2.3: Poet of the Revolution: Phillis Wheatly and American Freedom

She arrived in Boston in the 1760's, was purchased by the wealthy Wheatly family, and went on to become a published, not to mention, accomplished, poet.  She enjoyed an up-close view of the key events leading up to the American Revolution, commemorated many of these events in memorable prose, and traveled to London to secure a publisher for her work.  Amidst it all, she dealt with the scrutiny and doubt of a potential audience who found it hard to believe that a woman who was enslaved could use the English language so eloquently...but she could, she did, and her words spoke for a young nation yearning for its own freedom.  On this episode of History: Beyond the Textbook, we explore poet Phillis Wheatly and the expanding concept of "freedom" in the developing United States.

Key People
Phillis Wheatly
George Whitefield
Benjamin Franklin
George Washington

Key Events
Stamp Act
Boston Massacre
Emancipation

The third season of History: Beyond the Textbook focuses on the stories of individuals who shaped "America's Crucial Years" of 1783-1790, and runs from October 8-December 24. Catch up on Season One, "America's Colonial Era," and Season Two, "America's Revolution," wherever you listen to your podcasts!

Feel free to contact us with feedback or questions by clicking the "Send Us a Text" link or email us at: hbttpodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

Boston, Massachusetts, mid-1700’s…so, after the French and Indian War.  Most descriptions of Boston at this time stress its geographic resemblance to a peninsula, although it felt almost island-like at times.  The only real way to enter the city other than taking the ferry from nearby Charlestown was by crossing a land bridge known as the “Boston Neck,” an isthmus 40 yards wide lined by elm trees and susceptible to submersion during high tide.  Within the town, eighty wharves dotted the waterfront, and the steeples of the Old North Church and Old South Meetinghouse loomed prominently.  Enclaves for different segments of society existed, much like any city of the time, as did dozens of taverns, at least five newspapers, unusual for a town its size, and bookstores everywhere.  Yet Boston Harbor froze in the winter, so ships would ply their trade in the emerging centers of colonial commerce, namely Philadelphia and New York.  All three, however, would play a role in the human trafficking known as the “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” and Boston specifically serves as the home of a young woman whose prose made her an international sensation…and caused a stir since she was enslaved.  On today’s episode of History: Beyond the Textbook, we’ll look at pre-Revolutionary America through the lens of Phillis Wheatly, the poet of the Patriot movement.

Act I: Bondage in Boston

Our tenth episode of season one addressed the complexities and horrors of American slavery through the experiences of three individuals in different colonial regions.  As we look to expand on this narrative, we start with the reality that the American Revolution had a lot to do with the concepts of “freedom” and “rights,” and the implication that Great Britain was denying these rights to her American subjects.  And yes, observers on both sides of the Atlantic saw the irony, not to mention the hypocrisy, in that inhabitants of a land that accepted chattel slavery making a big to-do about rights and freedoms.  The terminology that Americans used through the generations also reflected their notions of how they viewed themselves and restrictions on their rights…especially any variation of the word “slave.”  As a predominantly Protestant nation, the English believed that this gave them a leg up on their Catholic counterparts, like the French and the Irish, whom they believed to be “enslaved” to the Pope.  Economically, the prospect of working for wages, an exceptionally common idea in today’s world, was an unfavorable situation in colonial America.  If one worked for or provided labor for another, it would ideally be a temporary scenario en route to owning one’s own business or shop; anything more was considered servile status, and laws even mandated the subordination of employee to employer.  Legally, the events we have analyzed in the past two episodes, such as the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts, were challenged along the lines of ensuring that all Americans, as “natural-born Englishmen,” received the rights and privileges of said natural-born Englishmen, as consistent with precedent-setting documents such as the English Bill of Rights.

The same could absolutely not be said for the estimated half a million African slaves living in deplorable conditions at the onset of the American Revolution.  It can be argued that the vast majority of the white colonial populace…be they writers, workingmen, merchants…didn’t even consider their African counterparts when they complained of being “enslaved” by Parliament or were forced into “servile” status.  Owners of large plantations, particularly in the South, spoke of liberty in terms of acting as what they called “masters,” while the skilled craftsmen of northern cities such as Philadelphia and New York placed a premium on their liberty…while also enslaving others.  However, our story, much like our episodes on Thomas Hutchinson and Samuel Adams, centers on…you guessed it: BOSTON.  It is in this epicenter of Patriot political thought that we begin the story of Phillis Wheatly.

