John and Susanna Wheatley had teenaged twins, Nathaniel and Mary, who were living at home when Phillis arrived. For reasons never explained, Mary, apparently with her mother’s enthusiastic encouragement, began to teach the child slave to read. (Mary would marry the Reverend John Lathrop, known as “the Revolutionary Preacher,” and pastor of the Old North Church.) Phillis, by all accounts, was a keen and quick pupil. As Lathrop wrote to a friend in 1773, his wife had “taught her to read, and by seeing others use the pen, she learned to write.” Mary tutored Phillis in English, Latin, and the Bible. William Robinson aptly calls her “rewardingly precocious.” That, if anything, is an understatement. As John Wheatley wrote in 1772 of her intellect and progress in letters:Phillis was brought from Africa to America, in the Year 1761, between Seven and Eight years of Age. Without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.
As to her Writing, her own Curiosity led her to it; and this she learnt in so short a time, that in the Year 1765, she wrote a letter to the Reverend Mr. Occom, the Indian Minister, while in England.
She has a great Inclination to learn the Latin tongue, and has made some progress in it. This Relation is given by her Master who bought her, and with whom she now lives.
Recall that this seven-year-old slave spoke no English upon her arrival in 1761. By 1765, she had written her first poem; in 1767, when she was thirteen or fourteen, the Newport Mercury published a poem that Susanna Wheatley submitted on her behalf. In 1770, when she was about seventeen, she immortalized the Boston Massacre in her poem, “On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March, 1770.” It reads in part: Long as in Freedom’s Cause the wise contend,
Dear to your unity shall Fame extend;
While to the World, the letter’s Stone shall
tell,
How Caldwell, Attucks, Gray, and
Mav’rick fell.
That same year, her elegy on the death of the Reverend George Whitefield—the widely popular English preacher, leader of the evangelical movement, and favorite of Susanna Wheatley—was published within weeks of his sudden and untimely death during a speaking tour in America. This exceptionally popular poem was published as a broadside in Boston, then again in Newport, four more times in Boston, and a dozen more in New York, Philadelphia, and Newport. Advertisements for the broadside appeared in “more than a dozen newspapers in Pennsylvania, New York, and Boston, and at least ten times in Boston newspapers alone.” Whitefield had been the chaplain of an English philanthropist, Selina Hastings, the countess of Huntingdon. Wheatley shrewdly apostrophized the countess in the Whitefield elegy, and sent a letter of condolence with the poem enclosed. With the poem’s subsequent publication in London in 1771, Wheatley suddenly had a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. It made her the Toni Morrison of her time.
Delighted with her slave’s dazzling abilities and her growing fame, Susanna Wheatley set out to have Phillis’s work collected and published as a book. Advertised in the Tory paper, the Boston Censor, on February 29, March 14, and April 18, 1772, was a list of the titles of twenty-eight poems that would make up Wheatley’s first book, if enough subscribers—perhaps 300—could be found to underwrite the cost of publication. But the necessary number of subscribers could not be found because not enough Bostonians could believe that an African slave possessed the requisite degree of reason and wit to write a poem by herself.
To understand why Wheatley’s achievement prompted such incredulity, it helps to know something about the broader discourse of race and reason in the eighteenth century. To summarize a vast and complex body of literature, involving Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Frederick Hegel, many philosophers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were vexed by the question of what kind of creatures Africans truly were—that is, were they human beings, descended along with Europeans from a common ancestor and fundamentally related to other human beings, or were they, as Hume put it in 1753, another “species of men,” related more to apes than to Europeans? As Hume wrote:I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.
Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning [Francis Williams]; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishment, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.
Just ten years later, Kant, responding directly to Hume, expanded upon his observations: The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from the countries, although many of them have been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.
The question of whether Africans were human was less related to color than the possession of reason, a tradition inaugurated by Descartes. But how was the faculty of reason to be recognized? Increasingly after Hume voiced his doubts about the African’s capacity to create “arts and sciences,” the question turned on whether or not Africans could write, that is, could create imaginative literature. If they could, this line of reasoning went, then they stood as members of the human family on the Great Chain of Being. If they could not, then the Africans were a species sub-human, more related to the apes than to Europeans. Even Thomas Jefferson had associated Africans with apes: black males find white women more beautiful than black women, Jefferson had argued, “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black woman over his own species.” As the Reverend Robert Nickol would put it in 1788, “I have not heard that an ourang outang has composed an ode.”
