[In the following essay, Bell discusses the careers of ex-slaves Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano, which he claims demonstrate how a hostile white literate society fostered the “twoness” of early black identity in the United States.]

Because of the distinctive history and acculturation of Africans in the English colonies during the revolutionary period, their literary gifts are most meaningfully assessed when viewed in the context of the tension between African-American attitudes toward integration and separatism on the one hand and the oral and literate cultural heritages on the other. Most modern historians accept the fact that American slaves were the descendants of peoples with a history and culture. Since culture is basically the symbolic and material resources developed in the process of interaction between the individual, his society, and his environment, it is neither acquired nor lost overnight, whether as the result of conditions imposed by the slave system or by the urban ghettoes. That the African slave's way of life did change radically with his introduction to a new environment and social system goes without saying. But the change was seldom rapid, never uniform, and generally accretive and syncretic rather than a sloughing off of Old World values and survival techniques with the adoption of New World values.

Too many students of American character and culture overlook the fact that the first blacks did not arrive in the colonies with a group identity as “neegars” but with specific African identities. The majority were Ibo, Ewe, Biafada, Bakongo, Wolof, Bambara, Ibibio, Serer, and Arada. Unlike the first white immigrants, they were the only involuntary servants brought to seventeenth-century Virginia in chains and systematically deprived of their Old World cultural heritage and social systems in order to transform them into better slaves. This development was the result of the interaction between slavery and racism, for the increasing demand for cheap labor led to political acts and a social ideology that severely restricted the rights of blacks. Prior to the end of the seventeenth-century free blacks in Virginia could acquire property, vote, and even intermarry with whites. But with the growth of slavery the black codes of the eighteenth century reduced them to a quasifree lower caste. Christian principles prevented neither southerners nor northerners from arrogating to themselves supreme power over other human beings, yet in practice Africans in the non-slave-based economies of the North fared better than their southern brothers. Many colonial slaves and free blacks in New England, for example, were taught to read and write in order to make them better Christians and more efficient porters, clerks, and messengers. It is also important to remember that the names of such eighteenth-century organizations as the African Society (1787), the New York African Free School (1787), the African Mason Lodge (1787), and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1794) established the first formal self-conscious group identity of free blacks as African.

While Egyptian, Ethiopian, and Arabic script were known in parts of Africa for centuries, eighteenth-century Africa was basically an oral culture. As Olaudah Equiano, the European-African abolitionist, tells us in his classic slave narrative, the spoken word, music, and dance were at the center of a communal, profoundly religious way of life. In contrast, industrialized Europe and England had moved beyond the oral stage and medieval thinking to a reverence for print and man. The literary tradition and its attendant values, especially reading and writing, were cherished as the exclusive heritage of civilized man. Until the twentieth century these two modes of perceiving, organizing, and communicating experience were believed by Europeans to be related to different stages of development of the mind. But as Claude Lévi Strauss notes, these alternative approaches are actually “two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and imagination: the other at a remove from it … one very close to, and the other at a remove from sensible intuition.” Each has its own advantages. While a literate orientation heralds the advancement of technology and abstract learning, an oral orientation reinforces the primacy of events and disciplined yet improvisational acts of a group nature. One culture conceives of man as the measure of all things; the other conceives of him as a deeply religious being, living in harmony with a mystical, organic universe.

By 1764 the institution of slavery had been established in the colonies for more than a hundred years, and by 1789 the compulsion of whites to remake blacks into harmless, civilized Christians was a matter of record. As Vernon Loggins observes, Cotton Mather's Rules for the Societies of Negroes, written in 1693, was typical of the general attitude of the Puritan and Anglican divines, whose interest in Christianizing blacks was to make them more honest, useful servants. Freedom in the form of manumission or a privileged status was the reward for those considered acceptably acculturated. The deprivation of educational, economic, and political opportunities for the majority of blacks, however, made cultural assimilation the prize of precious few. In addition, the process of adopting the dominant, racist Anglo-Saxon cultural pattern of the revolutionary period resulted in the ethnic double-consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois eloquently described in The Souls of Black Folk: (1903) “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” African-Americans were both people of African descent and nonpeople to the majority of whites; they were part of the society yet alienated from it; they were among the first colonists to build the nation, but the nation has yet to grant them first-class citizenship. African-Americans were therefore destined to function on two levels of reality, and their attitudes toward integration and separatism were largely determined by the degree of alienation from or faith in the principles of the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society.

Integration may be defined as the dual processes of cultural and social assimilation. While cultural assimilation during the revolutionary era involved essentially learning the English language, the Bible, the classics, the popular English and neoclassical writers, and colonial behavior patterns, social assimilation meant full participation in the organizations and institutions of the emerging nation. Fear for their physical and psychological security led white colonists to redefine Africans as a distinctive group of subhumans who ought to be culturally but not socially assimilated, especially in southern colonies where their numbers were a cause of alarm. This was particularly true of Virginia where there were only 300 blacks in the mid-seventeenth century but 120,156 blacks and 173,316 whites by the mid-eighteenth. Consequently, in 1662 the colony imposed a fine for interracial fornication; in 1691 it banned interracial marriages; and in 1723 it deprived free blacks of the right to vote. In seventeenth-century New England, where the black population was never more than 20,000, blacks were excluded from the militia; nevertheless, from the French and Indian wars to the Battle of Bunker Hill slaves and free blacks alike took up arms in the struggle for American independence.

