by Frank Thornsbury
The early-American poetess Phillis Wheatley lived over two hundred years ago, from 1753 to 1784, yet her life and literature speak to some of the most difficult questions of Christian cultural engagement today. How could this be? C.S. Lewis once wrote that through literature we can gain a window into someone else’s view of the world.[1] My aim is to help you see the world as Wheatley saw it and as she portrayed it in her poetry. Indeed, she perceived a created order designed with purpose and imbued with meaning by God and sought to reflect that in her thinking and her art.
I believe that if we were to adopt a perspective not unlike Wheatley’s, we would treat our education, approach to culture, political involvement, and faith with far greater seriousness. Wheatley stands as an excellent example of a committed Christian with a biblical worldview living out her faith in public. I hope that this brief biographical sketch will give you some sense of her contributions and an idea of how we can imitate her culturally confident Christianity.[2]
Washington
It was the winter of 1775, and General George Washington was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amid the siege on the city of Boston that had been going on since spring of that same year. American forces were attempting to take back Boston from the British; however, circumstances, at this point, looked especially bleak for the newly formed Continental Army. The British had superior earthen fortifications around Boston, better-trained soldiers, and a harbor full of ships. It seemed as if the British would posses Boston forever and, in so doing, guarantee their dominion over New England and over the American colonies. Perhaps the American War for Independence would be dead even before it could begin. Our story starts at this critical moment.
In mid-December, Washington received a rather surprising letter with an accompanying poem from an unlikely character. This character, of course, was the former slave and now twenty-two-year-old poetess Phillis Wheatley. The poem that she had attached to the letter was entitled simply “To His Excellency General George Washington.” In this poem, Wheatley uses the image of the female Amazonian warrior, Colombia, to describe the valiant fight not only of the American military forces but also of America itself. Colombia is America’s patron goddess, its Athena, if you will:
Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,
Colombia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven’s revolting light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night.[3]
Surely Washington read and understood and felt that sorrow and veil of night. But this is not where the poem ends. Wheatley goes on to marshal her poetic talents against America’s enemy:
Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Colombia’s arm prevails.
Anon [or “soon”] Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! Cruel blindness to Colombia’s state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.[4]
After many bellicose classical images and allusions in the intervening lines, Wheatley, in her last stanza, praises Washington outright:
Proceed, great chief, with virtue by 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.[5]
In a letter that Washington wrote back to Wheatley, he thanked her for her “polite notice” of him and praised her “elegant lines” and “great poetical talents.”[6] He ending, saying, “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. I am, with great Respect, Your [obedient] humble servant.”[7]
Nothing should be made of the seeming peculiarity of Washington’s conventional salutation, stating his obedient servitude to a former slave; however, the whole nature of his response and his invitation to Wheatley begs several questions: What had brought Phillis Wheatley to this point? What had brought her to such high-flung verse and knowledge of ancient culture and current events? What had brought her to the status of revolutionary poet and correspondent with the future president? She and Washington had come from opposite ends of American society, yet here they were fighting together, she with her pen and he with his sword. The answers to these questions begin in Africa.
Enslavement
Phillis Wheatley was sold into slavery in West Africa, probably around Senegal. She was only eight years old. Looking back on this episode later in life, Wheatley, in a manner not unlike Joseph of the Old Testament, would think of this trauma as a classic example of God’s transforming to good what had been intended for evil. In “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” she writes, “Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land, / Taught my benighted soul to understand / That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too: / Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.”[8] In another poem, in the middle of her plea to an English aristocrat to support the American cause for independence, she questions:
Should you my lord, while you per-use my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
…………………………………………………
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatched from Afric’s fancied happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labor in my parent’s breast?
……………………………………………….
