Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa around 1753. When she was about seven or eight years old, she was captured, enslaved, and shipped to Boston, where John and Susanna Wheatley bought her to serve as a household servant. What happened next was truly remarkable.
The Wheatleys noticed that she was teaching herself to read by observing others, and instead of discouraging her, they encouraged her learning. Susanna and her daughter Mary began to formally educate Phillis in English, Latin, and classical literature. Within a few years, she was reading works by Virgil and Pope and writing her own poetry. Boston's intellectual circles began to take notice, and in 1772, she was invited to appear before a panel of eighteen prominent men — including clergymen, merchants, and the governor — who questioned her to confirm that a young enslaved Black woman could actually have written the poems attributed to her. She passed their scrutiny. The following year, *Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* was published in London, making her the first African American and one of the first American women to publish a book of poetry.
“The book brought her a sort of celebrity that crossed the Atlantic.”
She corresponded with George Washington, who invited her to meet him after she sent him a poem in his honor, as well as with figures in the British abolitionist movement. She was manumitted — freed — around the time of her book's publication, likely in late 1773.
However, freedom did not guarantee security. John Wheatley died, the household was disbanded, and Phillis found herself navigating Boston during the Revolutionary War without any financial safety. She married John Peters in 1778, a free Black man whose business ventures consistently failed. She had three children, but none lived past infancy. She attempted to publish a second collection of poems but was unsuccessful. By 1784, she was working in a boarding house, in poor health, and she died in December of that year at around thirty-one. Tragically, her last child died on the same day.
