On September 1, 1773 Poems
on Various Subjects Religious and Moral was published in London thanks
to the patronage of Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntington. It created
a considerable stir. The author
was one of the earliest female poets whose work was issued in England.
The Puritan goodwife Anne
Bradstreet had been the first
resident of the Colonies of either sex to be published when The
Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was issued without her knowledge or consent back in 1650. Less
than a handful of women had appeared in print since. Even more noteworthy—Phillis Wheatley
was a 20 year old Boston slave who had recently visited Britain in company with her master who was eager to
display her accomplishments.
All ready famous in New England,
word spread across Europe. In Paris
Voltaire himself, the very embodiment
of the Age of Reason, wrote that she, “became the most
famous African on the face of the earth” and her work was proof that Blacks could write credible verse. Continental Naval Hero John Paul Jones later
sent her some of his own writing efforts to be considered by “Phillis the
African favorite of the Nine (muses) and Apollo.” He was just one of many Yankee notables to be astonished
and impressed with her work.
Not bad for a lass who was born in West
Africa in 1753 in what is now Gambia
or Senegal, and sold by a local Chief to Arab slavers who put her and her mother on the auction block on the coast.
Peter Gwin, master of the Phillis on the account of her owner Timothy
Finch. The girl was a sickly child
about 7 years old when acquired by master
tailor John Wheatley to be groomed as
a body servant to his wife Susannah.
Whatever their original intentions, the quick
witted, bright-eyed child soon
became a family favorite and pet.
The Wheatleys were widely
read and famously liberal. They—and subsequently Phillis—attended the Old South Meeting House which became a
hot bed of Patriot fervor and the launching
pad for the Boston Tea Party.
Early on the Wheatley’s teen age daughter Mary began to tutor the child and was soon joined by
her brother Nathaniel.
By the age of 12, Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics and difficult
passages from the Bible. At the age of 14, she wrote
her first poem, To the University of Cambridge, in New England, a tribute to Harvard College which she could
never dream of attending. Her
master and mistress were kind and
her household duties no more onerous than those expected of their
own children. In fact they seemed to have
regarded her as a virtual daughter and taken great pride in her precocious achievements.
For her part Phillis shared the
interests and passions of the family—the style
of liberal Christianity that was
taking hold in Boston and
shedding the harsh edges of Calvinist
Puritanism, the Enlightenment ideals
embraced by educated elite of
the city, and the Patriot
cause. All of it would become the
subject matter of her poetry.
Wheatley circulated Phillis’s work among his acquaintances and Patriot cohorts and she frequently recited at her mistress’s teas and other social gatherings.
Phillis acquired a local fame in Boston, which proved to
be a dangerous thing. Many could
not believe that a Black girl could write such accomplished poems and suspected
skullduggery if not worse. It had been more than 100 years since the
Salem Witch trials and they had
become an embarrassment but anti-witch laws remained in effect. Janet
Horne had been burned in
Scotland as recently as 1727. Plenty of people still believed in witchery and Boston had a long history
of mob violence. African natives suspected of maintaining occult pagan practices
from their tribal homes were especially vulnerable. After all, hadn’t the Black slave Hecuba been at the very heart of the
Salem accusations? To some witchcraft was the only explanation
for a Black teenager penning highly
literate verse.
The Wheatley family, prominent
Patriots, had enemies of their own in rapidly
polarizing Boston. If they could be proved to be foisting a fraud for nefarious
purposes on the citizens, it
could discredit the whole Patriot
movement.
The potential scandal grew to such serious proportions that the
Wheatley family agreed to allow Phillis to be examined by a panel of some of Boston’s most distinguished residents in 1772. The panel was actually carefully balanced.
On one hand it included the city’s most liberal Minister, the crypto-unitarian
Rev. Charles Chauncey; merchant, smuggler, and Patriot leader John Hancock and on the other Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson, and his Lt. Governor Andrew Oliver. A
fifth member, Scottish born merchant
John Erving could be considered a neutral
party.
After a close examination under which Phillis proved poised and erudite, proved
that she could read and write with ease, and was able to intelligently converse on complicated
theological issues, the panel issued a unanimous
statement agreeing that she was the true
author of the works attributed to
her.
Armed with the endorsement, John
Wheatley sought a Boston publisher
for Phillis’s work but no local printer would
touch it. Despite the testimony of the
elite, the rough and tumble—and highly maniputable—Boston mob of apprentices, port idlers, and street
toughs had exploded at less provocation than a Black poetess.
Wheatley’s work was often directed
to famous people. As early as 1768, she wrote To
the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, praising King George III for repealing the Stamp Act. She was then only
15 years old. Two years later she saluted the popular evangelist George
Whitefield in a poem that was printed as a broadside and particularly praised. Much of her work reflected
Christian themes.
But there were also often threads that seem to reflect her West African ancestral sun worship. She frequently referenced the Sun, often
couched in terms from classical
antiquity—Aurora, Apollo, Phoebus, and Sol—particularly
as personal inspiration. She also used
the common literary device of the
Sun as a homonym for the Son—Christ. Later those pagan references were chastised in An Address to Miss Phillis
Wheatley by another enslaved poet, Juppiter
Hammon.
What is missing from Wheatley’s work was much of the personal. Nowhere are their girlish yearnings apart from religion. There is no contemplation of the wonder
of nature, except for the Sun and Moon
and certainly no hint of love or romance. Wheatley wanted to
be seen as a woman of the mind not
of the heart.
