Phillis Wheatley Peters

Kate Davies

Kate Davies is a knitwear designer and the author of several books, some of which are about eighteenth-century women, including Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren (1995) and Bluestockings (2021), which she edited with Nicole Pohl, and from which this essay is taken) is available at KDD & Co. This beautiful book brings together a celebration of the group of eighteenth-century learned women known as the Bluestockings, with a wide-ranging exploration of sock and stocking knitting.

On 1 September 1773, a book was entered in the London stationers‘ register by printer Andrew Bell. A few days previously, he had registered the portrait of the author (which was to serve as the book‘s frontispiece); and, at this follow-up visit, publication of the volume was secured. The engraved portrait—which depicted a young woman in a contemplative pose, quill in hand, pausing in the act of creating her own words—was groundbreaking in itself, but the book that she had written was even more so. For the book was the work of a woman who, at the time of its publication, was just 19 and who had produced the accomplished poems the book contained during her teenage years. She was also the first woman of African descent to publish a book in either America or Britain—the former, the place where she resided; the latter, the country to which she had travelled in order to see her words in print. This black woman was also—at the time of her book‘s publication—regarded as the legal property of white people. Bought and bound as chattel to the Wheatley family of Boston, she was known by the name of the ship which, twelve years earlier, had removed her from her West African home. De-humanised by being bought and sold, and objectified by her enslaved status, in producing and publishing her own words this young woman laid powerful claim to her own humanity, subjectivity and selfhood. Her act of poetic authorship was also an act of cultural authority. The author of this book was Phillis Wheatley (later, Peters).

Wheatley Peters‘ Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) is one of the most important books to be published anywhere in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It is important because it is a book written by a black woman, who was very well aware that her new professional status as author held the key to her own freedom. It is important because it is a work of creative intellect, whose young writer displayed her imaginative prowess while revealing her adroit mastery of the contemporary literary forms of lyric, elegy and ode. It is important because it is a work of faith that spoke profoundly to a committed culture of evangelical Christianity, out of which the humanitarian movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery was beginning to emerge. It is important because it is a work of self-authorship, in which this poet, like countless other poets before and after, claimed her own right to speak by addressing what she wrote to those in positions of power and influence. It is important as a work of personal and political identity, in which a creative individual of African descent vocally expressed her admiration of, and solidarity with, other creative individuals of African descent. It is important because it is a work of its historical moment, the crossroads at which American liberty had become a charged ideological concept, and in which the failure of rebel colonists to consider the inclusion of enslaved people in the ideas of freedom they claimed for themselves was to play its own part in the bitter transatlantic feud that was beginning to turn to revolutionary war. And it is important more generally as a book of its time, when the very existence of a collection of poetry by a brilliant young black woman posed a significant challenge to “enlightenment” figures like David Hume, whose positioning of Africans at the bottom of their false hierarchies of humanity became so central to the racist discourses that helped to perpetuate slavery beyond the eighteenth century.

London was an interesting place to be as a black author in 1773. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Britain‘s black population numbered between 14,000 and 20,000, the vast majority of whom lived and worked in the capital city. During the 1770s, due to a series of high-profile cases brought by anti-slavery campaigners, the legal position of black people was rather different on the British mainland to what it was in the country‘s then-colonies in North America and the West Indies. In June 1772, Lord Mansfield had ruled, in the Somerset case brought by Granville Sharp to the King‘s Bench, that the purported “owner” of an enslaved person in Britain could not legally force such a person to travel, without their will or consent, to the colonies of the West Indies (where they would be bound under the legal context of plantation slavery). In a separate ruling (Knight v. Wedderburn), the Scottish courts later followed the precedent set by England, and both cases were understood, by many in Britain and across the wider Atlantic world, to effectively declare the illegality of chattel slavery on the British mainland. During the American revolutionary war, the British offered emancipation to black people who had been enslaved by white colonists loyal to the crown, and many people of African descent actively chose a British over an American identity because of the promise of their own liberty—a promise which, British loyalists were quick to point out, had been ignored by the founding fathers in their own discourses of political freedom. During the 1770s, then, black people were very well aware that they were regarded as possessing a right to basic freedom simply by setting foot on British soil, and at this time there was an upswell of cultural interest in publications by African authors—such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw‘s (1705–1775) famous Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life…of an African Prince, as Related by Himself (1772). As Vincent Carretta writes, the Somerset and Wedderburn cases “played a measurable role in the development of African-British writing”, and by the 1770s “England was obviously a far more receptive environment than North America for black writers”.

