The Off-Key Bard
History

Phillis Wheatley

Before white Boston would accept her poetry, they put Phillis Wheatley on trial to prove she wrote it. Eighteen prominent men — including the governor and John Hancock — certified her authorship. The society that questioned her intelligence never questioned why she was enslaved.

Sometime around 1761, a ship arrived in Boston carrying enslaved Africans. Among them was a little girl, probably about seven years old. We do not know the name her parents gave her, precisely where in Africa she was born, or what language she first spoke. The name history remembers came later. The ship that carried her was named the Phillis, and the Boston family that purchased her was named Wheatley. Within little more than a decade, that enslaved African girl became one of the most remarkable literary figures in British North America. She mastered English, studied Latin and classical literature, wrote sophisticated poetry, corresponded with prominent political figures, and became the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry. Her achievements created an immediate crisis for a society built upon assumptions of Black inferiority — and the way that society responded to the crisis revealed something essential about itself.

The Education

John and Susanna Wheatley purchased the girl as a household servant. Susanna recognized the child's unusual intelligence and, along with their daughter Mary, began teaching her English. The child learned with extraordinary speed. Within sixteen months she was reading difficult passages from the Bible. She then began studying Latin, classical texts, and English literature, particularly the poet Alexander Pope, whose formal verse forms would shape her own writing. She began composing poetry in her early teens.

It is easy, given what followed, to present this as a straightforwardly good outcome — a fortunate enslaved child who received an unusual education and produced remarkable work. The picture is more complicated. Phillis Wheatley received an education that many free white women were denied, but she remained enslaved property of the Wheatley family. The same household that enabled her literary development also owned her. She wrote poetry about liberty while being legally unfree. She produced sophisticated analyses of Christian faith while her own status as a person rather than property rested entirely on the willingness of others to treat her as one. The education was real. The bondage was equally real. Both of these things were true simultaneously, and neither cancels the other.

The Trial of 1772

By 1772, Wheatley had accumulated enough poems to attempt publication, but Boston publishers required evidence that an enslaved African woman was actually capable of writing the sophisticated verse attributed to her. The doubt was not casual — it was structural. Prevailing assumptions about African intellectual capacity made it seem more probable that a white person had actually written the poems and was falsely crediting them to an enslaved woman, perhaps as a curiosity or a commercial novelty. The only way to resolve the question was to examine her directly.

In October 1772, Phillis Wheatley appeared before a panel of eighteen prominent Boston men. The group included Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the merchant John Hancock, the Reverend Charles Chauncy, and other leading figures of Massachusetts society. They questioned her about her work, her literary knowledge, and her understanding of classical texts and poetic tradition. She answered everything. The men signed a formal attestation certifying that they were "satisfied" the poems were genuinely written by Phillis Wheatley, an African. The document was later included as a preface in her published collection.

The episode deserves to sit with us for a moment. Eighteen of the most powerful and educated men in Massachusetts — men who would within a few years be arguing strenuously about liberty, natural rights, and the dignity of citizens — convened to examine whether an enslaved African girl could prove she had written her own work. She passed their examination. They signed their names. And then they went home. The same society that could organize a formal intellectual examination of Phillis Wheatley had never organized any formal examination of why she was enslaved in the first place. The trial simultaneously verified her exceptional capacity and illustrated the system within which that capacity existed.

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Boston publishers, having certified her authorship, nonetheless declined to publish her manuscript. Wheatley's collection was published in London in 1773 — Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral — making her the first African American and one of the first American women to publish a book. She traveled to England with Nathaniel Wheatley to oversee publication, and her reception there was warm. London society found her remarkable and charming. The Wheatleys manumitted her, formally granting her legal freedom, shortly after the book's publication and her return to Boston.

Her poetry was largely composed within the formal traditions of eighteenth-century English verse — heroic couplets, classical allusions, devotional themes. Some later critics, especially in the twentieth century, criticized her work for not more explicitly condemning slavery or expressing African American identity in terms they expected. The criticism misreads both her position and her achievement. An enslaved person who openly attacked the institution of slavery in print in 1773 would have faced consequences beyond criticism. Within the available forms, Wheatley embedded arguments with considerable force. Her elegies — poems commemorating the deaths of prominent figures, which were among the most commercially viable forms of poetry at the time — often contained quiet claims about the dignity and spiritual equality of all people that contradicted the racial hierarchy her society claimed to believe in. She was writing for audiences who could end her freedom or restore it. She worked within those constraints without abandoning what she was trying to say.