Although confrontations with British soldiers like that of Crispus Attucks, the fugitive slave and New England seaman who was among the five colonists killed in the Boston Massacre, may be interpreted as integrationist acts of patriotism, the early petitions of slaves for permission to purchase their freedom and to return to Africa have the ring of separatism. In truth, however, the major loyalty of colonial blacks was not so much to a place or a people as it was to the principle of freedom, the principle the white colonists themselves expressed in terms of the natural rights of man as they laid the philosophical foundation for their separation from England. At least three petitions from New England slaves in 1773 sounded a similar note. The first was in January to Governor Hutchinson and the general court from “many slaves, living in the Town of Boston, and other Towns in the Province … who have had every Day of their Lives imbittered with this most intollerable Reflection, That, let their Behavior be what it will, nor their Children to all Generations, shall ever be able to do, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no not even Life itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts that perish. We have no Property! We have no Wives! No Children! We have no City! No Country. …” The second, a letter addressed to delegates to the House of Representatives by four slaves—Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie—“in behalf of our fellow slaves in this province and by order of their Committee,” came in April. After expressing “a high degree of satisfaction” with the legislative efforts of the colony “to free themselves from slavery,” the letter boldly asserts: “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them” and goes on to request “one day in a week to work for themselves, to enable them to earn money to purchase the residue of their time. …” Seeing no relief from degrading prejudice and discrimination in America, they were willing to submit to the law “until we leave the province … as soon as we can from our joynt labours procure money to transport ourselves to some part of the coast of Africa, where we propose a settlement.” The third petition addressed to Governor Hutchinson arrived in June and echoes the sentiments of James Otis's 1764 protest in the Rights of the British Colonies: “Your Petitioners apprehend they have in common with other men a natural right to be free and without molestation to injoy such property as they may acquire by their industry, or by any other means not detrimental to their fellow men. …” None of these petitioners was granted relief by the courts, the legislature, or the governor.

Perhaps the most historically revealing petition for freedom was dated May 25, 1774—less than a week before the British blockaded the Port of Boston in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party of December 1773—and addressed to Governor Thomas Gage and the General Court of Massachusetts by “a Grate Number of Blacks of the Province … held in a state of Slavery within the bowels of a free and Christian Country.” This moving document, which speaks volumes about the priority given by blacks to the forging of personal identities on the basis of their common condition and the evolving consciousness of a people in transition from an oral to a literate culture, reads:

That your Petitioners apprehind we have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms without Being depriv'd of them by our fellow men we are a freeborn Pepel and have never forfeited this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever. But we were unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest frinds and sum of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender Parents and from a Populous Pleasant and plentiful country and Brought hither to be made slaves for Life in a Christian land. … How can the master be said to Beare my Borden when he Beares me down whith the Have chanes of Slavery and operson. … Nither can we reap an equal benefet from the laws of the Land which doth not justifi but condemns Slavery or if there had bin aney Law to hold us in Bondage we are Humbely of the Opinion ther never was aney to inslave our children for life when Born in a free Country. We therefore Bage your Excellency and Honours will give this its deer weight and consideration and that you will accordingly cause an act of the legislative to be pessed that we may obtain our Natural right our freedoms and our children be set at lebety at the yeare of twenty one. …¹

As in the past, the legislature voted to let the question “subside”—did they find the petition unintelligible? unacceptable? inexpedient?—but subside it did not.

Despite the scores of antislavery petitions by blacks—some in the eloquent prose of the period, others acceptable, all intelligible—Quakers, and other groups, the Founding Fathers chose political expediency over principle when they deleted all reference to slavery from the final draft of the Declaration of Independence. According to Jefferson, the condemnation of slavery was deleted in deference to the economic interests of Georgia and South Carolina, who argued for the continuation of the slave trade. To compound this fracture between principle and practice, between the emerging national belief in the inalienable rights of man and colonial laws, between the antislavery, industrial North and the proslavery, agrarian South, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 gave explicit sanction to slavery by providing that representation in Congress and taxes were to be determined by the numbers of free persons in each state “and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.” In addition, the slave trade was extended for twenty years and fugitive slaves were to be surrendered to their owners. If it is true that the fathers of the Constitution were dedicated to the principle of freedom, it is no less true, as John Hope Franklin points out in From Slavery to Freedom, that they were even more dedicated to the ethnocentric, socioeconomic proposition that “government should rest upon the dominion of property.”

