{"id":157,"date":"2025-08-17T16:43:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T16:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/?page_id=157"},"modified":"2025-09-08T15:15:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T15:15:12","slug":"phillis-wheatley-on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america-1773","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/texts\/phillis-wheatley-on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america-1773\/","title":{"rendered":"Phillis Wheatley, \u201cOn Being Brought from Africa to America\u201d (1773)"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"Wheatley\"<\/a>
Phillis Wheatley, age 20 (Library of America<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)<\/a> was born in West Africa, kidnapped and enslaved at the age of seven, and then forced into domestic service for the Boston family of John and Susanna Wheatley.\u00a0 \u00a0During the 1760s and 1770s, Phillis Wheatley was enslaved in Boston but learned how to read and write, and proved to be a true prodigy as a poet.\u00a0 She began publishing poems in local newspapers in the late 1760s and became something of a celebrity by the early 1770s.\u00a0 Her first published collection of 28 poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral\u00a0<\/em>(1773) appeared in London and included \u201cOn Being Brought From Africa to America,\u201d which is presented below and which many now regard as her most famous literary effort.\u00a0 Later, during the American Revolution, Wheatley also achieved additional fame for supporting the patriot cause and for praising George Washington in a poem, which she sent to him directly and which he acknowledged in correspondence.\u00a0 The Wheatley family had a complicated relationship with Phillis Peters (the name she took once she married John Peters, a free black Bostonian).\u00a0 The family, especially Susanna Wheatley, promoted the young black poet but kept her enslaved until they finally manumitted her in 1774.\u00a0 During her years in freedom, Phillis Peters continued to write poetry in Boston but often struggled with various financial and family difficulties such as losing multiple children to illness and enduring the absences of her husband.\u00a0 She died essentially alone in 1784 at the age of 31, but left behind a legacy of nearly 150 poems that helped define her age while challenging, however subtly, the paradox and injustice of slavery and racism that existed beside the American revolutionary ideals of natural rights and democracy.<\/p>\n

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