C

The

Riverside

Anthology

of the

African

American

Literary

Tradition

GENERAL EDITOR

Patricia Liggins H///,

Professor^of English
University of San Francisco
EDITORS

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3;y iJ

Bernard W. 8e/l
Professor of English
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The Pennsylvania
State University
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Jrudier.Harris,
,
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_/. Car/yle S/tterson Professor of English
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
'u-WillianrJ. Harris .'
*
Associate Professor of English
The Pennsylvania State University
'r T y?
R. Baxter Miller
. Professor'of English and Director of the Institute for African American Studies
f, University of Georgia Qr
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J,!l JU

' Sondra'A: O'Nea/e J1'

' J'
" Dean of the Cof/ege of liberal Arts and Professor of English
^ t )Moyne State University, i
T
-"" "with Horace Porter
"'
'* '
"
'
Associate Professor of English and Chair of African American Studies
Stanford University

H O U G H T O N MIFFLIN COMPANY,' - ..BOSTON

NEW YORK

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"Go Down, Moses, Way Down in Egypt's Land"

The awful creatures had not cotched her
And tommyhawked heron the head
And left her on the ground for dead.
Young Samuel Allen, Oh! lack a-day
Was taken and carried to Canada.

25

PHILLIS WHEATLEY
(1753?-1784)
There is probably no more astounding account of emerging artistic genius in all of
American literary history than that of the eighteenth-century African American poet
Phillis Wheatley. Kidnapped from Africa when she was less than a decade old and sold
on a Boston auction block when she was near death, the child soon mastered both the
verbal and written language of her enslavers. By the time she was sixteen, she had become the best-known African writer in the colonies. Before her tragic and untimely
death at thirty years of age, she was lionized in England, Europe, and New England,
and she, was paraded before the new republic's political leadership and the old empire's aristocracy. As the abolitionists' illustration of the African's intellectual potential, Phillis Wheatley's name was a guilt-convicting reminder to all literate colonists;
her achievements were a catalyst for the colony's fledgling antislavery movement, and
her presence and writings were an inspiration to every colonial slave.
Born in West Africa around 1753, Phillis Wheatley was abducted into slavery
when she was about five or six years old and put on a slave ship headed for the
Boston docks with a shipment of "refugee" slaves who, because of age or physical
frailty, were unsuited for rigorous labor in the West Indian or southern colonies.
Purchased in 1761 by an upper-class Boston couple, John and Susannah Wheatley,
the girl, at about seven years old, was of slight build and quite sickly, apparently not
adjusting well to the cold New England climate. Shedding her teeth, the waif had
"no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her." Among the final
"items" purchased, Phillis was bought for "a trifle." Believing her to be terminally ill,
the captain of the slave ship wanted to gain at least a small profit before she died.
John Wheatley, a successful entrepreneur, owned several, slaves. He claimed
that they purchased the child because his wife "wanted a Black girl to train as a domestic." The Wheatleys' daughter, Mary, began to teach theology and literature to
the child worker to whom they had given the name "Phillis." The child was soon
spared the menial household chores and was not allowed to associate with the other
Wheatley slaves. Instead, she became a constant companion of Susannah Wheatley
who, recognizing a prodigy, taught her to read and write English and Latin as well as
how to study the Bible. She was soon immersed in "astronomy, geography, history,
British literature (particularly John Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope), and
the Greek and Latin classics of Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer."
She wrote her first letter to the Mohegan leader, Reverend Samson Occom, in
1765. However, neither this letter nor her first, poem, which was sent to Reverend
John Sewall of Boston's Old South Church, are extant. At services at the new South
Congregational Church, which she attended with the Wheatleys, she embraced the
religious teachings of her day, which included the idea of God as the ultimate and
final source of power.

