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Revolution & Early Republic · Literature

Phillis Wheatley

c. 1753 – 1784

Poet. Kidnapped from West Africa as a child, she published a book of poems in London in 1773 while still enslaved in Boston.

Engraved frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley seated at a writing desk with quill and paper, from her 1773 book of poems
Engraving attributed to Scipio Moorhead, 1773. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Phillis Wheatley was carried from West Africa to Boston as a child of about seven, sold to a merchant’s household, and within a decade had become one of the most widely read poets in the British Atlantic world. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773 while she was still enslaved, is the first book of poetry by an African American and the foundation of the Black literary tradition in the United States. Its reception turned her into evidence in the eighteenth-century argument over whether Africans possessed intellect equal to Europeans.

At a Glance

Born
c. 1753, West Africa (probably the Senegambia region)
Died
5 December 1784, Boston, Massachusetts
Known for
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773); elegy on George Whitefield (1770); “To His Excellency General Washington” (1775)
Fields
Literature
Era
Revolution & Early Republic

Early Life

Wheatley’s African name, family, and exact birthplace are unknown. Scholars place her birth around 1753 in West Africa, probably in the Senegambia region, an estimate based on her apparent age when she arrived. On 11 July 1761 the slave ship Phillis docked in Boston with a cargo of captive Africans. John Wheatley, a prosperous Boston merchant, bought a small, sickly girl as a servant for his wife, Susanna. The family named her after the vessel that had brought her.

The Wheatleys recognized her ability quickly. Their daughter, Mary, taught her to read, beginning with the Bible, and she went on to study English literature, Latin, and the classics, reading Alexander Pope, John Milton, Homer, and Ovid. The education was unusual for any girl in colonial Boston and nearly unheard of for an enslaved one. She was writing verse by about 1765, and in 1767, when she was about fourteen, the Newport Mercury printed her poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin.”

Life and Work

Her reputation was made in October 1770 by “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield,” mourning the English evangelist. The elegy was printed as a broadside and reprinted in Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia, and it reached London, where Whitefield’s patron, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, took an interest in its author.

Unable to find enough subscribers in Boston for a volume of her poems, the Wheatleys turned to London. The publisher Archibald Bell required proof that an enslaved African girl had written the poems. The book therefore opened with an attestation signed by eighteen prominent Bostonians, among them Governor Thomas Hutchinson and John Hancock, certifying that she was the author. Whether the signers questioned her together in a single sitting, as later retellings suggest, is not documented; the signed statement itself is the surviving record.

In 1773 Wheatley sailed for London with Nathaniel Wheatley, the family’s son. Over several weeks she was received by abolitionists, philanthropists, and members of the nobility, and she corresponded with the abolitionist Granville Sharp. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon and carrying an engraved portrait of the author at her writing desk, appeared in September 1773, after she had been called home to Susanna Wheatley’s sickbed. Its thirty-nine poems include elegies, meditations on religion and classical myth, and “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” an eight-line poem that reminds Christian readers that Black people “may be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”

Within months of her return the Wheatleys freed her. The precise terms are debated; scholars have suggested that her London contacts, and her awareness that slavery had no clear legal footing in England, gave her leverage. In October 1775 she sent George Washington, newly named commander of the Continental Army, a poem titled “To His Excellency General Washington.” Washington replied on 28 February 1776, praising her “elegant Lines” and inviting her to visit his headquarters at Cambridge. The poem was published in 1776. Her private letters, especially to Obour Tanner, a Black woman in Newport, and to the Mohegan minister Samson Occom, show her condemning slavery in direct terms.

Legacy

Freedom brought hardship. Susanna Wheatley died in 1774 and John Wheatley in 1778. That year Phillis married John Peters, a free Black man in Boston whose business ventures failed; he was later jailed for debt. She worked as a domestic servant, and in 1779 advertised proposals for a second volume of poems and letters, but the war-torn market produced too few subscribers and the book never appeared. She bore three children, none of whom survived. She died in Boston on 5 December 1784, about thirty-one years old.

Her work outlived the dismissal of skeptics. Thomas Jefferson disparaged her poetry in Notes on the State of Virginia, and abolitionists answered by republishing her book in the nineteenth century as proof of Black intellectual capacity. Modern scholarship, notably Vincent Carretta’s biography and editions of her complete writings, has recovered her letters and unpublished poems and read her work as deliberate, often subversive public argument. She is honored on the Boston Women’s Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue, alongside Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone.

The circumstances of her book’s publication have become a lasting symbol in their own right. That an enslaved teenager needed the signatures of a governor and a future signer of the Declaration of Independence before a London printer would accept her poems is now read as a record of the burden of proof placed on Black writers, a theme Henry Louis Gates Jr. took up in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. Some scholars and institutions now use her married name, Phillis Wheatley Peters, to acknowledge the free adult life that the better-known name obscures. Her poems remain the starting point for any history of African American literature.

For Educators

Phillis Wheatley’s poems founded the African American literary tradition, and the proof demanded before they could be published reveals the burden placed on Black writers to establish their own humanity and authorship. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. c. 1753 Born in West Africa, probably in the Senegambia region.
  2. 11 July 1761 Arrives in Boston aboard the slave ship Phillis; bought by John Wheatley.
  3. 1767 First poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” printed in the Newport Mercury.
  4. October 1770 Publishes her elegy on George Whitefield, which circulates throughout the colonies and in London.
  5. 1773 Sails to London with Nathaniel Wheatley.
  6. September 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published in London by Archibald Bell.
  7. Late 1773 Freed by the Wheatley family after her return to Boston.
  8. 28 February 1776 George Washington answers her poem and invites her to his Cambridge headquarters.
  9. 1778 Marries John Peters.
  10. 5 December 1784 Dies in poverty in Boston.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773). Link
  2. Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
  3. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003).
  4. Mass Moments, “Phillis Wheatley Arrives in Boston,” Mass Humanities. Link
  5. Massachusetts Women’s History, “Phillis Wheatley Peters (c. 1753–1784).” Link
  6. National Women’s History Museum, “Phillis Wheatley.” Link
  7. National Constitution Center, “Forgotten Founders: Phillis Wheatley, African-American Poet of the Revolution.” Link

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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