Phillis Wheatley chooses freedom : history, poetry, and the ideals of the American Revolution

Phillis Wheatley chooses freedom : history, poetry, and the ideals of the American Revolution

New York : New York University Press, 2018.

ix, 221 p. ; 24 cm.

920.72 W567ba 2018

(OCoLC)1029062604

Dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, an African-American poet who refused to marry a man she had never met and return with him to Africa as a missionary. She was enslaved in Africa as a child and transported to Boston, where she was sold to an evangelical family. Agreeing to the proposed marriage--arranged by Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins--would have echoed the social mores of the time, particularly those for enslaved black women. However, due to her prodigious talents as a poet, Wheatley won her freedom a year prior to Hopkins' arrangement, allowing her to take her future into her own hands. The author considers Wheatley's story and Hopkins's plan in the broader context of the American Revolution. The ideals of the revolution motivated Hopkins and some of his contemporaries to propose freeing African slaves and thus address the "monstrous inconsistency" fundamental to the white slave owners leading the revolution. In so doing, they presented themselves as freedom fighters who resisted the threat of slavery at the hands of British tyranny. Wheatley challenged this inconsistency and, taking the revolutionaries' rhetoric seriously, called for liberty for all human hearts: women's and men's, blacks' and whites'.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-213) and index.
L2021M110

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