Voices of Slave Poets

Scholars contend that poems revealing her early religious training,'such as "On
Being Brought from Africa;to America" and "To the University of Cambridge, in
New-England," may have beenwritten .prior to 1767, but they were-notpublished
until six years later. Her first poem, "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin," based on a true
adventure of survival at sea; appeared in the Newport Mercury on December 21,1767,
when she was about fourteen years old. Three years later, she wrote "On the Death of
the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, 1770," the poem that was to make her famous in
both-England and the American colonies as the "Sable Muse." Published as a broadside and a pamphlet in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, the poem was published
with Ebenezer. Pemberton's funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771.
By the time she was about eighteen years old, hr 1772, Phillis had composed at
least twenty-eight poems. Mrs. Wheatley advertised for subscription supporters to
publish them in a. collection, but her attempts were unsuccessful. American
colonists refused to support a volume of poems written by a slave. Mrs. Wheatley
had no choice, but-to turn to Londoh.for publication. In'December 1772, she
arranged for a London printer and a ship's master to visit the wealthy Countess of
Huntingdon in London with Phillis's manuscript. Agreeing to finance the volume's
publication, Lady Huntingdon liked the prospect of having the^book dedicated to
her and asked to have Phillis's picture in the frontispiece.
In 1773, the Wheatleys*sentuPhillis to London to get medical care for her
chronic asthma and to finalize the publication. She was accompanied by the Wheatleys' son, Nathaniel. England had abolished slavery a year earlier; according to a
technicality in the law, any enslaved person who set foot in England" was declared
free. This, together witK British newspaper reviews chiding the'Wheatleys for holding the African-poet in bondage, may have figured in Phillis's being formally freed
when she returned to America the next year.
Following publication of her book, much of Wheatley's contemporary recognition'rested on her relationships with''world leaders in the abolitionist movement in
England, Europe,'and the American colonies. These world leaders included John
Thornton, a great philanthropist and leading financial contributor to the Society for
the'Propagation.of.the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the only worldwide organization
dedicated to the education of African slaves. 'While few. slaves were educated in the
southern colonies, the overwhelming majority of slaves in the' northern colonies
who' received any education did so through this society. Thornton's home in
Clapham-was-headquarters for the Clapham Sect, which became the fountainhead
of the abolitionist movement among evangelicals, in bothEurope and-the colonies:
Moreover, during this trip to London, Phillis met Benjamin Franklin, received UIIT
limited renown in the British press, and was even touted by British royalty.
Through Thornton, she established connections with abolitionists who were in
the British parliament, continually pressing antislaveiy petitions. Thornton was also
a major contributor <to the Native American Samson Occom's Wheelock Indian
Schoola forerunner of Dartmouth College. He was instrumental in introducing
Phillis to Samson, thus establishing one of the many cooperative networks between
oppressed Native Americans and enslaved Africans.
Thornton also arranged for Phillis, while in London, to meet- with the
renowned preacher George Whitefield; with the-Earl of Dartmouth, who would become the British ruling governor of the American colonies; and with other promi-

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"Go Down, Moses, Way Down in Egypt's Land"

nent and wealthy benefactors in the influential Clapmah society. These meetings
allowed this wellspring of leadership in the antislavery movement to further dissemJ
inate Phillis's poetry to an ever-widening audience and to use her work to decry the
enslavement of such representative creative potential.
Phillis Wheatley" s London-published volume, included Christian elegies; political and patriotic pieces; and several poems about religion, morals, nature, imagination, and memory. It also contained^ highly original'English translation of Ovid
from the. Latin. Perhaps more.important, several of her poems embodied racially
self-conscious lines. For instance, in her tribute "To the Right Honorable William
Legge, Earl of Dartmouth," Wheatley expresses her personal desire and struggle for
freedom.as an enslaved African in America. Passionately, she informs the Earl that
her objection to,Britain's oppressions of the American colonies stems mainly from
the fact that because of "seeming cruel Fate," she was once "snatch'd from/Afric's
fancy'd happy Seat."
In 1774, hearing that Mrs. Wheatley was ill, Phillis returned to Boston. Not long
after her^ return, Mrs. Wheatley died. Phillis was formally freed some, three months
later. Shortly thereafter, when Mr. Wheatley died and the remaining members of the
family either died or moved away, Phillis became a free and vulnerable unattached
African in the American British colonies. That year, she wrote a final letter to
Occom in which she stated, "In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle,
which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants focDeliverance; and by Leave of our Modern Egyptians I will assert, that' the same Principle
lives in us." Wheatley's forceful declarationwritten only after she was freedfrbm
slaveryspeaks,for her people stillr:held in bondage as well as for enslaved, people
throughout the world.
On April 1,1778, she married the man she had been seeing for about five years, a
free black named John Peters. A freelance lawyer for black people before Massachusetts tribunals, Peters appears to have been an entrepreneur before and after the Revolutionary- War. Apparently quite successful before the war, he kept a grocery store
and at various times exchanged trade as a baker and barber. There is a record of Peters
paying taxes on a house of above-average value. Early scholars render an unflattering
depiction of Peters. Others, including Sidney Kaplan and Arthur Schorriberg, describe
him as an assertive black man who simply did not patronize white people.
M. A.-Richmond and Margaretta Matilda Odell cast Peters as ambitious, shiftless, arrogant, and proud, and Odell states that distant relatives of the Wheatleys
held Peters directly responsible for Phillis's death. But in an era that only valued
black male brawn, Peters's business acumen was simply unacceptable. Charles Akers
argues that "Peters was a free black man of considerable ability and personal charm
who appears not to have deserved his reputation as a ne'er-do-well whose irresponsibility contributed to his talented wife's untimely death."
The couple had three children between 1779 and 1783. To avoid the violence of
the Revolutionary War, Phillis and Peters moved temporarily from Boston to Wilmington5, Massachusetts, shortly after their marriage. Richmond points out that economic conditions in the colonies during and after the war were very harsh, not only
for slaves but for free blacks as well. White people especially resisted the entrance of
free black people into the job market. Thus, economic recession and racial discrimination contributed to the postwar poverty that the family suffered.