Although the antislavery movement was set back by the Three-fifths Compromise of the ruling class and its political repudiation of the natural rights of blacks, many African-Americans felt that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence still held out the promise of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for them as well as whites. For them the Revolutionary War had been a struggle more for personal freedom than for political independence. And at the end of the war, hundreds of the 5,000 blacks who fought for the patriots were freed by the states even though some masters contested the promises of manumission. By 1790 there were nearly 4,000,000 whites and slightly more than 750,000 blacks in the United States. In the southern states there were 641,691 slaves and 32,048 free blacks. The mid-Atlantic states had approximately 36,000 slaves and 14,000 free blacks. In contrast, New England had only 3,700 slaves in a black population of more than 13,000. While Vermont and Massachusetts reported no slaves at all, Connecticut had 2,600. The only city able to boast no slaves was Boston. Her 761 blacks were free.

By virtue of his unique situation as a slave or quasifree person in a society that was growing painfully aware of its paradoxical role as the oppressed and the oppressor, the African-American writer's struggle for independence provides a classic metaphor for the psychological and political schism of the new nation. Even more than the slave petitions for freedom, the writings of two African-Americans and a European-African reveal how individual processes of cultural and social assimilation in a basically hostile white Anglo-Saxon literate society fostered the twoness of early black identity. For Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano, the necessity of functioning on two planes of reality was a challenge that each met in terms of his own unique situation and gifts.

I

In the case of Jupiter Hammon, we see the influence of the Bible and slavery in shaping an otherworldly view of liberty and equality that distorted his social vision. What little is known about his life is found in scraps of information in letters and in the poetry and prose itself. Born a slave on October 17, 1711, Hammon was owned by the Lloyds, a merchant family of Long Island. A dutiful, intelligent servant, he was apparently encouraged in his efforts to read and write by Henry Lloyd, his first master, for in one of his discourses he refers to the English divines, Burkitt and Beveridge, whose works were in Lloyd's library. In 1733 he purchased a Bible from his master for seven shillings and six pence, an indication of the depth of his religious commitment, his thriftiness, and the nature of his master's benevolence. Since he was well-read in the Bible and considered an exemplary slave, and since there were black and Indian churches on Long Island and in Connecticut during this era, it is highly possible that Hammon was a slave exhorter. In 1760 he became the first black American to publish a poem in the colonies. Apparently this distinction and the prestige it brought his owner contributed to the poet not being freed upon the elder Lloyd's death in 1763. Instead, he was inherited by Joseph, one of four sons. After Joseph's death during the Revolutionary War, the family retainer was passed on to John Lloyd, Jr., a grandson. With the British takeover of Long Island, the patriotic Lloyd family took their talented, faithful servant with them to Hartford, Connecticut, where he is believed to have died a slave around 1800, even though slavery was abolished in the state in 1784 and the Revolutionary War ended in 1783.

Hammon's first broadside poem was titled An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ, with Penetential Cries: Composed by Jupiter Hammon, a Negro belonging to Mr. Lloyd of Queen's Village, on Long Island, the 25th of December, 1760. Lacking the originality, ironic tension, graphic imagery, and call and response pattern of black American spirituals, the poem reveals Hammon's personal resignation to slavery and the inspiration of the Psalms and Methodist hymnals:

Lord, hear our penetential Cry:
          Salvation from above;
It is the Lord that doth supply,
          With his redeeming Love.(2)

The repetition of “Salvation” in twenty-three of the poem's eighty-eight lines does not significantly elevate the prosaic quality of the verse. The next broadside was An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly, Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston, who came from Africa at eight years of age, and soon became acquainted with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Published in Hartford on August 4, 1778, this twenty-one stanza poem celebrates the salvation of his more famous and youthful contemporary from “heathen” Africa:

Thou hast left the heathen shore;
          Through mercy of the Lord,
Among the heathen live no more,
          Come magnify thy God.
…
Thou, Phillis, when thou hunger hast,
          Or pantest for thy God,
Jesus Christ is thy relief
          Thou hast the holy word.

As usual, the poet reminds his reader that ultimate freedom and joy is not earthly but heavenly:

While thousands muse with earthly toys,
          And rage about the street,
Dear Phillis, seek for heaven's joys,
          Where we do hope to meet.

Contrary to the poet's view, Phillis Wheatley was more capable of coping with and giving poetic form to the two planes of reality than he. A third poem, An Essay on the Ten Virgins, was printed in 1779 and advertised in the Connecticut Courant on December 14, 1779, but no copy has been preserved. Hammon's unimaginative use of the meter, rhyme, diction, and stanzaic pattern of the Methodist hymnal combined with the negative image of Africa and conciliatory tone of these early poems reveal the poet's limitations and the costly sociopsychological price he paid for the mere semblance of cultural assimilation.

