The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (3 page)

Some of the most skeptical had already conducted their own examinations of Phillis, one-on-one. Thomas Woolbridge, an emissary of the earl of Dartmouth, was among those who visited the Wheatley mansion. Woolbridge wrote to Dartmouth about his encounter:

Boston's reading public remained skeptical, however. As one of Phillis's supporters in Boston put it in a letter to his brother-in-law in Philadelphia, Wheatley's master “could not sell it by reason of their not crediting ye performances to be by a Negro.”

And so the bold gambit in the Old Colony House—the decision to assemble some of
the finest minds in all colonial America to question closely the African adolescent about the slender sheaf of twenty-eight poems that she and her master and mistress claimed that she had written by herself.

We have no transcript of the exchanges that occurred between Miss Wheatley and her eighteen examiners. But we can imagine that some of their questions would have been prompted on the classical allusions in Wheatley's poems. “Who was Apollo?” “What happened when Phaeton rode his father's chariot?” “How did Zeus give birth to Athena?” “Name the Nine Muses.” Was she perhaps asked for an extemporaneous demonstration of her talent? What we do know is that she passed with flying colors. After interrogating the poet, the tribunal of eighteen agreed to sign the following attestation:

That attestation was deemed absolutely essential to the publication of Wheatley's book, and even with the attestation no American publisher was willing to take on her manuscript. Susanna Wheatley turned to English friends for help. The publishing climate in England was more receptive to black authors. The Countess of Huntingdon though a slaveholder herself (she had inherited slaves in Georgia) had already, in 1772, shepherded into print one of the earliest slave narratives, by James Gronniosaw. Vincent Carretta, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century black transatlantic literature
and an expert on Wheatley, has observed that the British market for black literature may have been indirectly created by a court ruling, in 1772, that made it illegal for slaves who had come to England to be forcibly returned to the colonies. Although the ruling stopped short of outlawing slavery in England, it encouraged an atmosphere of sympathy toward blacks.

Through the captain of the commercial ship that John Wheatley used for trade with England, Susanna engaged a London publisher, Archibald Bell, to bring out the manuscript. The countess agreed to let Wheatley dedicate the book to her. An engraving of Wheatley appeared as the book's frontpiece, at the countess's request.

And so, against the greatest odds,
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
became the first book of poetry published by a person of African descent in the English language, marking the beginning of an African-American literary tradition. Various black
authors had published individual poems, but even these instances were rare. Jupiter Hammon, a slave from Long Island, had published the first of several poems in 1760. Edward Long caused a minor sensation when he discovered in 1774 that Francis Williams, a Jamaican who is said to have studied at the University of Cambridge, had apparently in 1759 written an ode in Latin.

Five advertisements for the book in the
London Morning Post
and
Advertiser in August
all point to the statement from the esteemed Bostonians as proof that Phillis is the volume's “real Author.” What's more, everyone knew that the publication of Wheatley's book was an historical event, greeted by something akin to the shock of cloning a sheep. As her printer, Archibald Bell bluntly put it in the same newspaper on September 13, 1773: “The book here proposed for publication displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced.” For, he continues,
“the Author is a native of Africa, and left not the dark part of the habitable system, till she was eight years old.”

Given the context of the Enlightenment conversation on race and reason, it should come as no surprise that the book was widely reviewed and discussed in Europe and America. Even Voltaire was moved, in 1774, to write to a correspondent that Wheatley had proven that blacks could write poetry. John Paul Jones, on the eve of sailing to France in June 1777, on the newly commissioned warship, the
Ranger
, sent a note to a fellow officer, asking him to deliver a copy of some of his own enclosed writings to “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo.”