London certainly proved a more “receptive environment” than Boston for publishing a series of Poems…Moral and Religious by a young black woman. Wheatley Peters‘ religious devotion had been widely admired throughout the transatlantic evangelical community after her publication of an “elegiac poem” in 1770 on the death of the famous methodist preacher, George Whitfield (1714–1770), in which she‘d celebrated the racial inclusivity of Whitfield‘s message, in which all were equal under God. Whitfield‘s patron, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, together with Wheatley Peters‘ own religious and intellectual mentors at Boston‘s Old South Meeting House, had urged publication of a volume of her poetry, but in Boston it had proved difficult to secure financial support for such a work. Because of her enslaved status, and a host of racist questions surrounding Wheatley Peters‘ authenticity, intellectual capacity and literary abilities, she had been forced to seek the attestation of eighteen of the most prominent men in Massachusetts—including the then governor, Thomas Hutchinson—to her legitimate authorship of the poetic work she had herself created. But, with the support of the Countess of Huntingdon (who suggested the inclusion of the volume‘s engraved frontispiece, thought to be the work of African-American artist Scipio Moorhead (fl. 1773–1775)), British subscriptions were sought, publication was arranged, and Wheatley Peters travelled from Boston to London to witness the publication of her groundbreaking book.

What did this book contain? In her Poems, Wheatley Peters had gathered a substantial collection of thirty-nine pieces including a range of elegies and odes and hymns. There were poems about the inspiration of breaking dawns, soft evening light and the power of memory; poems which took their cue from Old Testament verses; poems urging religious virtue upon wayward Harvard students; and poems in which Wheatley Peters shared the grief of members of her congregation at Boston‘s Old South Meeting House at the sad loss of friends and family members. One poem was importantly dedicated to Scipio Moorhead, the talented Boston artist, who, like Wheatley Peters, was one of the approximately 5,000 enslaved black people then living in Massachusetts.

As well as encouraging the creative endeavours of those of African descent who were enslaved, Wheatley Peters directly addressed the question of her own enslavement in a poetic address to William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth (the British Secretary of State for New England, who had opposed the Stamp Act and who shared Wheatley Peters‘ evangelical Christianity). The poem enjoined Dartmouth to look favourably on New England‘s desire for political freedom:

In this poem, Wheatley Peters‘ own sense of familial and cultural loss is clear. And she not only expresses her own personal desire for freedom, but also connects that desire to the ideal of political liberty that was then animating contemporary revolutionary New England. Despite the fact that radical commentators like James Otis had argued, during the debate on the Stamp Act, that political freedom should be extended to all people, black and white, this was an idea that very few revolutionary Americans were willing, at that time, to either countenance or articulate. That Wheatley Peters did so, openly, in her poetry is enormously significant.

Created two and a half centuries ago, Wheatley Peters‘ poems are written in a register, within a particular political environment, that is very different from our own. She speaks a language of evangelical commitment and sentimental feeling, and she wrote within the context of her own lived experience as an enslaved person within an elite white family. Beneath the heavy weight of that language and that context, the voice of the young black woman who is profoundly aware of the complexity and difficulty of her own position has seemed, to some later readers, hard to listen to or indeed to hear. But, through the pages of the volume that Phillis Wheatley Peters had published in London in the autumn of 1773, the idea of freedom runs like a silver thread, associated variously with the promise of religious emancipation, the gifts of knowledge, and the power of the creative imagination:

If Wheatley Peters saw in imagination the promise of an “unbound” soul, as a black author in London she also knew that her writing held the key to her own unboundedness in a very real sense. Arriving in England on the first anniversary of the Somerset case, and socialising with—and supported by—prominent anti-slavery campaigners like Granville Sharp, she was able to gain assurance of immediate manumission from the Wheatleys on her return to Boston. As she put it herself one month after her book had been published: “My master has at the desire of my friends in England, given me my freedom. The instrument is drawn so as to secure me and my property from the hands of the executors, administrators, and of my master, and secure whatsoever should be given me as my own.”