Voices of Slave Poets

Because Peters was often away either-looking for work-or dodging creditors,
Phillis eventually took work as a charwoman. During the first six weeks after returning to .Boston, Phillis and the children stayed with one of Mrs. Wheatley" s nieces in a
bombed-out mansion. Peters then moved them .into a run-down section of Boston
where, according to.Odell, other Wheatley relatives found Phillis sick and destitute.
Odell reports that "two of her, children were dead, and the third was sick unto death.
She was herself suffering for want of attention, for, many comforts and that greatest
of albcomforts in sicknesscleanliness. She was reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe
In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis; lay
the dying mother, and the wasting child." The woman who had stood honored and
respected in the presence of international prominence was "numbering the last
hours of her life in a state of the, most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems
of a squalid poverty."
Throughout these lean years, Phillis continued to write and publish poetry and
to maintain, on a limited scale, international correspondence with numerous dignitaries. Before her death, Phillis had attempted to publish a new collection of verse.
Due to racism and to the Revolutionary War, she did not realize this final hope.
Some historians believe that John Peters took trie manuscript with him after her
death; it has never been found. She lived with the hope that her American audience
was at last ready to publish this second volume of poetry. Between" October 30 and
December 18, 1779, with at least the partial motive of raising funds to help feed her
family, Phillis ran six advertisements soliciting subscribers for "300 pages in Octavo," a proposed volume which she intended'to be "Dedicated to the Right Hon.
Benjamin Franklin, Esq.: One of the Ambassadors of the United States at the Court
of France." The work was, to include thirty-three poems and thirteen letters; however, as was the case with Phillis's first volume, no American benefactors came forth
to support publication of the second volume.
i n 1784, the year of her death, the ailing poet was able to publish, under the
name Phillis Peters? a masterful sixty-four line poem in a pamphlet titled Liberty and
Peace, a euphoric celebration of America's victory over Great Britain. Wheatley, j n
this poem, is the first American to refer to this nation as "Columbia." Earlier that
year, she published "An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, the Reverent andvLeafned Dr. Samuel Cooper" in honor of the pastor of the Brattle, Street
church. In September, she-published an elegy in the Poetical Essays section of the
Boston^ Magazine' titled "To Mr. and Mrs.
, on the Death of their Infant
Son," which was probably a lament on the death of one of her own children and cer,tainly foreshadowed her own death three months later. Phillis Wheatley died sometime during the winter of 1784, when she was about 30 years old. She probably died
from complications of childbirth, with the last surviving child dying in time, to be
buried with his mother. Herhusband was incarcerated in debtors prison.
Her detractors maintain that the poet's dedication to Christianity was so. overwhelming as to make her ignore her own slave status and that of her fellow Africans.
However; Sondra O'Neale {"There Was 'No' Other Game in Town") and other
Wheatley supporters point out that if the poet,were to address, the issue of slavery at
all, the only possible, institution in which she could do so was evangelical Christianity. And, evenin -the, church, only a few "radicals" on both continents'spoke out
against the evils of the slave trade. In other articles, O'Neale also highlights Wheat-

