[Pontosdecultura] [CULTURA FEMINISTA] Phillis Wheatley

[Leila L]

1753–1784


Phillis Wheatley
Although she was an African slave, Phillis Wheatley was one of the  
best-known poets in prenineteenth-century America. Pampered in the  
household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in New  
England and England, with presses in both places publishing her poems, and  
paraded before the new republic's political leadership and the old empire's  
aristocracy, Phillis was the abolitionists' illustrative testimony that  
blacks could be both artistic and intellectual. Her name was a household  
word among literate colonists and her achievements a catalyst for the  
fledgling antislavery movement.

Phillis was seized from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa, when she was about  
seven years old. She was transported to the Boston docks with a shipment  
of "refugee" slaves, who because of age or physical frailty were unsuited  
for rigorous labor in the West Indian and Southern colonies, the first  
ports of call after the Atlantic crossing. In the month of August 1761, "in  
want of a domestic," Susanna Wheatley, wife of prominent Boston tailor John  
Wheatley, purchased "a slender, frail female child ... for a trifle"  
because the captain of the slave ship believed that the waif was terminally  
ill, and he wanted to gain at least a small profit before she died. A  
Wheatley relative later reported that the family surmised the girl—who  
was "of slender frame and evidently suffering from a change of climate,"  
nearly naked, with "no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about  
her"—to be "about seven years old ... from the circumstances of shedding  
her front teeth."

After discovering the girl's precociousness, the Wheatleys, including their  
son Nathaniel and their daughter Mary, did not entirely excuse Phillis from  
her domestic duties but taught her to read and write. Soon she was immersed  
in the Bible, astronomy, geography, history, British literature  
(particularly John Milton and Alexander Pope), and the Greek and Latin  
classics of Vergil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer. In "To the University of  
Cambridge in New England" (probably the first poem she wrote but not  
published until 1773) Phillis indicated that despite this exposure, rich  
and unusual for an American slave, her spirit yearned for the intellectual  
challenge of a more academic atmosphere.

Although scholars had generally believed that An Elegiac Poem, on the Death  
of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the  
Reverend and Learned George Whitefield ... (1770) was Wheatley's first  
published poem, Carl Bridenbaugh revealed in 1969 that thirteen-year-old  
Phillis—after hearing a miraculous saga of survival at sea—wrote "On  
Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," a poem which was published on 21 December 1767  
in the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury. But it was the Whitefield elegy that  
brought Wheatley national renown. Published as a broadside and a pamphlet  
in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, the poem was published with Ebenezer  
Pemberton's funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, bringing her  
international acclaim.

By the time she was eighteen, Phillis had gathered a collection of  
twenty-eight poems for which she, with the help of Mrs. Wheatley, ran  
advertisements for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772. When  
the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an  
African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a  
publisher. Phillis had forwarded the Whitefield poem to Selina Hastings,  
Countess of Huntingdon, to whom Whitefield had been chaplain. A wealthy  
supporter of evangelical and abolitionist causes, the countess instructed  
bookseller Archibald Bell to begin correspondence with Phillis in  
preparation for the book.

Phillis, suffering from a chronic asthma condition and accompanied by  
Nathaniel, left for London on 8 May 1771. The now-celebrated poetess was  
welcomed by several dignitaries: abolitionists' patron the Earl of  
Dartmouth, poet and activist Baron George Lyttleton, Sir Brook Watson (soon  
to be the Lord Mayor of London), philanthropist John Thorton, and Benjamin  
Franklin. While Phillis was recrossing the Atlantic to reach Mrs. Wheatley,  
who, at the summer's end, had become seriously ill, Bell was circulating  
the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773),  
the first volume of poetry by an American Negro published in modern times.

Poems on Various Subjects revealed that Phillis's favorite poetic form was  
the couplet, both iambic pentameter and heroic. More than one-third of her  
canon is composed of elegies, poems on the deaths of noted persons,  
friends, or even strangers whose loved ones employed the poet. The poems  
that best demonstrate her abilities and are most often questioned by  
detractors are those that employ classical themes as well as techniques. In  
her epyllion "Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from  
Ovid's Metamorphoses , Book VI, and from a "View of the Painting of Mr.  
Richard Wilson," she not only translates Ovid but adds her own beautiful  
lines to extend the dramatic imagery. In "To Maecenas" she transforms  
Horace's ode into a celebration of Christ."

In addition to classical and neoclassical techniques, Wheatley applied  
biblical symbolism to evangelize and to comment on slavery. For  
instance, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," the best-known  
Wheatley poem, chides the Great Awakening audience to remember that  
Africans must be included in the Christian stream: "Remember, Christians,  
Negroes, black as Cain, /May be refin'd and join th' angelic train." The  
remainder of Wheatley's themes can be classified as celebrations of  
America. She was the first to applaud this nation as glorious "Columbia"  
and that in a letter to no less than the first president of the United  
States, George Washington, with whom she had corresponded and whom she was  
later privileged to meet. Her love of virgin America as well as her  
religious fervor is further suggested by the names of those colonial  
leaders who signed the attestation that appeared in some copies of Poems on  
Various Subjects to authenticate and support her work: Thomas Hutchinson,  
governor of Massachusetts; John Hancock; Andrew Oliver, lieutenant  
governor; James Bowdoin; and Reverend Mather Byles. Another fervent  
Wheatley supporter was Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the  
Declaration of Independence.

Phillis was manumitted some three months before Mrs. Wheatley died on 3  
March 1774. Although many British editorials castigated the Wheatleys for  
keeping Phillis in slavery while presenting her to London as the African  
genius, the family had provided an ambiguous haven for the poet. Phillis  
was kept in a servant's place--a respectable arm's length from the  
Wheatleys' genteel circles--but she had experienced neither slavery's  
treacherous demands nor the harsh economic exclusions pervasive in a  
free-black existence. With the death of her benefactor, Phillis slipped  
toward this tenuous life. Mary Wheatley and her father died in 1778;  
Nathaniel, who had married and moved to England, died in 1783. Throughout  
the lean years of the war and the following depression, the assault of  
these racial realities was more than her sickly body or aesthetic soul  
could withstand.

On 1 April 1778, despite the skepticism and disapproval of some of her  
closest friends, Phillis married John Peters, whom she had known for some  
five years. A free black, Peters evidently aspired to entrepreneurial and  
professional greatness. He is purported in various historical records to  
have called himself Dr. Peters, to have practiced law (perhaps as a  
free-lance advocate for hapless blacks), kept a grocery in Court Street,  
exchanged trade as a baker and a barber, and applied for a liquor license  
for a bar. Described by Merle A. Richmond as "a man of very handsome person  
and manners," who "wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out 'the  
gentleman,'" Peters was also called "a remarkable specimen of his race,  
being a fluent writer, a ready speaker." Peters's ambitions cast him  
as "shiftless," arrogant, and proud in the eyes of some reporters, but as a  
black man in an era that valued only his brawn, Peters's business acumen  
was simply not salable. Like many others who scattered throughout the  
Northeast to avoid the fighting during the Revolutionary War, the Peterses  
moved temporarily from Boston to Wilmington, Massachusetts, shortly after  
their marriage.

Merle A. Richmond points out that economic conditions in the colonies  
during and after the war were harsh, particularly for free blacks, who were  
unprepared to compete with whites in a stringent job market. These societal  
factors, rather than any refusal to work on Peters's part, were perhaps  
most responsible for the newfound poverty that Phillis suffered in  
Wilmington and Boston, after they later returned there. Between 1779 and  
1783, the couple had three children (all of whom died as toddlers), and  
Peters drifted further into penury, often leaving Phillis to fend for  
herself and the children by working as a charwoman while he dodged  
creditors and tried to find employment.

During the first six weeks after their return to Boston, Phillis and the  
children stayed with one of Mrs. Wheatley's nieces in a bombed-out mansion  
that was converted to a day school after the war. Peters then moved them  
into an apartment in a rundown section of Boston, where other Wheatley  
relatives soon found Phillis sick and destitute. As Margaretta Matilda  
Odell recalls, "Two of her children were dead, and the third was sick unto  
death. She was herself suffering for want of attention, for many comforts,  
and that greatest of all comforts in sickness--cleanliness. She was reduced  
to a condition too loathsome to describe.... In a filthy apartment, in an  
obscure part of the metropolis, lay dying the mother, and the wasting  
child. The woman who had stood honored and respected in the presence of the  
wise and good ... was numbering the last hours of life in a state of the  
most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of a squalid poverty!"

Yet throughout these lean years, Phillis continued to write and publish her  
poems and to maintain, though on a much more limited scale, her  
international correspondence. She also felt that despite the poor economy,  
her American audience and certainly her evangelical friends would support a  
second volume of poetry. Between 30 October and 18 December 1779, with at  
least the partial motive of raising funds for her family, she ran six  
advertisements soliciting subscribers for "300 pages in Octavo," a  
volume "Dedicated to the Right Hon. Benjamin Franklin, Esq.: One of the  
Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France," that would  
include thirty-three poems and thirteen letters. As with Poems on Various  
Subjects, however, the American populace would not support one of its most  
noted poets. (The first American edition of this book was not published  
until two years after her death.) During the year of her death (1784), she  
was able to publish, under the name Phillis Peters, a masterful  
sixty-four-line poem in a pamphlet entitled Liberty and Peace , which  
hailed America as "Columbia" victorious over "Britannia Law." Proud of her  
nation's intense struggle for freedom that, to her, bespoke an eternal  
spiritual greatness, Phillis ended the poem with a triumphant ring:

Britannia owns her Independent Reign,


Hibernia, Scotia, and the Realms of Spain;


And Great Germania's ample Coast admires


The generous Spirit that Columbia fires.


Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav'ring Gales,


Where e'er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:


To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,


And Heavenly Freedom spread her gold Ray.

On 2 January of that same year, she published An Elegy, Sacred to the  
Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper,  
just a few days after the death of the Brattle Street church's pastor. And,  
sadly, in September the "Poetical Essays" section of The Boston Magazine  
carried "To Mr. and Mrs.________, on the Death of their Infant Son," which  
probably was a lamentation for the death of one of her own children and  
which certainly foreshadowed her death three months later."

Phillis Wheatley died, uncared for and alone. As Richmond concludes, with  
ample evidence, when Phillis expired on 5 December 1784, John Peters was  
incarcerated, "forced to relieve himself of debt by an imprisonment in the  
county jail." Their last surviving child died in time to be buried with his  
mother, and, as Odell recalled, "A grandniece of Phillis' benefactress,  
passing up Court Street, met the funeral of an adult and a child: a  
bystander informed her that they were bearing Phillis Wheatley to that  
silent mansion...."

Recent scholarship shows that Phillis Wheatley wrote perhaps 145 poems  
(most of which would have been published if the encouragers she begged for  
had come forth to support the second volume), but this artistic heritage is  
now lost, probably abandoned during Peters's quest for subsistence after  
her death. Of the numerous letters she wrote to national and international  
political and religious leaders, some two dozen notes and letters are  
extant. As an exhibition of African intelligence, exploitable by members of  
the enlightenment movement, by evangelical Christians, and by other  
abolitionists, she was perhaps recognized even more in England and Europe  
than in America. Early twentieth-century critics of Black American  
literature were not very kind to Wheatley because of her supposed lack of  
concern about slavery. Wheatley, however, did have a statement to make  
about the institution of slavery, and she made it to the most influential  
segment of eighteenth-century society--the institutional church. Two of the  
greatest influences on Phillis Wheatley's thought and poetry were the Bible  
and eighteenth-century evangelical Christianity; but until fairly recently  
Wheatley's critics did not consider her use of biblical allusion nor its  
symbolic application as a statement against slavery. She often spoke in  
explicit biblical language designed to move church members to decisive  
action. For instance, these bold lines in her poetic eulogy to General  
David Wooster castigate patriots who confess Christianity yet oppress her  
people:

But how presumptuous shall we hope to find


Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind


While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace


And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race


Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers


Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.



And in an outspoken letter to the Reverend Samson Occom, written after  
Wheatley was free and published repeatedly in Boston newspapers in 1774,  
she equates American slaveholding to that of pagan Egypt in ancient  
times: "Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for  
their Freedom from Egyptian Slavery: I don't say they would have been  
contented without it, by no Means, for in every human Breast, God has  
implanted a Principle, which we call Love of freedom; it is impatient of  
Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern  
Egyptians I will assert that the same Principle lives in us."

In the past ten years, Wheatley scholars have uncovered poems, letters, and  
more facts about her life and her association with eighteenth-century black  
abolitionists. They have also charted her notable use of classicism and  
have explicated the sociological intent of her biblical allusions. All this  
research and interpretation has proven Wheatley's disdain for the  
institution of slavery and her use of art to undermine its practice. Before  
the end of this century the full aesthetic, political, and religious  
implications of Wheatley's art and even more salient facts about her life  
and works will surely be known and celebrated by all who study the  
eighteenth century and by all who revere this woman, a most important poet  
in the American literary canon.
— Sondra A. O'Neale, Emory University


Bibliography

Books

An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent  
Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield ...  
(Boston: Printed & sold by Ezekiel Russell & by John Boyles, 1770);  
republished in Heaven the Residence of Saints, by Ebenezer Pemberton  
(London: Printed for E. & C. Dilly, 1771).
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. By Phillis Wheatley, Negro  
Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston (London: Printed for Archibald Bell  
& sold in Boston by Cox & Berry, 1773; Philadelphia: Printed by Joseph  
Crukshank, 1786).
An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and  
Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper (Boston: Printed & sold by E. Russell, 1784).
Liberty and Peace, A Poem (Boston: Printed by Warden & Russell, 1784).
Collections

