The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Read Online Free Page B

of the 26th of October did
not reach my hands, till the middle of December.
Time enough, you will say, to
have given an answer ere this. Granted.
But a variety of important occurrences,
continually interposing to distract the
mind and withdraw the attention, I hope
will apologize for the delay, and plead my
excuse for the seeming but not real neglect.
I thank you most sincerely for your
polite notice of me, in the elegant lines

you enclosed; and however undeserving I
may be of such encomium and panegyric,
the style and manner exhibit a striking
proof of your poetical talents; in honor of
which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I
would have published the poem, had I
not been apprehensive, that, while I only
meant to give the world this new instance
of your genius, I might have incurred the
imputation of vanity. This, and nothing
else, determined me not to give it place in
the public prints.
    If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses, and to whom nature has so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great respect, your obedient humble servant.
    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:
    One century scarce perform’d its destined
round,
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended
race! . . .
    Â 
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    Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be
thine.
    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:
    Phyllis is a negress, born in Africa, brought to Boston at the age of ten, and sold to a citizen of the city. She learned English with unusual ease, eagerly read and re-read