The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PREFACE

  The Trials of Phillis Wheatley

  Bibliography

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  The African-American Century (with Cornel West)

  Wonders of the African World

  Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man

  The Future of the Race (with Cornel West)

  Identities (with K. Anthony Appiah)

  Colored People

  Loose Canons

  Figures in Black

  The Signifying Monkey

  EDITED BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR .

  The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts

  Africana (edited with K. Anthony Appiah)

  Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

  by Harriet E. Wilson

  For Sharon, Maggie, and Liza

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the National Council on the Humanities and William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, for selecting me to deliver the 2002 Jefferson Lecture and Bruce Cole, Dr. Ferris’s successor, for his generous introduction to my lecture and for his kindness and hospitality to me and my family during our stay in Washington, and my visit with the staff at the endowment. To be chosen to deliver the Jefferson Lecture is a signal honor in a humanist’s career. It most certainly was in mine, and I was deeply honored and humbled by my selection.

  Several friends and colleagues aided me enormously both as I prepared the lecture and the longer essay that grew from the lecture. Jennifer Wood-Nangombe and Terri Oliver helped me to locate secondary sources on Wheatley, Jefferson, and Wheatley’s eighteen “authenticators.” John Stauffer pointed me to the writings of several black abolitionists who wrote about Thomas Jefferson. Vincent Carretta kindly lent his considerable expertise on Wheatley and her world as I completed my manuscript, and William Andrews helped me to understand Wheatley in the larger context of slave literature. Dana Goodyear and Henry Finder provided remarkably generous editorial advice as I revised the lecture for publication in The New Yorker. Homi Bhabha, Ted Widmer, and Argela DeLeon offered valuable comments on the working draft. Hollis Rob-bins aided me enormously in editing the various versions of this essay and arriving at a final text. Abby Wolf checked my bibliographical sources and helped me to compile the bibliography. Elizabeth Maguire expressed support for the publication of my Jefferson Lecture as a book almost as soon as it was delivered, and her assistant, Will Morrison Garland, helped me to adhere to a strict set of deadlines. Joanne Kendall, as always, typed the several drafts of the text. William Ferris, former chair of the endowment, extended the invitation to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, while his successor, Bruce Cole, assisted ably by his colleague, Mary Lou Beatty, presided graciously and efficiently over the lecture and the ceremonies surrounding it. I would especially like to thank my wife, Sharon Adams, for her enthusiasm for this project, and her patience as I struggled to complete this meditation on Phillis Wheatley’s importance to her own time, and ours.

  PREFACE

  This book is an expanded version of the Thomas Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities that I was privileged to deliver to the Library of Congress in March 2002. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to the National Endowment for the Humanities, its past chairman William R. Ferris, its current chairman, Bruce Cole, and the National Council on the Humanities for choosing me to deliver the Jefferson Lecture on the thirtieth anniversary of the series.

  The Jefferson Lectures began in 1972 with Lionel Trilling’s address on “Mind in the Modern World.” As hard as it is to believe, the Jefferson Lectures are more than a tenth as old as the nation they serve. I am honored to occupy a line of succession that includes Saul Bellow, Walker Percy, Toni Morrison, John Hope Franklin, and so many other luminaries.

  It is humbling to receive what has been called the highest intellectual honor bestowed by the U.S. government. I feel especially humbled and appreciative because I interpret this honor as a statement about my field, African-American studies, which arrived in the academy only three decades ago.

  I am especially proud to be a fellow country-man of Jefferson’s in several senses. As a citizen, like all of you, of the republic of letters. As an American who believes deeply in the soaring promise of the Declaration of Independence. As a native of Piedmont, West Virginia, and, hence, in a broad sense, a fellow Virginian.

  Who knows? Judging from all the DNA disclosures of the last few years, I may even be related to him. For all of us, white and black alike, Jefferson remains an essential ancestor.

  John F. Kennedy once famously addressed a group of distinguished intellectuals by saying they were the greatest gathering of brilliant thinkers to visit the White House since Jefferson dined alone. It’s a great line—but I don’t think Jefferson ever did dine alone. Even when no one was at the table with him, someone was cooking for him, someone was bringing him his food, and somebody was busy planning his next meal. And the chances are good that some of those people were African Americans. And it is Jefferson’s role in the shaping of black literary and political discourse that is the subject of this book.

  I hope that readers will accept my challenge to recuperate Phillis Wheatley, the first African poet in English, from the long shadow of Jefferson’s misgivings about her gifts.

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Cambridge, MA February 19, 2003

  The Trials of Phillis Wheatley

  It was the primal scene of African-American letters. Sometime before October 8, 1772, Phillis Wheatley, a slim, African slave in her late teens, met with eighteen gentlemen so august that they could later allow themselves to be identified publicly “as the most respectable characters in Boston.” The panel had been assembled to verify the authorship of her poems and to answer a much larger question: was a Negro capable of producing literature?

