TEXT: Wheatley, “On Being Brought From Africa” (1773)
- Eight line poem in heroic couplets with iambic pentameter
- Published as part of a volume of poetry entitled Poems on Various Subjects –the first by an African American author– in London in 1773.
CONTEXT: Great Awakening
“Only with hindsight does the Great Awakening look like a unified movement. The first revivals began unexpectedly in the Congregational churches of New England in the 1730s and then spread through the 1740s and 1750s to Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists in the rest of the thirteen colonies. Different places at different times experienced revivals of different intensities. Yet in all of these communities, colonists discussed the same need to strip their lives of worldly concerns and return to a more pious lifestyle. The form it took was something of a contradiction. Preachers became key figures in encouraging individuals to find a personal relationship with God.”–American Yawp, 4: IV
INDIVIDUAL CONTEXT
- Phillis Wheatley (original name unknown) was kidnapped from her home in West Africa in the early 1760s when she was only seven or eight, and endured the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic on the slave ship, Phillis. She was purchased by John Wheatley, a successful clothing merchant, to be enslaved as a household servant for his wife Susanna.
- According to Wheatley biography David Waldstreicher, the only memory that Phillis later retained or shared from her life in Africa was that her mother used to perform a libation ritual before sunrise each morning (blessing the earth and ancestors by pouring water on the ground).
- The Wheatleys were Congregationalists active in various Christian philanthropies and missionary activities. This was during a period of Christian revivalism in the American colonies known as the Great Awakening.
- Phillis Wheatley embraced Christian imagery and themes in her poetry and continued to do so as a free black woman after his manumission (freedom) in 1774. She married a free black man named John Peters and lived until 1784 when she died after childbirth.
NATIONAL CONTEXT
- Phillis Wheatley also embraced patriotic themes in her poetry and became celebrated in the 1770s (including by George Washington, though not by Thomas Jefferson, who dismissed her poetry as “below the dignity of criticism”)
- On the eve of the 250th national anniversary, scholars and partisans have been debating how best to commemorate the American Revolution and the promise (or hypocrisy) of its ideals.
- A main feature of this debate has concerned the term “American exceptionalism.” The longstanding question has been whether or not American national history is unique, either because Americans have been blessed by providence (a “covenant of grace” as it were, or “Manifest Destiny”) or by their own accumulated sacrifices and good decisions (a kind of “covenant of works” or perhaps “Gift Outright”). President Ronald Reagan famously invoked these ideas without using the phrase “American exceptionalism” in his Farewell Address (1989) by recalling John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon to the Puritans arriving in Massachusetts:
- Donald Trump in his second inaugural address on January 20, 2025 also alluded to a general concept of American exceptionalism: “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.” And now many of the cultural battles erupting in Trump’s second term and concerning the presentation of American history in classrooms and museums derive from the longstanding debate over the meaning of American exceptionalism and how to present stories like Phillis Wheatley’s on the eve of the nation’s 250 anniversary and especially in museums like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
SUBTEXT: Wheatley and the Challenge of Identity
- Was Wheatley being sincere when she called her forced removal from Africa a form of “mercy”?
- Was Wheatley being intentionally subversive, or even confrontational, when she reminded “Christians” that African Americans might well “join th’ angelic train”?
- How might eighteenth-century white audiences have reacted to reading such a poem from an enslaved black woman?
METHODS CENTER —Plagiarism
Complete Academic Integrity module no later than 9/15
- Understand the difference between paraphrase and plagiarism
- When you’re not quoting, don’t look at your sources. Use your own words to summarize the point. That’s legitimate paraphrase.
- And then when you are paraphrasing an important idea or unique fact, cite your sources even though you are using your own words.