Even more striking is the absence of
much mention of her condition of servitude.
She touched on in only twice, once seeming to look on it as a blessing for saving her from paganism.
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 dye.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join t’ angelic train.
Of course Wheatley’s personal
experience in the bosom of a supportive and even loving family was far different than the norm. Even there other slaves had to take up the menial chores that would have been expected of her while her master and mistress lavished a superior education on her and encouraged her to write. But
in another poem she made a reference to slavery as “a cruel fate” more as an observation of others than a statement of
her own condition.
In 1773 Phillis, always in delicate health, suffered from asthma that Boston physicians could not treat. Apparently that was the main reason that John
Wheatley sent his son Nathaniel to sail with her to London. But he also sent her collected poems and the
prestigious testimonial in hopes of securing a British publisher.
Phillis Wheatley made quite a splash
in London which was often enchanted by charming exotics. She was
granted an audience with the Lord Mayor
of London and introduced in fashionable salons. She also met Benjamin Franklin, then the Colonial
Agent in London. An audience with
King George, who she had once honored in verse, was arranged, but she had to
return to Boston with her master before the appointment could be kept. She also corresponded with several distinguished personages. In a letter to the Rev. Samsom Occom, a Mohegan
from Connecticut who became a prominent Presbyterian minister, she
praised his beliefs of how the slaves should be given their natural born
rights in the Colonies. She also
corresponded with the philanthropist
John Thornton who promoted her work in influential circles.
Those circles may have included the
Countess of Huntington, whose personal
chaplain had been George Whitefield.
Wheatley’s ode to the Evangelist had been used in an oration at his funeral and was widely circulated in
England. That is how the Countess came
to underwrite Wheatley’s book
without ever having met her. She hoped
the two could meet when the bookseller and
publisher Archibald Bell issued her
volume.
Alas, before the two could meet and
before the Royal audience, Wheatley received word that her mistress had fallen
seriously ill and had requested her to come home. While she was at sea the book appeared in London
to wide acclaim. Copies would soon be
sent to Boston.
The Wheatleys manumitted Phillis that October, not long after her book appeared
in Boston book stalls. Some scholars believe that for legal reasons the emancipation was not technically completed until John Wheatley’s
death in 1778. At any rate, Phillis
continued to live with the family, supported by them, and given some pittance in wages. She also had a modest independent income from the sale
of her book.
Susannah Wheatley died in 1774, a
stunning blow to Phillis.
Meanwhile the furor over the Stamp Act had energized and radicalized
the Patriots. After the Boston Tea Party in December 1774 Boston Harbor was closed to trade and the
city was occupied by British troops.
Phillis was deeply supportive of the cause and wrote about it in verse,
particularly Columbia which gained the admiring attention of none other than
George Washington with whom she
corresponded. In 1775 while Washington
was conducting his Siege of Boston
she sent him her poem To His Excellency, George Washington
to which he warmly responded. In
March 1776 she was able to personally visit her hero at his headquarters at Cambridge. The next month Thomas Paine published her patriotic verse in his Pennsylvania
Gazette.
It was probably the high point of Wheatley’s life. Things were about to go downhill in a hurry.
Both John Wheatley and his daughter
Mary died in 1778 without apparently making provision for Phillis in his will.
Nathaniel was married. Phillis was without a home and any immediate prospects. She completed enough new work to submit a
second volume of poetry but with the loss of her patrons could not afford to
get it printed or to secure the advance subscription that could have
made it possible. Boston was still
suffering from the loss of most of its trade
due to the war and in a deep
depression rendering many of her supporters unable to afford even the
modest cost of a subscription. Many of
the poems intended for the book were subsequently published in newspapers or as
broadsides, but they brought little, if any income.
About that time Wheatley a married a
handsome, charismatic free Black named
John Peters. He was a noted dandy and very ambitious. He operated
a grocery, acted as a pettifogging lawyer to other Blacks,
and had several other business
schemes. Some of Wheatley’s friends
thought he was a braggart, blowhard,
and schemer. Whatever he was, he was not a good businessman or at least he could
not succeed in economically depressed Boston.
Soon after Phillis lost a
first child in infancy, the couple was so destitute
that they often went actually hungry.
She lost a second child.
Phillis found work as a scullery maid in a boarding house, the kind of physical
labor that she had never performed as a slave. Then, while she was pregnant for the third time, her husband abandoned her. On December 5, 1784 Phillis Wheatley
Peters died after childbirth. She was 31
years old or thereabouts. The child
survived her by only hours.
Most of her known poems were finally
collected and issued in the 1830.
The poem in which Wheatley addressed
slavery more directly than her famous apology for it was written to a noted English abolitionist.
To The Rt. Hon. William, Earl Of Dartmouth
Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The northern clime beneath her genial ray,
Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:
Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,
Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,
While in thine hand with pleasure we behold
The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold.
Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies
She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:
Soon as appear’d the Goddess long desir’d,
Sick at the view, she languish’d and expir’d;
Thus from the splendors of the morning light
The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,
And thee we ask thy favours to renew,
Since in thy pow’r, as in thy will before,
To sooth the griefs, which thou did’st once deplore.
May heav’nly grace the sacred sanction give
To all thy works, and thou for ever live
Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,
Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,
But to conduct to heav’ns refulgent fane,
May fiery coursers sweep th’ ethereal plain,
And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,
Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God.
—Phillis Wheatley
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