Phillis Wheatley Peters (c. 1753-1784) was a poet of the Revolutionary Era who was initially trafficked to Boston from West Africa in 1761. She was later emancipated after her trip to London in 1773. Her poetry included death elegies, but her art increasingly reflected her experiences in Boston and her time in England. When she wrote to General George Washington in 1775, she saw herself as liberated in her choice to support the rebellion against British rule in North America. The moral sentiments expressed in her letter and poem to Washington strongly echo throughout her work and biography.
Early Life
The child who would mature into the seasoned poet Phillis Wheatley Peters, a philosopher of morality and religion, was forced to what would become the United States in 1761. What her life in the regions of Senegal and the Gambia was before 1761 relies primarily on speculation. When she arrived at the harbor in Boston, her enslaver, John Wheatley (1703-1778), noted that she was sickly and was listed as “refuse,” or difficult to sell at the slave market. He purchased the child, whom he would name Phillis, after the ship that delivered her to North America, and she was only meant to amuse his ailing wife, Susanna Wheatley (1709-1774). Most literary historians believe that Susanna noticed her aptitude for the English language and poetry. In 1767, Wheatley published her first poem in the Newport Mercury, and her 1770 poem on the death of George Whitefield (1714-1770), a famous itinerant preacher from England, skyrocketed her to some fame in the English-speaking world.
Around 1772, Wheatley began to focus on publishing a book of poems. Some evidence suggests that she sought subscribers in Boston but failed to gather the necessary number required to send her collection to the printing press. In June of 1772, the English Court ruled in the case of Somerset v. Stewart that enslavement in England was not “positive law,” meaning slavery lacked a current statute, and some interpreted this law to mean that any enslaved African (or any other) in England was thus considered legally a “free person.” Wheatley would have been aware of this case, as she met and stayed with Granville Sharpe (1735-1813), one of the leading abolitionists in England, during her stay there in the summer of 1773. With Nathaniel Wheatley (1743-1783) as a chaperone, Wheatley’s adventures in London also meant a visit to the Tower of London, and she had a diplomatic meeting with Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).1
In London, Wheatley was legally a free woman, as she was a subject of the British Dominion just like the colonies. While on the voyage back to North America in September 1773, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was printed in London. Her book was well received in England and France, and it would become a major rhetorical tool in the already underway abolitionist movement in that part of the world. England had served the poet an individual win. She wrote to her friend, David Wooster, upon her return to America in October 1773 she was emancipated by her dying enslaver, Susanna Wheatley.”2 Even though copies of the first edition were enroute during the final weeks of 1773, the shipment was delayed drastically because of the events of the Boston Tea Party that December. Three hundred copies of the second edition would arrive from London in April 1774.
The Patriots’ successes in the April 1775 Battle of Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the War of Independence, also pushed the British back into Boston. The aftermath of this battle saw Africans in America participate in the war on both sides, with about 20,000 becoming Loyalists and fewer than 10,000 choosing the Patriots’ side by the war’s closing. Many Africans would support the rebelling patriots with their axes and shields, but Wheatley's tools came in the form of her pen and paper, as she so clearly captured, for Washington, a perspective on divine providence that could help revitalize the waning spirit for the war effort in the closing days of 1775.
Wheatley and Washington
Wheatley’s poem and letter to Washington were dated October 26, 1775, about four months after his appointment in June. When the news of the General’s appointment became public, the announcement was prominently featured in colonial newspapers. “I have taken the freedom to address your Excellency in the enclosed poem,” Wheatley wrote to Washington, “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.”3There’s little evidence that Wheatley knew Washington before his appointment. For Wheatley, Washington’s celebrated appointment must have felt impactful because it resonated with many colonists who shared a universal understanding of Washington’s military capabilities and his style and mannerism guiding them from colonial subjugation to a free and independent Columbia, as she described in her poem.
