Wheatley, Phillis

By: John C. Shields

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Wheatley, Phillis

Sex:  Female

Born:  Senegal
c.1753

Died:  Near Boston, Massachusetts, United States
5 December 1784

Activity/Profession:  Slave, Letter Writer, Poet

(b. c. 1753; d. 5 December 1784),
Revolutionary era poet and author.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book and the second American woman to publish a book of poems (Anne Bradstreet was the first). The volume was her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

Early Life and Education

Because she herself identifies Gambia in “Phillis's Reply” as the land of her birth and because her slender facial features (long forehead, thin lips, well-defined cheekbones, and small nose) resemble those of the present-day Fulani, a people who occupied the region of the Gambia River during the eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley was probably born of the Gambian Fulani. At the time of her purchase in Boston on or about 11 July 1761, she was losing her front baby teeth, suggesting that she was seven or eight at that time and that she had been born around 1753. The name of the slave ship that transported her was the Phillis, and we can only speculate about the discomfort that this intelligent and sensitive child experienced because she was named after this ill-fated vessel. Her name must have served as a lifelong, moment-to-moment reminder of the horrid Middle Passage from Africa to America.

The only memory of her mother that Wheatley cared to recall to her white captors was that of her mother pouring “out water before the sun at his rising” and then prostrating herself in the direction of the rising sun (toward Mecca); this same sun subsequently became the central image of her poetry. On the numerous occasions when the poet employs solar imagery, she only infrequently articulates the commonly occurring eighteenth-century western pun on sun-Son (Christ); rather, her sun is more often simply the life-giving sun of nature, symbolizing her mother's devotion. Her mother's practice of this daily ritual suggests syncretism of hierophantic solar worship (usually practiced by the African aristocracy) and Islam, which by the mid-eighteenth century had established a presence within the Gambia region of West Africa. Wheatley's later blending in her poems of solar imagery, Judeo-Christian thought and figures, and images from ancient classicism bespeaks complex multicultural commitments, not the least of which is to her African heritage.

Wheatley's principal biographer, Margarita Matilda Oddell, recorded that Wheatley “was frequently seen,” shortly after her purchase by John and Susanna Wheatley, “endeavoring to make letters upon the wall with a piece of chalk or charcoal.” Perhaps these letters were Arabic characters, but in any case her efforts seem to have prompted Mary Wheatley, one of the Wheatley twins (Nathaniel was the other), to teach Wheatley how to read the English Bible. Her master John wrote in a letter dated 14 November 1772 (a portion of which appears in the prefatory material of her 1773 Poems) that “by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language.” He noted, “She has a great Inclination to learn the Latin Tongue, and has made some Progress in it.” Indeed, she had by the next year mastered Latin so well that for Poems she rendered into heroic couplets the Niobe episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses with such dexterity that she created one of its finest English translations.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book and the second American woman to publish a book of poetry—her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral of 1773, in which the drawing shown here appeared.

Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

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Significantly, Wheatley did not stop with mere translation; she added so many interpolations to Ovid's original (such as invocation to the muse, long speeches by Niobe and a goddess, and machinery of the gods) that she has effectively recast the Latin to create her own epyllion, or short epic.

Early Patriot Writings

Wheatley's first memorable composition appears to have been a letter to Samson Occom, the Mohegan minister, described in the prefatory letter by her master as written in 1765. Her first published poem was printed on 21 December 1767 in the Newport Mercury, a colonial newspaper of Newport, Rhode Island, where her black friend Obour Tanner resided. Some have speculated provocatively that Wheatley and Tanner were brought over together on the Phillis. In any event, Wheatley corresponded with Tanner with greater tenacity than with any other known correspondent. Later evidence suggested that these two visited one another frequently as well, with Wheatley traveling round-trip from Boston to Newport.

Wheatley, as a young woman, may have socialized with the other young women of Boston who joined the regular meetings of the singing schools conducted by William Billings, America's first full-time composer and choirmaster. Evidence that Wheatley and Billings knew each other has surfaced from the publication of Wheatley's elegy on Samuel Cooper's death, for appended to a six-page version of the Cooper elegy is a two-page anthem “set to Musick by Mr. Billings” to be sung at Cooper's funeral. Billings's 1770 The New England Psalm-Singer, the first collection of original anthems published by an American, included one piece entitled “Africa,” which may well have been a paean to Wheatley. As early as 2 October 1769, Billings ran an ad in the Boston Gazette that read “John Barrey and William Billings Begs Leave to inform the Publick, that they propose to open a Singing School This Night, near the Old South Meeting-House, where any Person inclining to learn to sing may be attended upon at said School with fidelity and Dispatch.” The Old South Boston Meeting House was Wheatley's church and the designation “any Person,” not limiting sex or race, could have appealed to her.