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"Go Down, Moses, Way Down in Egypt's Land"

ley's use of biblical terms such as "salvation," "Cain," "light/' and "Christian," to
discuss eighteenth1 century slavery. Again, the use of this type of biblical language
was the only safe way in which a slave writer could speak against his or her enslavers.
Using Christian'symbolism to speak to an audience that considered America to be a
Christian society not only legitimized the African American "slave writer as an acceptable contemporary 'artistit was" the only possible vehicle for those African
Americans seeking to invoke Christian conscience.
'
Another, critic offering revisionist theories of Wheatleys work is John C.1
Shields. In "Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism," he thoroughly discusses Wheatley's 'unusually extensive knowledge of the Greek'and Roman classics'and the ways
in which she uses them to authenticate her poetic gifts and to allude to her ethnic
identity and to innate childhood memories of familial sun- worship when "her
mother poured out water before the sun at his rising." Shields convincingly argues
that "Wheatley's .syncretism of solar worship, Christianity and-classical mythology
demonstrates-a substantial and even provocative use of classicism." He concludes
that
.
J*
What Wheatley essentially does, then, is to decide that this worldwhich allows slavery to remain legitimate, is unsatisfactory to her; so she manipulates the conventions of neoclassicism to build in her poems another, acceptable world.... Not only
was Wheatley vitally concerned for the plight of her enslaved brothers and sisters,
but she fervently sought her own freedom, both in this world and in the next. Sor
complete was her absorption in the struggle for freedom that this endeavor, governed her conception of poetry, causing her to be no more imitative than any other
good student and writer of literature.
Wheatley's detractors disregard these accomplishments; they count it as a light
thing that she met and had correspondence with the first president of the United
States, that she had private meetings with Benjamin Franklin, and that she was even
scheduled to have an audience'with King George III. They also discount another
crucial observation: No less a personage than Thomas Jefferson believed that her au^
thenticity as an African! American female poet was such-a threat to the sanctity of
slavery that he denounced'her work as being "beneath contempt" and dismissed it
as imitative of classic eighteenth-century poetry. He also castigated her writing on
the grounds that it was impossible for an African woman to have the intellectual or
artistic capacity to produce creative art. The statesman concluded that "Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whately*[sic]; but it could not produce a poet."
Another indication of the extreme racism in the eighteenth-century North was
the refusal of the colonial aristocracy to raise the money needed,to publish Phillis's
first book, even after its astounding success in London. The first American edition was
not published until 1787, three years after her death. According to William Robinson
in Reconstructing American Literature (1983), "While her secondedition, published as
Poems, went through at least four London printings for a run of about 1200 copies,' in
America the same volume fared poorly early on," Even though'she was identified as a
black poet during her lifetime, Boston printers, who advertised'the first American
publication other book, would not credit "ye performances to be bya Negro."
Critical revaluation of Wheatley and her poetry began during the early years of
the contemporary women's movement when eighteen'African American^ women

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Voices of Slave Poets

poets held the PhillisAVheatley Poetry Festival atjackson State College, Mississippi,
in 1973. Such writers.as.Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Audre Lorde,
Lucille Clifton, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker paid tribute to the poet and commemorated the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Poems. Since then,
Wheatley has been regarded as the foremother of the African American and
women's literary traditions. To date, Wheatley's Poems has been reprinted more
than twenty-four times in the United States and Europe, and selections have appeared regularly in literature, anthologies. This resurgence, of activity around Wheatley's work will surely yield further significant revelations about,the depth and complexity of her work and the missing facets of her life.