Act II: Emerging Talent

It was in this city of a little over 15,000 in which the ship carrying Phillis, also named the Phillis, docked in summer 1761, two years prior to the “official” end of the French and Indian War.  A seven-year old girl was on board who would be said to have a “humble and modest demeanor,” at least in the words of 53-year old Susanna Wheatly.  It was rare for a ship to travel directly from West Africa to Boston, but it occurred frequently enough for newspapers to advertise their arrival.  Arranging the purchase of the people on board would often take weeks since it might take longer to arrange the sale of women and children than young men.  It may seem a bit odd and jarring to blasely refer to humans as commodities for purchase, but this was the reality for the majority of Africans in colonial America.  Young Phillis was from…an unknown location, since the owner of the ship was ordered to make as many stops as necessary to fill the cargo hold, so she could have come directly from West Africa, or maybe the Caribbean.  Phillis was now considered property of the wealthy Wheatly family, and to illustrate just how wealthy, consider that the year before, when a great fire destroyed 10 percent of all city residences, the Wheatly family collected 300 pounds in damages to repair their property.  They were merchants who sold goods acquired throughout the Atlantic world, owned another large warehouse, and a smaller sailing vessel.  Purchasing a girl for their household would certainly not have been much of a financial burden, so Phillis Wheatly would grow up observing a rather privileged world.

And what of her talents as a writer?  If you’ve heard anything about Phillis Wheatly, it may pertain to her writing, specifically as a poet.  After all, she would be the first black woman to have her own written work published in the American colonies, but we’re over one decade away from that.  Wheatly arrived when the black population of Boston was at least 10 percent, maybe more, and like so many Bostonians who were enslaved, she lived in the Wheatly household, yet was still “separate.”  A family friend of the Wheatlys claimed that Phillis was treated as if she was Susanna’s own daughter and only engaged in so-called “light duties,” and later accounts indicate that she didn’t really mingle with other slaves in the household.  Her ingenuity with the pen owed much to her literacy which, bear in mind, was illegal in many localities where slavery persisted.  Patriarch John Wheatly claimed that within 16 months of her arrival in Boston, Phillis was completely literate in the English language, and depending on which version you believe, it was either Susanna or Mary Wheatly who served as the teacher.  Shortly thereafter, Phillis allegedly began making rhymes and would later admit that she considered writing to be a “valuable act.”  Minister Jeremy Belknap preserved the first lines that Wheatly ever wrote, a short rhyme about the Thatcher family who lived a few blocks away.  These lines were written in 1765, the same year that the dreaded Stamp Act sailed through Parliament to raise revenue for Britain’s defense of North America.

Wheatly’s formative years were influenced by pre-Revolutionary events in which Boston took center stage.  1765 alone saw ire over the implantation of the Stamp Act, but also the very public support of the law courtesy of Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard.  As alluded to in Act I, it's very telling that as this back-and-forth dialogue about British law morphed into an assertion of the rights of Englishmen, “slavery” was already becoming a metaphor for the relationship between the mother country and her colonial subjects.  The processions where perceived Tories, or Loyalists, were hung in effigy would often proceed directly past the Wheatly house, so Phillis would have certainly taken note of this.  Regarding the protest that the Sons of Liberty planned for the date the Stamp Act was to take effect, she also would have noticed that black Bostonians were to remain indoors.  In fact, colonials who were black, free or otherwise, were increasingly banned from any and all protests.  Over in England, William Pitt, the “Great Commoner” whose policies won the Seven Years’ War, claimed that Americans “…would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”  Intelligent as she was, Wheatly would also have immediately recognized this dual-faced dynamic.

Act III: Earning Fame

The Stamp Act did end up getting repealed, and Wheatly would acknowledge this with “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty on His Repealing the American Stamp Act.”  That’s right: Wheatly wrote a poem that thanked King George III for his repeal of the Stamp Act.  The first draft is believed to have been composed in either 1766 or 1767; I say “believed” because it wasn’t immediately published, same as all of her other poems up to this point.  Whether Wheatly truly believed in independence from Britain at this stage will always be a matter up for interpretation, but her lyrical adoration of the young monarch suggests that she was seeking to glorify king, country, and empire more than she sought to elevate, say, the local protest leaders who, recall, would not have allowed her to attend any celebration of the Stamp Act’s repeal.  This early version really emphasizes the greatness of George III and also invokes God’s protection on him, seen in the lines, “Thus every clime with equal gladness see, when kings do Smile, it sets their subjects free.”  However, the revised edition that she dated 1768 changed this line, for it now read “A monarch’s smile can set his subjects free!”  A slight alteration, but one that seems to stress a shift in whose freedom matters.