One possible motivation for Wheatley's consistent patriotism might have been her close association with Old South Church itself. This church was the site of the town meeting that followed the Boston Massacre and that resulted in the expulsion of the royal governor. Wheatley's poem “On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March” was most likely about the Boston Massacre and would surely have celebrated the martyrdom of Crispus Attucks, the black man who organized the “affray.” “To Samuel Quincy, Esq; a Panegyrick,” also non-extant, doubtless extolled Quincy, attorney for the Wheatley family and prosecutor of the British troops who fired on the American colonists in the massacre. This same Old South Church became the site of the massacre's anniversary orations, one of which was delivered by John Hancock, who signed Wheatley's letter of attestation as well as the Declaration of Independence. Here also was held the organizational meeting of the Boston Tea Party.

Still, Wheatley would not have required a building as a setting in which to learn the meaning of freedom. As a slave until mid-October 1773, this poet chose the American quest for independence hardly by accident. American patriot rhetoric must have held an inexorable attraction for one who struggled so determinedly in her poetry for freedom. The fact that Wheatley was a communicant of the largely patriot Old South Church, though John and Susanna Wheatley attended the more Loyalist New South Church, has gone relatively unnoticed. For example, as recently as 1982, J. Saunders Redding published in the Dictionary of American Negro Biography a sketch of Wheatley in which he claimed she was, along with the entire Wheatley family, a faithful Loyalist.

Little could be farther from the truth. Not only was Mary Wheatley married, by January 1771, to the fiery patriot John Lathrop, minister of Old North Church (largely a patriot congregation), but Wheatley herself wrote no poetry on behalf of the Tories' predicament. It is true that John and Susanna were indeed Loyalists, and it is likely that their son Nathaniel, the other twin, who remained in England when Wheatley returned to Boston in September 1773, was a staunch Loyalist, as well. Benjamin Franklin, who was in England at the same time as Wheatley, remarked in a letter of 7 July 1773, “I went to see the Black Poetess and offer'd her any Services I could do her. Before I left the House, I understood her Master was there and had sent her to me but did not come into the Room himself, and I thought was not pleased with the Visit.” The poet's political stance must have been uncomfortable to maintain in view of the divisive attitudes within the family.

Wheatley addressed patriot themes throughout her career, writing poems dedicated to George Washington, General David Wooster, and the declaration of peace in the 1783 Treaty of Paris; for this last occasion, she wrote the poem “Liberty and Peace.” Such a political position, doubtless known by the citizens of Boston, may have discouraged publication of a volume of Wheatley's poems in Boston in 1772. Whether or not the poet's politics played a role in this, racism definitely did play a decisive role, for the Boston public would not support “anything of the kind” to be printed. Wheatley was, however, soon to find a more sympathetic backer in England. Largely because of Wheatley's publication in 1770 of her most famous elegy, “On the Death of Mr. George Whitefield,” a poem widely printed in broadside on both sides of the Atlantic, the poet came to the attention of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, a wealthy philanthropist whose personal chaplain Whitefield had been. When the countess heard that Boston would not endorse Wheatley's volume, she agreed to back its appearance financially in London.

The First Volume of Poems

Wheatley's first proposal for a volume was made on 29 February 1772, and almost a year and a half elapsed before the volume finally went to press in July 1773. The collection as originally proposed was quite different from the 1773 volume; in effect, it was two separate volumes. Such titles as “On America,” “On the Death of Master Seider [Snider], who was killed by Ebenezer Richardson, 1770” (Snider was arguably, according to Wheatley, “the first martyr for the common good”), “On the Arrival of the Ships of War, and the Landing of the Troops,” “On the Affray in King-Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March,” and “To Samuel Quincy, Esq; a Panegyrick” had all been eliminated by July 1773 and replaced by such new titles as “To Maecenas,” “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” “Hymn to the Morning,” “Hymn to the Evening,” “Isaiah,” “On Recollection,” “On Imagination,” “Hymn to Humanity,” “To S. M.,” and “Niobe in Distress.”

Though the earlier volume would have had much more appeal to an American patriot audience, Wheatley may have hoped that the 1773 Poems would appeal aesthetically to an audience that would find pro-American poems inflammatory. The 1772 volume's subject was American patriot politics; if published, Wheatley arguably could have been the author of the first book of Revolutionary War poems, challenging Philip Freneau's claim to this distinction. The 1773 Poems, however, has for its subject poetry, or rather how and why one Phillis Wheatley should write poetry.

Nonethelesss, the poems that Wheatley added to the 1773 volume are among her best; the year and a half between March 1772 and July 1773 was unusually productive, a period in which this poet matured as an artist. Finding her freedom unattainable still, Wheatley turned inward to construct a poetics of liberation. In her most powerful and best poem, “On Imagination,” as a poet with absolute power over the words of her poems she can “with new worlds amaze th'unbounded soul.” In the very next line of this piece, she constructs a new world not bound by winter's iron bands and instead populated by fragrant flowers and forests heavy with verdant leaves. This world into which she escapes is more redolent of her African Gambia than of a Christian paradise. As the consummate romantic poet John Keats was to learn some forty years later, Wheatley realizes that no poet can indefinitely sustain a poetic world; hence, she reluctantly leaves “the pleasing views” and returns to a winter whose starkest reality is the condition of slavery.

