WIREFRAME ONLY - NOT YET DESIGNED
1753 - 1784
It is believed that Phillis Wheatley Peters was born around 1753, in Gambia, on the west coast of Africa. She was kidnapped in 1761 and brought to Boston, Massachusetts, aboard the Phillis, which was her enslavers’ inspiration for her name. She was purchased by a prosperous couple- John and Susanna Wheatley. As she began to give Phillis a basic education, Susanna discovered how intelligent the young girl was and broadened her instruction to include Greek, Latin, history, English literature, astronomy, and geography. [i]
Phillis developed a passion for poetry and began writing her own as a teenager, publishing her first poem at about the age of 14. Her poems continued to appear in pamphlets and newspapers, and she became widely known after the 1770 publication of “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine George Whitefield.” However, as her renown spread, skepticism was raised by those who believed an African, let alone a young woman, could not possibly have been intelligent enough to compose such works. In 1772, Phillis had to face the humiliation of being cross-examined by a panel of prominent White male Bostonians. Then, even though they concluded that she had, indeed, written the poems, no publisher in the American colonies would print her first book. Susanna approached her English friend Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, who provided funds for Phillis and Susanna’s son to travel to England to find a publisher. They achieved their goal and in 1773, Poems on Various Subjects- Religious and Moral, complete with a forward signed by John Hancock, was published.
Many of Phillis' poems are elegies, commemorating a person who had died, or speak of Christian salvation. The poem “On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA” contains the only mention of race: “Some view our sable race with scornful eye.” Wheatley ended this poem with a reminder to Christians that Black people “May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train,” reflecting the common view of the day that enslaved Africans should be converted to Christianity.
Phillis was emancipated upon her return to Boston, where. despite her freedom and her popularity and successes in England, her life proved to be difficult. When Susanna Wheatley died in 1774, Phillis wrote to John Thornton, a supporter of Moor’s Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, that "By the great loss I have sustain'd of my best friend, I feel like One forsaken by her parent in a desolate Wilderness."
John Wheatley died in 1778, the same year that Phillis married John Peters, a free African American grocer and businessman. None of their children lived to adulthood. Hostile neighbors and lawsuits upended a promising future in Middleton, Massachusetts, and the couple returned to Boston where John was eventually sent to a debtor’s prison, causing Phillis to begin working in a boardinghouse to help support her family. She was never able to secure funding for future publications. Phillis Wheatley and her newborn infant died on December 5, 1784. She was 31 years old.[ii]
[i] For biographical information relating to Lucy’s life, including her early years and education in the household of John and Susannah Wheatley, see Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2023 edition. For a study of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ literary and intellectual context and contributions, see David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (New Yor: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023).
[ii] Cornelia H. Dayton, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton” The New England Quarterly, Vol. XCIV, no. 3 (September 2021.)