Phillis Wheatley

Biography of a Genius in Bondage

Vincent Carretta

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780820347042
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

With Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman—of any race or background— to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. In Phillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status.

A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, market­ing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography.

Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later.

Index

abolitionist movement, 153, 161, 207n2

and revolutionary rhetoric, 139–40

and Wheatley, 195–96, 198–99

Abridgement of Burn’s Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, 193

“Act to prevent the Importation of Negro Slaves into this Province,” 139

Adams, Abigail, 157, 226–27n32

Adams, John, 47, 70, 157, 226–27n32

Adams, John Quincy, 201

Adams, Samuel, 74

Adams, Thomas, 181

Adanson, Michel, 188 A Voyage to Senegal, 152

Addison, Joseph, Cato. A Tragedy, 51

Rosamund. An Opera, 51

Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley, Ethopian Poetess (Hammon), 54, 170

“Address to the Atheist, by P. Wheatley at the Age of 14 Years—1767—” (Wheatley), 54–56, 211n15

“Address to the Deist—1767—” (Wheatley), 56–57, 58

Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America (Rush), 89–91,127

Address to the Negroes in the State of New York (Hammon), 53

Adkins, Dilly, 193

Africa, 1, 4 Gold Coast, 151, 206n38, 226n18

idealized descriptions of, 151, 152

African descent, people of: arguments on intelligence of, 198–201

in Boston 1761, 1

and education, 38–39

eighteenth–century prejudices and stereotypes about, 5–6

free, and compulsory labor, 20

and identity, 4

life expectancy of, 189

participating in the slave trade, 1, 2

and portraits, 100

Alexis (pseud.), “Wrote after reading some Poems composed by PHILLIS WHEATLLY,” 166

“Amazing Grace” (Newton), 195

“America” (Wheatley), 70–71

American colonies: commercial transactions in, 177–78

enslaved Africans in, 3–4

hypocrisy of, regarding slavery, 126–27, 132

law practiced in, 192–93

and the Mansfield ruling, 125–26, 129–30, 222–23n45

medicine practiced in, 191–92

and revolutionary rhetoric, 132

tensions between Britain and, 67–72, 104, 126, 148, 213n41

American Revolution, 126

currency during, 16

depressi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• One “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
• Two “Thoughts on the Works of Providence”
• Three “I prefer the Verse”
• Four “A WONDER of the Age indeed!”
• Five “A Farewell to America”
• Six “Now upon my own Footing”
• Seven “The uncertain duration of all things Temporal”
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index