Phillis Wheatley

The Atlantic, as a route and a region, was fundamental in the shaping of the person we know as Phillis Wheatley (Peters). Wheatley was an enslaved Black woman living in 18th-century Massachusetts who rose to fame as a poet when she published her one and only volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. Hers is the earliest known book published by a person of African descent living in British North America. Wheatley was born in the Senegambia region of West Africa, somewhere between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. Her encounter with the Atlantic began in 1761, when she was about seven or eight years old. She was kidnapped, taken across the Middle Passage, and sold into slavery in colonial Massachusetts. Compelled by what her enslavers deemed a natural curiosity, Wheatley quickly learned how to read and write in English. She began publishing poems as a young teen. One of her most famous poems, published in 1770, when she was about sixteen, is an elegy occasioned by the death of the Reverend George Whitefield, a famous English Methodist evangelist. Three years later, with the help of an English philanthropist named Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects. Importantly, she published the book in London when efforts to secure publication in colonial Massachusetts failed. In 1773 she traveled with the son of her enslavers to England to oversee publication and promote the book. The Atlantic was a prominent aspect in the process by which Wheatley published her book and in the themes of the poems in the book. The poems meditate on her capture from West Africa and transatlantic travel. She penned verses in honor of prominent figures in England and Massachusetts and even offered occasional oblique references to her parents in Senegambia. Shortly after the book was published, the Wheatleys manumitted Phillis Wheatley, succumbing perhaps to the pressures of a transatlantic community that advocated for her freedom. As a newly emancipated woman, Wheatley continued to pen verses with the intention of publishing a second book. The book never materialized in print, however, perhaps owing in part to the outbreak of war. In 1778 she married a man named John Peters, who also was formerly enslaved. Peters owned a small grocery store. They moved to the countryside outside of Massachusetts, until just before Wheatley’s death on 5 December 1784, at the approximate age of thirty-one.