this poem against the whole body of Wheatley’s
poems and letters. In context, it seems she felt
that slavery was immoral and that God would
deliver her race in time.
Author Biography
The African slave who would be named Phillis
Wheatley and who would gain fame as a Boston
poet during the American Revolution arrived in
America on a slave ship on July 11, 1761. She
was seven or eight years old, did not speak Eng-
lish, and was wrapped in a dirty carpet. She was
bought by Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a Bos-
ton merchant, and given a name composed from
the name of the slave ship, ‘‘Phillis,’’ and her
master’s last name. It is supposed that she was
a native of Senegal or nearby, since the ship took
slaves from the west coast of Africa. Because she
was physically frail, she did light housework in
the Wheatley household and was a favorite com-
panion to Susanna. She did not mingle with the
other servants but with Boston society, and the
Wheatley daughter tutored her in English, Latin,
and the Bible. Phillis was known as a prodigy,
devouring the literary classics and the poetry of
the day. She was baptized a Christian and began
publishing her own poetry in her early teens.
Wheatley’s mistress encouraged her writing
and helped her publish her first pieces in news-
papers and pamphlets. She had written her first
poem by 1765 and was published in 1767, when
she was thirteen or fourteen, in the Newport
Mercury. These were pre-Revolutionary days,
and Wheatley imbibed the excitement of the
era, recording the Boston Massacre in a 1770
poem. That same year, an elegy that she wrote
upon the death of the Methodist preacher
George Whitefield made her famous both in
America and in England.
Wheatley’s growing fame led Susanna
Wheatley to advertise for a subscription to pub-
lish a whole book of her poems. This failed due
to doubt that a slave could write poetry. Thus,
John Wheatley collected a council of prominent
and learned men from Boston to testify to Phillis
Wheatley’s authenticity. The eighteen judges
signed a document, which Phillis took to Lon-
don with her, accompanied by the Wheatley son,
Nathaniel, as proof of who she was. In 1773 her
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
(which includes ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa
to America’’) was published by Archibald Bell of
London. It was dedicated to the Countess of
Huntingdon, a known abolitionist, and it made
Phillis a sensation all over Europe. She returned
to America riding on that success and was set
free by the Wheatleys—a mixed blessing, since it
meant she had to support herself.
She was planning a second volume of
poems, dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, when
the Revolutionary War broke out. The Wheat-
leys had to flee Boston when the British occupied
the city. Phillis lived for a time with the married
Wheatley daughter in Providence, but then she
married a free black man from Boston, John
Peters, in 1778. He deserted Phillis after their
third child was born. The first two children
died in infancy, and the third died along with
Wheatley herself in December 1784 in poverty in
a Boston boardinghouse. She had not been able
to publish her second volume of poems, and it is
thought that Peters sold the manuscript for cash.
Some of her poems and letters are lost, but sev-
eral of the unpublished poems survived and were
later found.
A sensation in her own day, Wheatley was all
but forgotten until scrutinized under the lens of
Phillis Wheatley(The Library of Congress)
On Being Brought from Africa to America