As his first published sermon indicates, Hammon was under fire from his black brothers and sisters for his otherworldly view of freedom. A Winter Piece: Being a Serious Exhortation with a Call to the Unconverted: and a Short Contemplation on the Death of Jesus Christ, published in Hartford in 1782, attempts to explain his ostensible betrayal of his people's struggle for freedom in this life:

My dear Brethren, as it hath been reported that I had petitioned to the court of Hartford against freedom, I now solemnly declare that I never have said, nor done any thing, neither directly nor indirectly, to promote or to prevent freedom; but my answer hath always been I am a stranger here and I do not care to be concerned or to meddle with public affairs, and by this declaration I hope my friends will be satisfied, and all prejudice removed, Let us all strive to be united together in love, and to become new creatures. (p. 174³)

The lessons of the Bible and slavery had taught him that for body and soul, black and white, individual and nation, freedom was God's alone to grant:

Come my dear fellow servants and brothers, Africans by nation, we are all invited to come, Acts x, 34. Then Peter opened his mouth and said, of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, verse 35. But in every nation he that feareth him is accepted of him. My Brethren, many of us are seeking a temporal freedom, and I wish you may obtain it; remember that all power in heaven and earth belongs to God; if we are slaves it is by the permission of God, if we are free it must be by the power of the most high God. Stand still and see the salvation of God, cannot that same power that divided the waters from the waters for the children of Israel to pass through, make way for your freedom. (p. 175)

Hammon's reference to himself and his people as “Africans by nation” reflects his awareness of the duality of his identity, a duality he unfortunately sought to transcend rather than synthesize through religiosity. Appended to the sermon is the seventeen quatrain “Poem for Children with Thoughts of Death” as further testimony to the poet's piety.

The sermon and poem believed to have been written soon after A Winter Piece contain references to “the Present War.” In An Evening's Improvement. Shewing the Necessity of beholding the Lamb of God … Hammon is true to his apolitical, religious philosophy of life:

And now my brethren, I am to remind you of a most melancholy scene of Providence; it hath pleased the most high God, in his wise providence, to permit a cruel and unnatural war to be commenced. … Have we not great cause to think this is the just deserving of our sins. … Here we see that we ought to pray, that God may hasten the time when the people shall beat their swords into a ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, and nations shall learn war no more. (pp. 175-76)

And in the second half of “A Dialogue Intitled the Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant,” the two-page poem concluding the sermon, the poet stands above the battle praying for peace:

                                                            Servant
Dear Master, now it is a time,
          A time for great distress;
We'll follow after things divine,
          And pray for happiness.
                                                            Master
Then will the happy day appear,
          That virtue shall increase;
Lay up the sword and drop the spear,
          And Nations seek for peace.

Banal, bloodless, unoriginal, and nonracial, these lines on Christian virtue tell us as much about the theology whites imposed on colonial blacks as they do about Hammon's warped sense of identity and poetry.

The most decisive evidence of the poet-preacher's exploitation by those who found his religious convictions a model for African-American character and behavior is found in Hammon's final discourse, An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York. Dedicated to the African Society of New York in 1786, the Address was published two years after slavery was outlawed in the state and a year before it became the eleventh state to ratify the Constitution. Since Hammon was seventy-six at the time, he sincerely intended this discourse to be the “last … dying advice, of an old man.” With an uncommon if not unnatural faith in God and white people, whose sinful habits, he believed, did not in God's eyes and his own condone the slaves', Hammon preaches against the sins of disobedience, stealing, lying, swearing, and idleness. Consciousness of the irony of his people's oppression by those who had waged a costly and bloody war to end their own oppression is expressed but quickly suppressed by personal resignation to slavery and otherworldliness:

Now I acknowledge that liberty is a great thing, and worth seeking for, if we can get it honestly, and by our good conduct prevail on our masters to set us free. Though for my own part I do not wish to be free: yet I should be glad, if others, especially the young negroes were to be free, for many of us who are grown up slaves, and have always had masters to take care of us, should hardly know how to take care of ourselves; and it may be more for our own comfort to remain as we are. That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white people, in the late war. How much money has been spent, and how many lives have been lost to defend their liberty. I must say that I have hoped that God would open their eyes, when they were so much engaged for liberty, to think of the state of the poor blacks and to pity us. … But this, my dear brethren, is by no means, the greatest thing we have to be concerned about. Getting our liberty in this world is nothing to having the liberty of the children of God.⁴

Jupiter Hammon's importance as a poet is essentially historical and sociological, for his blind faith in the benevolence of whites and the kingdom of heaven is a vivid illustration of the ambiguous political role of too many early African-American integrationist writers and preachers whose double-consciousness was both a blessing and a curse in the struggle of blacks for independence.

II

In contrast to Jupiter Hammon, several eighteenth-century black ministers asserted their right to be free of prejudice and to run their own affairs by breaking off from the established white churches and organizing their own separate institutions. Although the dates and themes of their miscellaneous writings do not fall within the scope of this book, their struggle for freedom of worship paradoxically has much in common with one of the ultimate goals of the Revolution. David George, a slave, started the first black Baptist church among the slaves in the colonies in Silver Bluff, South Carolina, between 1773 and 1775. In 1788 Andrew Bryan, another slave exhorter whose master encouraged his preaching because he believed it had a salutary influence on other slaves, established the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia. But the most celebrated black church fathers are ex-slaves Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. Dragged from their knees while praying in St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, these two ministers and the other blacks attending service “all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church.” In Reverend Allen's words, “we were determined to seek out for ourselves, the Lord being our helper.” Thus in 1794 Allen founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and fought for many years to protect his church and congregation from the hostility of white Methodist preachers and trustees. During the same year Jones, who had earlier accepted an Episcopalian pastorate, dedicated the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church of Philadelphia. Less assertive but no less pious nor significant is Phillis Wheatley.

