Lucy Terry and Jupiter Hammon, had printed
individual poems before her.
The American Revolution
Against the unlikely backdrop of the institution
of slavery, ideas of liberty were taking hold in
colonial America, circulating for many years in
intellectual circles before war with Britain
actually broke out. This was the legacy of phi-
losophers such as John Locke who argued
against absolute monarchy, saying that govern-
ment should be a social contract with the people;
if the people are not being served, they have a
right to rebel. These ideas of freedom and the
natural rights of human beings were so potent
that they were seized by all minorities and ethnic
groups in the ensuing years and applied to their
own cases. Even before the Revolution, black
slaves in Massachusetts were making legal peti-
tions for their freedom on the basis of their
natural rights. These documents are often
anthologized along with the Declaration of
Independence as proof, as Wheatley herself
said to the Native American preacher Samson
Occom, that freedom is an innate right.
Revolutionary Boston
Wheatley lived in the middle of the passionate con-
troversies of the times, herself a celebrated cause
and mover of events. The Wheatley home was not
far from Revolutionary scenes such as the Boston
Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. While she had
Loyalist friends and British patrons, Wheatley
sympathized with the rebels, not only because her
owners were of that persuasion, but also because
many slaves believed that they would gain their
freedom with the cause of the Revolution.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims inThe Trials
of Phillis Wheatleythat Boston contained about a
thousand African Americans out of a population
of 15,520. Only eighteen of the African Ameri-
cans were free. This condition ironically coexisted
with strong antislavery sentiment among the
Christian Evangelical and Whig populations of
the city, such as the Wheatleys, who themselves
were slaveholders. In fact, the Wheatleys intro-
duced Phillis to their circle of Evangelical anti-
slavery friends. John Hancock, one of Wheatley’s
examiners in her trial of literacy and one of the
founders of the United States, was also a slave-
holder, as were Washington and Jefferson.
There were public debates on slavery, as well as
on other liberal ideas, and Wheatley was no doubt
present at many of these discussions, as references
to them show up in her poems and letters, addressed
to such notable revolutionaries as George Wash-
ington, the Countess of Huntingdon, the Earl of
Dartmouth, English antislavery advocates, the
Reverend Samuel Cooper, and James Bowdoin.
Her praise of these people and what they stood for
was printed in the newspapers, making her voice
part of the public forum in America.
The question of slavery weighed heavily on
the revolutionaries, for it ran counter to the
principles of government that they were fighting
for. The justification was given that the partic-
ipants in a republican government must possess
the faculty of reason, and it was widely believed
that Africans were not fully human or in posses-
sion of adequate reason. Proof consisted in their
inability to understand mathematics or philoso-
phy or to produce art. Into this arena Phillis
Wheatley appeared with her proposal to publish
her book of poems, at the encouragement of her
mistress, Susanna Wheatley. She was about
twenty years old, black, and a woman.
The collection was such an astonishing testi-
mony to the intelligence of her race that John
Wheatley had to assemble a group of eighteen
prominent citizens of Boston to attest to the
poet’s competency. They signed their names to
a document, and on that basis Wheatley was able
to publish in London, though not in Boston. She
was so celebrated and famous in her day that she
was entertained in London by nobility and
moved among intellectuals with respect. Her
published book, Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral(1773), might have pro-
pelled her to greater prominence, but the Revo-
lutionary War interrupted her momentum, and
Wheatley, set free by her master, suddenly had to
support herself. It is supremely ironic and tragic
that she died in poverty and neglect in the city of
Boston; yet she left as her legacy the proof of
what she asserts in her poems, that she was a free
spirit who could speak with authority and equal-
ity, regardless of origins or social constraints.Critical Overview.
From the 1770s, when Phillis Wheatley first
began to publish her poems, until the present
day, criticism has been heated over whether she
was a genius or an imitator, a cultural heroine or
a pathetic victim, a woman of letters or an item
of curiosity. The early reviews, often written by
people who had met her, refer to her as a genius.
William Robinson provides the diverse earlyOn Being Brought from Africa to America