Among the “property” which Wheatley Peters now rightly claimed her own was the income from the poetry she‘d published. On her return to New England, she immediately wrote to her good friend, Obour Tanner, asking her “to use your interest to get subscriptions, as it is for my behalf”. Tanner was part of a highly engaged and active group of free and enslaved black people in Newport, Rhode Island, and a founding member of America‘s first black-led community organisation, the African Union Society. Wheatley clearly knew she had a supportive audience for her work among her community, and she also wrote to elite white people to assist with gathering the subscriptions which, if extensive enough, would help to secure her financial independence as well as basic freedom. For example, she asked her friend Colonel Wooster to “use your interest with gentlemen and ladies of your acquaintance to subscribe, for,” she wrote, “the more subscribers there are, the more it will be for my advantage…this I am the more solicitous for as I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine”. Wooster was then the customs inspector in New Haven; and, in writing in such terms to him, Wheatley Peters displayed a canny awareness of the threat to her own income posed by infringements of authorial copyright by American publishers (who then routinely reprinted British books for their own profit). Wheatley demanded that Wooster “would desire the printers in New Haven not to reprint the book as it will be a great hurt to me, preventing any further benefit that I might receive from the sale of my copies from England”.

For the British and American bluestocking writers (who were Wheatley‘s contemporaries), literary property was absolutely central to their independence as eighteenth-century women. For example, the subscriptions Elizabeth Carter was able to secure for her Epictetus enabled her to buy her own home; Catharine Macaulay‘s lucrative deal with the Dilly brothers provided financial support for herself and her daughter after the death of her first husband; and Mercy Otis Warren astutely referred to the copyright in her published works as “the only thing I can truly call my own”. If literary property, and the professional status of published author, was so crucial to the personal and economic independence of these elite Bluestocking writers, then imagine the significance of such things to the young black woman who had already spent more than a decade of her life robbed of her own personhood as the legal property of a white family.

In Wheatley‘s extant letters, her sense of that personal and collective injury is clear. “In every human breast,” as she wrote to her friend, Indigenous-American minister Samson Occom, “God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for deliverance. By the leave of our modern Egyptians, I will assert, that the same principle lives in us.” Writing a few short months after her return to New England, in the midst of her attempts to secure her own economic future by generating subscriptions for her book, Wheatley Peters‘ association of contemporary white Americans with the brutal Babylonian oppressors of the Hebrews is as unambiguous as her own desire for deliverance.

The years after 1774 clearly proved difficult for Phillis Wheatley Peters, as they did for so many other black women, enslaved and free, who struggled to find their way in revolutionary America. The details of the last decade of her life are unclear (and assumptions about those years are rightly contested), but we do know that she married a local free black businessman, John Peters, and that she consistently used his name—the only name she had been able to choose for herself—in the letters she continued to write to her friends after her marriage. Another fact of which we can be certain is that Phillis Wheatley Peters died in Boston in December 1784, at the age of 31, one year after the state constitution of Massachusetts deemed chattel slavery to be illegal in the wake of the Quock Walker case. This groundbreaking young writer had spent the first seven years of her life in West Africa, and had endured a horrific transatlantic crossing in which one quarter of her fellow passengers had died around her. She was bought, enslaved and raised by a white family, but was supported by the nurturing, intellectual congregation of Boston‘s Old South Meeting House, by New England‘s wider community of black and Indigenous people, and by a transatlantic culture of evangelical Christians that helped her literary endeavours to find an audience and, later, publication. She lived twelve years as chattel, twelve years a free woman, and made a profound mark on the world as the first black woman to publish a book of poetry anywhere in the Atlantic world. As the distinguished contemporary poet Honoré Fanonne Jeffers puts it, this “brilliant, insightful young woman” made future “female black poets possible”.

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