Vincent Carretta - Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage

Phillis Wheatley

Biography of a Genius in Bondage

VINCENT CARRETTA

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

This publication is made possible, in part, through a grant from the Hodge Foundation in memory of its founder, Sarah Mills Hodge, who devoted her life to the relief and education of African Americans in Savannah, Georgia.

Paperback edition published in 2014 by
The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
2011 by Vincent Carretta
All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins
Set in Adobe Caslon by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are
available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover
edition of this book as follows:
Carretta, Vincent.
Phillis Wheatley : biography of a genius in bondage /
Vincent Carretta.
xiv, 279 p., [22] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]259) and index.
ISBN 978-0-8203-3338-0 (cloth : alk.paper)

1. Wheatley, Phillis, 17531784. 2. African American women poetsBiography. 3. Poets, AmericanColonial period, ca. 16001775Biography. 4. SlavesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
ps866.w5z5827 2011
811'.1dc22
[B] 2011016374

Paperback isbn 978-0-8203-4664-9

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4704-2

To the memory of
Lillian Maude Carretta
(19192010)

IN NOVEMBER 2005, a 174-word letter signed by Phillis Wheatley to a fellow servant of African descent in 1776 sold at auction for $253,000, well over double what it had been expected to fetch. It was reportedly the highest price ever paid for a letter by a woman of African descent. Anyone whose correspondence is worth over $1,400 a word has more than enough cultural significance to deserve an authoritative biography. The publication of Phillis Wheatley in 2011 coincides with the 250th anniversary of Wheatleys arrival in Boston from Africa. She was only about seven years old when she stepped off the slave ship.

Wheatley was a pioneer of American and African American literature, and her poems appear in every anthology of early American literature. Googling Phillis Wheatley turns up over 33,000 items. Despite opposition since the eighteenth century from those who have questioned the literary quality or the political and social implications of her writings, Wheatley has achieved iconic status in American culture. Elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the United States bear her name. A prominent statue in Boston memorializes her. Wheatley has been the subject of numerous recent stories written for children and adolescents. Her appeal is understandable: the prejudices against her race, social status, gender, and age notwithstanding, in 1773 she became the first person of African descent in the Americas to publish a book. The collection of poems she wrote in Boston while she was still a teenager first appeared in London and made her the earliest international celebrity of African descent.

DESPITE WHEATLEYs historical significance and literary status, Phillis Wheatley is the first full-length biography of her. William Henry Robinson published a seventy-page biographical introduction to his Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings in 1984. Now long out of print, Robinsons book appeared early in the current period of historical research into all aspects of African American studies. Wheatley is a very challenging and elusive biographical subject. Her biographer must not only reconstruct the religious and political contexts within which and about which she so often wrote, but also try to fill in the significant gaps in her short life. Although Wheatleys historical and literary significance is now rarely questioned, much of her life has remained a mystery. She left no autobiography and rarely writes about her own life in the surviving documents. Her biographer must try to resist the urge to read her writings, especially her poems, as transparently autobiographical.

Where did she come from? How did Wheatley overcome the odds against her to gain transatlantic fame? How active a role did she play in the production and distribution of her writings? How was she able to establish a network of associations that included many of the most important people in North American and British military, political, religious, and social life? What more can be found about Phillis Wheatleys husband, John Peters? Did Phillis die a celebrity or in desperate obscurity? Her artistic legacy is still controversial. As a writer, was she an imitator or an innovator? Was she an overly accommodating race traitor, as some black critics considered her during the 1960s and 1970s, or a subtly subversive defender of racial freedom and equality? Phillis Wheatley addresses all of these questions.

Phillis Wheatley is deeply indebted to the research of Robinson, and to the editorial labors of Julian D. Mason Jr., and John C. Shields, as well as to publications by the many scholars cited in the endnotes below. I have profited from the work of my predecessors, my own previous experience as a biographer of Olaudah Equiano, and recently available digital databases of eighteenth-century primary sources. My own discoveries include more writings by and attributed to Wheatley; new information about her origins, her upbringing in Boston, her likely role in the production and distribution of her works, the way she gained her freedom, her religious and political identities, and her marriage to John Peters, including the fact that they lived together for months before their wedding; and a plausible explanation for why she disappeared from the public record for several years during the 1780s.

Although we usually classify Wheatley today as an African American writer, she spent all but the last year of her life as the subject of Britains George III, to whom she addressed one of her earliest poems, To the kings Most excellent Majesty. My biography shows when, where, how, and why she eventually chose an African American identity rather than the African-British identity available to her. Phillis Wheatley played a far more active role in establishing her African American identity than has previously been recognized. Wheatleys trip to London in 1773 transformed not only her literary identity. It offered her the opportunity to transform her legal, social, and political identities as well. For someone from such humble and unpromising beginnings, Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network of friendships and affiliations that transcended race, class, status, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Phillis Wheatley reconstructs that network, relocating Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world. My biography recounts the life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn international celebrity, only to die in obscurity and poverty a few years later. Phillis Wheatley restores Phillis Wheatley to the recognition and status she deserves as a heroic figure in an age of heroes.

I AM GREATLY INDEBTED to the staffs and collections of the following institutions: the Dartmouth College Library; the Emory University Library; the Haverford College Library; the McKeldin Library of the University of Maryland; the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Harvard University; the Howard University Library; the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania; the John Carter Brown Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Connecticut Historical Society; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Boston Public Library; the Rhode Island Historical Society; the Newport Historical Society; the Massachusetts Archives; the Wilmington (Massachusetts) Historical Commission; the New England Historic Genealogical Society; the American Antiquarian Society; the American Philosophical Society; the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Historical Library and Wood Institute; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the Church of Latter Day Saints Family History Library; the Library of Congress; the British Library; the Dr. Williamss Library; the Cheshunt Foundation, Cambridge University Library; the National Archives (Kew); the London Metropolitan Archive; and the Staffordshire Record Office.