Phillis Wheatley

Their life

Kidnapped from West Africa as a child and enslaved in Boston, she mastered English, Latin, and the classics within years — and at about twenty became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. Doubted so thoroughly that eighteen of Boston’s leading men examined her to certify she could have written it, she answered with verse that reached General Washington and readers across two continents.

Known for

• Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)
• First African American to publish a book
• On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield
• Correspondence and poem to George Washington
• Authenticated by eighteen Boston examiners
• Pioneering voice in American poetry

The road they walked

She was born around 1753 somewhere in West Africa, likely in the region of present-day Gambia or Senegal, and taken captive as a small child — perhaps seven or eight years old, judging by the loss of her front teeth, a detail the ship's manifest recorded. She crossed the Atlantic in 1761 aboard a slave ship called the Phillis, and it was from that vessel that the Boston merchant John Wheatley and his wife Susannah gave her the name by which history knows her, alongside their own surname, as was the custom of enslavement.

The Wheatleys, unusually, allowed and even encouraged the education of the girl they had purchased as a domestic servant. Within about sixteen months she was reading the Bible in English; she went on to study Latin, geography, astronomy, and the classical poets, particularly Alexander Pope, Ovid, and Horace. Boston in these years was a city of Congregationalist sermons and rising revolutionary talk, and Wheatley absorbed both, writing devotional and occasional verse from her early teens. Her 1770 elegy for the itinerant preacher George Whitefield, printed in Boston and reprinted in London, made her name known on both sides of the ocean, though it also intensified skepticism that a poem so accomplished could have come from an enslaved teenager.

Unable to find a Boston printer willing to publish a full collection under her name, the Wheatleys arranged for it to appear in London in 1773, prefaced by the signed attestation of those eighteen prominent men. Phillis herself traveled to London that year, meeting the Lord Mayor and other dignitaries and narrowly missing an audience with the young Benjamin Franklin, and returned to Boston to be manumitted within months, likely at the urging of English abolitionist opinion. She married a free Black Bostonian, John Peters, in 1778, and continued to write — most famously a 1776 poem addressed to George Washington, who replied with an invitation to visit his headquarters, which she apparently accepted.

How their story ended

Phillis Wheatley Peters died in Boston on December 5, 1784, at about thirty-one years old, in poverty following her husband's financial troubles and imprisonment for debt. Two of her three children had already died, and the third, an infant, died shortly after her. She was working as a scrubwoman in a boarding house in her final months, a bitter contrast to the acclaim of a decade earlier, and the exact cause of her death was not recorded, though biographers point to the toll of childbirth, malnutrition, and hardship.