When Wheatley described North America as Columbia, it marked the first notable use of this nomenclature, influencing the naming of the republic’s Federal District in 1791.4 Columbia, often personified as a woman guiding people to justice, prosperity, and community, is presented in Wheatley’s poem to Washington as if the General himself should feel his war effort was a provocation of providence. Such beliefs were prevalent in early America, and we can see some of Wheatley’s use of providence from her upbringing in the former Puritan stronghold of Massachusetts.
When Washington received Wheatley’s letter and poem, the early days of the war felt nearer to the war’s end than Washington would have hoped. The Siege of Boston was stalled, and many of the able-bodied white men were unaccustomed to a battle against a well-trained and well-regulated British front. While Wheatley impacted the General’s sense of providence, he also understood that the public perception of the war was paramount.
The poem’s first twelve lines describe the Patriots as a “celestial choir” whose charge is a lasting freedom, which is to be built in the wake of Columbia’s fury:
Celestial choir! Enthroned in realms of light,
Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth offspring's fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!
The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel binds her golden hair:
Where shines this native of the skies,
Unnumbere’d charms and recent graces rise. (1-12)5
The idea that God’s providence for America had been destined would be a common reframe for Wheatley because it had been part of colonial vernacular culture since the time of John Winthrop’s (1588-1649) prophetic “city on a hill.”6 She was indoctrinated into Congregationalist circles in the Wheatleys' home, and this religious group is a direct descendant of people who understood God’s providence as actively judging the world as a cultural characteristic. Wheatley was just one voice among a tapestry of voices that used their talents for the Patriots' cause in the early days of the war. Written from her perspective as a colonial woman, and one who, at one time, believed her enslavement was providential, we can also sense a strong desire for this new Columbia to shun the ways of the old and, in its place, imbue “freedom’s cause” in this new Columbia as “nations gaze at scenes before unknown.”
Wheatley, too, was a member of this “Celestial Choir.” In her letter, she “takes the freedom” to address General Washington. Little could be used in the poem to denote the slippery yet firmly held boundaries of race and gender in colonial American society. “The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair, / Olive and laurel bind her golden hair / Wherever shines this native of skies / Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise” (9-12) is suggestive of a new nation on the rise, and one that could reestablish the civic body politic between subject and state.
Of course, Wheatley also desired to mutually pledge herself to this new civic body politic, even after having missed her only chance to abscond America for England, perhaps believing that the Patriots would shun practices of racial control and power in the aftermath of a successful campaign against the British:
One century scarce perform’d its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;7
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!
Fix’d are the eyes of nations on scales,
For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.
Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! Cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late. (29-28)
When General Washington, clearly busy with the war's affairs, stumbled upon Wheatley’s poem again in February 1776, it lay tucked beneath a pile of other papers he intended to discard, as he would mention in a letter to his attaché, Colonel Joseph Reed of Pennsylvania. He refers to Wheatley’s poem towards the end of his lengthy letter to Reed, implying the poem encouraged him at the battle front, and writing “With a view of doing justice to her great poetical Genius, I had a great Mind to publish the Poem, but not knowing whether it might not be considered rather as a mark of my own vanity than as a Compliment to her I laid it aside till I came across it again in the manner just mentioned.”8
Washington likely wanted to publish the poem, but he may have felt it was too self-serving if it had come from him. Thus, Reed published the poem in the Virginia Gazette on March 30, 1776, just a month after Thomas Paine’s Common Sense ignited the spirit of colonial America. Paine, perhaps wishing to be inclusive to Wheatley’s revolutionary rhetoric, republished the poem with Reed’s headnote that emphasizes Wheatley’s racial identity: “The following letter and verses were written by the famous Phillis Wheatley, the African Poetess, and presented to His Excellency Gen. Washington.” Paine included the poem in the April 1776 edition of his Pennsylvania Magazine. Wheatley’s identity was not highlighted in her poem or her letter to General Washington, certainly not in any significant racial or gendered context. While she clearly wrote in support of “heaven’s defended race,” we interpret this defense as a testament to a patriot liberated to fight for the persecuted and oppressed rather than for the Empire.
