1883) (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).
Carl Bridenbaugh, "The First Published Poems of Phillis Wheatley," New England Quarterly, 42 (December 1969): 583-584.
Charles F. Heartman, Phillis Wheatley: A Critical Attempt and a Bibliography of Her Writings (New York: Printed for the author, 1915).
Mukhtar Ali Isani, "The British Reception of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects," Journal of Negro History, 66 (Summer 1981): 144-149.
Sarah Dunlap Jackson, "Letters of Phillis Wheatley and Susanna Wheatley," Journal of Negro History, 58 (April 1972): 212.
Robert C. Kuncio, "Some Unpublished Poems of Phillis Wheatley," New England Quarterly, 43 (June 1970): 287-297.
Thomas Oxley, "Survey of Negro Literature," Messenger: World's Greatest Negro Monthly, 60 (February 1927): 37-39.
Carole A. Parks, "Phillis Wheatley Comes Home," Black World, 23 (February 1974): 92-97.
Benjamin Quarles, "A Phillis Wheatley Letter," Journal of Negro History, 34 (October 1949): 462-466.
Gregory Rigsby, "Form and Content in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies," CLA Journal, 19 (December 1975): 248-257.
Rigsby, "Phillis Wheatley's Craft as Reflected in Her Revised Elegies," Journal of Negro Education, 47 (Fall 1978): 402-413.
William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975).
Robinson, "Phillis Wheatley in London," CLA Journal, 21 (December 1977): 187-201.
Robinson, ed., Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).
Charles Scruggs, "Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth Century England," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 10 (1981): 279-295.
John C. Shields, "Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary Relationship," CLA Journal, 23 (June 1980): 391-398.
Shields, "Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism," American Literature, 52 (March 1980): 97-111.
Kenneth Silverman, "Four New Letters by Phillis Wheatley," Early American Literature, 8 (Winter 1974): 257-271.
Albertha Sistrunk, "Phillis Wheatley: An Eighteenth-Century Black American Poet Revisited," CLA Journal, 23 (June 1980): 391-398.
Original manuscripts, letters, and first editions are in collections
at the Boston Public Library; Duke University Library; Massachusetts
Historical Society; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Library Company
of Philadelphia; American Antiquarian Society; Houghton Library, Harvard
University; The Schomburg Collection, New York City; Churchill College,
Cambridge; The Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh; Dartmouth College
Library; William Salt Library, Staffordshire, England; Cheshunt
Foundation, Cambridge University; British Library, London.