Sincerity: Phillis Wheatley and the Enslavers' Avarice

Introduction

Phillis Wheatley’s life and work stand as a testament to the power of intellect and virtue in overcoming prejudice. Her poetry not only challenged the assumptions of her time but also illuminated universal truths about freedom, happiness, and moral excellence.

Proving Genius in a Skeptical World

Phillis Wheatley’s poetry did not circulate freely on its own merits. When a London publisher agreed to print her work, he required proof that an enslaved Black woman could have written poems of such classical sophistication. In response, a group of prominent white Bostonians—including John Hancock and the colonial governor—publicly affirmed her authorship. This moment, sometimes called the “trial” of Phillis Wheatley, reveals how deeply insincere assumptions about race shaped the Founding era. Yet Wheatley met this injustice without deceit or bitterness. Wheatley met this skepticism not with protest or exaggeration, but with mastery. Her command of the classical and moral tradition the Founders revered offered quiet but decisive evidence that the virtues they celebrated were not confined by race. In doing so, she answered doubt with sincerity and contradiction with truth.

Virtue as the Path to Happiness

Wheatley’s poetry drew on the same classical and Christian sources that shaped the Founders’ moral thought. Like Cicero and the Stoics, she treated virtue as the foundation of happiness, not pleasure or power. In On Virtue, she presented moral excellence as the means by which the soul rises toward true fulfillment. Her work also examined the struggle between reason and passion, a central theme in Founding-era philosophy. Wheatley showed that self-mastery and moral clarity—not domination or indulgence—were the marks of a truly free and happy life.

Applying Revolutionary Principles Universally

Wheatley’s sincerity was most evident in her insistence on consistency. In poems such as her address to the Earl of Dartmouth and in elegies written during the Revolution, she placed the colonies’ claims to liberty alongside her own condition as an enslaved person. The implication was clear without being stated. Principles professed as universal could not be limited by race or status without losing their meaning. By speaking in the moral language the Founders respected, Wheatley illuminated the distance between American ideals and American practices while remaining faithful to the ideals themselves.

The Founders understood the pursuit of happiness as a moral project rooted in virtue and self-mastery. Wheatley’s life shows what sincerity looks like when those ideals are applied consistently. Jefferson’s contradictions show what happens when principles are subordinated to convenience.

Wheatley and the Measure of Sincerity

Phillis Wheatley lived the principles she expressed. Her poetry aligned thought, word, and moral action, even as she endured enslavement and exclusion. In doing so, she embodied sincerity as the Founders defined it: truth without deceit and virtue without evasion.

Her life reveals that sincerity does not require power or comfort. It requires moral consistency.

Jefferson and the Failure of Alignment

The response of Thomas Jefferson exposes the cost of insincerity. While praising liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson dismissed Wheatley’s poetry and denied the intellectual equality of Black people. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination.

"Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Wheatly; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem.

Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head."

At the same time, he maintained a life of comfort made possible by enslaved labor, including his own children by Sally Hemings.

Jefferson’s racial ideology and self-justification reveal how avarice—attachment to comfort, power, and status—distorts moral judgment. His failure was not ignorance of principle, but unwillingness to live by it.

Together, these perspectives reveal a central lesson of the Founding era: happiness cannot be sustained without sincerity, and a constitutional democracy cannot endure when its ideals are proclaimed but not practiced.