Constitutional Voices: Phillis Wheatley
Throughout her life, poet Phillis Wheatley intersected with several of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Today, her work’s impact is being debated as it was during her brief career.
“She entered the room—perhaps in Boston’s Town Hall, the Old Colony House—carrying a manuscript consisting of twenty-odd poems that she claims to have written. No doubt the young woman would have been demure, soft-spoken, and frightened, for she was about to undergo one of the oddest oral examinations on record, one that would determine the course of her life and the fate of her work, and one that, ultimately, would determine whether she remained a slave or would be set free. The stakes, in other words, were as high as they could get for an oral exam. She is on trial and so is her race.”
In his 2003 book The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the renowned scholar of African American literature and culture, conjures this mise-en-scène as he imagines the process by which a young Phillis Wheatley was forced to prove her literary capabilities to a cadre of eighteen men self-described as “the most respectable characters in Boston.” The exact nature of this exam is lost to history, living only in the creative imaginations of writers like Gates; indeed, some historians argue that an explicit examination never occurred at all—Vincent Carretta, a Wheatley biographer, suspects that these “respectable characters” were part of the same affluent Boston social milieu as Wheatley’s enslavers, and, by interacting with the young Phillis over time, had become convinced of her authorship.
Whatever did or did not occur in her authentication process, we do know that, somehow, Wheatley convinced these eighteen men to endorse her work. Prefacing her 1773 publication, Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral, one can find an attestation stating that “WE whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the POEMS specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl.”
An attestation of authorship seems odd to our 21st-century sensibilities. However, this verification was, unfortunately, necessary for Wheatley in the 18th century. She was writing at a time when the thought of a Black, female, enslaved poet was unthinkable to most Euro-American audiences. In fact, with Poems on Various Subjects, Wheatley became the first enslaved woman to publish a book.
So, who was Phillis Wheatley? How did she come to be such a central figure in colonial Boston’s literary landscape?
The woman we now know as Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 in West Africa. The exact location of her birth is still under debate: until recently, most historians had believed Wheatley to be from the Senegambia region; however, new scholarship has posited that she may have been born in what is present-day Sierra Leone. At roughly 7 years old, she was kidnapped by slave traders and brought to Boston on a slave vessel called the Phillis––after which she would later be renamed. In Boston, she was purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley, a wealthy merchant family. Phillis quickly displayed an aptitude for learning and was eventually tutored by the Wheatleys’ daughter, Mary. Phillis received a classical education: learning Latin, reading English literature, and studying astronomy and geography.
Phillis was drawn to verse, penning her first poem in 1767. In 1770, she attracted transatlantic attention by authoring an elegiac poem to George Whitefield, a prominent British evangelist. The 1773 publication of Poems on Various Subjects made her a veritable celebrity, garnering the admiration of figures such as French philosopher Voltaire, as well as Philadelphia luminary Benjamin Franklin.
Indeed, throughout her life, Wheatley intersected with several of the nation’s Founding Fathers. For example, John Hancock, whose famous signature is immortalized on the Declaration of Independence, was one of the eighteen men who attested to Wheatley’s authorship. Moreover, in 1775, Wheatley penned an ode to then-General George Washington, which she sent directly to him, accompanied by a letter expressing her excitement over his appointment as “Generalissimo of the armies of North America.” In February of the following year, Washington responded, praising Wheatley’s “great poetical Talents” and promising to see the author “so favourd [sic] by the Muses.”
Despite her undeniable talent, Wheatley’s commercial success did not endure. After receiving her freedom in 1773, Phillis remained at the Wheatley home until John Wheatley’s death in 1778. Soon after, she married John Peters, a free Black man. Peters was initially a prosperous businessman; however, he fell victim to the post-Revolution economic depression, from which the family never recovered. Beyond this point, Wheatley Peters (as it is now customary to refer to her after her marriage) was largely unsuccessful in publishing her poems—a Boston printer denied her request to put together a second volume of her work, which she intended to dedicate to Benjamin Franklin.
However, even while working as a maid, she never stopped writing. Scholars now believe that Wheatley Peters may have written nearly 150 poems during her marriage to John Peters. These records are, unfortunately, lost to history.
Tragically, Phillis Wheatley Peters died, impoverished, on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31.
Yet even after her death, Wheatley Peters—the nation’s first Black poet—remained an important figure in the early Republic’s debates over slavery. Abolitionists frequently turned to her as evidence against prevailing notions of Black unintelligence and inhumanity. Defenders of slavery and detractors of Black capability, such as Thomas Jefferson, likewise focused on Phillis Wheatley Peters—trying to discredit her work. Indeed, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson infamously wrote of Wheatley Peters that “Religion indeed has produced a Phillis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions composed under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Wheatley Peters would remain the paradigmatic example of African American literary talent until the ascendance of Frederick Douglass as a national figure in the 1840s.
Well after the abolition of slavery, debates around Wheatley Peters and her poetic work have endured—stretching into the 20th century. In the 1960s and 1970s, echoing previous criticisms by novelist Richard Wright and literary scholar J. Saunders Redding, Black activists took umbrage with Wheatley Peters for what they interpreted as accommodationist or suppliant views on race and slavery. Most of this opprobrium traces to the eight lines which comprise the poem, On Being Brought from Africa to America:
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
Gates suggests that, historically, On Being Brought from Africa to America has been “the most reviled poem in African American literature.” And, at face value, Wheatley Peters’ words seem to validate the logic that enslavers used to justify the kidnapping and ownership of human beings. However, Gates and other more recent scholars have attempted to rehabilitate Wheatley Peters’ legacy by challenging reductive interpretations of her racial politics.
They have demonstrated that, elsewhere in her oeuvre and in personal letters to friends, Wheatley Peters is sharply critical of the institution of slavery and the hypocrisy of American racism. Moreover, historians and literary scholars have highlighted Wheatley’s engagement with 18th-century Anglo-America abolitionists, such as Reverend Samuel Hopkins and Granville Sharpe.
For far too long, the scope of Wheatley Peters’ political vision was occluded by criticism of this one poem; luckily, we are beginning to move beyond overly simplistic categories and rediscover Phillis Wheatley Peters as a full and complex writer and human being.
Today, Wheatley Peters’ poems are studied in universities across the country, and she has rightly been returned to her place in the pantheon of African American letters.
Trey Sullivan is a Content Fellow at the National Constitution Center and a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Marshall Scholar.