Phillis Wheatley Had to Prove She Wrote Her Poems
Quick answer: In 1772 Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved teenager in Boston, had to prove to the colony's most powerful men that she wrote her own poems. The true story.
Boston, 1772. A young woman of about eighteen, enslaved in the household of a merchant named John Wheatley, has written enough poems to fill a book. She has been appearing in newspapers since she was around thirteen. Her elegy for the preacher George Whitefield has been read across the colonies and in England. And yet the book cannot be printed, because a large part of literate Boston simply does not believe that an enslaved African girl wrote it.
What happened next produced one of the strangest documents in publishing history: a signed statement from eighteen of the most powerful men in Massachusetts, among them the governor and John Hancock, assuring the public that Phillis Wheatley was the author of her own poems. No other poet in the language has needed a certificate of authenticity bound into her first book. Her story is painful, astonishing, and, for any writer who has ever been doubted, worth following to its end.
The poem
Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Phillis Wheatley, 'On Imagination' (1773)
Eighteen Signatures
The document is headed 'To the Publick' and it is printed at the front of her 1773 collection. In it, the signatories declare that the poems were written by Phillis, a young Negro girl brought from Africa, and that she has been examined and judged qualified to have written them. The names underneath include Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, his lieutenant governor Andrew Oliver, John Hancock, and seven ministers of the town's churches.
One honest caution. Whether all eighteen men gathered in a single room on a single day to question her is not documented; the courtroom-style scene many of us picture is a modern reconstruction, most famously dramatised by the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is careful to note the limits of the evidence. What is beyond doubt is the signed attestation itself, and the depth of disbelief that made such a document necessary. Boston required a panel of dignitaries to certify that a Black teenager could write heroic couplets. The couplets, meanwhile, spoke for themselves.
Seven Years From the Ship to the Page
She arrived in Boston in 1761 aboard a slave ship called the Phillis, and was named after the vessel that carried her. Her age, roughly seven or eight, was guessed from her missing front teeth. John Wheatley bought her as a servant for his wife Susanna, and the household soon noticed something unusual: the child was absorbing English at startling speed. In a letter later printed with her poems, John Wheatley wrote that within sixteen months of her arrival she could read the most difficult passages of the Bible.
The Wheatleys' daughter Mary tutored her, and the girl went on to study Latin, astronomy, geography and the English poets, above all Alexander Pope's translation of Homer, whose polished couplets became the engine of her own verse. Her first known published poem appeared in the Newport Mercury in 1767, when she was around thirteen or fourteen. Three years later her elegy on the death of George Whitefield, the most famous preacher of the age, circulated on both sides of the Atlantic and made her name.
Boston Said No, London Said Yes
In 1772 proposals were circulated for a Boston edition of her poems. Enough subscribers never materialised; disbelief in her authorship was part of the reason, and the attestation was gathered in this atmosphere. The rescue came from England. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, a patron connected to Whitefield's circle, agreed to support a London edition.
In 1773 Phillis sailed to London with the Wheatleys' son Nathaniel, where she was received by aristocrats and public figures; Benjamin Franklin recorded calling on her. That September, the bookseller Archibald Bell published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book of poetry published by an African American. It carried her engraved portrait as a frontispiece, a quill in her hand, itself a quietly radical statement: this face, this hand, wrote this book.
Freedom, Then Silence
Within months of her return to Boston in late 1773 she was freed, reportedly under pressure from her English admirers. Freedom, in her case, did not mean security. Susanna Wheatley died in 1774, John in 1778, and the household that had educated her dissolved. That year she married John Peters, a free Black grocer, and the couple slid into poverty made harsher by war and by illness.
In 1779 she circulated proposals for a second volume of poems. Not enough subscribers came forward, this time for a poet of proven, certified fame. She died on 5 December 1784, aged about thirty one. The manuscript of that second book has never been found, one of the great losses of American literature.
What Her Trial Says to a Writer Now
Wheatley answered her doubters in the most devastating way available: technically. She mastered the exact forms her examiners prized, the heroic couplet, the neoclassical elegy, the biblical allusion, and produced them to a standard they could not dismiss. There is a lesson in that for any writer facing gatekeepers: skill is the one argument that does not require the gatekeeper's goodwill. Nobody signs an attestation for mediocre work.
The second lesson is harder. Proof did not save her from poverty, and vindication is not the same as reward. Wheatley wrote anyway, to the end, circulating proposals for a book nobody would fund. Writers today face nothing like her circumstances, but the underlying discipline transfers: your job is the work and its circulation. The verdicts, fair and unfair, arrive on their own schedule.
Reading Wheatley Today
Start with 'On Being Brought from Africa to America', eight lines that seem meek and then turn on the reader in the final couplet, rebuking those who view her people with scorn. Then read 'To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works', one artist encouraging another across the same impossible circumstances. And read 'On Imagination', her celebration of the writing mind's freedom, written by a woman legally owned when she composed it. That context turns a conventional eighteenth century subject into something piercing.
What poets can take from this
- Let mastery be your argument; Wheatley silenced doubters with technique they could not fault.
- Study the tradition your readers respect, then use it for your own purposes, as she used Pope's couplets.
- Publish where you are welcomed; when Boston refused her, London did not.
- Keep copies of everything; her lost second manuscript is a warning across the centuries.
- Expect vindication and reward to arrive separately, if at all, and write anyway.
- When someone doubts your authorship or ability, save your energy for the next poem, not the argument.
Try it yourself
Write a poem addressed to someone who does not believe you made the thing you made. Do not defend yourself directly; instead, demonstrate, in the poem's own control and precision, exactly what they doubted.
Questions
Did Phillis Wheatley really have to prove she wrote her poems?
Yes. Her 1773 book opens with a signed statement from eighteen prominent Massachusetts men, including Governor Thomas Hutchinson and John Hancock, attesting that she wrote the poems herself. Whether they examined her together in one formal sitting is not documented, but the attestation itself is real and was considered necessary to publish her.
Was Phillis Wheatley freed from slavery?
Yes, within months of returning from London in late 1773, reportedly at the urging of her English supporters. Freedom brought hardship rather than comfort: she married John Peters in 1778, lived in deep poverty, and died in 1784 at about thirty one.
What happened to Phillis Wheatley's second book?
She advertised proposals for a second volume in 1779, but too few subscribers came forward and it was never printed. The manuscript disappeared after her death and has never been found.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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