As the first slave and second woman writer in America to publish a book of poems, Phillis Wheatley's literary achievement was considered an extraordinary development on both sides of the Atlantic. To many of her contemporaries her poetry was indisputable evidence of the mental equality of blacks. But Moses Coit Tyler's observation in The Literary History of the American Revolution (1897) that “her career belongs rather to the domain of anthropology, or of hagiology, than to that of poetry—whether American or African” is more useful as an example of the tenacity of eighteenth-century prejudices and the limitations of nineteenth-century American scholarship than as a just assessment of the literary gifts of “Afric's muse,” as she calls herself in “Hymn to Humanity.” Like Jefferson, Tyler believed her poetry “below the dignity of criticism.” But as Julian Mason, Jr., rightly observes in the authoritative edition of the poet's complete works: “Her poems are certainly as good or better than those of most of the poets usually included and afforded fair treatment in a discussion of American poetry before 1800, and this same evaluation holds true when she is compared with most of the minor English poets of the eighteenth century who wrote in the neoclassical tradition.”

A frail, precocious African child of seven, Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston on a slave ship from Senegambia, the territory known in modern Africa as Senegal and Gambia, in 1761. She was purchased by John Wheatley, a prosperous tailor and owner of several household slaves, as a special servant for his wife, Suzanna Wheatley. The Wheatleys were dedicated to missionary work among Indians and blacks; their home was a well-known meeting place for Boston's cultured society. Once Mrs. Wheatley and her daughter Mary discovered Phillis Wheatley's quickness of mind, their humanitarian impulse to provide her with the proper cultivation was irresistible. In a letter to her London publisher in 1772, Mr. Wheatley wrote: “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. to which she was an utter stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.” Thanks mainly to Mary Wheatley's teaching, as Benjamin Brawley points out in The Negro in Literature and Art, Wheatley soon learned “a little astronomy, some ancient and modern geography, a little ancient history, a fair knowledge of the Bible, and a thoroughly appreciative acquaintance with the most important Latin classics, especially the works of Virgil and Ovid.” She took pride in Terence's African heritage, became proficient in grammar, and favored Pope's translations of Homer among the English classics. Mrs. Wheatley's favorite, the young poet was not allowed to associate with the other domestics nor do hard work. Her memory of Africa was vague, and her only recollection of her mother was that she poured out water before the rising sun. Gradually her frail health and literary genius earned her privileged treatment as a companion to her mistress and an adopted member of the family. “I was treated by her more like her child then her servant,” Wheatley wrote in 1774 to her African friend, Obour Tanner; “no opportunity was left unimproved of giving me the best of advice; but in terms how tender! how engaging!”

Eager to write, “she learnt in so short a Time, that in the Year 1765, she wrote a Letter to the Rev. Mr. Occum, the Indian Minister,” who later published a hymnal for his people. In 1767, when she was only only fourteen, Wheatley wrote her first poem, “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” in blank verse. Bearing witness to the success of Mrs. Wheatley's missionary efforts, the first stanza of the original manuscript reads:

While an intrinsic ardor bids me write
The muse doth promise to assist my pen.
'Twas but e'en now I left my native shore
The sable Land of error's darkest night.
There, sacred Nine! for you no place was found.
Parent of mercy, 'twas thy Powerful hand
Brought me in safety from the dark abode.(5)

With the restrained moral fervor of a young New England convert, she admonishes the Harvard students:

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 bring eternal ruin on the Soul.

Six years later in the first edition of her work, she significantly revised the poem, compressing it from thirty-two to thirty lines, and changing “The sable Land of error's darkest night” to “The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom” and “the sable monster” to “the deadly serpent.” Unlike Jupiter Hammon, maturity, success, and travel brought increasing artistic and ethnic pride to the young black woman who became a kind of poet laureate for what was then the literary capital of America.

Between 1768 and 1769 the young poet wrote at least three more poems. The first, “To the King's Most Excellent Majesty. 1768,” praises King George III for his last favor to the colonies, the repeal of the Stamp Act, and wishes him God's blessings so that he may give further evidence to “his subjects” of his concern for peace and freedom. The second, “On the Death of the Rev. Dr. Sewell, 1769,” was the first of several occasional poems celebrating or lamenting the birth or death of Boston's elite. The Reverend Doctor Joseph Sewall (son of Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, who was both presiding judge at the Salem witch trials and the author of the first New England antislavery tract) was pastor for fifty-six years at Boston's famous old South Church where Wheatley became the first of her race to be baptized in 1771. The third poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” is the earliest effort of the fifteen-year-old poet to come to grips with the dual nature of her identity. Her shortest poem, it reads:

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

As in the original poem to the Harvard students, the poet accepts the social prejudices and religious mythology of the revolutionary period and considers herself fortunate to have been redeemed by Christ and “refin'd” by the Wheatleys. At the same time, the closing couplet boldly and ingeniously reminds Christians who look on her people with “scornful eye” that it is their duty to cultivate the moral and intellectual capacities of “Negroes” so that they, too, may enjoy spiritual if not social equality. Circulated among the Wheatleys and their friends, these poems soon won a local reputation for the young poet. “The Wheatleys had adopted her,” writes J. Saunders Redding in To Make A Poet Black, (1939) “but she had adopted their terrific New England conscience.”

