28/03/2026
Phillis Wheatley has appropriately been called “the mother of African American literature,” but with equal justice she can be described as the “poet laureate of the American Revolution.” Phillis arrived in America on a slave ship in July 1761 a 7 year old child, being offered for sale on the Boston docks. She was to prove a prodigy. Purchased by John & Susanna Wheatley, raised & educated in their home, within 16 months she was fluent in English & by age 11 she was composing poems that were admired around Boston. In 1773, she negotiated her own manumission & continued writing.
Like the Wheatleys, Phillis was sympathetic to the grievances of the colonists against the Crown. When fighting broke out at Lexington & Concord in April 1775, she sent her poem “To His Excellency General Washington”. For any writer to express such views was, in the eyes of the British, to commit the capital crime of treason, potentially punishable by death. For Wheatley as a Black woman, there was the additional danger that if captured by the British or their loyalist supporters, she might be summarily transported to the Caribbean & sold into slavery. Thus by writing this poem & others like it over the next 8 years, Wheatley as much as any American patriot was risking her liberty & her life. The ardor of Wheatley’s patriotism contributed to Washington’s decision both to invite her to visit him at his headquarters & to charge his aide, Joseph Reed, with publishing her poem in a pro-American newspaper.
No other poet was as persistent in supporting the American cause in her verse from the Stamp Act in the 1760s down through the Revolutionary War all the way to independence in the 1780s, & no other poet risked more in doing so.
Source: gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/phillis-wheatley-poet-laureate-american-revolution
Primary sources:
Wheatley letter to Washington: founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0222-0001
Washington letter to Wheatley: founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-03-02-0281
