The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Read Online Free Page A

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:
    Sir [George Washington]
I have taken the freedom to address
your Excellency in the enclosed poem,
and entreat your acceptance, though I am
not insensible of its inaccuracies. Your
being appointed by the Grand Continental
Congress to be Generalissimo of the
armies of North America, together with
the fame of your virtues, excite sensations
not easy to suppress. Your generosity,
therefore, I presume will pardon the

attempt. Wishing your Excellency all possible
success in the great cause you are so
generously engaged in, I am,
Your Excellency’s most humble servant,
Phillis Wheatley [October 26, 1775]
    On February 28, 1776, Washington responded, acknowledging the gift of the poem and inviting Wheatley to visit him at his headquarters in Cambridge:
    Miss Phillis,
Your favor