Wheatley, Phillis

By: Evan Haefeli

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

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. 1754; d. 5 December 1784),
American poet.

Phillis Wheatley was one of America's first published poets, and the first African American woman to have her work published. Born in Africa and brought to America in 1761 when she was about seven years old, Phillis lived most of her life in Boston. Her birthplace was probably somewhere in Senegambia, and her first language was most likely Wolof, yet she mastered the English language and died a free woman and American patriot. An extraordinary individual, she has served as a controversial focus of debates about race ever since the eighteenth century.

Phillis was the name of the slave ship that brought her to Boston, and Wheatley was the name of the family that purchased her. Arriving in rags, the girl found her life transformed in the household of her new masters. John Wheatley was a wealthy merchant and tailor. His wife, Susanna, initially bought Phillis because she wanted a house servant. The Wheatleys were a pious family with connections to evangelicals in Britain. Apparently inspired with a desire to convert Phillis to Christianity, their daughter, Mary, taught Phillis to read the Bible and write in English and Latin. Phillis was an excellent student. She became a devout Christian and demonstrated a genius for writing. Only four years after arriving in Boston, she wrote a letter to Sansom Occum, a famous Native American minister. Two years later, with the help of Susanna Wheatley, she published her first poem in the Newport Mercury. At the age of barely fourteen years old, Phillis Wheatley became a published poet.

Phillis Wheatley, portrait by an unknown artist from Revue des Colonies, c. 1834–1842; the printer was Bernard Lemercier, Paris. The Revue was founded by Charles Bissette in France and may have been the first periodical published by black people there.

New York Public Library, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Her success depended on the support of her master's family. Her mistress, Susanna, was especially attached to her. When George Whitefield, a famous evangelical preacher, died in 1770, Wheatley wrote an elegy for him. Susanna ensured that it was quickly published in an American newspaper. The poem contained a reference to one of Whitefield's sponsors, Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, who was at the center of a group of elite evangelicals in Britain. Susanna was in touch with members of a special religious community called Lady Huntingdon's Connexion, and with their help Wheatley was able to publish her work in London, where her elegy on Whitefield appeared in 1771 and, two years later, her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Susanna Wheatley's patronage brought Phillis into personal contact with the highest levels of British society. In 1773 Phillis went to London with Susanna's son, Nathaniel, to oversee the publication of her book and to meet members of the Huntingdon Connexion who were impressed with the Calvinist piety that filled her poetry. She even met Benjamin Franklin. Because Phillis had a number of poems that were not printed in the first volume, she planned to publish a second volume dedicated to Franklin. She was scheduled to meet Britain's King George III when suddenly her world began to fall apart. Susanna had fallen seriously ill while Phillis was away and wrote for her to come back to care for her. Phillis rushed home without ever meeting the king. The Wheatleys freed Phillis in December 1773, shortly after she returned. Three months later, in March 1774, Susanna died. A year afterward the America Revolution broke out, sundering the transatlantic connection that had supported Phillis Wheatley and her work.

Phillis Wheatley was a patriot in the Revolutionary War era. She supported the cause of freedom for America as well as that of enslaved Africans. She memorialized in poetry the Boston Massacre, an incident in 1770 when several British soldiers fired on a crowd of rioting colonists, killing five men. And she wrote of all humans' natural desire for liberty. When George Washington arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1775 to take command of the Revolutionary army, Wheatley not only wrote a poem in praise of him but also met him in person. The Wheatleys, on the other hand, opposed the Revolution, as, of course, did members of the Lady Huntingdon's Connexion.

Although Phillis Wheatley supported the American Revolution, it destroyed her career. The Wheatleys and their Tory friends either died or left Boston, cutting her off from her publishers in England. Before 1776 Phillis Wheatley was famous and respectable enough to meet both Washington and Franklin. However, once the revolution became a war for independence, there was no group of Americans willing to promote her as Lady Huntingdon's Connexion had. In a country where many depended on slave labor, there were plenty of reasons to suppress her talents.

Like many free blacks in Massachusetts, Phillis Wheatley was poor. The long years of the American Revolution were hard on her. She married a free black named John Peters in 1778, but he was unable to sustain their family. Wheatley had to work hard to survive. She had three children before she turned thirty, and all of her children died in infancy. She tried to publish a second volume of poetry in 1779 and again in 1784 but could not get the necessary financial support. Her husband abandoned her after she gave birth to their third child. Often plagued with health problems, Wheatley succumbed to illness and poverty on the outskirts of Boston in December 1784. As there was no family to care for her work, her second volume of poetry was never published. Peters apparently sold the only copy of the manuscript. Occasionally, one of the lost poems is discovered, but the fate of the manuscript remains a mystery.

For better or worse, Wheatley's art depended on the interest and patronage of white Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic. This explains why only one volume of her poetry was ever published. While her talent did not change, the Anglo-American world did. Her mistress, Susanna, had originally hoped to publish her poems in Boston, but no American publisher would accept the manuscript. They thought it impossible that an African American could write such sophisticated poetry. To prove that Phillis was the author, the Wheatleys arranged an interview between her and eighteen of the most distinguished men of Massachusetts in 1772, including men who would soon oppose each other in the American Revolution, like Governor Thomas Hutchinson and the Massachusetts legislature member John Hancock, but also several men who were published poets themselves. They all signed an attestation that Phillis Wheatley was indeed the author of her poems. Still, no colonial press would publish her, and the manuscript was sent to London. After 1776 this was no longer possible.

Even before she was published, Phillis Wheatley found herself at the center of a major debate about race and slavery. By the eighteenth century the enslavement of Africans was being justified by the assumption that Africans were inferior to Europeans, intellectually and otherwise. If an enslaved African woman could master both the English language and the classics of Latin literature to write a series of highly respected poems, then theories of white racial superiority were in danger. For this reason, even in England people had trouble believing Wheatley had written the poems. After they were published, many critics, including Thomas Jefferson, who could not deny that she had written them, argued that they were not good poems.

Phillis Wheatley's fame and fortune depended on a white audience that was preoccupied with Africans for a host of reasons that had little to do with her art. Her influential English and American patrons supported her because she was a rare example of an articulate African American convert to evangelical Calvinism. They found in her a confirmation of their own religious views and hoped that her work would help spread them. Indeed, one prominent member of the Connexion wanted her to marry a free black theologian living in Newport, Rhode Island, and join him on a mission to convert Africans in Africa. Many others, including the French writer Voltaire, considered her work to be proof that blacks were capable of writing poetry—and thus could become the equals of Europeans.

Ironically, many African Americans from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century dismissed Phillis Wheatley for the same reasons Anglo-Americans had found her so threatening in the eighteenth century. Wheatley's engagement with Anglo-American culture—her devout Calvinism and her mastery of classical literature and English-style poetics—seemed to some African Americans to be a denial of her original African heritage and an acceptance of the social values that justified the enslavement of Africans. But these critics, like the white critics, are judging her by their standards and preoccupations, not hers.

Phillis Wheatley was a brilliant woman living in a complicated time. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic have used her poetry to prove one theory or another about people of African descent, but she had a mind of her own. She refused the suggestion of going to Africa to convert Africans—she did not know the man she was supposed to marry or the language of the part of Africa her sponsors wanted to send her to. Her familiarity with slavery clearly shaped her religiosity and her art. She wrote many poems for people who suffered. Secure in a Calvinist sense of salvation, in her poems she portrays death as a form of liberation, an entrance into a better life for all true Christians, white or black.

See also American Revolution; Franklin, Benjamin, and African Americans; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Literature; Race, Theories of; Religion; and Washington, George, and African Americans.

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