Wheatley, Phillis

c. 1753
December 5, 1784

The poet Phillis Wheatley was born, according to her own testimony, in Gambia, West Africa, along the fertile lowlands of the Gambia River. She was abducted at the age of seven or eight, and then sold in Boston to John and Susanna Wheatley on July 11, 1761. The horrors of the Middle Passage very likely contributed to the persistent asthma that plagued her throughout her short life. The Wheatleys apparently named the girl, who had nothing but a piece of dirty carpet to conceal her nakedness, after the slave ship Phillis, which had transported her. Nonetheless, unlike most slave owners of the time, the Wheatleys permitted Phillis to learn to read, and her poetic talent soon began to emerge.

Her earliest known piece of writing was an undated letter from 1765 (no known copy now exists) to Samson Occom, a Native American Mohegan minister and one of Dartmouth College's first graduates. The budding poet first appeared in print on December 21, 1767, in the Newport Mercury newspaper, when the author was about fourteen. The poem, "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," relates how the two gentlemen of the title narrowly escaped being drowned off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Much of her subsequent poetry also dealt with events occurring close to her Boston circle. Of her fifty-five extant poems, for example, nineteen are elegies; all but the last of these are devoted to commemorating someone known by the poet. Her last elegy is written about herself and her career.

In early October 1770, Wheatley published an elegy that was pivotal to her career. The subject of the elegy was George Whitefield, an evangelical Methodist minister and privy chaplain to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. Whitefield made seven journeys to the American colonies, where he was known as "the Voice of the Great Awakening" and "the Great Awakener." Only a week before his death in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on September 30, 1770, Whitefield preached in Boston, where Wheatley very likely heard him. As Susanna Whea-tley regularly corresponded with the countess, she and the Wheatley household may well have entertained the Great Awakener. Wheatley's vivid, ostensibly firsthand account in the elegy, replete with quotations, may have been based on an actual acquaintance with Whitefield. In any case, Wheat-ley's deft elegy became an overnight sensation and was often reprinted.

It is almost certain that the ship that carried news of Whitefield's death to the countess also carried a copy of Wheatley's elegy, which brought Wheatley to the sympathetic attention of the countess. Such an acquaintance ensured that Wheatley's elegy was also reprinted many times in London, giving the young poet the distinction of an international reputation. When Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was denied publication in Boston for racist reasons, the Countess of Huntingdon generously financed its publication in London.

Wheatley's support by Selina Hastings, and her rejection by male-dominated Boston, signaled her nourishment as a literary artist by a community of women. All these women—the countess, who encouraged and financed the publication of her Poems in 1773; Mary and Susanna Wheatley, who taught her the rudiments of reading and writing; and Obour Tanner, who could empathize probably better than anyone with her condition as a slave—were much older than Wheatley and obviously nurtured her creative development.

During the summer of 1772, Wheatley actually journeyed to England, where she assisted in the preparation of her volume for the press. While in London she enjoyed considerable recognition by such dignitaries as Lord Dartmouth, Lord Lincoln, Granville Sharp (who escorted Wheatley on several tours about London), Benjamin Franklin, and Brook Watson, a wealthy merchant who presented Wheatley with a folio edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost and who would later become lord mayor of London. Wheatley was to have been presented at court when Susanna Wheatley became ill. Wheatley was summoned to return to Boston in early August 1773. Sometime before October 18, 1773, she was granted her freedom, according to her own testimony, "at the desire of my friends in England." It seems likely, then, that if Selina Hastings had not agreed to finance Wheatley's Poems and if the poet had not journeyed to London, she would never have been manumitted.

As the American Revolution erupted, Wheatley's patriotic feelings began to separate her even more from the Wheatleys, who were loyalists. Her patriotism is clearly underscored in her two most famous Revolutionary War poems. "To His Excellency General Washington" (1775) closes with this justly famous encomium: "A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, / With gold unfading WASHINGTON! be thine." "Liberty and Peace" (1784), written to celebrate the Treaty of Paris (September 1783), declares: "And new-born Rome [i.e., America] shall give Britannia Law."

Phillis Wheatley's attitude toward slavery has also been misunderstood. Because some of her antislavery statements have been recovered only in the 1970s and 1980s, she has often been criticized for ignoring the issue.

But her position was clear: In February 1774, for example, Wheatley wrote to Samson Occom that "in every human breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance." This letter was reprinted a dozen times in American newspapers over the course of the next twelve months. Certainly Americans of Wheatley's time never questioned her attitude toward slavery after the publication of this letter.

In 1778 Wheatley married John Peters, a free African American who was a jack-of-all-trades, serving in various capacities from storekeeper to advocate for African Americans before the courts. But given the turbulent conditions of a nation caught up in the Revolution, Wheatley's fortunes began to decline steadily. In 1779 she published "Proposals for Printing by Subscription," a solicitation for funds for a new volume of poems. Although this failed to attract subscribers, it attests that the poet had been diligent with her pen since the 1773 Poems, and that she had indeed produced some three hundred pages of new poetry. This volume never appeared, however, and most of its poems are now lost.

Phillis Wheatley Peters and her newborn child died in a shack on the edge of Boston on December 5, 1784. Preceded in death by two other young children, Wheat-ley's tragic end resembles her beginning in America. Yet Wheatley has left to her largely unappreciative country a legacy of firsts: She was the first African American to publish a book, the first woman writer whose publication was urged and nurtured by a community of women, and the first American woman author who tried to earn a living by means of her writing.

On February 4, 1999, a long-lost poem by Phillis Wheatley, titled "Ocean," was read publicly for the first time in 226 years. The copy of the poem, written in Wheatley's hand, was part of the Newseum's 1999 special exhibition African American Newspeople, Newsmakers.

See also Poetry, U.S.

Bibliography

Davis, Arthur P. "Personal Elements in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley." Phylon 13 (1953): 191–198.

O'Neale, Sondra A. "A Slave's Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley's Use of Biblical Myth and Symbol." Early American Literature 21 (1986): 144–165.

Robinson, William H. Black New England Letters: The Uses of Writing in Black New England. Boston: Public Library of the City of Boston, 1977.

Robinson, William H., ed. Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings. Detroit, Mich.: Broadside Press, 1975.

Robinson, William H., ed. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Shields, John C. "Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study of Literature Relationship." College Language Association Journal 23 (1980): 377–390.

Shields, John C. "Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism." American Literature 52 (1980): 97–111.

Shields, John C. "Phillis Wheatley's Struggle for Freedom in Her Poetry and Prose." In The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Shields, John C. "Phillis Wheatley." In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith. New York: Scribner's, 1991.

john c. shields (1996)