The poet's letter of 18 October 1773, to David Wooster, enumerating her activities in London during the past summer, announces the following: “Since my return to America my Master has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom.” She was freed, then, because of events that occurred in England. This same letter reveals that while Wheatley was in London she met such dignitaries as Thomas Gibbon, Granville Sharp, Brook Watson (later lord mayor of London), and the Earl of Dartmouth. Dartmouth gave Wheatley five guineas with which he encouraged her to purchase Alexander Pope's Complete Works “as the best he could recommend to my perusal.” While it is certain that Wheatley was well acquainted with many of Pope's works before this time (for instance, her familiarity with Pope is demonstrated in “To Maecenas”), Dartmouth's recommendation to the poet that she examine Pope's complete opus suggests either that the earl was unaware of Wheatley's knowledge of Pope or that she was not as thoroughly steeped in Pope's works as has heretofore been assumed.

Regarding the Issue of Slavery

Regarding Wheatley's attitude toward slavery, in a letter to Samson Occom of 11 February 1774, she presents her most eloquent and emphatic condemnation of slavery when she declares, “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.” Wheatley issued this magnificent indictment of slavery after her own manumission had been accomplished, hence refuting the notion that she was unconcerned for the fate of her black brothers and sisters still suffering under the yoke of slavery. The letter eventually saw almost a dozen reprintings in New England newspapers before 1780.

In October 1775, Wheatley wrote a poem in honor of George Washington; this piece she mailed to the commander in chief of the Continental Army, receiving an enthusiastic reply from the general and an invitation to visit him at his headquarters. Washington passed Wheatley's encomium on to a friend; subsequently, the poem was printed several times as an instrument for the patriot cause. Wheatley accepted Washington's invitation, and met with him privately for thirty to forty-five minutes in his Cambridge headquarters. This poem and Wheatley's visit may have contributed to Washington's anguish about the slavery question in his later years.

In Wheatley's final years, nevertheless, she met with disappointment after disappointment. In 1778, the year of her marriage to John Peters, John Wheatley died, leaving her with greatly limited resources. The very next year, one senses almost desperation in the impulse behind her decision to try to publish a new volume of poems. This attempt may have failed not because of racist reasons but because a country engaged in revolution has little time or money for poetry. Even so, this volume projects some three hundred pages of poetry, only a small portion of which has been reclaimed. Until that manuscript is recovered (many think Peters took the manuscript south to Philadelphia after his wife's death), poems by Wheatley will probably continue to surface. During the last year of her life, Wheatley published what is perhaps her most moving funeral elegy on the death of her mentor, Samuel Cooper, as well as a poem celebrating the victory and peace of the American Revolution and another elegy. The elegy on Cooper describes its subject as “A Friend sincere, whose mild indulgent rays/Encouraged oft, and oft approv'd her lays.” The paean to the Revolution boldly asserts “And new-born Rome shall give Britannia Law.”

Legacy

While neither of these poems suggests a weakening of her poetic powers, her powerful “An Elegy on Leaving—” does imply that the poet's career may indeed be fast coming to an end, for she bids farewell to “friendly bow'rs” and streams, protesting that she leaves “with sorrow each sequester'd seat.” She seems uncannily to know she will soon cease to visit in imagination the plains and shepherds of the pastoral land of pure poetry. Yet even in her estranged condition, “sweet Hope” may “Bring calm content to gild my gloomy seat.”

America's first internationally respected author, Wheatley was only about thirty-one when she died. She died in Boston, unattended, of complications arising from the birth of her third child. This child apparently passed mercifully with her, the third child of hers to die.

Phillis Wheatley Peters (as she signed her name after her marriage) deserves to be remembered, not only as a first-rate author but also for the other firsts she accomplished. Wheatley is the first American woman author who tried to earn a living by means of her writing. Henry Louis Gates Jr. identifies Wheatley as “the progenitor of the black literary tradition” and “the black woman's literary tradition.” In the history of American letters, Wheatley's sponsors and supporters composed the first community of women devoted to ensuring the success of one of their own sex. Moreover, she and her work were promoted by Susanna Wheatley, her mistress, who encouraged her literary pursuits until her death; Mary Wheatley, daughter of Susanna, who apparently taught her to read the Bible; Obour Tanner, Wheatley's black soulmate (according to the scholar William Robinson), with whom she commiserated throughout her life; and Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, who financed Wheatley's publication of her Poems in 1773. All of these women nourished this young artist and without their assistance her talents and achievements might never have seen the light of day.

See also Poetry and Revolutionary War.

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