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?[9]
The “others” in that last line are the American colonists who were suffering under the tyranny of the British crown and parliament. Elsewhere in the poem, Wheatley intensifies the correlation between her enslavement and the colonists’ lack of redress:
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.[10]
Many scholars have been quick to point out the inconsistency in Wheatley’s support for the American cause for freedom despite the fact that she herself had been enslaved there. Some have counted her support as unwitting treason against her fellow enslaved Africans. Others have attempted to resolve the perceived irony by reading a subtext of early liberationist rhetoric in her revolutionary poems. Yet a casual look at Wheatley’s poetry and prose provides a clearer, simpler response.
Phillis Wheatley thought the cause of America to be a noble and righteous cause in much the same way that many colonial elites had, even those such as Benjamin Rush, who had vehemently opposed the slave trade. Perhaps she hoped that American independence would serve as an impetus for the gradual abolition of slavery. Perhaps she thought of the slave trade as an abuse of the English crown that would be diminished after separation. Perhaps she thought of the two issues as related in principle but separate in practical outworking. Perhaps she took any number of positions that were popular among colonists in Boston at the time. Her exact position was probably in flux throughout her life. The important fact is that she supported and prodigiously contributed to the whole project of the Revolution, and she did so in a way that bespeaks genuine conviction and personal agency.
Her support for independence did not keep her from speaking pointed truths to her fellow colonists; again in “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” she writes,
Some view our sable [or “black”] race with scornful eye,
‘Their color is a diabolic dye.’
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.[11]
She’s saying that people from Africa are people too and that they can be free, just as everyone else can be free, through Christ. Here, Wheatley makes a rather complex theological statement about the nature of human dignity and freedom. That every human soul pants for the freedom of Christ’s deliverance is the root of her assessment that all humans deserve respect. Another key implication here is that proper freedom is not freedom for the sake of freedom alone. Freedom, according to Wheatley, has a higher purpose, one that mirrors the results of the gospel. Freedom that is worth having yields renewal and order, not social and political upheaval. This is a lesson that some of Wheatley’s more radical contemporaries such as Philip Freneau and Thomas Paine never learned.
Wheatley’s conviction that ultimate freedom can be obtained only through Christ nearly took her back to Africa as a missionary. She was never able to do this, but her lifelong commitment to the gospel is a model for us. Another characteristic worth imitating is Wheatley’s commitment to political freedom. Like the colonists whom Wheatley supported, we should value and seek to conserve the histories and institutions that ensure our political freedoms. Wheatley’s commitment to freedom was forged by trauma, but it was perfected by faith and aided by a good education.
In a subsequent essay, I intend to explore Wheatley’s education and resulting worldview.
About the Author: Frank Thornsbury is a native of eastern Kentucky but now resides in Gallatin, TN, with his wife Christa Thornsbury, a regular HSF contributor. Frank holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Welch College and a master’s degree in English from Valparaiso University. The end of the 2018–19 academic year marked the completion of his fifth year as Welch’s English program coordinator.
[1]See C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961).
[2] Culturally confident believer as a term to describe Christian literary lights originates from John Mark Reynolds’s excellent Great Books Reader.
[3]Phillis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 145.
[4]Ibid., 146.
[5]Ibid.
[6]George Washington, “To Phillis Wheatley,” in Washington: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 216.
[7]Ibid.
[8]Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. A, Beginnings to 1820, gen. ed. Nina Baym (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), 725-53.
[9]Phillis Wheatley, “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for America, &c.,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. A, Beginnings to 1820, gen. ed. Nina Baym (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), 755.
[10]Ibid.
[11]Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 753.
May 29, 2019
Wonderful article! Thank you for sharing! I look forward to the next article about her! An inspiration indeed, a breath of fresh air and wonderful writing talent. The only thing that confused me a bit is that if she was Christian, why was she writing about a Pagan god to George Washington? Did I miss something?
I’d like to also recommend Andrew Murray (May 8, 1828 – Jan 18, 1917). His rich in depth understanding of Christ was simply amazing, I’ve spent hours listening to him over and over. You can find Reverand Murray’s audiobooks to listen to for free on youtube. God Bless!