The Genius of Phylis Wheatley

Originally published in personal blog.

 

In “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth”, Wheatley addresses the white slave-owners who have freedom on their mind when the poem was written in 1773, but freedom wasn’t for slaves (2, 8). She cries out about the injustice when she writes:

No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievances unredress’d complain,
No more shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and meant it t’ enslave the land (15-19).

She addresses the chains under which colonists see themselves in as British subjects under “wanton Tyranny”, unable to have a voice and compares it to the even more restrictive chain of slavery (18-19). Just three years later, Thomas Jefferson penned the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… [and have a Right to] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (Jefferson.) Jefferson didn’t mean all men were created equal though even then. The sole determining factor for who was free and who wasn’t was racism– the African race were a “hated faction [who] [died]” (Wheatley 10).

Wheatley is clever in how she presents her abolitionist work. Her title suggests that she is going to deliver a eulogy for William, Earl of Dartmouth which she does by comparing his escape from the prison of mortality [and wages of sin] that he has been sent free from via Jesus’s Atonement to the slavery imprisonment African slaves suffer. She does this by using phrases like “Freedom’s charms unfold”; “iron chain”; and “love of Freedom” (8, 17, 21).

It’s almost like Wheatley is making an impassioned plea much like Moses in Egypt to let her people go. If that is the question, history reveals that the answer was “not yet” as emancipation didn’t occur until after the Civil War.

Works Cited:

Jefferson, Thomas. “Declaration of Independence.” Charters of Freedom: A New World is at Hand. National Archives, 4 Jul 1776. Web. 4 May 2016.

Wheatley, Phillis. “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2016. Web. 4 May 2016.