She was the first Black woman and only the second woman to publish a book of poems in America. But it wasn’t until she turned 25 that the poet we know as Phillis Wheatley was allowed to decide her own name.
The woman we know as Phillis was born around 1753 (the exact date isn’t known) in Gambia, West Africa. When she was seven, a local chief sold her to slave traders, who took her from her parents and forced her to board a ship to America. The ship docked in Boston in 1761, and John Wheatley, a wealthy merchant, bought the young girl as a gift for his wife. She was given the name Phillis, the same one as the slave ship she arrived on.
Known in New England as a progressive, John Wheatley tasked his children, Nathaniel and Mary, with teaching Phillis to read and write. She was a gifted pupil who, by the age of 12, was reading Greek and Latin classics in their original languages, as well as the canon of English literature and the Bible. She studied astronomy, geography and history too, and at 14 published her first poem, about a miraculous survival at sea.
Even as they enslaved Phillis, the Wheatleys believed, similar to the abolitionists, in the inherent artistic and intellectual abilities of Black people. They showed Phillis off to friends and family, and encouraged her to continue writing poetry.
Phillis’s poems gained a literary following, and as the colonies headed toward war with England, took on revolutionary themes. One of her first poems, “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” praised King George III for repealing the Stamp Act; another poem, An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield, was published in Boston, Philadelphia and Newport as a broadsheet, and in London in 1770.
By the time she was 18 Phillis had written 28 poems, a collection comprised of elegies (laments to the dead), dedications to famous historical and contemporary figures, and verses with Christian, classical and abstract themes.
Susanna (Mrs. John) Wheatley looked for a publisher in Boston, but in 1772 Phillis ended up in court having to prove to a group of men who included John Hancock, and the governor and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, that the poems were, in fact, hers. They decided they were, and Phillis was forced to include an attestation in the forward of the collection. Still, publishers refused the manuscript because it was written by a slave.
Thinking that England might be more receptive to Phillis’s work, Susanna sent Phillis to London with her son Nathaniel, in part to ease Phillis’s chronic asthma, but also to meet English dignitaries whom Susanna believed would support a poetry collection written by an African woman.
She was right. An English countess who followed abolitionist and evangelical causes underwrote the manuscript, and in 1773, while Phillis was crossing the ocean to return to Boston, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published. It was the first volume of poetry written by an African woman in America.
The Wheatley family emancipated Phillis soon after she returned from England. Now free, Phillis continued writing; the family served as benefactors until 1778, when John Wheatley died. Up until then, Phillis lived an in-between life — not accepted into the Wheatley’s social circles, separated from the household’s slaves, and insulated from the harsh realities of living as a free Black person.
That changed in the spring of 1778, when Phillis married John Peters, a free Black man. Phillis chose to take her husband’s name, changing hers to Phillis Peters; the marriage and name-change were the first decisions about her own life that she’d ever made.
The marriage was difficult, and the couple was poor. John couldn’t find work (jobs typically were given to white men) and several business ventures failed. Phillis wrote a second volume of poetry, but as with her first book, publishers refused to support a Black woman, no matter her earlier success. To support the family, Phillis took a job as a scullery maid in a boarding house. She and John had three children, but none of them survived.
She continued to write, and in 1794 published a poem in the pamphlet Liberty and Peace, in which she celebrated America’s victory over English rule. She also published two elegies, one for the funeral of a Boston reverend and another to an anonymous couple on the death of their infant son. The second poem, published in Boston Magazine, is believed to be about the death of one of her own children.
It also foreshadowed Phillis’s death, in childbirth, just three months later. Phillis and the baby died alone and in poverty; John was in debtor’s prison at the time.
In the last decade, renewed interest in her writing has led critics to re-examine how Phillis used Biblical and evangelical imagery in her poetry and letters as a statement against slavery.
Her most famous poem, On Being Brought From Africa to America, reminded abolitionists and progressives that Africans belong in their definition of Christianity. While she admired the American patriots, Phillis believed their support of slavery prevented them from achieving true hero status.