Life and Works of Phillis Wheatley. Containing Her complete Poetical Works,  
Numerous Letters and a complete Biography of This Famous Poet of a Century  
and a Half Ago, edited by G. Herbert Renfro (Washington, DC: A. Jenkins,  
1916).
The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Edited with an Introduction and Notes,  
edited by Charlotte Ruth Wright (Philadelphia: The Wrights, 1930).
The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, edited by Julian D. Mason, Jr. (Chapel Hill:  
University of North Carolina Press, 1966).
Letters

Charles Deane, ed., Letters of Phillis Wheatley, the Negro-Slave Poet of  
Boston (Boston: Privately printed, 1864).
Carter G. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters  
Written During the Crisis: 1800-1860 (Washington, DC, 1926): xvi-xxi.


Further Reading


William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley: A Bio-Bibliography (Boston: GK Hall,  
1981).
Margaretta Matilda Odell, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Boston:  
Light, 1834).
BB Thatcher, Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave  
(Boston: GW Light/New York: Moore & Payne, 1834).
Benjamin Griffith Brawley, Note on Wheatley, in Early Negro American  
Writers: Selections with Biographical and Critical Introductions, edited by  
Brawley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 31-55.
Brawley, Negro Builders and Heroes (Chapel Hill: University of North  
Carolina Press, 1937).
Shirley Graham, The Story of Phillis Wheatley (New York: J. Messner, 1949).
Martha Bacon, Puritan Promenade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964).
Sidney Kaplan, "Phillis Wheatley," in The Black Presence in the Era of the  
American Revolution, 1770-1800 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society,  
1973), pp. 150-170.
Merle A. Richmond, Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and  
Poetry of Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) and George Moses Horton (ca.  
1799-1883) (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974).
Carl Bridenbaugh, "The First Published Poems of Phillis Wheatley," New  
England Quarterly, 42 (December 1969): 583-584.
Charles F. Heartman, Phillis Wheatley: A Critical Attempt and a  
Bibliography of Her Writings (New York: Printed for the author, 1915).
Mukhtar Ali Isani, "The British Reception of Wheatley's Poems on Various  
Subjects," Journal of Negro History, 66 (Summer 1981): 144-149.
Sarah Dunlap Jackson, "Letters of Phillis Wheatley and Susanna Wheatley,"  
Journal of Negro History, 58 (April 1972): 212.
Robert C. Kuncio, "Some Unpublished Poems of Phillis Wheatley," New England  
Quarterly, 43 (June 1970): 287-297.
Thomas Oxley, "Survey of Negro Literature," Messenger: World's Greatest  
Negro Monthly, 60 (February 1927): 37-39.
Carole A. Parks, "Phillis Wheatley Comes Home," Black World, 23 (February  
1974): 92-97.
Benjamin Quarles, "A Phillis Wheatley Letter," Journal of Negro History, 34  
(October 1949): 462-466.
Gregory Rigsby, "Form and Content in Phillis Wheatley's Elegies," CLA  
Journal, 19 (December 1975): 248-257.
Rigsby, "Phillis Wheatley's Craft as Reflected in Her Revised Elegies,"  
Journal of Negro Education, 47 (Fall 1978): 402-413.
William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings  
(Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975).
Robinson, "Phillis Wheatley in London," CLA Journal, 21 (December 1977):  
187-201.
Robinson, ed., Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Boston: GK Hall, 1982).
Charles Scruggs, "Phillis Wheatley and the Poetical Legacy of Eighteenth  
Century England," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 10 (1981): 279-295.
John C. Shields, "Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary  
Relationship," CLA Journal, 23 (June 1980): 391-398.
Shields, "Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism," American Literature, 52  
(March 1980): 97-111.
Kenneth Silverman, "Four New Letters by Phillis Wheatley," Early American  
Literature, 8 (Winter 1974): 257-271.
Albertha Sistrunk, "Phillis Wheatley: An Eighteenth-Century Black American  
Poet Revisited," CLA Journal, 23 (June 1980): 391-398.
Original manuscripts, letters, and first editions are in collections at the  
Boston Public Library; Duke University Library; Massachusetts Historical  
Society; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Library Company of  
Philadelphia; American Antiquarian Society; Houghton Library, Harvard  
University; The Schomburg Collection, New York City; Churchill College,  
Cambridge; The Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh; Dartmouth College  
Library; William Salt Library, Staffordshire, England; Cheshunt Foundation,  
Cambridge University; British Library, London.



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