Exposing Revolutionary Hypocrisy

In 1774, Wheatley wrote a letter to Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister and fellow Christian, responding to his arguments about slavery and liberty. The letter was published in several colonial newspapers and became one of her most politically direct statements. She wrote that she could not reconcile the cry for political liberty among Christians with their continued enslavement of Africans, and she compared American enslavers to the Egyptians of the biblical Exodus — the oppressors from whom God's people sought liberation. Her argument was addressed to a Christian audience in the Christian language they used themselves. Liberty, she argued, was a divine gift — which meant enslaving people who possessed it was not simply a political injustice but a theological one.

The timing was deliberate. Colonial political rhetoric was saturated with invocations of liberty, slavery, and tyranny — colonists described British taxation as enslaving them, which made the continued actual enslavement of Africans a particular kind of rhetorical exposure. Wheatley had noticed the contradiction and named it in public, in print, in the language of the Bible that her readers claimed as authority.

George Washington and Columbia

In 1775, Wheatley sent a poem to George Washington, who had just been appointed commander of the Continental Army. The poem praised Washington in elevated terms and employed the figure of "Columbia" as a personification of the emerging American nation — an early use of a term that would later become embedded in American national imagery. Washington responded with a gracious letter and invited Wheatley to visit him at his headquarters, an invitation she accepted in 1776. The exchange has sometimes been cited as evidence of mutual respect. It was also an exchange between a man who enslaved more than a hundred people and a woman who had until recently been enslaved herself, using the language of American liberty as their shared medium. Both of those things were true of the meeting.

Jefferson's Counter-Argument

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson dismissed Wheatley's poetry as evidence that Black intellectual capacity was fundamentally limited — arguing that her verse, while technically competent, failed to demonstrate genuine creativity or elevated feeling. The passage is remarkable partly for its dishonesty: Jefferson was attempting to refute evidence of Black intellectual achievement by redefining what counted as intellectual achievement. For Jefferson, Wheatley's poetry needed to fail. The alternative — accepting that an enslaved African woman had produced sophisticated, published, internationally recognized literary work — undermined the entire racial framework that permitted American slavery to coexist with American republican ideals. Wheatley's existence was, for that framework, a problem. Jefferson's response was to dismiss the evidence rather than revise the conclusion.

Subsequent generations read both Jefferson's Notes and Wheatley's poetry, and the gap between what Jefferson claimed and what the poems actually demonstrated has only widened with time.

Death and Legacy

Wheatley married John Peters, a free Black man, in 1778. The Revolutionary War had scattered her social network — the Wheatley family had dispersed, her white supporters were preoccupied with the conflict, and the economic opportunities available to free Black women in wartime Boston were severely limited. She died in December 1784, probably at around thirty-one years old, in poverty. Three children born to her and John Peters had also died. She was buried in an unmarked grave, and her fourth book of poetry — which she had been working to publish — was never found.

Her legacy proved more durable than her circumstances. Abolitionists cited her work in arguments against slavery. Later generations of African American writers claimed her as a founding figure of a Black literary tradition. Scholars have increasingly recognized that the apparent conventionality of her verse concealed arguments that could not have been made more explicitly without endangering her freedom. She was working within the only literary forms that could reach the audiences she needed to reach, and she used them precisely.

What the Trial Proved

The examination of 1772 is the sharpest image of Phillis Wheatley's position and meaning. Eighteen powerful men questioned her to determine whether she was capable of writing sophisticated poetry. She was. They signed their names and went home. Their willingness to organize an examination to verify her intellectual capacity was never matched by any comparable willingness to examine whether the system that enslaved her was intellectually defensible. The examination proved that she could write. It also proved something the examiners did not intend: that the society questioning her humanity was not nearly as interested in the questions it claimed to ask as it was in the hierarchy it wanted to preserve.

Phillis Wheatley did not write at the edge of the American founding. She wrote at its center — in its language, with its allusions, about its most important subjects — and made it impossible for anyone paying attention to claim that the principles of liberty applied only to the people already free.

Sources

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