Phillis Wheatley: A Voice Across the Atlantic
In the crowded harbor of Boston in the 1760s, a young girl carried a story that began thousands of miles away. She had been born in West Africa, probably around 1753, but the details of her earliest years were lost when she was seized and transported across the Atlantic aboard a slave ship. Like countless other Africans caught in the machinery of the transatlantic slave trade, she arrived in North America stripped of her name, family, and freedom. In Boston, she was purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley, a prosperous couple who gave the child their surname and called her Phillis, after the slave ship that had carried her across the ocean. Yet within this brutal transformation, an extraordinary intellectual life would emerge. Phillis Wheatley would become one of the first African American authors to publish a book of poetry, challenging assumptions about race, education, and intellectual ability in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
The Wheatleys recognized the girl's unusual aptitude for learning and provided an education that was exceptional for an enslaved child. Under Susanna's guidance, Phillis learned to read and write, mastering English with remarkable speed. She studied the Bible, classical literature, mythology, and the works of English poets, absorbing the language and intellectual traditions of the world around her. By adolescence, she was composing poetry of considerable sophistication. Her education was also a contradiction: the same society that denied her freedom had given her access to books and learning, while the institution of slavery generally sought to restrict enslaved people's education. Wheatley's literary gifts therefore developed within an uneasy landscape of privilege and oppression. Her poems demonstrated that an African-born girl who had been enslaved could command the literary forms, classical references, and theological vocabulary expected of educated colonial writers.
Wheatley's growing reputation eventually carried her beyond Boston. In 1773, she traveled to London with John Wheatley's son, Nathaniel, partly to promote the publication of her poetry. The journey brought her into contact with British literary and political circles and offered an enslaved woman from Boston an extraordinary opportunity to see the heart of the empire whose economic prosperity was intertwined with slavery. That same year, her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in London. The volume contained poems on religion, morality, history, and contemporary events, and its publication was a landmark. Wheatley became the first African American woman known to publish a book. The frontispiece portrayed her at a writing desk, pen in hand—a carefully constructed image of an author asserting intellectual presence in a society that frequently denied the humanity of people of African descent.
Religion occupied a central place in Wheatley's poetry. Raised in a deeply Christian household, she frequently employed biblical imagery and theological themes, writing verses that reflected the religious culture of eighteenth-century New England. Yet her poetry could also carry subtler meanings. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," she addressed her own forced migration in just a few compact lines, describing the transformation through the language of Christian salvation while also confronting readers with their assumptions about Blackness. Elsewhere, she celebrated George Washington in "His Excellency General Washington," demonstrating her command of the heroic poetic style. Her poems were often shaped by the conventions of the era, including references to Greek and Roman mythology, biblical stories, and classical literary forms. Beneath those conventions was something more disruptive: a Black woman was using the literary language of the Atlantic world to establish herself as an observer, thinker, and creator.
The circumstances surrounding Wheatley's publication revealed how extraordinary her achievement appeared to white society. Before her book could be published, a group of prominent Bostonians examined her work and signed a statement affirming that she had written the poems herself. Among them were figures who occupied important positions in colonial society, including John Hancock. The episode exposed the racial skepticism Wheatley faced: her authorship itself required verification because many people could not accept that an enslaved African girl possessed the intellectual capacity to produce sophisticated poetry. The resulting testimony was intended to authenticate her work, but it also became an enduring document of the prejudice she confronted. Wheatley's success therefore did more than introduce a talented poet. It challenged a hierarchy that claimed education, reason, and literary creativity belonged primarily to Europeans.
After returning from London, Wheatley's circumstances changed. John Wheatley eventually emancipated her, and she married John Peters, a free Black man, in 1778. Their later years were marked by financial hardship and personal difficulties, and Wheatley struggled to secure a publisher for a second volume of poetry. She died in Boston in December 1784, probably only about thirty-one years old. The contrast between her literary accomplishments and the poverty of her final years is stark. The young writer whose poems had crossed the Atlantic and attracted attention in Britain could not easily translate literary fame into economic security. Her short life nevertheless left behind a body of work that survived the circumstances that had sought to define her merely as property. In her poems, Wheatley had preserved an intellectual record of a person whom slavery attempted to reduce to an object.
Wheatley's influence extended far beyond her own lifetime. Later Black writers found in her career evidence that African Americans had been creating sophisticated literature since the colonial era. Her work helped establish a tradition in which Black authors used poetry, autobiography, journalism, speeches, and fiction to confront the intellectual and political assumptions of American society. Writers and scholars increasingly returned to Wheatley as an early figure in African American literary history, while her poetry became a window into the complicated experiences of Black people living within the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. Her influence was not always straightforward; later generations sometimes criticized her reliance on European literary conventions and the restrained language through which she addressed slavery. But those very tensions make her work valuable, revealing how a marginalized writer could use the cultural tools available to her while navigating an oppressive society.
Today, Wheatley's importance reaches beyond literature. Her surviving poems and historical records have helped historians and anthropologists reconsider whose experiences deserve to become part of the historical record. Her life demonstrates the extraordinary difficulty of reconstructing marginalized histories: the voices of enslaved people were often recorded by others, their African identities obscured, and their personal histories fragmented by systems of forced migration and racial inequality. Wheatley's writings offer something rare—a surviving voice speaking across the centuries in her own words. They remind researchers that marginalized people were not simply passive subjects of history but observers, thinkers, artists, and participants who interpreted the worlds around them. From a child taken from West Africa to an internationally published poet, Phillis Wheatley's journey crosses an ocean, a system of bondage, and the boundaries imposed by race and gender. Her pen became a small but enduring instrument of historical survival, ensuring that a life once treated as property could not be forgotten.
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