The rich irony recorded here offers another exam-
ple of her rhetorical strategy; it is the unpolished
and formally uneducated slave teenager—who as
woman and black slave could never have gained
access to Harvard—who chides these “sons of sci-
ence” members of the ostensibly superior race,
sex, and class.
In this and several poems Wheatley readily
seems to embrace her African identity. Despite this,
however, she also seems to have accepted the com-
mon notion of her day that Africa was a “Pagan
land,” a dark continent, “The land of errors, and
Egyptian gloom.” Consequently, early scholars crit-
icized Wheatley for her failure to speak out directly
against slavery, failing to her see that her simple
but not simplistic language and muffled voice con-
veyed her biting critique of slavery as well as an
attack on the hypocrisy of nominal Christians.
This is clearly the case in “On Being Brought
from Africa to America,” in which her speaker de-
clares, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as
Cain, / May be refined, and join the’ angelic trains”
(The Poems 12). Dickson Bruce provides insight
into current evaluations of her perspective and
work when he writes:
Her lines are at once simple and fairly com-
plex, given Wheatley’s position. At one level
asserting her own identity, they assert her per-
ceptiveness and her ability to comment on the
world around her. Somewhat more deeply, and
ironically, they allowed her, from her own mar-
ginal position, to see the failure in others that
others failed to see in themselves. (44)In 1773, in London, where she had gone to re-
cuperate from illness, Wheatley, no longer a slave,
published her first collection of poems, Poems
on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, which
contained 38 verses. Not surprisingly, given the
18th-century enlightened world’s discourse on
race, in which blacks were deemed incapable of
intellectual development, Wheatley was called
on to prove, during what HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.,
calls an “oral examination,” that she had penned
the verses in this, the first collection of published
poems written in English by a former slave, before
her work could be validated in America. Gates
argues, “If she had indeed written her poems,
then this would demonstrate that Africans were
human beings and should be liberated from
slavery” (26–27).
In the end, Wheatley and her work received at-
testations and authentication from some of “the
most respectable characters in Boston” (Gates, 5),
including Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of
Massachusetts; his lieutenant governor, Andrew
Oliver; Reverend Mather Byles, the grandson of
Increase Mather and nephew of Cotton Matter;
the Reverend Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mat-
ter; and John Hancock. Washington wrote thank-
ing Wheatley for her flattering verse, commenting
on her genius and noting, “the style and manner
exhibit a striking proof of [her] poetic talents”
(Gates, 38). To show his appreciation, Washington
invited Wheatley to visit him at his Cambridge
headquarters.
A notable exception was the reception Wheatley
received from the distinguished statesman and au-
thor of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas
Jefferson, who found it impossible to accept as
credible Wheatley’s intelligence and, by extension,
her humanity. Jefferson, who was convinced that
blacks, “in imagination... are dull, tasteless, and
anomalous,” wrote in his infamous Notes on the
State of Virginia that “the compositions published
under [Wheatley’s] name are below the dignity of
criticism. (Gates, 42–43). History, in the end, has
proved him wrong.
Wheatley, who married John Peters and lost
three children in their infancy, died in 1784. She
has taken her rightful place next to the Founding
Fathers as an important colonial voice who cher-
ished freedom and as one of the founders of the
African-American literary tradition.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. The Origins of African Ameri-
can Literature, 1680–1865. Charlottesville: Univer-
sity Press of Virginia, 2001.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheat-
ley: American’s First Black Poet and Her Encounter
with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas
Books, 2003.Wheatley, Phillis 545