The young personal servant was sold to a household in Boston, not into hard labor in the fields and plantations in the South, because she was a scrawny and sickly child and the captain of the slave ship didn't expect her to live long. Her new family named her Phillis for the ship that brought her to the colonies, and Wheatley because she was their property. But her fierce intellect was immediately apparent and the Wheatleys taught her English, reading and writing, history, geography, Greek and Latin -- enough to study Virgil, Homer, and Ovid -- and astronomy. She devoured the Bible, Milton and Pope, and her poems were influenced by the ideas she found there. Wheatley used her mind and her poetry to argue for the dignity in individual freedom and to support the heroes of the fledgling Revolution.
Phillis Wheatley was no radical, but her life was. Slaves were not taught to read, or educated in any way, and they were never allowed to mix household chores with studies and writing poetry. The Wheatley family encouraged her work, launching a subscription drive to publish her poems. Wheatley's first poem, about a miracle at sea, was published in the Newport "Mercury" in 1767 when she was 12 or 13. The elegy that brought her to fame, a poem on the death of the reverend George Whitefield, was printed along with Whitefield's funeral sermon as a broadside and pamphlet in Newport, Boston and Philadelphia. But the culture in Boston was not ready to sponsor literature produced by a slave. So, in her twenties, Wheatley traveled to England, where the Countess of Huntingdon, a strong abolitionist, arranged for her collected works to be published.
The celebrated slave-poet was not shy about expressing her political views or corresponding with the political leaders of her day. She gave public poetry readings, wrote “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” a tribute to King George III on the repeal of the Stamp Act, and cast George Washington as a great hero of American independence in “To His Excellency, General Washington.” Wheatley met with Washington and read her poem aloud to him and the work was widely publicized in America and in England. She made no apologies for her unhesitating support for Washington and the American patriots during the war, but wrote and spoke of the limits of a nation that would tolerate the enslavement of some of its people.
Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock were fans; Thomas Jefferson was dismissive. Throughout her brief life, Phillis Wheatley wrote, spoke, corresponded and tried to publish views that were pro-Revolution, pro-Abolition, and deeply Christian. She framed her issues with care, mindful that she was dependent on white masters for her survival, education and publication, and that her audience was primarily the white and well-educated of both America and Europe. Her poetry is elegant, never strident, and her views, while unshakable, were expressed with diplomatic subtlety. Wheatley, a celebrated and outspoken supporter of the Revolutionary War, was freed in the either 1774 or 1778 (accounts differ), but her independence was not a cause for celebration. The economic marginalization of free blacks accomplished what slavery failed to do. Phillis Wheatley died, alone and destitute, in Boston in 1784, her second volume of poems unpublished.