"Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department of Harvard University, presented an all-but-forgotten episode in the history of colonial America and its aftermath.
With the eventual publication of her book, he says, Phillis Wheatley, "almost immediately, became the most famous African on the face of the earth..." — 2002 Jefferson Lecture: The Case Of A Slave Poet, A Forgotten Historical Episode
Left image:
Phillis Wheatley
by Lemercier, Bénard et Cie, lithographer
from the journal Revue des Colonies,
January, 1837. Image Source: Georgetown University Art Collection 2020.1.1
"Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?"
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?"
— Phillis Wheatley, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” (wr. 1772), in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773. Born in Africa, Phillis Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery as a child.
Courtesy of The Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History
Phillis Wheatley (frontispiece to "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral")
Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery
Bio Excerpts: The Poetry Foundation by by Sondra A. O’Neale, Emory University
"Wheatley was seized from Senegal/Gambia, West Africa, when she was about seven years old. She was transported to 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 and Southern colonies, the first ports of call after the Atlantic crossing.
In the month of August 1761, “in want of a domestic,” Susanna Wheatley, wife of prominent Boston tailor John Wheatley, purchased “a slender, frail female child ... for a trifle” because the captain of the slave ship believed that the waif was terminally ill, and he wanted to gain at least a small profit before she died.
Although she was an enslaved person, Phillis Wheatley Peters became one of the best-known poets in pre-19th century America. Educated and enslaved in the household of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley, lionized in New England and England, with presses in both places publishing her poems, and paraded before the new republic’s political leadership and the old empire’s aristocracy, Wheatley was the abolitionists’ illustrative testimony that blacks could be both artistic and intellectual..." MORE
Poem & Analyses: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History On Tyranny and Slavery
Poem & Analyses: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History On Tyranny and Slavery