‘The Pen of an Untutor’d African’: Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784)

The following article by Ian Shaw is featured in the November 2025 issue of the Banner of Truth Magazine (no. 746). You can subscribe to the magazine in print or digital formats for eleven edifying issues each year.

‘It is ironic that of all the people one might expect to hold a low view of God because of their circumstances, the African slave actually held the highest view. Despite all the suffering and oppression of slavery, slaves maintained a view of God that emphasized his sovereignty and his goodness. They were committed to the biblical revelation that exalted God in all his perfections.’—Thabiti Anyabwile¹T. M. Anyabwile, The Decline of African-American Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007).

During the Great Awakening in America, ‘All across the British Atlantic world, African slaves were converting to Christianity in large numbers through the new Evangelical movements.’²J. Coffey, ‘Evangelicals, Slavery and the Slave Trade: from Whitefield to Wilberforce’ (Anvil 24 (2): 2007), p.101. Gilbert Tennent, speaking of a preaching tour in the winter of 1740-41, when he was in Charlestown, wrote, ‘Multitudes were awakened, and several had received great consolation; especially among the young people, children and negroes.’³A. A. Alexander, The Log College (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1968), 32. Through this and subsequent articles on Jupiter Hammon, Lemuel Haynes and Olaudah Equiano, when referring to ethnic and national groups, I sometimes but not always capitalize ‘White’ and ‘Black.’ Conventions on this matter differ between the UK and America. For example, quotations from Lemuel Haynes in a later article show him tending to capitalize ‘Black’ and write ‘white’ in lower case, as when he wrote, ‘Liberty is Equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one.’ There may be instances where readers will feel that I have been inconsistent and perhaps inappropriate in my practice, for which I ask forbearance. In similar terms, William Tennent wrote to one of his correspondents, Thomas Prince. Speaking of his ministry in Freehold, New Jersey, October 11, 1744, he recorded, ‘Some negroes, I trust, are made free in Christ, and more seem to be unfeignedly seeking after it’ (p. 231). Samuel Davies, later to become the President of the College of New Jersey, wrote in 1757, ‘What little success I have lately had, has been chiefly among the extremes of Gentlemen and Negroes. Indeed, God has been remarkably working among the latter. I have baptized 150 adults.’ It was ‘from Calvinism this generation of black authors drew a vision of God at work providentially in lives of black people, directing their sufferings yet promising the faithful among them a restoration to his favour and presence.’⁴J. Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4.

After preaching a final sermon on one visit to Philadelphia and retiring to his lodgings, Whitefield recorded, ‘Near 50 Negroes came to give me thanks for what God had done for their souls.’ He considered this an answer to prayer, saying, ‘I have been much drawn in prayer for them, and have seen them wrought upon by the word preached.’ On Whitefield’s death in 1770, An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield, appeared, containing the following lines:

He pray’d that grace in every heart might dwell:
He long’d to see America excell…
He urg’d the need of HIM to every one;
It was no less than GOD’s co-equal SON!
Take HIM ye wretched for your only good;
Take HIM ye starving souls to be your food.
Ye thirsty, come to this life-giving stream:
Ye Preachers, take him for your joyful theme:
Take HIM, ‘my dear AMERICANS,’ he said,
Be your complaints in his kind bosom laid:
Take HIM ye Africans, he longs for you;
Impartial SAVIOUR, is his title due;
If you will chuse to walk in grace’s road,
You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to GOD.