All of this helps us to understand why Wheatley’s oral examination was so important. If she had indeed written her poems, then this would demonstrate that Africans were human beings and should be liberated from slavery. If, on the other hand, she had not written, or could not write her poems, or if indeed she was like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly, then that would be another matter entirely. Essentially, she was auditioning for the humanity of the entire African people.
Some of the most skeptical had already conducted their own examinations of Phillis, one-on-one. Thomas Woolbridge, an emissary of the earl of Dartmouth, was among those who visited the Wheatley mansion. Woolbridge wrote to Dartmouth about his encounter:While in Boston, I heard of a very Extraordinary female Slave, who made some verses on our mutually dear deceased Friend [Whitefield]; I visited her mistress, and found by conversing with the African, that she was no Imposter; I asked if she could write on any Subject; she said Yes; we had just heard of your Lordships Appointment; I gave her your name, which she was well acquainted with. She, immediately, wrote a rough Copy of the inclosed Address & Letter, which I promised to convey or deliver. I was astonished, and could hardly believe my own Eyes. I was present when she wr
ote, and can attest that it is her own production; she shewd me her Letter to Lady Huntington [sic], which, I dare say, Your Lordship has seen; I send you an Account signed by her master of her Importation, Education &.c They are all wrote in her own hand.
Boston’s reading public remained skeptical, however. As one of Phillis’s supporters in Boston put it in a letter to his brother-in-law in Philadelphia, Wheatley’s master “could not sell it by reason of their not crediting ye performances to be by a Negro.”
And so the bold gambit in the Old Colony House—the decision to assemble some of the finest minds in all colonial America to question closely the African adolescent about the slender sheaf of twenty-eight poems that she and her master and mistress claimed that she had written by herself.
We have no transcript of the exchanges that occurred between Miss Wheatley and her eighteen examiners. But we can imagine that some of their questions would have been prompted on the classical allusions in Wheatley’s poems. “Who was Apollo?” “What happened when Phaeton rode his father’s chariot?” “How did Zeus give birth to Athena?” “Name the Nine Muses.” Was she perhaps asked for an extemporaneous demonstration of her talent? What we do know is that she passed with flying colors. After interrogating the poet, the tribunal of eighteen agreed to sign the following attestation:We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.
That attestation was deemed absolutely essential to the publication of Wheatley’s book, and even with the attestation no American publisher was willing to take on her manuscript. Susanna Wheatley turned to English friends for help. The publishing climate in England was more receptive to black authors. The Countess of Huntingdon though a slaveholder herself (she had inherited slaves in Georgia) had already, in 1772, shepherded into print one of the earliest slave narratives, by James Gronniosaw. Vincent Carretta, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century black transatlantic literature and an expert on Wheatley, has observed that the British market for black literature may have been indirectly created by a court ruling, in 1772, that made it illegal for slaves who had come to England to be forcibly returned to the colonies. Although the ruling stopped short of outlawing slavery in England, it encouraged an atmosphere of sympathy toward blacks.
Through the captain of the commercial ship that John Wheatley used for trade with England, Susanna engaged a London publisher, Archibald Bell, to bring out the manuscript. The countess agreed to let Wheatley dedicate the book to her. An engraving of Wheatley appeared as the book’s frontpiece, at the countess’s request.
And so, against the greatest odds, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral became the first book of poetry published by a person of African descent in the English language, marking the beginning of an African-American literary tradition. Various black authors had published individual poems, but even these instances were rare. Jupiter Hammon, a slave from Long Island, had published the first of several poems in 1760. Edward Long caused a minor sensation when he discovered in 1774 that Francis Williams, a Jamaican who is said to have studied at the University of Cambridge, had apparently in 1759 written an ode in Latin.
Five advertisements for the book in the London Morning Post and Advertiser in August all point to the statement from the esteemed Bostonians as proof that Phillis is the volume’s “real Author.” What’s more, everyone knew that the publication of Wheatley’s book was an historical event, greeted by something akin to the shock of cloning a sheep. As her printer, Archibald Bell bluntly put it in the same newspaper on September 13, 1773: “The book here proposed for publication displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced.” For, he continues, “the Author is a native of Africa, and left not the dark part of the habitable system, till she was eight years old.”
