Writing in Chains

Phillis Wheatley wrote about liberty while enslaved. The contradiction was not lost on her or her readers.

In 1773, the year of the Tea Party, Wheatley's collection of poems was published in London—the first book by an African American author. She was approximately twenty years old, had been stolen from Africa as a child, and had taught herself to write verse that impressed Samuel Adams and George Washington.

Her poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" walks a careful line. It acknowledges her enslavement as providential—bringing her to Christianity—while asserting that "Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train." The argument was subtle: if Black souls could be saved, what justified Black bodies being owned?

Wheatley corresponded with the Revolution's leaders, praising Washington's cause while knowing that cause did not include her freedom. She was manumitted after her master's death but struggled in freedom, her husband imprisoned for debt, her children dying young. She died in poverty at about thirty-one.

Her poetry survives, elegant and constrained, the careful words of a genius working within impossible limits.