On July 11, 1761, a “slender frail, female child,” who was about seven years old, arrived in Boston aboard the schooner Phillis coming from Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los, off the coast of Guinea. She was a native Wolof speaker from the Senegambia region in West Africa. Mrs. Susanna Wheatley “went to the schooner to purchase a house servant.” She bought the child for a small amount and named her Phillis after the schooner that brought her from Africa. 

Mary Wheatley, Susanna and John Wheatley’s daughter, taught Phillis to read, and she taught herself to write. At the time, there were no black children enrolled in Boston’s grammar or Latin schools. Mary tutored her in English, Latin, and the Bible. According to John Wheatley, Phillis could read English fluently in 16 months. By 1765 she had written her first poem and, in 1767, when she was 13 or 14, she was published in the Newport Mercury. In 1770, Phillis wrote a poem about the Boston Massacre and an elegy on the death of the Reverend George Whitefield, which was published as a “broadside” (a poem printed on a single sheet of paper) in Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia, and subsequently in London. 

Authorship Verified

In 1772, Susanna Wheatley tried to have Phillis’ poems published as a book, but could not solicit the necessary number of subscribers “because not enough Bostonians could believe that an African slave possesses the requisite degree of reason and wit to write a poem by herself.” 

Subsequently, on October 8, 1772, Phillis met with a panel “assembled to verify the authorship of her poems” and “to determine whether Phillis Wheatley was truly the author of the poems she claimed to have written.” The assembled panel included Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts; Andrew Oliver, lieutenant governor; Reverend Mather Byles, minister of Hollis Street Congregational Church and a poet; Joseph Green, a poet; Reverend Samuel Cooper, minister of Brattle Street Church and a poet; James Bowdoin, a poet, friend of Benjamin Franklin and future governor of Massachusetts; John Hancock; and Reverend Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather and a minister. The majority were slaveholders.

After interviewing Phillis, the “tribunal of eighteen” signed the following attestation:

We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro girl who was by a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.

This attestation was a necessary precursor to publication of Phillis’ book. Because the publishing climate in England was more welcoming to black authors, Susanna Wheatley turned to English friends for help. The publisher was Archibald Bell, and the book was dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon. Thus, in 1773, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral became the first book of poetry published by a person of African descent in the English language, “marking the beginning of an African-American literary tradition.” 

Phillis was freed while she was in London. She left London where she had the prospect of a profitable career to return to Boston and the Wheatley family. Freedom meant that Phillis was responsible for her literary career and her finances. 

Phillis was sympathetic to the Revolution. Mary Wheatley died in 1774, and John Wheatley fled Boston. In April 1775, when fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, she left Boston for Providence, moving back to Boston in 1776. In 1778, Phillis married John Peters, a Black man who was a merchant. 

While in Providence, she wrote “To His Excellency General Washington,” praising Washington and making a political statement supporting the American cause. Unusually, Washington invited Phillis to visit him at his headquarters in Cambridge and enlisted his aide with arranging for publication of her poem in a pro-American newspaper, which he did in the Virginia Gazette on March 30, 1776. Other poems celebrating the American cause included her elegy “On the Death of General Wooster” in 1778, which celebrated an American war hero who died in the war. Another was “An Elegy Sacred to the Memory of the Rev’d Samuel Cooper, D.D.,” a clergyman, patriot, minister of the Brattle Street Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and part of Washington’s inner circle. She was never able to publish a second volume of poems, which she intended to dedicate to Benjamin Franklin, because she could not generate the necessary number of subscribers. 

In addition to George Washington, Phillis encountered three other Founding Fathers. John Hancock was one of her 18 examiners in 1772. She had a visit from Benjamin Franklin when she was in London in 1773 and promised to dedicate her second book of poems to him. She never met Thomas Jefferson, but he read and criticized her poems, finding them lacking in substance. He did not believe a black woman had the intellectual capacity to think deeply. 

After 1779, Phillis wrote few poems. She endured financial and personal reversals. She died poor and alone of cholera along with her baby in December 1784, abandoned by her husband after losing two children in infancy.

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Editor’s note: The author is Editor-in-Chief of the Federal Bar Council Quarterly.

1.  Forgotten Founders, at 101.

2. Forgotten Founders, at 102.

3. Forgotten Founders, at 101.

4. Forgotten Founders, at 102.

5. Exemplar of Liberty, at 148.