The second version of Wheatly’s ode to the king was written when there was still a fair amount of colonial pride in their British ancestry, but momentum was still building towards a complete break with England.  In the interim between these two drafts, she continued to hone her craft while also commenting on the brewing racial and revolutionary rhetoric of the day.  Writers continued to lament Parliamentary actions as leading to colonial enslavement, going so far as to state that colonials should “never submit calmly to be chain’d in perpetual servitude.”  There were even efforts to minimize mainland slavery by highlighting the perceived brutality of plantation owners in the West Indies. Salem resident Timothy Pickering wasn’t afraid to take his fellow colonials to task when he wrote “how contrary is our slavery to the spirit of the gospel…for in the first place…Africans are torn from their tender parents…when little children.”  Ironic given that this was the most likely beginning for Phillis Wheatly.  She wrote additional poems such as the New England-centric “America,” written in the same year that thousands of British troops descended upon Boston to keep the King’s peace in the wake of protests over the Townshend Acts.  Wheatly allegedly acknowledged that occasion with “On the arrival of the Ships of War, and Landing of the Troops.”  It was never published, but it reveals her awareness of the position of Boston within the greater world, and her role in exposing it.  She would continue this pattern following the most well-known consequence of the British occupation: the Boston Massacre.  Remember, Wheatly’s King Street address allowed her a front-row seat to revolutionary events, and as a result she was published for the first time, albeit anonymously, and the poem’s contents indicate that it came from her pen.  She laments the immediate deaths of “Caldwell, Attucks, Gray, and Mav’rick,” and further eulogizes them by stating “Long as in Freedom’s case, the wise contend, Dear to your unity shall fame extend.

The first published poem that was attributed to Phillis Wheatly was written in honor of an Englishman, although it’s not quite fair to classify Anglican minister George Whitefield as “just another Englishman.”  Whitefield rose to prominence as part of what posterity has deemed the “First Great Awakening,” a time frame when revivals were held by travelling ministers in an attempt to invoke deeply emotional, spiritual experiences from their attendees.  This greater movement of the 1730’s and 1740’s was kicked off by New Englander Jonathan Edwards, but Whitefield also spread the message, and made several trips to America in what amounted to “grand tours.”  He seemingly sided with colonials in their struggles with Parliament, denouncing the Stamp Act and sympathizing with their seemingly disappearing liberties.  His seventh, and final, trip abroad began with his arrival in Boston on August 14, 1770, coincidentally, the five-year anniversary of the first Stamp Act protests.  The Wheatly’s relationship with Whitefield went back to his first visit in the 1740’s, and he probably stayed with the family in 1770.  Six weeks upon his arrival, after preaching several times per day, he collapsed and died.  Phillis Wheatly commemorated his life and legacy in a poem that provided her with instant notoriety.  The poem was published on its own merits rather than in an established newspaper, and was advertised as written by “PHILLIS, a Servant girl of 17 Years of Age.”  Here was a teenaged girl, enslaved, who could mourn a spiritual giant and articulate the possibilities of evangelism.  Theoretically, Wheatly would no longer need to remain anonymous when she published her works, which increasingly emphasized Christian imagery and ideals.

Act IV: Freedom

Her elegy for George Whitefield not only provided her with colonial fame, but also made her somewhat of a European sensation when it was published in London in 1771.  It was good…too good, so said her critics, who were predominantly white men with a world view that openly questioned the literary abilities of a young woman who was enslaved.  Bear in mind that by the mid-1700’s, not only had chattel slavery developed along racial lines in colonial America, but perceived differences, mainly those between those who were white and black, were scrutinized and emphasized by preeminent thinkers.  There was speculation, incorrect as it was, that black and white people might even belong to separate species.  Bear in mind that much of these biased opinions were directed towards addressing the uncomfortable reality that members of one race were primarily enslaving another, so justification was seen as necessary.  Her most well-known American critic was arguably the Sage of Monticello himself: Thomas Jefferson.  From 1781-1784, which was the year of Wheatly’s untimely death at age 31, Jefferson composed the draft for what would become Notes on the State of Virginia.  This wasn’t formally published until 1787, so Wheatly was unable to defend herself from Jefferson’s accusations.  Simply put, Jefferson admitted that slavery as an institution was unjust, but he nevertheless attacked her merits as a poet and intellectual.  He stated, to quote, “Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatly, but it could not produce a poet.  The compositions under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”  Harsh, and unjustified: Jefferson was implying that the Christian faith made Wheatly literate, but that her poetry wasn’t true poetry, no matter what the tribunal had stated 15 years earlier.

