Phillis Wheatley

Early life

Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa, probably in the Senegambia region, around 1753. She was kidnapped as a young child, about seven or eight years old, and carried to Boston. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society, she arrived on 11 July 1761 and was sold at auction. The merchant John Wheatley bought her for his wife, Susanna, and she was given the family's surname.

The Wheatleys' daughter Mary taught her to read and write. She learned English quickly and went on to study the Bible, Latin, classical literature and English poetry.

A young poet

Her first published poem, "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," appeared in Rhode Island's Newport Mercury in December 1767, when she was about fourteen. Her elegy on the death of the evangelist George Whitefield was printed as a broadside in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, as well as in London, and brought her wide attention.

In 1772 she sought subscribers for a book of poems in Boston but did not attract enough support. Many white readers doubted that an enslaved African woman could write such verse. The book that finally appeared included a statement affirming her authorship, signed by eighteen prominent Bostonians. The Library of Congress names John Hancock and Governor Thomas Hutchinson among those who vouched for her.

Poems on Various Subjects

In 1773 Wheatley sailed to London with Nathaniel Wheatley, her enslaver's son. There, with backing from Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, to whom it was dedicated, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in September 1773. It contained thirty-nine poems and is recognized as the first book of poetry published by an African American. Its frontispiece portrait of Wheatley is attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved Boston artist.

Freedom and later years

Wheatley gained her freedom around this time, though sources differ on exactly when. The Massachusetts Historical Society says she was legally freed in the fall of 1773, and the Library of Congress says before her London voyage. The Academy of American Poets reports that scholars place it between 1774 and 1778.

In 1776 she sent George Washington a poem in his honor. He thanked her and invited her to visit him at Cambridge. In April 1778 she married John Peters, a free Black grocer. The couple had three children, all of whom died young. Wheatley sought subscribers for a second volume of poems and letters but could not raise the money, and many of those works are lost. She died in poverty in Boston on 5 December 1784, at about thirty-one, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Legacy

Wheatley's 1773 volume made her one of the most famous Africans in the Atlantic world in her lifetime, and it marks the beginning of a published African American literary tradition. A first American edition followed in Philadelphia in 1786.