‘Compos’d in America by a Negro Girl Seventeen Years of Age,’ the poet’s name was Phillis Wheatley.⁵P. Wheatley, Complete Writings: Phillis Wheatley. (London: Penguin Books, 2001). Simonetta Carr has written a life of Wheatley (Phillis Wheatley. Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2021). She had been seized  from Senegal and Gambia, West Africa, when she was about seven years old, and transported to the Boston docks with a shipment of slaves, who because of age or physical frailty were unsuited for rigorous labour in the West Indian and Southern colonies. We know through ship manifest records for the Phillis, that she was taken to America in 1761 where, in the month of August, she was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston. ‘In want of a domestic,’ Susanna Wheatley, wife of prominent Boston tailor John Wheatley, purchased ‘a slender, frail female child … for a trifle,’ because the captain of the slave ship believed that the waif was terminally ill, and he wanted to gain at least a small profit before she died. Here she became the enslaved servant of Susanna Wheatley. Her original birth-name is unknown. The origins of her name are a combination of the boat she had been sold from and the owners’ family name.

Phillis was treated well and, despite being owned by the family, they arranged for her to be educated by private tutors in several subjects, including Latin and Greek. She was ‘so brilliant that she began to publish serious poems as a young teenager.’⁶J. G. Basker, Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660-1810 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 170. By the time she was eighteen, Wheatley had gathered a collection of twenty-eight poems for which she, with the help of Mrs Wheatley, ran advertisements for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772. By the age of twenty, Phillis was no longer tied to the family estate, and in 1772 she was tasked in accompanying the eldest son, Nathaniel, to England, as the family thought it would improve her ailing health as well as her chances of becoming a published poet, in contrast to the attitudes of the colonists. Within a year, Phillis was the first African-American to be published, on the release of her first volume of poetry in 1773.

Her Poetry

She reflected thus on her life:⁷In ‘To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth’ on his appointment as minister to America.

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Her 1770 poem on the death of Whitefield was a pivotal poem in Wheatley’s life. Whitefield was not the only one for whom she wrote an elegy. She published An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, The Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper. She wrote a poem to no less than the first president of the United States, George Washington, with whom she had corresponded and whom she was later privileged to meet. She was thought to be only thirteen when she wrote ‘To the University of Cambridge, in New England,’ urging,

Still more, ye sons of science ye receive
The blissful news by messengers from heav’n,
How Jesus’ blood for your redemption flows.
See him with hands out-stretch’t upon the cross;
Immense compassion in his bosom glows;
He hears revilers, nor resents their scorn:
What matchless mercy in the Son of God!

In 1767, aged fourteen, she had written ‘An Address to the Deist,’ refuting their scepticism. It opens with boldness, taking on a task normally of ordained men. She hints at this in her opening line:

Must Ethiopians be employ’d for you?
Greatly rejoice if any good I do.
I ask O unbeliever, Satan’s child
Hath not thy saviour been too much revil’d
Th’ auspicious rays that round his head do shine
Do still declare him to be Christ divine
Doth not the Omnipotent call him son?
And is well pleas’d with his beloved One—?
How canst thou thus divide the trinity—

And urges,

Seek the Eternal while he is so near …
At the last day where wilt thou hide thy face
The Day approaching is no time for Grace.
Too late perceive thyself undone and lost …

Her most famous poem is ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’:

’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, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

Her poem expresses the view that it was God’s larger plan for her salvation, rather than the wickedness of slave traders, that determined the events of her life.⁸Perhaps the most helpful reflection on this question by a Black reformed writer is Carter, A. J. 2016. Black and Reformed: Seeing God’s Sovereignty in the African-American Christian Experience.  New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing. But she also undermines White complacency, reminding Christians (with an apt pun on cane sugar-refining) that blacks and whites are equal in the divine plan. In her poetic eulogy to General David Wooster she castigated patriots who confess Christianity yet oppress her people:

   But how presumptuous shall we hope to find
   Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind
   While yet, O deed ungenerous, they disgrace
   And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race.
   Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers
   Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.

‘The pen of an untutor’d African’

She had sent her poem on Whitefield to the Countess of Huntingdon, who then acted as her patron. When doing so she had said, ‘The Tongues of the Learned are insufficient, much less the pen of an untutor’d African, to paint in lively characters the excellencies of this citizen of Zion.’⁹All the quotations from her letters are from Wheatley, (2001), pp. 139-164.