“Tribunal?”  Yes, we arrive at the part of the story where Wheatly’s prose was considered so eloquent and inspiring that her authorship was not only openly questioned, but apparently required validation.  Fall 1772 was when this so-called validation occurred…the “lull” between the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, when time could apparently be devoted to such things.  No official record or transcript exists to indicate what occurred in this meeting, any potential questions that may have been asked, or what Wheatly stated in her defense.  The 18 men gathered as part of the tribunal did so at the explicit request of John Wheatly, who had the reputation of a man whose wishes would be, if not honored, given serious consideration.  John and Susana were attempting to procure an American publisher for Phillis’s manuscript, and those persistent questions of legitimacy kept resurfacing.  Although we don’t know the details, we know the end results: these 18 prominent Bostonian men pledged that, in their words, “the POEMS were (as we verily believe) written by PHILLIS…and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a family in this town.”  Her race was also highlighted so there could be no doubt as to the status of this exalted author.  And just how distinguished were these signees?  John Hancock was one of them…yes, that John Hancock testified in her favor, as did the subject of episode 2.1: Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson.  There two alone are some seriously heavy hitters in 1772 Boston, so her talents, which should never have been in doubt, were now publicly vindicated.

And yet the manuscript of this supremely skilled young woman, now about 19, remained unpublished.  Even with what amounted to a certificate of authenticity, the Wheatlys couldn’t find any American publisher to take on the task…which is why they decided to reach out to their connections in London.  Persistence paid off when, in September 1773, three months prior to the Boston Tea Party, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published by Londoner Archibald Bell.  Phillis had been in London for several months preceding this occasion to ensure that publication went smoothly, but also would serve as tangible evidence that she was indeed the book’s author (which still appeared to be in doubt).  During this time, Wheatly made rounds that would resemble the itinerary of a foreign dignitary: she met the Earl of Dartmouth, she met Dr. Daniel Solander, who had traveled with Captain James Cook, and she even met with the esteemed Dr. Benjamin Franklin, wo allegedly “offered her any services I could do her.”  Nothing would come of this, but Wheatly’s status was probably disconcerting to Nathaniel Wheatly, John and Susana’s son, who had the original idea of traveling to London for business and taking Phillis along.  As the months wore on, he appeared to play more the role of chaperone to Wheatly, although her legal status as a slave combined with her physical presence in London presented an issue.  One year earlier, an English court ruled that any slave who arrived in England could not be forced to return to the American colonies.  However, Wheatly did return…and was freed shortly thereafter.  Why was Phillis Wheatly emancipated?  WE can’t exactly say for certain: it may have been in the works, only to be delayed until she reached adulthood.  Her trip abroad may have raised her profile to a point where it was unviable for her to remain in bondage.  Whatever the official reasons, she was free, and also officially responsible for her own financial well-being.  The impending war didn’t make her life any easier, although she would write a letter on October 26, 1775, accompanied by a poem, congratulating George Washington on his appointment as head of the Continental Army.  He responded, and even saw to the publication of her poem to him in a Virginia paper.  Wheatly’s remaining years would be filled with hardship as a second manuscript, which she intended to dedicate to Ben Franklin, went unpublished, and whose full contents remain unrecovered.  Her death in 1784 at age 31 was a tragedy, as was the loss of any potentially brilliant and insightful work she had yet to write.  Yet her legacy as a woman from Africa, enslaved, rubbing elbows with elites, whose trajectory ran alongside what freedom would truly mean to a young nation, remains as strong as ever.

In our next episode, we explore the outbreak of actual combat as Americans would fight the British at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.  Our subject enjoyed near universal respect, but is often sidelined due to his unfortunate death in leading troops at Bunker Hill.  Join us next week on History: Beyond the Textbook, as we look at Dr. Joseph Warren, the “Fighting physician” of the Revolutionary War.