From her first appearance in print with the elegy An Elegaic Poem, on George Whitfield (1770) to the London publication of her first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773, Wheatley became the object of curiosity and admiration. Her poems and her person were used as evidence in the debate over the intellectual equality of blacks. Reprinted in Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and England, the elegiac broadside, addressed primarily to the Countess of Huntingdon, philanthropist and Whitefield's patron, immediately extended the poet's reputation. The lines “Great Countess, we Americans revere / Thy name, and mingle in thy grief sincere” allude to the Countess of Huntingdon's philanthropic work and the poet's sense of identity as an American. But her silence about the Boston Massacre, especially the death of the fugitive slave Crispus Attucks, which occurred a few blocks from the Wheatley house in the same year as Whitefield's death, is curious. The circumstances of her privileged position in the Wheatley household seem to have vitiated the poet's sense of ethnic and national identity.

In Boston Wheatley was frequently invited to the homes of people in Mrs. Wheatley's social and missionary circle, where she was regarded with “peculiar interest and esteem.” Her trip to England with Nathaniel Wheatley in May 1773, we now know from the recent discovery of new letters by the poet, was not merely for reasons of health but also for an introduction to British missionary circles during a politically volatile time. For in April Parliament had passed the Tea Act and sparked yet another chain of events destined to culminate in the Revolution. Against this backdrop, Wheatley's new admirer and patron, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, to whom the poet's first edition was dedicated, introduced her to British society, where her exceptional talent and tact as a conversationalist apparently steered her clear of political subjects and won her praise and presents, including a copy of the 1770 Glasgow folio edition of Paradise Lost from the lord mayor of London. Mrs. Wheatley's illness and request for her prevented the poet from accepting an invitation to stay in England for presentation at the court of George III. In October Wheatley, little improved in health but much in reputation, was back in Boston. Before she left London, however, she participated in arrangements for the publication of her first volume of poetry.

The first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral contains Wheatley's best poetry. Critics have noted the influence of English writers on her poetry, especially the debt to Milton for “An Hymn to the Morning” and “An Hymn to the Evening,” to Gray for the Whitefield elegy, and to Addison and Watts for “Ode to Neptune” and “Hymn to Humanity.” But the greatest influence on the volume of thirty-nine poems was religion and neoclassicism. Her Christian convictions and the influence of the Bible are most clearly seen in the inventive use of biblical narrative in “Goliath of Gath,” one of her longest poems, and “Isaiah lxiii. 1-8.” In the tradition of New England colonial writers, she freely embellishes the biblical account of David and Goliath—a convention that became even more distinctively employed in the African-American tradition. She casts the poems, however, in the neoclassical mode of iambic pentameter couplets, invocation to the muse, elevated language, classical allusions, and panoramic scope. Here—particularly in her precision of meter, use of heroic couplet, and stilted diction—her models were Alexander Pope and the Latin writers themselves. The mixture of Christian and classical references in Poems on Various Subjects impressed some of her contemporaries with her genius and acculturation. Others were more fascinated by her youth, sex, race, or class.

Wheatley was certainly aware of the twoness of her identity and reception. Her pride in and exploitation of her African identity is apparent in the reference to Terence in “To Maecenas” and in her self-image in several poems as “Ethiop,” “Afric's muse,” and “vent'rous Afric.” The degree to which she is also conscious of the larger society's Manichean image of Africa and her descendants is obvious in “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” and “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North America, etc.” In the last poem, written in 1772 upon the Earl of Dartmouth's appointment, with the hope of encouraging him to use his new power to support the colonies' struggle for freedom, we see the skillful manner in which the nineteen-year-old poet gives poetic form to her double vision:

          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'd 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?

Wheatley, as these lines indicate, was more conscious of her African heritage and sophisticated in her craftsmanship than Jupiter Hammon, but her religious indoctrination and unique status in the Wheatley family dictated against the expression of more positive, unequivocal sentiments about her African past.

The poet's visit to England was the high point in her brief career and a test of her piety. In London she was received as a “most surprising genius,” but a very important friend of the American missionary movement, John Thornton, believed such praise a worldly snare and cautioned her against pride in her intellectual gifts. Thornton, merchant, philanthropist, and Calvinistic Anglican, and the Countess of Huntingdon, who as the patron of John Marrant, another colonial black writer, persuaded him in 1785 to go to Nova Scotia as a missionary, supported Eleazer Wheelock's Indian Charity School in New Hampsire. Both philanthropists, we learn from a recent critic, kept in close contact with the Wheatleys, who “disbursed the funds Thornton donated to Indian missionary work, posted him on its progress, and sent their son to him for improvement.” Thornton was particularly interested in hearing about the progress of Wheelock's famous pupil, the Monhegan Indian preacher Samson Occom. It was to Occom, of course, that eleven-year-old Phillis wrote her first letter. Occom and Thornton both considered the young poet a potential missionary and encouraged her to become “a Female Preacher to her kindred.” But in writing to Thornton in 1774 she respectfully declined this role, considering it “too hazardous” and herself “not sufficiently Eligible.” Moreover, she did not want to leave her “British & American Friends” and confessed that she was no longer an African but an African-American: “how like a Barbarian should I look to the Natives; I can promise that my tongue shall be quiet for a strong reason indeed being an utter stranger to the Language of Anamaboe …” In this manner the poet tactfully responded to Thornton's view that “silent wonder and adoration of the wisdom and goodness of God” more becomes faith than does the ability to “talk excellently of divine things, even so as to raise the admiration of others.” In the same letter the poet informs Thornton of Mr. Wheatley's “generous behaviour in granting me my freedom … about 3 months before the death of my dear mistress & at her desire, as well as his own humanity. …”

