Editorial commentary
Phillis Wheatley's 1773 poem 'On Being Brought from Africa to America' is eight lines long and has produced more scholarly commentary than poems of forty times its length. The poem's interpretive history is itself a piece of intellectual history, because the readings the poem has supported across two and a half centuries trace the shifting conditions under which Black writing has been received by predominantly white reading publics.
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) was the first African-American author to publish a book of poetry. Kidnapped from West Africa as a child of approximately seven years and sold into slavery in Boston in 1761, she was educated by the Wheatley family, who recognized her precocity. Her 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral required her to be examined by a panel of Boston dignitaries who attested in the volume's preface that she was the actual author. She was emancipated after the volume's publication but lived in poverty for the remaining decade of her life.
Her 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was the first book of poetry published by an African-American author. Publication required Wheatley to be examined by a panel of Boston dignitaries — including the colonial governor, John Hancock, and several prominent ministers — who attested in the volume's preface that they had verified she was the actual author of the poems.
The eight-line poem has been read in three substantially different ways. The eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century reading received it as a sincere expression of Christian conversion gratitude. The mid-twentieth-century reading treated it as an embarrassing artifact of accommodationism. The contemporary reading has come to read the poem as a piece of double discourse — surface piety masking a careful argument against the religious and cultural justifications of slavery. The contemporary reading rests on close attention to the poem's second quatrain, which addresses 'Christians' directly and positions Wheatley as outside the addressed group, performing critique from a position of religious authority equivalent to theirs.
Thomas Jefferson's 1782 dismissal of Wheatley's poetry in Notes on the State of Virginia was a piece of analytical argument that Jefferson needed to make in order to maintain the consistency of his broader position on the natural capacities of African-descended people; the analytical work Wheatley's existence required him to perform is itself evidence of the political stakes of her poetry. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003) is the standard contemporary scholarly engagement.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
'Their colour is a diabolic die.'
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
Editorial commentary
Phillis Wheatley's 1773 poem 'On Being Brought from Africa to America' is eight lines long and has produced more scholarly commentary than poems of forty times its length. The poem's interpretive history is itself a piece of intellectual history, because the readings the poem has supported across two and a half centuries trace the shifting conditions under which Black writing has been received by predominantly white reading publics.
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) was the first African-American author to publish a book of poetry. Kidnapped from West Africa as a child of approximately seven years and sold into slavery in Boston in 1761, she was educated by the Wheatley family, who recognized her precocity. Her 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral required her to be examined by a panel of Boston dignitaries who attested in the volume's preface that she was the actual author. She was emancipated after the volume's publication but lived in poverty for the remaining decade of her life.
Her 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was the first book of poetry published by an African-American author. Publication required Wheatley to be examined by a panel of Boston dignitaries — including the colonial governor, John Hancock, and several prominent ministers — who attested in the volume's preface that they had verified she was the actual author of the poems.
The eight-line poem has been read in three substantially different ways. The eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century reading received it as a sincere expression of Christian conversion gratitude. The mid-twentieth-century reading treated it as an embarrassing artifact of accommodationism. The contemporary reading has come to read the poem as a piece of double discourse — surface piety masking a careful argument against the religious and cultural justifications of slavery. The contemporary reading rests on close attention to the poem's second quatrain, which addresses 'Christians' directly and positions Wheatley as outside the addressed group, performing critique from a position of religious authority equivalent to theirs.
Thomas Jefferson's 1782 dismissal of Wheatley's poetry in Notes on the State of Virginia was a piece of analytical argument that Jefferson needed to make in order to maintain the consistency of his broader position on the natural capacities of African-descended people; the analytical work Wheatley's existence required him to perform is itself evidence of the political stakes of her poetry. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003) is the standard contemporary scholarly engagement.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.