[In the essay that follows, Erkkila emphasizes the revolutionary power of Wheatley's use of republican and religious figurations of enslavement and redemption.]

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, those who advocated a break with England did so in the language of the two primary social tropes: the family and slavery. The position of America was figuratively represented as the natural right of the son or daughter to revolt against a tyrannical parent and the natural right of a slave to revolt against a master. Through a masterful deployment of these parent/child and master/slave tropes in Common Sense, which was published in 1776, Tom Paine galvanized popular support for the formal break with England that would occur six months later. In his attempt to "divest" the king and monarchy of their traditional authority, Paine represented the king as a slave master seeking to deprive Americans of their natural liberties: "When the republican virtue fails, slavery ensues. Why is the constitution of England sickly, but because monarchy has poisoned the republic, the crown has engrossed the Commons?" Pleading the cause of "final separation" from Britain in the language of the "violated unmeaning names of parent and child," Paine says,

No man was a warmer wisher for a reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April, 1775, but the moment the event of that day was made well known, I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharoah of England for ever; and disdain the wretch that with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.¹

In a political economy in which the rights of women were absorbed and legally "covered" by the constituted authority of the male and blacks were held as property under the institution of slavery, the widespread rhetorical representation of America as child of liberty or enchained slave oppressed by the tyranny of father/master had a particularly potent social appeal. This appeal was heightened by the violent and bloody visual iconography that accompanied the written representation of the American cause.

In the newspaper cartoon "Britannia Mutilated" (1774), for example, Britain appears as a naked female figure, enchained, amputated, and deprived of her former power by the aggressive colonial policies of king and Parliament. In "The able Doctor, or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught" (1774), America is figured as a half-clad Indian woman who is violated by a number of male figures who force her to submit to the "bitter draught" of the Boston Port Bill and other British policies while Britannia turns away in distress. In the etching "Liberty Conquers Tyranny" (1775), Liberty leans on a pillar with her foot on the neck of a man whose crown and chain represent the oppression of Britain as monarch and enslaver. The old world order of the patriarch is represented as a barren landscape of war and violence in which a female appears to be at the mercy of an aggressive male figure. The new world order of female liberty is represented as a pastoral landscape of abundance, fertility, and peace where male and female dance in apparent harmony. In "Columbia Trading with all the World" Columbia as a figure of the United States takes her sovereign place among the four female continents: America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Liberated from the oppressions of patriarch and slave master, she freely engages in commerce and exchange with the entire world.

The radicalizing effect that Revolutionary rhetoric and icohography could have on women's self-conceptions and the traditional relations between male and female is particularly evident in the correspondence between Abigail and John Adams during the Revolutionary years. Abigail Adams was one of the first to note and draw out the Revolutionary implications of the analogy between the political position of America and the position of the female within a masculine economy. "I long to hear that you have declared an independency," she wrote John on March 31, 1776,

and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose itwill be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.²

In this justifiably famous passage Adams not only challenges traditional orders of masculine authority in family or in state; her masterful deployment of the rhetoric of representation and consent, desire and power, self-sovereignty and natural law, also illustrates the importance of the American Revolution in giving women the language and metaphors to "foment" further rebellion in their struggle for citizenship, suffrage, and full human rights.

Whereas John Adams and the Founding Fathers wanted a change of regime, Abigail Adams was asking for a change of world. Like such male satirists as Alexander Pope in England and John Trumbull in America, John Adams seeks to diffuse the logic and power of Abigail Adams's Revolutionary appeal through humor.

As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.

Recognizing the dangerous loosening of traditional bonds of rank and subordination brought by the Revolutionary situation, John insists on reconstituting the absolute authority of patriarchy: "Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems."³ His bantering tone does not disguise the fact of his self-contradiction. While he was advocating the right of rebellion in the political sphere, asserting that "the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves had deputed and to constitute abler and better agents, attorneys, and trustees," he was attempting to suppress the rebellion in his own household by reasserting the absolute authority of a "Masculine" system that was hereditary, divinely sanctioned, and beyond repeal.⁴

Abigail Adams refused to be silenced. She pointed out the contradiction between the antiauthoritarian rhetoric of the Revolution and her husband's insistence on maintaining the divine right of the father as king. "I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies," she wrote, "for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. But you must remember that Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken."⁵ Like other Revolutionary women, Abigail Adams took advantage of the Revolutionary situation to press for-widespread political reform both within and outside marriage. Alarmed by a "conspiracy of the Negroes" in Boston, who had agreed to fight on the side of the royalist governor in return for arms and liberation, she expressed her essential sympathy with the slave's demand for liberation: "I wish most sincerely there was not a Slave in the province," she wrote John in 1774, pointing the contradiction between the rhetoric of liberty and the fact of slavery in America. "It allways appeard a most iniquitous Scheme to me—fight ourselfs for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have. You know my mind on this Subject."⁶

During the American Revolution, the challenge to constituted authority came not only from privileged and highborn women like Abigail Adams, but, also as John Adams had grudgingly noted, from apprentices, Indians, and Negroes who "grew insolent to their Masters." The potential danger of this challenge is evident in the life and work of the black poet Phillis Wheatley, who was abducted from Africa and sold as a slave in Boston in 1761. Whereas Abigail Adams compared the condition of women in America to "Egyptian bondage," for Wheatley, drawing upon the same Old Testament image to describe the captivity of her people to "our Modern Egyptians," the language of bondage and freedom was no longer metaphoric but real. Knowing the truth of slavery as part of her daily experience as the slave of a prosperous Boston merchant, she, too, pointed out the contradiction between rhetoric and reality in America. In a letter to the Native American preacher Samson Occom, Wheatley expressed hope for "Deliverance" from the "Avarice" that impelled Americans to "countenance and help forward" the enslavement of "their fellow Creatures." In this letter, which was printed in the Boston Post-Boy and the Boston News-Letter in 1774, she noted ironically "the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine."⁷ Positioning herself in the breach between trope and truth, between the rhetoric of republican liberty and her actual experience of black African enslavement, Wheatley transformed the discourse of liberty, natural rights, and human nature into a subtle critique of the color code and the oppressive racial structures of Revolutionary America.

It is no coincidence that Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (1773), which was the first full-length book published by an African American, appeared during the Revolutionary period. According to her "Master" John Wheatley, "Phillis was brought from Africa to America, in the Year 1761, between Seven and Eight Years of Age. Without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language."⁸ By age 12 she was reading and translating Ovid, at age 15 she published her first poem, and she was 20 when Poems was published. Wheatley and her book were, in effect, a Revolutionary phenomenon.

In Home Leroi Jones criticizes what he calls Wheatley's "ludicrous departures from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights."⁹ But his criticism misses the point. Within the discourse of racial inequality in the eighteenth century, the fact of a black woman reading, writing, and publishing poems was in itself enough to splinter the categories of white and black and explode a social order grounded in notions of racial difference. The potential danger of her enterprise is underscored by the doubleness of the authenticating picture that represents her in the Revolutionary figure of a black woman reading, thinking, and writing at the same time that it enchains her in the inscription "Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston."

Her volume of poems was accompanied by the authenticating documents, a picture and a "Notice to the Public" signed by several local authorities, which would frame and mark later African-American writing. Wheatley's complex position as black woman slave in Revolutionary America is suggested by the fact that the signatures of the royalist governor Thomas Hutchinson and the leader of Boston resistance John Hancock were joined for a brief moment over the body of her Poems. But while Wheatley was the "property" of John Wheatley and the authenticating male figures who "notice" her text, she was possessed by the insurrectionary "Goddess of Liberty" who stalks her poems as she was at that very moment stalking the landscape of Revolutionary America.

Even before Wheatley's book was published, the Philadelphia physician and antislavery advocate Benjamin Rush cited her poetry as a sign at once of black humanity and the sameness of human nature. In his antislavery tract, An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America upon Slave Keeping (1773), he wrote, "There is now in the town of Boston a Free Negro Girl, about 18 years of age, who has been but 9 years in the country, whose singular genius and accomplishments are such as not only do honor to her sex, but to human nature. Several of her poems have been printed, and read with pleasure by the public."¹⁰

Within the context of Revolutionary America, loyalist and patriot alike laid claim to Wheatley's voice: for the loyalists she might serve as a means of garnering slave support for the cause of Britain in America, and for the patriots she represented a sign of human progress rather than degeneration within America. But while Wheatley appears to utter the ideals of her time in the ordered and allusive heroic couplets of Pope and the neoclassical writers, she also knew how to manipulate language, image, and phrase in a manner that destabilizes while it appears to reinforce the categories of the dominant culture. As the poet Naomi Long Madgett says in a recent tribute to "Phillis," she "learned to sing / a dual song":

Show to the world the face the world would see;
Be slave, be pet, conceal your Self—but be.

Lurking behind the docile Christian Lamb,
Unconquered lioness asserts: "I am!"¹¹

Within the Revolutionary matrix of eighteenth-century America, Phillis Wheatley learned the power of speaking doubly as African and American.

From the dedication to the countess of Huntington that opens her Poems to her tribute "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth" enclosed within, Wheatley's book is enmeshed in a web of Revolutionary associations. Margaret Burroughs exaggerates only slightly when she says, "If the Continental Congress had possessed an intelligent counter-intelligence service, Phillis Wheatley might have been interned for the duration as a security risk, on the principle of guilt by association."¹² The countess of Huntingdon was a well-known supporter of both the evangelical and the antislavery movement in England. Her friend and associate, the earl of Dartmouth, supported the British policy of inciting slaves to revolt against rebel masters when he served as secretary of state for North America between 1772 and 1775.

As a book of poems by a woman slave celebrating the cause of American liberty, Wheatley's Poems is loaded with the irony of a cause and a country at odds with itself. While Wheatley was in London in 1773, where she met several supporters including the earl of Dartmouth and Benjamin Franklin, no less than five petitions for freedom were presented to the Massachusetts General Council by Boston slaves: "We have no Property. We have no Wives! No Children! We have no City! No Country!," one exclaimed. In February 1774 an article in the Massachusetts Spy, signed by an "African" patriot, invoked the rhetoric of natural right and consent to point out the analogy between America's defiance of Britain and the slaves' defiance of their masters in America: "Are not your hearts also hard, when you hold them in slavery who are intitled to liberty, by the law of nature, equal as yourselves? If it be so, pray, Sir, pull the beam out of thine eye."¹³ At the time Wheatley's Poems was published, there was widespread fear of slave revolt; Abigail Adams's September 1774 letter to John on the conspiracy of Boston Negroes is only one of a number of signs that fear of slave insurrection was spreading from the South to New England. Perhaps because of this growing fear of blacks, whether free or enslaved, Wheatley's book, having failed to receive an adequate subscription in America, was sponsored and published in England.

Like others who have lived and written in a dangerous social environment, Phillis Wheatley knew the art and necessity of speaking with a double tongue. In her poetry, she makes subtle use of ambiguity and irony, double meaning and symbolic nuance, to speak what was otherwise unspeakable from her position as an African woman slave in Revolutionary America. Wheatley's Poems opens with an address "To Maecenas," the patron of Horace and Virgil, who appears to represent her image of an ideal patron andaudience for her poems. Wheatley enters the literary community by invoking the classical tradition of Homer and Virgil, but she ends with an invocation to Terence, the Roman slave of African descent who was able to use his literary talent to attain freedom:

The happier Terence all the choir inspir'd,
His soul replenish'd, and his bosom fir'd;
But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,
To one alone of Afric's sable race;
From age to age transmitting thus his name
With the first glory in the rolls of fame?

Self-consciously placing herself and her poems within a specifically African tradition, Wheatley registers her own ambitious desire to share—or perhaps transcend—the "first glory" of her African forbear in a poetics of ascent "That fain would mount, and ride upon the wind."

In "To the University of Cambridge, in New England," which was one of the earliest poems she wrote, Wheatley begins by representing her passage into American slavery as a paradoxical Christian deliverance out of the bondage of African paganism:

'Twas not long since I left my native shore
The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom:
Father of mercy, 'twas thy gracious hand
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.

In the remainder of the poem, the "intrinsic ardour" of God's grace becomes the source of her moral authority, enabling her not only to speak as a poet but also to become a kind of female preacher who delivers a jeremiad to the unredeemed Harvard students:

Let sin, that baneful evil to the soul,
By you be shunn'd, nor once remit your guard;
Suppress the deadly serpent in its egg.
Ye blooming plants of human race devine,
An Ethiop tells you 'tis your greatest foe;
Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain,
And in immense perdition sinks the soul.

The racial underscoring—"an Ethiop tells you"—appears to be a rhetorical maneuver that increases the persuasiveness of the poet's lesson by drawing upon the negative social equation of black and African with sin and evil. But Wheatley's emphatic Ethiop also suggests a figure of racial pride who speaks to the privileged white race from a position of moral superiority.

The ambiguity of the passage is particularly evident in a 1767 manuscript version of the poem, in which the concluding lines read:

Let hateful vice so baneful to the Soul,
Be still avoided with becoming care;
Suppress the sable monster in its growth,
Ye blooming plants of human race, divine
An Ethiop tells you, tis your greatest foe,
Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain,
And brings eternal ruin on the Soul. [emphasis added]

The line "Suppress the sable monster in its growth" is syntactically double, functioning as both command against evil and statement against the "sable monster" of black enslavement. Read this way, the "transient sweetness" of sin becomes linked with the economics of slavery, the production of molasses and sugar, and the "eternal ruin" that will be visited upon the white race by a divine order of retribution. Although Wheatley herself ultimately suppressed the figure of the "sable monster," the fact of her suppression suggests her underlying awareness of the potentially dangerous doubleness of language—a doubleness that still marks the final version of the poem.

In her most anthologized poem, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," Wheatley speaks with a similarly double voice. The poem is, like the title, formally split between Africa and America, embodying the poet's own split consciousness as African American. In the opening quatrain, the poet speaks as an American, representing slavery as a paradoxical Christian deliverance, a necessary stage in the black person's advance toward redemption and civilization; in the second quatrain the poet speaks as an African, turning the terms of Christian orthodoxy into a critique of white hypocrisy and oppressive racial codes.

'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 color is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians. Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd and join th' angelic train.

As in "To the University of Cambridge," Wheatley's "redemption" becomes the source of her moral authority, signaling her transformation from being passively "brought" and "taught" by God's Providence to being the active black subject who speaks and instructs in the second quatrain of the poem.

The poem operates on what Maya Angelou has called the "Principle of Reverse": "Anything that works for you can also work against you."¹⁴ Speaking as a black woman slave, Wheatley turns the racial codes of the dominant culture back upon themselves, giving them an ironic inflection. What appears to be repetition is in fact a form of mimesis that mimics and mocks in the act of repeating. This process is particularly evident in the final lines of the poem, in which Wheatley challenges and destabilizes the white discourse of racial difference by placing that discourse in quotation marks—"Their color is a diabolic die." As the racially conscious voice of her people, Wheatley literally "mimics" the white view of "our sable race" in a manner that recasts the discourse of racial difference in an ironic mode.

Within the context of the poem, the use of italicization has a similarly destabilizing effect: the italicized terms Pagan, Christian, Negroes, and Cain are simultaneously underscored and marked for interrogation. The slipperiness of these terms is evidenced in the final lines of the poem, in which through punctuation and italicization the phrase "Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain" might be read doubly as an address to Christians about black humanity and an address to Christians and Negroes that links them both in the figurative image "black as Cain." Both readings undermine the color code by emphasizing the equality of spiritual condition shared by whites and blacks alike as sinful descendants of Adam and potentially "redeemed" heirs of Christ's saving grace.

Wheatley's most over criticism of the institution of slavery occurs in "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North America, &c." Here again the poet speaks doubly as American patriot and African slave, celebrating "Fair Freedom" as the cause of New England patriots and "the Goddess long desir'd" by enslaved blacks. She associates the 1772 appointment of Dartmouth as secretary of state for North America with the return of Freedom, "Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies":

Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,
Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,
While in thine hand with pleasure we behold
The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold.

When one remembers that as secretary of state for the colonies and president of the Board of Trade and Foreign Plantations between 1772 and 1775 the earl of Dartmouth became engaged in the British policy of inciting American slaves to revolt against their patriot masters, the poet's "hope" of freedom for "her race" takes on a particularly insurrectionary cast.

Wheatley draws upon the Revolutionary rhetoric of tyranny and enslavement to promote the cause of America, but as the language of an American slave her words bear specific reference to the cause of black liberation:

No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t'enslave the land.

Wheatley further literalizes the slave metaphor by calling attention to her own condition as an American slave:

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy's 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?

Transforming the Revolutionary trope of enslavement into the thing itself, the poet becomes self-authenticating, authorizing her voice as the poet of freedom in her historical experience as an American slave. Wheatley's most direct personal statement about her African past becomes as well her most direct protest against the reality of slavery as the true tyranny in America.

Wheatley's reference to her "seeming cruel fate" might be read as a sign of the mutilating influence of slavery, the mark of the black poet's capitulation to the codes of the dominant culture.¹⁵ But her words are self-protectively ambiguous. Read within the context of Wheatley's ardent Christian faith, her words also suggest a moving attempt to make sense of the fate of herself and her people as slaves within a "seeming cruel" providential order. The poet is not "brought" but "seiz'd" and "snatch'd from Afric 's fancy'd happy seat," a phrasing that represents her enslavement as a kidnapping and Africa as a site not of illusory but of still imagined happiness. Bearing witness to slavery and the slave trade as a cold-blooded violation of the fundamental social unit, the familial bond between father and child, Wheatley turns her personal history into an emotionally charged "case" against the institution of slavery. Her prayer that "Others may never feel tryannic sway" is a prayer that encompasses not only American colonists but the "Others" of her own African race.

According to her nineteenth-century biographer Margaretta Matilda Odell, Wheatley's only memory of her African homeland was the daily sunrise ritual of her mother, who "poured out water before the sun at his rising."¹⁶ In Wheatley's writings, the memory of African sun worship merges with the language of evangelical Christianity andthe language of Revolutionary freedom to produce a poetics of ascent and liberation. In this poetics the sun/son is the central figure of a constellation of images that moves from dark to light, white to black, sin to redemption, bondage to deliverance.

The intersection of these languages is particularly evident in "On Imagination," in which Wheatley imagines herself mounting on the "silken pinions" of "Fancy" toward the sun, toward God, and toward liberation:

Soaring through air to find the bright abode
Th'empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th'unbounded soul.

Like Memory ("Mneme") in "On Recollection" and Liberty ("the goddess") in "To Washington" and "Liberty and Peace, a Poem," Wheatley's "Imagination" is a potent female figure, an "imperial queen" whose wings carry the poet into "new worlds" of the "unbounded soul." These "new worlds" are at once the heavenly other world of biblical revelation and the poet's own "raptur'd" vision of an alternative earthly economy. In the last stanza of the poem the "rising fire" of Wheatley's poetic aspiration fuses with the language of revelation and revolution and her memory of the African sunrise, leading her on to an insurrectionary vision of deliverance out of the "iron bands" of an oppressive white order—figured in the poem as the "frozen deeps" of "Winter"—into the "radiant gold" of a new dawn on earth. The poet's voice and vision "cease" in the final lines of the poem: "Winter austere forbids me to aspire, / And northern tempests damp the rising fire; / They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea." But the poet's closing images of herself as a "rising fire" and "flowing sea" suggest that she will continue to sing against and beyond the damp and chill of white northern oppression.

The visionary language of evangelical Protestantism gave Wheatley the means of engaging in the Revolutionary struggle for black freedom without losing her devout Christian faith. Commenting on the "natural Rights" of Negroes in her 1774 letter to the Native American activist Samuel Occom, Wheatley envisions the black struggle against American slavery as a type of the Old Testament struggle of Israel "for their Freedom from Egyptian Slavery." "In every human Breast," she says,

God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Wayand Time, and get him honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures.¹⁷

Wheatley was the first in a long line of African-American writers to merge the Revolutionary language of liberty and natural rights with the biblical language of bondage and deliverance in a visionary poetics that imagines the deliverance of her people not as a religious translation only but as a revolutionary change of world.

A few months after the publication of her Poems and at the urging of her English supporters and her mistress, Susannah Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley was freed by John Wheatley. In a letter to Colonel David Wooster on the sale of her book in Connecticut she wrote, "I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, & It is the Chief I have to depend upon."¹⁸ Both literally and figuratively, Wheatley's poems—like those of her forbear, Terence—became a means of writing herself into freedom, and through them she continued to act, both directly and indirectly, toward the deliverance of her race.

On October 26, 1775, Phillis Wheatley sent a poem "To His Excellency George Washington." Inspired by "the goddess" Freedom and impelled by the "wild uproar" of Freedom's warriors, the poem is a subtle attempt to enlist Washington as a freedom fighter for real as well as for metaphoric slaves. "We demand," the poet says,

The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam'd for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!

Like the addresses to Washington written by other Revolutionary poets, including Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau, the poem suggests the potential power of writing at a time when poets as well as politicians were engaged in the process of creating a nation. As in Wheatley's addresses to other figures of cultural power, including the earl of Dartmouth, the preacher George Whitefield, and the lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, Andrew Oliver, the poem also suggests a certain openness and indeterminacy in black-white relations during the Revolutionary years—an openness that would begin to close and rigidify once the war was over and slaves were written into the Constitution as three-fifths human.

In 1784, only a year after the close of the war, Phillis Wheatley died and was buried in an unmarked grave. Within the same year Thomas Jefferson set very distinct limits on the revolutionary discourse of freedom, equality, and "self-evident" truth when in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) he advanced it "as a suspicion only, that blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both mind and body." The potential danger of Wheatley's Poems as proof against Jefferson's "suspicion" of racialinequality is suggested by the fact that in advancing his argument, he singles out her work for criticism. In one of the earliest instances of the politics of canon formation in post-Revolutionary America, he not only dismisses her work from serious literary consideration; he also, and perhaps intentionally, transmutes her name from "wheat" to "what": "Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem."¹⁹ At a time when the "loose and dangerous" notions of equality and consent were threatening to subvert traditional orders of masculine authority, subordination, and subjection, Jefferson's comment on the issue of race represents one of the first attempts of the white fathers to counter the Revolutionary discourse of equality with the post-Revolutionary discourse of racial and sexual difference.

"What do We Mean by the Revolution?" John Adams asked in 1815 in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. "The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington."²⁰ While Adams recognized that the real American Revolution took place in the "Minds of the People," he saw the Revolution as something that ended with the break from England. This reading of the American Revolution appeared to be confirmed by the 1787 Constitution, which reined in the egalitarian possibilities of the Revolution by representing slaves as three-fifths human and women as nonexistent under the supreme law of the land.

What the American Revolution gave to privileged white women like Abigail Adams and formerly enslaved black women like Phillis Wheatley was not real legal or political rights, but the knowledge, the moral ground, and perhaps most of all the language and the metaphors with which to "foment" further rebellion against the constituted orders of white masculine authority in the United States. Thus, it is no coincidence that the poetic and essentially political work of Phillis Wheatley would (re)emerge at the very center of the abolition movement in the 1830s and the Black Power movement in the 1960s. Nor is it any coincidence that as the first act of the women's suffrage movement, the Declaration of Principles at Seneca Falls in 1848 was a self-consciously female rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, and the still unratified Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 is phrased in the language of equal rights that had been proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence but denied to women in the Constitution of the United States. Abigail Adams was right; John Adams was wrong. The revolution was not over.

Notes

¹ Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), 16, 23, 25.

² L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1, 370.

³ Butterfield, 1, 382.

⁴ John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George A. Peek (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1954), 13.

⁵ Butterfield, 1, 402.

⁶ Butterfield, 1, 162.

⁷ Phillis Wheatley, "To Samson Occom," in The Poems of Phillis Wheatley: Revised and Enlarged Edition, ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 203-4. This letter was printed in several other New England newspapers about this time.

⁸ Wheatley, 47.

⁹ Leroi Jones, Home (New York: William B. Morrow, 1966), 106.

¹⁰ Quoted in William H. Robinson, Jr., "On Being Young, Gifted, and Black," in Robinson, ed., Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 24. For a review of the debate on the nature of the Negro that surrounded the publication of Wheatley's Poems, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s excellent essay "Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro," in his Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 61-79.

¹¹ Naomi Long Madgett, "Phillis," in Robinson, 207.

¹² Margaret Burroughs, "Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together?" in Robinson, 145.

¹³ Quoted by Charles Akers, "'Our Modern Egyptians': Phillis Wheatley and the Whig Campaign against Slavery in Revolutionary Boston," Journal of Negro History 60 (1975), 404.

¹⁴ Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Random House, 1969), 215.

¹⁵ Merle A. Richmond comments on the "warping influence" of slavery. "It mutilated her," he says in Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley … And George Moses Horton (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974), 66. For others who have commented on Wheatley's internalization of racist attitudes, see Vermon Loggins, The Negro Author (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), and Terence Collins, "Phillis Wheatley: The Dark Side of the Poetry," Phylon 36 (1975), 78-88.

¹⁶ Margaretta Matilda Odell, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Boston: George W. Light, 1834), 10-11.

¹⁷ Wheatley, 204.

¹⁸ Wheatley, 197.

¹⁹ Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 143, 140.

²⁰ Lester J. Cappon, ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 11, 455.