Wheatley, Phillis

Source:

 African American National Biography

Wheatley, Phillis

(c. 1753–5 Dec. 1784),

poet and cultivator of the epistolary writing style, was born in Gambia, Africa, probably along the fertile lowlands of the Gambia River. She was enslaved as a child of seven or eight and sold in Boston to John and Susanna Wheatley on 11 July 1761. The horrors of the Middle Passage likely contributed to her persistent trouble with asthma. The Wheatleys apparently named the girl, who had nothing but a piece of dirty carpet to conceal her nakedness, after the slaver, the Phillis, that transported her.

The Wheatleys were more kindly toward Phillis than were most slaveowners of the time, permitting her to learn to read. The poet in Wheatley soon began to emerge. She published her first poem on 21 December 1765 in the Newport Mercury when she was about twelve. The poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” relates how these two gentlemen narrowly escaped drowning off Cape Cod.

Much of her subsequent poetry deals, as well, with events occurring close to her Boston circle. Of her fifty-five extant poems, nineteen are elegies; all but the last of them are devoted to the commemoration of someone she knew personally. Wheatley herself and her career are the subjects of her last elegy. One possible explanation for her preoccupation with this genre may be that she recalled the delivery of oral laments by the women of her tribal group whose responsibility it was to make such deliveries.

In October 1770 Wheatley published an elegy that must be called pivotal to her career. The subject of this elegy is George Whitefield, evangelical Methodist minister, a close friend of Charles Wesley, and privy chaplain to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. During his career Whitefield had made seven journeys to the American colonies, where he was known as the “Voice of the Great Awakening” and as the “Great Awakener.” Only a week before his death in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on 30 September 1770, Whitefield preached in Boston where Wheatley very likely heard him. As Susanna Wheatley 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 quotes the minister is alleged to have spoken, may, then, have been based on actual acquaintance. Owing to this evangel's extreme popularity, Wheatley'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. It was this elegy that 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 an international reputation. This acquaintance also ensured that Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in print, not in Boston where the project was rejected for racist reasons, but in London, printed in 1773 by the English publisher Archibald Bell and financed by the countess.

Wheatley's support by Hastings and her rejection by white male–dominated Boston signaled her nourishment as a literary artist by a community of women. While Wheatley received encouragement for the writing of her poems by prominent men of Boston such as the ministers Mather Byles (nephew of Cotton Mather) and Samuel Cooper, she was taught to read the King James Bible by Susanna Wheatley and probably as well by her daughter Mary. In addition, Susanna promoted Wheatley's publication of her poems in local newspapers.

Wheatley displays in her poems a sophisticated classicism. She knew Latin well enough to craft the excellent epyllion (or short epic) “Niobe in Distress …” from book six of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Of Wheatley's twenty-two extant letters, seven are addressed to Obour Tanner, an African American who many have speculated may have been forced to make the journey of the Middle Passage with Wheatley; in any event, the intimacy of their relationship is self-evident from the tone and detail of Wheatley's letters to her (none of Tanner's responses are extant). Tanner must have been a close friend and probably a valuable counselor and confidante of the poet.

All these women (the countess, who encouraged and financed the publication of her Poems; Mary and Susanna Wheatley, who taught her to read and write; and Obour Tanner, who could empathize probably better than anyone with her condition as a slave) were much older than the poet and obviously nurtured her development. Their importance to Wheatley's development is virtually incalculable. It is not excessive to submit that without this community of women, Wheatley's poems may never have been printed. Although Anne Bradstreet's poems, Jane Turell's, and those of other women poets who preceded Wheatley were published by then, the publication of her poems through the efforts of women marks the first such occasion in the annals of American letters.

During the summer of 1773 Wheatley journeyed to England, where she assisted in the preparation of her volume for the press. While in London she enjoyed considerable recognition from such dignitaries as Lord Dartmouth, Lord Lincoln, Granville Sharp (who escorted Wheatley on several tours about London), Benjamin Franklin, and Brooks Watson, a wealthy merchant who presented Wheatley with a folio edition of Milton's Paradise Lost and who later became lord mayor of London. Wheatley was to have been presented at court when, owing to an illness of Susanna Wheatley's, she was summoned to return to Boston in August. It is significant that sometime before 18 October 1773 Wheatley was granted her freedom, according to her own testimony, “at the desire of my friends in England” (Collected Works, ed. Shields [1988]: 170). It follows then that if Hastings had not agreed to finance Wheatley's Poems and if the poet had not then journeyed to London, she probably would never have been manumitted.

When the American Revolution erupted, Wheatley's patriotic feelings separated her even more from the Wheatleys. After Susanna died on 3 March 1774, Wheatley's relationship with her Loyalist former master doubtless became strained. As her position in regard to independence has often been confused with the Loyalist position of John Wheatley and his son Nathaniel, her patriotism requires underscoring. Throughout her career she repeatedly celebrated American freedom, indeed rivaling Philip Freneau's claim to the title “Poet of the American Revolution.” Her two most famous revolutionary war poems are “To His Excellency General Washington” (1775), which closes with the encomium “A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine / With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine,” and “Liberty and Peace” (1784), written to celebrate the Treaty of Paris and containing the forceful line “And new-born Rome [i.e., America] shall give Britannia Law.”

Another misunderstood contribution of Phillis Wheatley is her attitude toward slavery. Because major statements Wheatley made attacking the institution of slavery were recovered only in the 1970s and 1980s, she was earlier thought to have ignored the issue. In February 1774, for example, Wheatley wrote to Samson Occom: “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 next twelve months. Certainly whites and blacks of Wheatley's time never questioned her attitude toward slavery.

Later in the same year Wheatley observed in a letter to John Thornton, the English philanthropist, “The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dang'rous than its smiles and flatteries, and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of Wisdom.” This entire letter appears cast in the tone of the African American who has found her white would-be benefactor's motive to be less than philanthropic and indeed hollow or even destructive, much in the manner of the fictions of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. In an elegy of July 1778 on the death of Major General David Wooster, who, according to Wheatley, “fell a martyr in the Cause of Freedom,” Wheatley challenges the notion that whites can “hope to find / Divine acceptance with th' Almighty mind” when “they disgrace / And hold in bondage Afric's blameless race.”

The year 1778 was a pivotal one for Wheatley. Soon after John Wheatley died, Phillis 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 Wheatley's fortunes began to decline. In 1779 she published a set of “Proposals” for a new volume of poems, probably in an effort to mitigate her worsening poverty. While the “Proposals” failed to attract subscribers, they show that she had produced some three hundred pages of new poetry since the publication of Poems six years earlier. The volume never appeared, and, sadly, most of its poems are lost.

Wheatley's final proposal for a volume of poems in September 1784 went virtually unnoticed. This volume, whose title was to have been Poems and Letters on Various Subjects, would have included thirteen letters to dignitaries such as Benjamin Rush, the Earl of Dartmouth, and the Countess of Huntingdon. Once having carried a reputation of such distinction that it earned her an audience with General Washington in March 1776, Wheatley and her newborn child died alone in a shack on the edge of Boston. It is believed she died as a result of an infection from the birth.

Wheatley's end, like her beginning in America, was pitiable. Yet this genius of the pen left to the country a legacy of firsts: the first African American to publish a book, the mother of African American letters, 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.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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