Mrs. Wheatley's death on March 3, 1774, and Wheatley's personal hardships over the next decade were to test her faith even more. Writing to her friend Obour Tanner on March 21, she expresses the depth of the loss of her best friend: “I have lately met with a great trial in the death of my mistress; let us imagine the loss of a parent, sister or brother, the tenderness of all were united in her.” Despite this loss, the poet continues to invoke her muse for occasional poems such as the 1775 encomium “To His Excellency General Washington.” Washington was so pleased by the poem that he invited Wheatley to visit him at Cambridge, an invitation she gladly accepted in 1776. In that poem, Liberty and Peace, and “On the Capture of General Lee,” the poet coined the term Columbia to refer to America. With the death of Mr. Wheatley on March 12, 1778, the family household broke up, and the next month Wheatley married John Peters. Legend has it that her husband was a respectable but excessively proud black man who tried his hand as a baker, grocer, doctor, and lawyer without much success. The marriage resulted in estrangement from her former white friends and a life of poverty. Yet on October 30, 1779, the Evening Post and General Advertiser outlined her “Proposals” for publishing by subscription a new volume of “Poems & Letters on various subjects, dedicated to the Right Hon. Benjamin Franklin Esq: One of the Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France.” Since the treaty ending the war was not signed until 1783, she was unable to secure enough subscribers and the book was not published. Misfortunes began to multiply. Her husband was jailed for debt; two of her children died between 1783 and 1784; and she was reduced to working in a cheap lodging house. On December 5, 1784, Phillis Peters died and was buried with her third child, who had died soon after his mother. Her husband disappeared with the unpublished manuscript of her second book. Two years later her first and only book was republished in America.

A vivid example of cultural and ethnic divisions during the revolutionary era is the manner in which Wheatley's genius and poetic talents were praised in the beginning by General Washington in 1776 and dismissed at the end by Thomas Jefferson in 1784. In different degrees and under different circumstances, both Washington and Jefferson were Virginia slaveholders who believed that slavery ought to be abolished by law; that blacks were inferior to whites; and that blacks and whites should be separated. Of the two, however, Jefferson seems to have held the stronger convictions. In response to the letter and poem sent to him by the poet, Washington wrote to “Miss Phillis”:

I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the elegant lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical talents; in honor of which, and as a tribute justly due you, I would have published the poem, had I not been apprehensive that, while I only meant to give the world this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of vanity. This, and nothing else, determined me not to give it a place in the public prints.

If you ever come to Cambridge, or near head-quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses, and to who nature has been so liberal and beneficient in her dispensations.⁶

The sincerity of these sentiments take on a different color in the light of a letter written a few weeks earlier to his former secretary in which Washington says: “I recollect nothing else worth giving you the trouble of, unless you can be amused by reading a letter and poem addressed to me by Miss Phillis Wheatley.” In contrast to Washington's amused benevolence, Jefferson's “suspicion” that “the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” sounds more like a conviction when we read the following remarks in Notes on Virginia:

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whately; 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.⁷

No African-American writer during the revolutionary period was more integrated in her society than Wheatley, yet when she was not the object of paternalistic indulgence from admirers, she was the object of intellectual derision for detractors. In either case, the genius and piety that inform her double-consciousness and love of liberty commanded the attention of the age and the ages to follow.

III

Five years after Phillis Wheatley's death, Olaudah Equiano published in London The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African and became the new celebrated black writer of the period. While Wheatley's memories of Africa were vague and essentially religious, those of Equiano are unquestionably the earliest, most detailed description of the nature of bondage and freedom in Africa, the Caribbean, and colonial America from a black perspective. The Narrative is the first major slave narrative, a genre that became popular during the abolition movement of the nineteenth century and remains a literary testament to the will of an oppressed people to be free. Completed in 1788, it was first published in America in 1791 and by 1794 had gone into its eighth edition in London.

Neither a black American nor a black Englishmen, Equiano was born in 1745, spent his early childhood in Benin, now a part of southern Nigeria, and his mature years in antislavery work in England. But, as Arna Bontemps notes, his slavery in Virginia and years in the service of a Philadelphia Quaker merchant, who saw to his education and put him to work on small trading vessels in the Caribbean, were the years that shaped his consciousness and provided the frame of reference for his Narrative. In addition, bibliophiles and students of American cultural history generally consider Equiano's Narrative the most influential of the eighteenth-century black autobiographies. Two others are Briton Hammon's fourteen-page A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man, published in Boston in 1760, and John Marrant's more popular A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with J. Marrant … Taken Down from His Own Relation, published in London in 1785.