Washington wrote to Wheatley on February 28, 1776, eighteen days after writing Reed with “his mind to publish the poem” thanking her, “most sincerely,” writing, “in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however underserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick,9 the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical Talents; in honor of which, and as a trouble justly due to you, I would have published the Poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only mean to give the World this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred imputation of Vanity.”10
While Washington must have felt that the poem could resonate in the war’s rhetoric, remembering that successful military campaigns rely as much on the provocation of words as they do on battles, his choice of response to her contrasts sharply with how other white American revolutionary leaders reacted. For example, in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) infamously claimed that Wheatley was beneath criticism and not a poet.11
Wheatley’s work validated Washington: “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side, / Thy ev’ry action let goddess guide. / A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, / With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine” in the poem’s closing lines (39-42). Phillis Wheatley played a significant and personal role in the tapestry of rhetoric supporting the patriots, directly addressing General George Washington. While the poem was impactful enough that he felt compelled to have it published, the historical record following the war often echoed Jeffersonian claims about Wheatley rather than those of Washington.
After the American Revolution
In the years during and after the war, Wheatley’s desire to write and publish poetry never faded. Soon after Poems was published, Wheatley began working on a second collection, even reaching out to publishers for a volume of thirteen letters and thirty-three poems; unfortunately, the project never came to fruition. She married John Peters in 1778, though little is known about their union. We do know that the Peters had children, all of whom died in infancy. When Phillis Wheatley Peters died in 1784, the Columbia she perhaps hoped for had not come to pass.
Legacy
The contradiction of Black Africans’ subjugation under planters like Washington is objectively oxymoronic to the Patriots’ cause of liberty. Washington enslaved people throughout his lifetime at Mount Vernon and was dependent on the institution of slavery until his death in 1799. Indeed, the American patriots’ long shot for “freedom’s cause” against the British was limited, excluding the fullness of a providential abolition that Wheatley’s Columbia came to guide the Patriots towards. Even though many Africans desired to support this cause, the United States continued to grapple with the distinction between slavery and liberty. We can see how Phillis Wheatley Peters also endeavored to confront this harsh reality during her life. Her legacy in early America sparks rich debate about these intersections. Her poetic contributions since the Boston Massacre serve as a narrative, revealing alternative perspectives on the significant events leading up to and following the War for Independence.
Don Holmes, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh
Notes:
1. In a letter, dated 7 July 1773, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jonathan Williams about Wheatley’s visit with him in London: “Upon your Recommendation 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. I should perhaps have enquired first for him; but I had heard nothing of him. And I have heard nothing since of her.” “From Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Williams, Sr., 7 July 1773,” Founders Online, National Archives.
2. Phillis Wheatley to David Wooster, 18 October 1773, in The Complete Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters, edited by Vincent Caretta (Oxford, 2019), 109-110; 198-202.
3.“To George Washington from Phillis Wheatley, 26 October 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives and “Enclosure: Poem by Phillis Wheatley, 26 October 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives.
4. Vincent Caretta notes that Wheatley’s use of Columbia may not amount to the first usage but rather a participation in the ideas of the day about what to call the unified colonies. For more information see in The Complete Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters, edited by Vincent Caretta (Oxford, 2019), 211.
5.“To His Excellency General Washington,” as published in Thomas Paine’s The Pennsylvania Magazine: or, American Monthly, 2 April 1776, The National Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives.
6. John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” 1630, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
7. Gallic refers to the French.
8. “From George Washington to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Reed, 10 February 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives,
9. Speaking of or about someone is really high praise.
10.“From George Washington to Phillis Wheatley, 28 February 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives.
11. For more on Jeffersonian criticism of Wheatley, see Notes on the State of Virginia, “Query XIV, 85, from Documenting the American South.
Bibliography:
Caretta, Vincent, ed. The Complete Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters. Oxford University Press, 2019.