John Thornton, perhaps the key figure in the circle of the Clapham ‘Saints,’ was in correspondence with Wheatley on several occasions. She wrote to him in July 1772, in reply to him, ‘I thank you for recommending the Bible to be my chef [sic] Study … O that my eyes were more open’d to see the real worth, the true excellence of the word of truth, my flint heart Soften’d with the grateful dews of divine grace.’ She wrote again on her return to America in late 1773, with a remarkable open boldness, urging him, ‘disdain not to be called the Father of Humble Africans and Indians; though despised on earth on account of our colour, we have this Consolation, if he enables us to deserve it, “That God dwells in the humble & contrite heart.” O that I were more and more possess’d of this inestimable blessing; to be directed by the immediate influence of the divine Spirit in my daily walk & Conversation.’

She was deeply saddened by the death of her mistress, telling a frequent correspondent, ‘I have lately met with a great trial in the death of my mistress … I was a poor little outcast and stranger when she took me in: not only into her house but I presently became a sharer in her most tender affections. I was treated by her more like her child than her Servant,’ and recorded how she departed ‘in inexpressible raptures, earnest longings and impatient thirstings for the upper courts of the Lord.’ She also wrote to Thornton on Mrs Wheatley’s death, giving a more extensive account of how at the close ‘she eagerly longed to depart to be with Christ.’ Phillis ‘sat by the whole time at her bedside and Saw with Grief and Wonder, the Effects of Sin on the human race.’ ‘Where had been our hopes,’ had not Christ taken away the sting of death.

Thornton had obviously entertained the idea that she should return to Africa with two others as missionary to her people. It was not feasible, one reason being that she was then ‘an utter stranger’ to the language of the peoples from whence she had originated. ‘How on my arrival how like a Barbarian I Should look to the Natives.’ In a subsequent letter to Thornton, it is clear the debt she feels to him for ‘such uncommon tenderness for thirteen years from my earliest youth—such unwearied diligence to instruct me in the principles of true Religion.’ She saw him as a father and wished, following Mrs Wheatley’s death, that ‘you could in these respects Supply her place, but this does not seem probable from the great distance of your residence’ (October 1774).

She was also in correspondence with Samuel Hopkins. In February 1774 and again later, she was telling him of copies of ‘my books’ (her poetry collection), and of knowing of two ‘Negro men’ who wished to return from Britain ‘desirous of returning to their native country, to preach the gospel.’ She expressed her desire to do all she could, despite her weakness, ‘to promote this laudable design.’ Indeed, she rejoiced hearing of conversions, writing to a Rhode Island correspondent, ‘It gives me very great pleasure to hear of so many of my Nation, Seeking with eagerness the way to true felicity.’ Two months later she tells the same correspondent of her poor health all the last winter.

John Wheatley emancipated Phillis in 1778, three months before the death of her mistress, allowing Phillis to marry John Peters, another free Black person and grocer, three months later. However, the couple struggled with ill-health, low income and poor work, leading to the death of two of their infant children. The financial situation for the family worsened and in 1784 Phillis’ husband was imprisoned for the accumulation of his debts, forcing her to work as a scullery maid at a boarding house to support them. Phillis died on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31, found by other Wheatley family members ‘reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe,’ uncared for and alone. Their last surviving child died in time to be buried with his mother.

Wheatley was much praised by her contemporaries. Jane Dunlap, of whom little is known and who described herself as a poor Bostonian ‘in an obscure station in life,’ published in 1771 a volume of poems inspired by Whitefield’s sermons and dedicated to his memory. The example of Wheatley had moved her to write.

Shall his due praises be so loudly sung
By a young Afric damsel’s virgin tongue?
And I be silent! and no mention make
Of his blest name, who did so often speak
To us, the words of life,
Fetch’d from the fountain pure,
Of God’s most holy sacred truth;
Which ever shall endure.

Her life and writing may move others also.

Ian Shaw is a member of York Evangelical Church, York, England. 

Photo credit (visible when article is shared on social media): A first edition of the book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.