With the publication of her book, Phillis Wheatley, almost immediately, became the most famous African on the face of the earth, the Oprah Winfrey of her time. Phillis was the toast of London, where she had been sent with Nathaniel Wheatley in the spring of
1773 to oversee the publication of her book. There she met the Earl of Dartmouth, who gave her five guineas to buy the works of Alexander Pope; Granville Sharp, the scholar and antislavery activist, who took her to the Tower of London; and Brook Watson, a future Lord Mayor of London, who gave her a folio edition of “Paradise Lost.” Benjamin Franklin paid her a visit, which he mentions in a letter to his nephew Jonathan Williams, Sr. “Upon your Recommendation I went to see the black Poetess and offer'd her any Services I could do her,” he wrote. “And I have heard nothing since of her.” On the strength of this seemingly perfunctory visit, Wheatley decided to dedicate her second volume of poetry to Franklin. Even an audience with King George was arranged, although she had to cancel it when Susanna Wheatley suddenly fell ill and needed her care.

Within a month of the book's publication and Phillis's return to America, the Wheatleys freed her. (English reviewers, using Wheatley's
book as a point, had condemned the hypocrisy of a colony that insisted on liberty and equality when it came to its relationship to England but did not extend those principles to its own population.) “Freedom” meant that she became fully responsible for her literary career, and for her finances. In mid-October, she wrote a letter to David Wooster, the customs collector in New Haven, alerting him that a shipment of her books would soon arrive from England, and urging him to canvass among his friends for orders. “Use your interest with Gentlemen & Ladies of your acquaintance to subscribe also, for the more subscribers there are, the more it will be for my advantage as I am to have half the Sale of the Books.” She continued, “This I am the more solicitous for, as I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, & it is the Chief I have to depend upon. I must also request you would desire the Printers in New Haven, not to reprint that Book, as it will be a great hurt
to me, preventing any further Benefit that I might receive from the Sale of my Copies from England.”

Franklin was just one of four Founding Fathers who would cross Wheatley's path in one form or another. John Hancock was one of her interrogators. On October 26, 1775, Wheatley sent a letter and a poem she had written in his honor, to General George Washington at his headquarters in Cambridge. The letter reads as follows:

On February 28, 1776, Washington responded, acknowledging the gift of the poem and inviting Wheatley to visit him at his headquarters in Cambridge:

According to Benson J. Lossing, “Washington invited her to visit him at Cambridge, which she did a few days before the British evacuated Boston. She passed half an hour
with the commander-in-chief, from whom and his officers she received marked attention.” Washington overcame his fear of the imputation of vanity and, by means of an intermediary, secured publication of Wheatley's pentametric praise in the
Virginia Gazette
, in March 1776. The poem is noteworthy in several ways, but especially for its description of Washington as “first in peace” and in its often repeated final couplet:

But no encounter with a Founding Father would prove more lasting in its impact than that with Thomas Jefferson, whom she never met. (I should say that when we discuss the blind spots of giants like Jefferson, we must do so with the humility of knowing that, in future decades, others shall condescendingly be discussing our own blind spots, if they bother discussing us at all.)

Jefferson's literary criticism of Wheatley was occasioned by François, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, who inspired Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia
. Marbois was, at the time, the secretary of the first French mission to the United States and later consul-general to the United States. In 1781, on behalf of his government, he had asked Jefferson for statistical information about various states in the Union, particularly Virginia. Jefferson sent his response to Marbois in 1781. Jefferson's report caused such a stir among Benjamin Rush and his fellows at the American Philosophical Society that he enlarged and revised his answers.
A private edition of
Notes
was printed in Paris in 1785, an “authorized” edition was published by Stockdale in London in 1787, and the first American edition followed in 1788. Of Marbois's queries, it was that occasioned by his encounter with Wheatley's
Poems
in 1779, which proved germinal in the history of the criticism of African-American writing.

Marbois considered Phillis “one of the strangest creatures in the country and perhaps the whole world.” In an August 28, 1779, journal entry subsequently sent to his fiancée in Paris, Marbois described Wheatley's accomplishments:

Jefferson begged to differ. In his response to his French correspondent's questions, as outlined in Queries VI and XIV of the
Notes
, Jefferson lays out clearly his views. “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” The criticism comes in a passage setting out his views on the mental capacity of the various races of man. “In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” Jefferson writes about blacks; he continues: