The very title was constructed like a cathedral: "An Elegiac Poem on the Death of the celebrated Divine, and eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the late Reverend, and Pious George Whitefield, Chaplain to Right Honourable the Countess of Huntingdon, &c, &c, Who made his exit from this transitory State to dwell in the Celestial Realms of Bliss, on Lord's Day, 30th of September, 1770."

Phillis Wheatley had been writing verse for several years, but it was the spectacular success of this elegy that catapulted her from the level of local celebrity to the plateau of poet with a reputation throughout the Colonies and in what still was the mother country overseas. The poem was published as a broadside with the legend "By Phillis, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, belonging to Mr. J. Wheatley, of Boston:—And has been but 9 Years in this Country from Africa." Within a few months it appeared in Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, and New York in at least several editions, and in London in two.

The popularity of the elegy derived, in measure, from its subject, and since the poem was to play so significant a part in Phillis Wheatley's life it is permissible to dwell a while on the Reverend George Whitefield. An evangelist of the Methodist church in its nascent years, he was, as the elegiac title said, chaplain to Lady Huntington, but not a private chaplain in the ordinary sense. Lady Huntington was founder, spiritual leader, and financial patron of an early Methodist circle, which then still functioned within the Anglican church to further greater piety, personal and "methodical." As a peeress the good lady insisted she had a right to maintain as many clergymen as her ample financial means could support, and she exercised this right by appointing clergymen who shared her zeal to as many as sixty chapels in various parts of England and Wales. Her devout concern extended to the Christian state of the American Colonies and there she dispatched the Reverend Whitefield as her chaplain-missionary.

Foreshadowing latter-day revivalists, Whitefield preached the gospel in the Colonies, from Georgia to Massachusetts. His powers were attested to by very sophisticated contemporary witnesses, worldly men whose judgment was not influenced by any share in the Reverend's religious fervor.

In England the crusty Samuel Johnson said, "His popularity, Sir, is chiefly owing to the peculiarity of his manner. He would be followed by crowds were he to wear a night-cap in the pulpit, or were he to preach from a tree."

More acid was Wheatley's poetic model, Alexander Pope, who paid his respects to the preacher and a lesser-known newspaper writer named Webster in The Dunciad:

               Ass intones to Ass;
Harmonic twang! of leather, horn, and brass:
Such as from lab'ring lungs th' Enthusiast blows,
High Sound, attemper'd to the vocal nose;
Or such as bellow from the deep Divine;
There, Webster! peal'd thy voice, and Whitfield thine.

In the Colonies, the frugal Benjamin Franklin related, "His [Whitefield's] eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance… I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles of gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all."

One other witness was Oloudah Equiano, the black man who was kidnapped from his native Nigeria and sold into slavery in the West Indies, later securing his freedom, in which status he heard Whitefield preach in Philadelphia. "When I got into the church," Equiano related, "I saw this pious man exhorting the people with the greatest fervor and earnestness, and sweating as much as I ever did while in slavery on Montserrat beach.… I was very much struck and impressed with this; I thought it strange that I had never seen divines exert themselves in this manner before, and was no longer at a loss to account for the thin congregations they preached to." ["I would give a hundred guineas," said David Garrick, "if I could only say 'Oh' like Mr. Whitefield" (Dictionary of American Biography [1936], vol. 10, part 2, "Whitefield," p. 128).]

An elegy for this preacher was a natural vehicle for the pious sentiments that were transported by Phillis Wheatley's earlier verse, but at seventeen her poetic line is more assured, firmer, and more vigorous:

 "Take him, ye wretched, for your only good,
"Take him, ye starving sinners, for 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 on his kind bosom laid:

"Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you;
"Impartial Saviour is his title due:
"Washed in the fountain of redeeming blood,
"You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God."

Amid the praise for God, the Son, and the preacher, there is also a note of sympathy for the patron lady:

Great Countess, we Americans revere
Thy name, and mingle in thy grief sincere …

This elegy was to serve as her passport to England, to her patronage by the Countess of Huntingdon, and was instrumental, perhaps decisive, in the publication of a volume of her verse. All that came later. Before following her on her journey to England, there are some important matters in the Colonies to be considered.

The year of Whitefield's death was also the year of the Boston Massacre. This first fatal volley by British troops against American colonists was fired on King Street, only a few blocks from the Wheatley residence, close enough so that the poet perhaps heard the musket blasts, and if she did not hear these, there were other alarms to shatter the stillness of the March evening, for as one witness, Ebenezer Bridgham, testified, "all the bells in town were ringing, I heard the Old South first."

Surely Phillis Wheatley must have been aware that among the five colonists killed was a fugitive slave, who apparently had changed his white-given name, Michael Johnson, to one of his own choosing, Crispus Attucks. She might even have been acquainted with the inquest ("taken in Boston … the Sixth Day of March in the tenth Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord, George the Third"), which read: "The said Michael Johnson was willfully and feloniously murdered at King Street in Boston … on the evening of the 5th instant, between the hours of nine & ten by the discharge of a Musket or Muskets loaded with Bullets, two of which were shot thro' his body, by a party of soldiers to us known, then and there aided and commanded by Captain Thomas Preston of his Majesty's 29th Regiment.…"

Surely she was aware of the agitation among the colonists against the Quartering Act and the subsequent billeting of British troops in their midst, which was the immediate cause of the tensions that led to the fatal encounter on the evening of March 5. In weather-conscious Boston, especially so in the vagaries of March, she might have noted that the evening in question was cold and clear, the moonlight reflected in the blanket of snow and ice, spotted with oyster shells, that covered the ground. According to eyewitnesses, in the tense prelude to the fatal volley some of the townspeople on the scene, aroused beyond verbal sallies at the troops, may have hurled snowballs, ice, and oyster shells. In the Wheatleys' social milieu one can readily imagine impassioned discussion about the propriety and prudence of the colonists' behavior, and about the related question: did or did not the king's soldiers overreact?

Even as Phillis Wheatley was composing her elegy for Whitefield, who died September 30, Boston was agog with the forthcoming murder trial of the British soldiers, which finally opened in November. According to eyewitness testimony at the trial, the fatal confrontation (like so many confrontations to come) was triggered by teen-age boys.

"I saw a number of boys around the sentry," James Bailey testified, describing the scene in which a group of colonists was taunting a dozen British soldiers on duty close to the nearby State House, its roof adorned with two lions rampant.

"How many?"
"Twenty or thirty."
"Were they all boys?"
"Yes, none more than seventeen or eighteen years old."

Youth was in the van, a black man fell—and Phillis Wheatley, young and black, neighbor to these events, wrote an elegy for an old, white preacher. Not until two years later could anything she wrote be understood as an allusion to the Boston Massacre, and even then it was so veiled as to be susceptible of other interpretations. This allusion was contained in a letter, dated October 10, 1772, to the Earl of Dartmouth, accompanying a poem upon his appointment as Secretary of State for the Colonies.

"Nor can they [the colonists] my Lord be insensible of the Friendship so much exemplified in your Endeavours in their behalf during the late unhappy Disturbances. I sincerely wish your Lordship all possible success in your Undertaking for the interest of North America," she wrote.

"The late unhappy Disturbances" might have been the Boston Massacre, or, since the disturbances are linked to his endeavors on the colonists' behalf, the allusion might have been to much earlier protests against the Stamp Act. To the colonists generally, Dartmouth was known for his active and prominent part in the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 during his brief tenure as president of the Board of Trade in London. As a consequence, he was reputed to be "a friend of the colonies" and his appointment was welcomed by Colonial leaders, Benjamin Franklin among them.

Phillis Wheatley had been aware of the Stamp Act's repeal, although she was only twelve or thirteen at the time, for she celebrated the event with a panegyric to the king, reflecting in this the then-prevalent Puritan calculation of the accounts due, respectively, to God and Caesar. In the Puritan scale of the 1760's the king still occupied a place near God's. All the petitions then addressed by the colonists to the Crown were grounded on the premise that what they asked was their due as loyal subjects of His Majesty. With this premise, the more they asked the more fervently they professed their loyalty. Mirroring this state of mind, the child poet added loyalty to piety in a thanksgiving hymn to the king upon repeal of the Stamp Act:

 But how shall we the British King reward?
Rule thou in peace, our father and our lord!
'Midst the remembrance of thy favors past,
The meanest peasants most admire the last.
May George, beloved by all the nations round,
Live with heaven's choicest, constant blessings crowned.
Great God! direct and guard him from on high,
And from his head let every evil fly;
And may each clime with equal gladness see
A monarch's smile can set his subjects free.

Dartmouth had been the king's instrument in effecting the deed that evoked such gratitude, but for Phillis Wheatley he had a significance that transcended temporal matters. He was a leading figure in Lady Huntingdon's religious circle; so prominent, in fact, that at one time, when Lady Huntingdon took ill, he seemed destined to become the leader of the group, a fate from which he was spared by her recovery. Whitefield called him "the Daniel of the age, the truly noble Dartmouth." (Another contemporary, less pious and more scornful, called him the "Psalm-Singer.")

It is not at all strange, then, that Phillis Wheatley wrote a congratulatory poem to Lord Dartmouth. What is strange is that this poem, apparently planned to be the most formal of eulogies, contained the most unusual passage in all her verse:

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 snatched from Afric's fancied happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast!
Steeled was that soul, and by no misery moved,
That from a father seized his babe beloved:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Critics have pointed to the qualifications: seeming cruel fate … Africa's fancied happy seat; and the burden of anger is for the bereavement of the parent, not the bondage of the child. It is also true that by 1772 the Colonial air was rent with agitation for freedom and against tyranny, and the cynical might say that Phillis Wheatley, ever the conformist, now conformed to the new spirit of the times.