A helpful, full-lengtlrbiographical treatment of Wheatley is Shirley Graham's

The Story of Phillis Wheatley (1949). See also M. A. Richmond's" Bid the Vassal Soar:
Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton
(1974) as well as biographical discussions of Wheatley in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography, vol. 31 (1986) by Sondra O'Neale and Kenny J. Williams, vol. 50. Texts
that include necessary history for Wheatley's biographical background include
Charles W. Akers's "'Our Modern Egyptians:' Phillis Wheatley and the Whig Campaign Against Slavery in Revolutionary Boston" in the Journal of Negro History, vol.
60 (July 1975); and Benjamin Brawley's The. Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the
Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (1937). Valuable
revisionists' assessments of Wheatley's poetry can be found in three critical editions
of her works: Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (1984), edited by William H. Robinson; The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley (1988), edited by John Shields; and The
Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1966), edited by Julian Mason; as well as in the following
works: O'Neale's "A Slave's Subtle War: Phillis -Wheatley's Use of Biblical Myth and
Symbol" in Early American Literature -21 (1986); O'Neale's "A Challenge to Wheatley's Critics: There Was NoOther Game In Town" in the -Journal of Negro Education, vol. 54, no. 4 (Spring;1986); Eugene B. Redmond's Drumvoices: The Mission of
Afro-American Poerrj\(1976); and Kenny J. Williams's "Phillis Wheatley" in the Dictionary of Literary ,Biography, vol. 50 (1986)., More recent scholarship viewing
Wheatley's life and,work from a feminist perspective includes Frances Smith Foster's Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892
(1993) and Gloria HulFs "Black Women Poets from Wheatley to Walker" in Sturdy
Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979).
Original manuscripts, letters, and first editions are in collections at the Boston
Public Library, Duke University Library; Massachusetts Historical Society; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Library Company of Philadelphia; American Antiquarian Society; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Churchill College, Cambridge;
The Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh; Dartmouth College Library; William Salt
Library, Staffordshire, England; British Library, London; Cheshunt Foundation,
Cambridge University; Bowdoin College; Library of Congress; Modrland-Spingarn
Research Center of Howard University; and therSchomburg Library Collection of
the New York Public Library.
< ..
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On Being Brought from Africa to America
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

"*
>
f

I
To the University of Cambridge, in New-England
While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write,
The muses promise to assist my pen;
'Twas not long since I left my native shore
The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom:
Father of mercy, 'twas thy gracious hand
5
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.

|
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Students, to you 'tis giv'n to scan the heights

Above, to traverse the ethereal space,
And mark the systems of revolving worlds.
Still more, ye sons of science ye receive
'
The blissful news by messengers from heav'n,
How Jesus' blood for your redemption flows.
See him with hands out-stretcht upon the cross;
Immense compassion in his bosom glows;
He hears revilers, nor resents their scorn:
What matchless mercy in the Son of God!
When the whole human race by sin had fall'n,
He deign'd to die that they might rise again,
-And share with him in the sublimest skies,
Life without death, and glory without end'
Improve your privileges while they stay,
Ye pupils, and each hour redeem, that bears
Or good or Bad report of you to heav'n.
Let sin, that baneful evil to the soul,
By you be shunn'd, nor once remit your guard;
Suppress the deadly serpent in its egg.
Ye blooming plants of human race devine,
An Ethiop tells you 'tis your greatest foe;
Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain,
And in immense perdition sinks the soul.

to

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Philis's [sic]. Reply to the Answer in our last by the Gentleman in the Navy
r

For one bright moment, heavenly goddness! shine,

Inspire my song and form the lays divine.

Voices of Slave Poets

Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,
But to conduct to heav'ns refulgent fane,
Mayfierycoursers sweep th" ethereal plain,
And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,
Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy.God.

40

To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works

To show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathingfigureslearnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight? t
Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue,
On deathless gloriesfixthine ardent view:
Still may the painter's and the poet's fire
To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!
And may the charms of each seraphic theme
Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!
High to the blissful wonders of the skies
Elate thy soul, and raise thy wishful eyes.
Thrice happy, when exalted to survey
That splendid city, crown'd with endless day,
Whose twice fix gates on radiant hinges ring:
Celestial Salem blooms in endless spring.
Calm and serene thy moments glide along,
And may the muse inspire each future song!
Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless'd,
May peace with balmy wings your soul invest!
But when these shades of time are chas'd away,
And darkness ends in everlasting day,
On-what seraphic pinions shall we move,
And view the landscapes in the realms above?
There shall thy tongue in heav'nly murmurs flow,
And there my muse with heav'nly transport glow:
No more to tell of Damon's tender sighs,
Or rising radiance of Aurora's eyes,
For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,
And purer language on th' ethereal plain.
Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of night
Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

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On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770

Hail, happy saint, on thine immortal throne,
Possest of glory, life, and bliss unknown;

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