The Trials of Phillis Wheatley

Table of Contents

 

 

 

ALSO BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

The African-American Century
(with Cornel West)

The Future of the Race
(with Cornel West)

Identities
(with K. Anthony Appiah)

 

 

EDITED BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR .

Africana
(edited with K. Anthony Appiah)
Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
by Harriet E. Wilson

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

T
his 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.

 

I
t 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 playing 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.