Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

    Phillis Wheatley was seven when she was kidnapped in Africa, brought to America, and sold to well-to-do Bostonian Susanna Wheatley.  She was evidently treated well by members of this Christian household, who tutored her in English, Latin, and the Bible.  She is best known for her poems on piety and patriotism.

• To see the Library of Congress image of Wheatley's book's title page with additional biographical information, click here.
• To read more of Wheatley's poems from the 1834 reprint of her Poems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Documenting the American South site, click here.
• For "The Voyage of the Sable Venus" and "A Negro Festival," engravings depicting slavery as beneficial for the African slaves, in Bryan Edwards' The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies (London: J. Stockdale, 1794), click here.  The first engraving might almost have been inspired by Wheatley's poem.  Thomas Stothard's engraving was created before Isaac Teale's poem, "Sable Queen."