  The details of the meeting have been lost to history, but I have often imagined how it might have happened. She entered the room—perhaps in Boston’s Town Hall, the Old Colony House—carrying a manuscript consisting of twenty-odd poems that she claims to have written. No doubt the young woman would have been demure, soft-spoken, and frightened, for she was about to undergo one of the oddest oral examinations on record, one that would determine the course of her life and the fate of her work, and one that, ultimately, would determine whether she remained a slave or would be set free. The stakes, in other words, were as high as they could get for an oral exam. She is on trial and so is her race.

  She would have been familiar with the names of the gentlemen assembled in this room. For there, perhaps gathered in a semicircle, would have sat an astonishingly influential group of the colony’s citizens determined to satisfy for themselves, and thus put to rest, fundamental questions about the authenticity of this woman’s literary achievements. Their interrogation of this witness, and her answers, would determine not only this woman’s fate but the subsequent direction of the antislavery movement, as well as the birth of what a later commentator would call “a new species of literature,” the literature written by slaves.

  Who would this young woman have confronted that day in the early autumn of 1772? At the center no doubt would have sat His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts. Hutchinson, a colonial historian and a royal official, who would end his life in England as a loyalist refugee, was born in Boston into a wealthy family descended from merchants. (Anne Hutchinson was also an ancestor.) Young Thomas, we are told, preferred “reading history to pl
aying with other children” and early on became an admirer of Charles I. So precocious was he that he entered Harvard College at the age of twelve, “where,” his biographer tells us, “his social standing entitled him to be ranked third in his class.” (Even back then, grade inflation loomed on the banks of the Charles River.)

  Hutchinson was the governor between 1769 and 1774. Following the Boston Tea Party, Hutchinson went to London “for consultations.” His family joined him in exile in 1776. Just four years following this examination, he would receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford on, of all days, July 4, 1776. Hutchinson never returned to his beloved estate in Milton, Massachusetts.

  At Hutchinson’s side in the makeshift seminar room would have sat Andrew Oliver, the colony’s lieutenant governor (and Hutchinson’s brother-in-law through his wife’s sister). Oliver, who took the A.B. and M.A. degrees from Harvard, became—along with his brother and business partners, Peter and Thomas Hutchinson—leaders of the faction that dominated provincial Massachusetts politics until the eve of the Revolution. Oliver imprudently allowed himself to be publicly identified as a supporter of the Stamp Act of 1765, prompting angry crowds to ransack his house and uproot his garden. When in 1774, Oliver died of a stroke, commentators assumed it to have been brought on by the increasingly vituperative attacks of the antiloyalists.

  Quite a few men of the cloth were present. The Reverend Mather Byles, still another Harvard graduate, taking the A.B. degree in 1725 and his A.M. in 1728, was the first and only minister of the Hollis Street Congregational Church in Boston between 1732 and 1775. Byles was the grandson of Increase Mather and the nephew of Cotton Mather. As a young man Byles corresponded with Alexander Pope and Isaac Watts, and in 1744 he had published his own book of verse, Poems on Several Occasions. Byles was highly regarded for his wit; his sermons “praised for their sonorous language and elaborate descriptive passages,” Mary Rhinelander McCarl tells us, and “not for their probing ethical, moral, or theological content.” He was a favorite for delivering eulogies at state funerals. Like Hutchinson and Oliver, Byles was a Tory loyalist, and he lost his pulpit when Massachusetts finally rebelled. He was sentenced to banishment, later committed to house arrest, for his loyalist views. (Ever the wit, he called the sentry stationed just outside of his home his “Observe-a-Tory.”)

  Besides Mather Byles, another poet was there that morning: Joseph Green, a well-known satirist. David Robinson calls Green “the foremost wit of his day,” and he and Byles often exchanged satiric poems and parodies. Among Green’s most well-known pieces was a lampoon of Boston’s first Masonic procession, held in 1749, and entitled Entertainment for a Winter’s Evening. The poem depicts the Masons as proceeding from church to their real destination, a tavern. A loyalist to the end, Green fled to London in 1775; he died in exile in 1880.

  The Reverend Samuel Cooper, also a poet, received his A.B. and A.M. from Harvard in 1743 and 1746, respectively. He was the only minister of the Brattle Street Church from 1747 until his death in 1783. Known as “the silver-tongued preacher,” Cooper was Minister to no less than “one-fourth of Boston’s merchants and more than half of Boston’s selectmen,” as Frederick V. Mills tells us. Mills continues: “Cooper was at the center of an inner circle consisting of James Otis, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren and Samuel Adams, who showed outward respect for Governor Thomas Hutchinson at the same time they kept agitation against British policy focused.” So pivotal was Cooper’s role during the Revolution in encouraging the American alliance with France in 1777 that he would receive a stipend from Louis XVI until his death.

  The august James Bowdoin was included in this circle of inquisition as well. Bowdoin was one of the principal American exemplars of the Enlightenment. A close friend of Franklin’s, he was a student of electricity and astronomy, as well as a poet, publishing a volume titled A Paraphrase on Part of the Oeconomy of Human Life in 1759, and four poems in the volume Harvard Verses presented to George III in 1762 “in an attempt to gain royal patronage for the struggling college,” as Gordon E. Kershaw notes. His remarkable library contained 1,200 volumes, ranging in subjects from science and math to philosophy, religion, poetry and fiction. By the time of this interview, he had become a vocal opponent of Governor Hutchinson’s policies. Bowdoin would become the governor of Massachusetts in 1776. In addition to opposing the policies of the royalists in the room, Bowdoin was also a steadfast foe of “his old political enemy,” John Hancock, who was also in the room.