Given the context of the Enlightenment conversation on race and reason, it should come as no surprise that the book was widely reviewed and discussed in Europe and America. Even Voltaire was moved, in 1774, to write to a correspondent that Wheatley had proven that blacks could write poetry. John Paul Jones, on the eve of sailing to France in June 1777, on the newly commissioned warship, the Ranger, sent a note to a fellow officer, asking him to deliver a copy of some of his own enclosed writings to “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo.”
With the publication of her book, Phillis Wheatley, almost immediately, became the most famous African on the face of the earth, the Oprah Winfrey of her time. Phillis was the toast of London, where she had been sent with Nathaniel Wheatley in the spring of 1773 to oversee the publication of her book. There she met the Earl of Dartmouth, who gave her five guineas to buy the works of Alexander Pope; Granville Sharp, the scholar and antislavery activist, who took her to the Tower of London; and Brook Watson, a future Lord Mayor of London, who gave her a folio edition of “Paradise Lost.” Benjamin Franklin paid her a visit, which he mentions in a letter to his nephew Jonathan Williams, Sr. “Upon your Recommendation I went to see the black Poetess and offer’d her any Services I could do her,” he wrote. “And I have heard nothing since of her.” On the strength of this seemingly perfunctory visit, Wheatley decided to dedicate her second volume of poetry to Franklin. Even an audience with King George was arranged, although she had to cancel it when Susanna Wheatley suddenly fell ill and needed her care.
Within a month of the book’s publication and Phillis’s return to America, the Wheatleys freed her. (English reviewers, using Wheatley’s book as a point, had condemned the hypocrisy of a colony that insisted on liberty and equality when it came to its relationship to England but did not extend those principles to its own population.) “Freedom” meant that she became fully responsible for her literary career, and for her finances. In mid-October, she wrote a letter to David Wooster, the customs collector in New Haven, alerting him that a shipment of her books would soon arrive from England, and urging him to canvass among his friends for orders. “Use your interest with Gentlemen & Ladies of your acquaintance to subscribe also, for the more subscribers there are, the more it will be for my advantage as I am to have half the Sale of the Books.” She continued, “This I am the more solicitous for, as I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, & it is the Chief I have to depend upon. I must also request you would desire the Printers in New Haven, not to reprint that Book, as it will be a great hurt to me, preventing any further Benefit that I might receive from the Sale of my Copies from England.”
Franklin was just one of four Founding Fathers who would cross Wheatley’s path in one form or another. John Hancock was one of her interrogators. On October 26, 1775, Wheatley sent a letter and a poem she had written in his honor, to General George Washington at his headquarters in Cambridge. The letter reads as follows:Sir [George Washington]
I have taken the freedom to address
your Excellency in the enclosed poem,
and entreat your acceptance, though I am
not insensible of its inaccuracies. Your
being appointed by the Grand Continental
Congress to be Generalissimo of the
armies of North America, together with
the fame of your virtues, excite sensations
not easy to suppress. Your generosity,
therefore, I presume will pardon the
attempt. Wishing your Excellency all possible
success in the great cause you are so
generously engaged in, I am,
Your Excellency’s most humble servant,
Phillis Wheatley [October 26, 1775]
On February 28, 1776, Washington responded, acknowledging the gift of the
poem and inviting Wheatley to visit him at his headquarters in Cambridge:Miss Phillis,
Your favor of the 26th of October did
not reach my hands, till the middle of December.
Time enough, you will say, to
have given an answer ere this. Granted.
But a variety of important occurrences,
continually interposing to distract the
mind and withdraw the attention, I hope
will apologize for the delay, and plead my
excuse for the seeming but not real neglect.
I thank you most sincerely for your
polite notice of me, in the elegant lines
you enclosed; and however undeserving I
may be of such encomium and panegyric,
the style and manner exhibit a striking
proof of your poetical talents; in honor of
which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I
would have published the poem, had I
not been apprehensive, that, while I only
meant to give the world this new instance
of your genius, I might have incurred the
imputation of vanity. This, and nothing
else, determined me not to give it place in
the public prints.
If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses, and to whom nature has so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great respect, your obedient humble servant.
According to Benson J. Lossing, “Washington invited her to visit him at Cambridge, which she did a few days before the British evacuated Boston. She passed half an hour with the commander-in-chief, from whom and his officers she received marked attention.” Washington overcame his fear of the imputation of vanity and, by means of an intermediary, secured publication of Wheatley’s pentametric praise in the Virginia Gazette, in March 1776. The poem is noteworthy in several ways, but especially for its description of Washington as “first in peace” and in its often repeated final couplet:One century scarce perform’d its destined
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Page 2
