She had been property. She wrote to George Washington.

He wrote back.

This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Phillis Wheatley needs to be remembered.

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The slave ship was called the Phillis. It sailed from West Africa to Boston in 1761 with a child in the hold, perhaps seven years old, perhaps from Senegal or the Gambia.

When she was sold on the Boston dock to John and Susanna Wheatley, the family named her after the ship.

Within sixteen months she was reading the Bible. Within a few years she was reading Latin and Greek. Mary Wheatley tutored her. She translated Ovid. By thirteen she was writing verse. In 1767 the Newport Mercury printed her first poem. In 1770 her elegy on the Rev. George Whitefield made her a transatlantic name.

She was a slave who wrote like Alexander Pope.

In 1772 her supporters proposed a Boston volume of her poems. Not enough subscribers came forward. Bostonians did not believe a Black girl had written them.

So eighteen prominent men signed an attestation. Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver. John Hancock. James Bowdoin. Seven ministers. They certified the poems were hers. The certificate was printed at the front of the book.

In May 1773 she sailed for London with Nathaniel Wheatley. She met Benjamin Franklin. She met Granville Sharp, the lawyer who had argued the Somerset case the year before — the case that had effectively abolished slavery on English soil. Her book was published in London on September 1, 1773. It was the first book of poetry by an African American. The frontispiece was engraved by Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved man. The title page still called her “Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley.”

The London Magazine reviewed her seriously. The Monthly Review used the occasion to shame the Americans. This ingenious young woman, the reviewer noted, was as yet a slave. The Bostonians who boasted of liberty had not seen fit to free her. The book had performed two functions at once: it had proved her, and it had indicted the city that produced her.

She was freed soon after she returned to Boston. In a letter to David Wooster on October 18, 1773, she wrote that her master had given her her freedom. Massachusetts itself would not abolish slavery in court until 1783. She was legally free. She was socially still inside the language of slavery.

In February 1774 she wrote a public letter to the Mohegan minister Samson Occom. It was reprinted in the Connecticut Journal. She called American slaveholders “modern Egyptians.” She wrote that in every human breast God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom — that it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.

By the fall of 1775 the Continental Army was besieging Boston. The British held the city. Independence had not yet been declared. The outcome of the rebellion was, by every reasonable estimate, in doubt.

On October 26, 1775, from Providence, Phillis Wheatley wrote a letter to George Washington.

She enclosed a forty-two-line poem titled “To His Excellency General Washington.” She addressed him as “Generalissimo of the armies of North America.” She opened: “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.”

The poem cast America as Columbia. It is the earliest sustained literary use of that name as the personification of the new country. It closed:

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.

She did not know whether the letter would arrive. She did not know whether Washington would read it. She did not know whether her audacity would be met with praise, silence, or punishment. She did not know whether the rebellion would survive the winter.

She wrote it anyway.

The letter took six weeks to reach Washington. He read it in mid-December at his Cambridge headquarters. He let it sit. On February 28, 1776, he wrote back.

He thanked her for her “polite notice.” He praised “the style and manner” of her lines as “a striking proof of your great poetical Talents.” He said he would have published the poem himself but feared the “imputation of Vanity.” He invited her to Cambridge: “If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near Head Quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favourd by the Muses, and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations.”

He sent the poem on to Joseph Reed. The Virginia Gazette printed it on March 30, 1776. Thomas Paine’s Pennsylvania Magazine printed it that April. Washington’s reply is preserved at the Library of Congress in his secretary’s transcript, copied in 1781.

Whether Wheatley accepted the invitation is contested. The story of the visit first appeared in print in the 1850s. No contemporary letter, newspaper, or aide’s notebook records the meeting. She herself, when marketing her second volume years later, never mentioned it. The visit may have happened. The invitation certainly did.

What followed was harder than the war.

In 1778 she married a free Black grocer named John Peters. The Wheatley family was dying off. Three children came. None survived infancy. Two attempts at a second volume failed — once in 1779, once in 1784. The manuscript was lost.

In 1784 Peters was imprisoned for debt. With a sickly infant to feed, Phillis took work as a scullery maid in a Boston boarding house. She had never done such work. She caught pneumonia. On December 5, 1784, she gave birth to a daughter and died the same day. The infant died with her. They were buried together. The grave is unmarked.

She was thirty-one.

A year later, Thomas Jefferson took up his pen against her.

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, Jefferson was building an argument. He was arguing that Black people were intellectually inferior to whites. He needed the argument because he was a slaveholder and the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the contradiction had to be managed. Wheatley was the obvious problem. She had been examined by eighteen of Boston’s most prominent men. She had been published in London. Washington had answered her. The Monthly Review had used her to shame American slaveholders. If she was a poet, the argument collapsed.

Jefferson disposed of her in one sentence. Her poems, he wrote, were “below the dignity of criticism.” Religion, he allowed, had produced her. But religion “could not produce a poet.” He acknowledged that she existed. Then he ruled her out as evidence.

He did not engage the work. He did not quote a line. He did not name a poem. He declared the question closed.

The damage was structural. Jefferson was not a man on a porch offering an opinion. He was the author of the Declaration. He would be the third president. He was the most influential American intellectual of his generation, and when he ruled a poet unworthy of criticism, the literary establishment took the cue. Wheatley was dropped from anthologies. Her work was treated as curiosity rather than poetry. The first American edition of her book did not appear until 1786, two years after her death, in Philadelphia.

For roughly a hundred years, American letters proceeded as if Jefferson had settled the matter. He had not refuted her. He had simply declared her beneath refutation. One sentence, written by the right man in the right book, erased a poet for a century.

Editorial Note: I am disappointed to hear this about Jefferson. ~ CCJ

She was not seriously read again until the late nineteenth century, when Black scholars began reading her on her own terms rather than Jefferson’s. The Harlem Renaissance finished the work. She is now recognized as a foundational figure in American literature — the first voice in a tradition that runs through Frederick Douglass and Frances Harper and Langston Hughes.

Jefferson’s verdict was wrong. It was also effective. That is the lesson of cultural authority. It does not need to be right to do its work.

The Revolution celebrated the courage of men under fire. Wheatley’s courage was different. It was the courage of speech from a position designed to be silent.

A literate Black woman in the colonies in 1775 was a threat to the order that had produced her. To address the commanding general of the Continental Army was to claim a place in the conversation of the founding. The men who had attested to her authorship in 1772 had done so because the alternative — a Black woman who could write English verse — was unbelievable. She wrote anyway. She wrote to Washington anyway. She made him answer anyway.

The exchange settled nothing. It did not free a single slave. It did not change the Constitution that would, twelve years later, count three-fifths of her in the apportionment of the House. It did not save her from the boarding house.

But it is in the record. Washington’s reply sits in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress. Her letter sits in Founders Online. Her poem ran on the front pages of two of the most influential periodicals of the early Republic. The first sustained literary use of the word Columbia for the new country was made by a woman the country had bought as a child.

Phillis Wheatley needs to be remembered.

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Next in this series: Olaudah Equiano — He Turned Survival into Evidence.