  Like Bowdoin, Hancock prepared for Harvard at Boston Latin, then graduated from Harvard in the class of 1754, the second youngest in a class of twenty, in which he ranked fifth, William Fowler notes, as “an indication of his family’s prominence.” (His uncle, Thomas—his guardian after age eight—was one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants, and John was raised in a Beacon Hill mansion.) Upon his uncle’s death in 1764, John assumed the leadership of the House of Hancock, which grew rich by trafficking in whale oil and real estate. In part because the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 had such dire effects on business, and because he resented what he saw as an abridgement of his rights as an Englishman, Hancock increasingly identified his interests with the patriots, both as a Boston selectman and member of the General Court. Hancock became something of a hero in patriot circles when, in 1768, his sloop, the Liberty, was seized for smuggling Madeira. The Sons of Liberty organized a mob, which attacked the customs officials, who then fled for their lives. Hancock was hailed as a victor over British oppression, and would go on to become the third president of the Continental Congress, and the first governor of the Commonwealth.

  The Reverend Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather, graduated from Harvard College in 1723. He was Thomas Hutchinson’s brother-in-law. Mather’s career as a minister was quite controversial—he was charged with “improper conduct” in 1741, and, though found innocent, was dismissed that same year from his pulpit at the Second Church in Boston. (Misbehavior among Boston clerics was regarded less leniently than would later be the case!) Mather is principally remembered for his library, which Mason I. Lowance describes as “one of the greatest in New England.” But he is also remembered, Lowance concludes, as being “the end of that dynasty” that had commenced with his great-grandfather Richard in 1630.

  What an astounding collection of people were gathered in the room that morning—relations and rivals, friends and foes. Here truly was a plenum of talent and privilege, cultivation and power. There were seven ordained ministers, three poets, six staunch loyalists, and several signal figures in the battle for independence. Of these eighteen gentlemen, many were Harvard graduates.

  What they were not, however, was an association for the advancement of colored people. Of the eighteen gentlemen assembled, a majority were slaveholders: one, Thomas Hubbard, had actually been a dealer in slaves. Even the venerable James Bowdoin bought and sold slaves in the 1760s, while we know from Joseph Green’s will that he left one hundred pounds to his slave “Plato.” Another, the Reverend Charles Chauncy, in 1743, had attacked the Great Awakening because it allowed “women and girls; yea Negroes—to do the business of preachers.”

  Five among them—Bowdoin, Cooper, Hubbard, Moorhead, and Oliver—would be immortalized by the poet herself either in elegies upon their deaths or occasional verse. In the hands of this group, self-constituted as judge and jury, rested the fate of Phillis Wheatley, and to a large extent the destiny of the African-American literary tradition, on that October day in 1772.

  Why had this august tribunal been assembled by John Wheatley, Phillis’s master? They had one simple charge: to determine whether Phillis Wheatley was truly the author of the poems she claimed to have written. John Wheatley hoped that they would support Phillis’s claim of authorship, and that the opinion of the general public would follow.

  And to understand how fraught this moment was, we need to turn from the judges to the one they were judging.

  The girl who came to be known as Phillis Wheatl
ey came to town on July 11, 1761, on board a schooner, the Phillis, owned by Timothy Finch and captained by Peter Gwinn. The ship had recently returned from gathering slaves in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los, off the coast of Guinea. Among its cargo was “a slender frail, female child,” a Wheatley relative would write, “supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth.” It’s a fair guess that she would have been a native Wolof speaker from the Senegambian coast. Mrs. Susanna Wheatley, wife of the prosperous tailor and merchant, John Wheatley, in response to advertisements in the Boston Evening Post and the Boston Gazette and Country Journal in July and August, went to the schooner to purchase a house servant. Mrs. Wheatley acquired the child at the wharf on Beach Street “for a trifle,” one of her descendants tells us, “as the captain had fears of her dropping off his hands, without emolument, by death.” The child was “naked,” covered only by “a quantity of dirty carpet about her like a fillibeg.”

  The two boarded “the chaise of her mistress” and returned to the Wheatley mansion located on the corner of King Street and Mackerel Lane (today’s State and Kilby Streets), just a few blocks from the Old State House. Both the Stamp Act riots of 1765 and the Boston Massacre of 1770 took place down the street from her front door. Wheatley’s loving biographer, William Robinson, estimates her purchase price as less than ten pounds. Susanna Wheatley named the child “Phillis,” ironically enough, after the name of the schooner that had brought her from Africa.

  According to Robinson, Phillis’s Boston consisted of 15,520 people in 1765, 1,000 of whom were black. Of this black population only eighteen, as of 1762, were free. Between Phillis’s arrival in 1761 and her death in 1784, “no black children,” Robinson continues, “could be counted among the more than 800 young scholars enrolled in the city’s two grammar or Latin schools and the three vocational writing schools.”