Nonetheless, this remains the one explicit statement that her condition as an African slave made her a particular partisan of freedom. In this rare departure from Pope's classical strictures, speaking as protagonist, in a highly personal vein, she brands slavery as tyranny. To be sure, she must have been affected by the general spirit of revolt that then animated the Colonies, but thisis no general testament, as the later poem to Washington was, for instance. She writes from the specific, unmistakable vantage point of an African and a slave. Here for the first time is a spark amid the ashes of piety, a spark of independence, of self-awareness that suggests, however fitfully, a sense of distinct identity.

The poet was then nineteen, a volatile age for such sparks, but at this juncture she was caught up by a head-turning diversion, the prospect of a trip to England. To a provincial in the Colonies England was the great world, the metropolis; to a poet it was Mecca. Maybe it was the voyage, maybe the spark was foredoomed by feebleness to expire swiftly; whatever it was, the spark never kindled a flame, to employ a phrase associated with another poet of African origin. There was no later glimmer of it.

Shortly after she wrote the lines to Dartmouth her imagination was companion to her mistress somewhere on the waters of the Atlantic. She composed an "Ode to Neptune—On Mrs. W—'s Voyage to England," containing the line, "while my Susannah skims the watery way." The timing of Mrs. Wheatley's voyage suggests that she might have been the bearer of the letter and poem to the king's Secretary of State for the Colonies and that once in England she paved the way for her protege's transatlantic journey the following spring.

Notes

The full title of her elegy to the Rev. George Whitefield appeared in various broadsides; in the first edition of her Poems [(Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (Boston, 1834))] the title was simply "On the Death of the Rev'd Mr. George Whitefield.—1770." Both Mason and Loggins give October 11, 1770, as the first extant announced publication date of the elegy (Whitefield's death occurred September 30, 1770), for the Massachusetts Spy advertised it as "this day … published." Mason's opinion is that it may have been published prior to the newspaper's announcement; he further states it was republished as a broadside "once in Newport, four more times in Boston, once in New York, and once in Philadelphia" (Poems, pp. 66, no. 4, 67). Loggins' conclusion is that the elegy was published in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York in six different editions within a few months ([Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1834)] The Negro Author, pp. 16, 369, n. 40). Loggins is the authority that the elegy was published in London in two editions (ibid., p. 18).

In Wheatley, Poems, a footnote to the elegy refers to the Countess of Huntingdon "to whom Mr. Whitefield was chaplain." [Benjamin] Brawley devotes a paragraph to the patron-chaplain relationship in Negro Builders and Heroes ([Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1937], p. 20), and mentions it again in The Negro Genius ([New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937], p. 21); Loggins refers to italso (The Negro Author, pp. 18-19).

Samuel Johnson's estimation of George Whitefield is quoted from George Birbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, 6 vols. (New York: Bigelow, Brown & Co., n.d.), 2:91. The characterization by Pope of Whitefield is in The Dunciad, Book the Second, lines 253-258. Benjamin Franklin's story appears in his Autobiography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922), pp. 152-153. Loggins quotes Gustavus Vassa ([The] Interesting Narrative [of the Life of Oloudah Equino, or Gustavus Vassa], p. 4).

The testimony taken in connection with the Boston Massacre is from Transcript, The Trial of the British Soldiers of the 29th Regiment on Foot, for the Murder of Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Patrick Carr (Boston: Wm. Emmons, 1824), pp. 9-10, 15. This interesting document is lodged at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The inquest referred to bears the title Inquest on Michael Johnson alias Crispus Attucks, and is a reprint from the New England Historical and Geneological Register, October, 1890, to be found in the Thomas Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

The letter from the poet to the Earl of Dartmouth is in the Wetmore Collection on Rhode Island Commerce, 1771-1772, Massachusetts Historical Society; it may also be found in Mason (Poems, pp. 110-111).

The references here made to Lord Dartmouth's relation to the colonies are in B. D. Bargar, Lord Dartmouth and the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 43, 57-58, 69.

Phillis Wheatley's poem to King George contains a footnote that her reference is to the repeal of the Stamp Act.

It was Sir Nathaniel William Wrazell who called Dartmouth the "Psalm-Singer" (Barger, ibid., p. 10, n. 4; Bargar is also the authority for Whitefield's characterization of Dartmouth, ibid., p. 13, n. 23).

That a slave poet should have addressed such a poem to Lord Dartmouth contains a certain irony since, in 1775, commenting on the opposition by the North American colonists to the growing slave trade, he said: "We cannot allow the Colonies to check or to discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation" (E. D. Morel, The Black Man's Burden [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969], p. 21). The quoted phrases following the poem are from [J. Saunders] Redding (To Make a Poet Black [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1939], p. 10). The other poet of African origin referred to is Pushkin.