Living in the fertile province of “Essaka,” some distance from the capital of Benin and the sea, Equiano “had never heard of white men or Europeans, nor of the sea; and our subjection to the king of Benin was little more than nominal, for every transaction of the government … was conducted by the chief of elders.” His father was an elder who with other “chief men, decided disputes and punished crimes.” In most cases, the trial was short and “the law of retaliation prevailed.”

The youngest and favorite of seven children, Equiano lived for his first eleven years in a collective, agrarian, religious society whose basic modes of expression were oral. “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets,” he says. “Thus every great event such as a triumphant return from battle or other cause of public rejoicing is celebrated in public dances, which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion.” To improve the blessing of an uncommonly rich and fruitful land, agriculture was his people's chief industry; “and everyone, even the children and women are engaged in it. … Everyone contributes something to the common stock; and, as we are unacquainted with idleness, we have no beggars.” As for religion, Equiano—revealing his European acculturation by assuming a third person voice—writes:

the natives believe that there is one Creator of all things, and that he lives in the sun, and is girted round with a belt; that he may never eat or drink, but, according to some, he smokes a pipe, which is our own favorite luxury. They believe he governs events, especially our deaths or captivity; but, as for the doctrine of eternity, I do not remember to have ever heard of it; some, however, believe in the transmigration of souls in a certain degree. Those spirits which were not transmigrated, such as their dear friends or relations, they believe always attend them, and guard them from the bad spirits of their foes. For this reason they always, before eating as I have observed, put some small portion of the meat, and pour some of their drink, on the ground for them; and they often make oblations of the blood of beasts or fowls at their graves. (pp. 12-13⁸)

In contrast to Phillis Wheatley, Christianity altered but by no means destroyed Equiano's respect for the holistic culture and tribal religion of his people and their reverence for priests, magicians, and wise men.

Despite obvious differences in color and culture between Europeans and Africans, Equiano does not accept the absurd correlations between the color of one's skin and the content of one's mind that characterizes Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. “Are there not causes enough to which the apparent inferiority of an African may be ascribed,” Equiano observes, “without limiting the goodness of God, and supposing he forebore to stamp understanding on certainly his own image, because ‘carved in ebony.’ Might it not naturally be ascribed to their situation. … Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all its fire and every noble sentiment. … Let the polished and haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, and even barbarous. Did Nature make them inferior to their sons? and should they too have been made slaves?” In short, inferiority to an acculturated yet proud African writer of the eighteenth century was not an innate, racial constant for nonwhites but the result of different historical and social circumstances.

Regarding slavery in Africa, he confesses that sometimes his nation sold slaves to traders, “but they were only prisoners of war, or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, and some other crimes which we esteemed heinous.” Although his nation and family kept slaves, the difference between the system of slavery in Africa and the New World was crucial:

With us, they do no more work than other members of the community, even their master; their food, clothing, and lodging were nearly the same as theirs (except that they were not permitted to eat with those who were free-born); and there was scarce any other difference between them, than a superior degree of importance which the head of a family possesses in our state, and that authority which, as such, he exercises over every part of his household. Some of these slaves have even slaves under them as their own property, and for their own use. (p. 12)

When he was eleven, Olaudah Equiano and his sister were kidnapped by native traders, and during his manhood he saw first-hand the difference in slavery in Africa, America, and the Caribbean.

After the wonder of seeing the sea for the first time and the mysterious movement of slave ships as well as the terrors of the middle passage and the dread that “we should be eaten by these ugly men,” the narrator was sold to a Virginia planter. He received his most indelible impression of the treatment of slaves in Virginia when he was called to his master's house to fan him and saw a black woman cooking with an iron muzzle locked on her head so that she could neither speak, eat, nor drink. Equiano was sold after “some time” to the captain of a merchant ship and lieutenant in the royal navy, who renamed him Gustavus Vassa and took him to England. In two or three years he not only spoke English and felt “quite easy with these new country-men, but relished their society and manners. I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them, to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners.” The next step in adopting his new culture was to persuade his mistress in 1759 to have him baptized. He did not become “a first-rate Christian” and missionary, however, until much later after he had searched in vain for the key to salvation among the Quakers, the Roman Catholics, the Jews, and the Turks. He ultimately found the key in Methodism and sought unsuccessfully to be ordained for missionary work “among his countrymen” in Africa.

In 1763 he was sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant in the West Indies. While working on his master's boats, Equiano witnessed the general practice of white men brutally raping female slaves, including “females not ten years old.” He also observed how the system of absentee landlords left many island estates in the hands of managerial incompetents and human butchers. As in America, the Caribbean had its instruments of torture. “The iron muzzle, thumb-screws, &c., are so well known as not to need a description, and were sometimes applied for the slightest faults.” The inhumanity of slavery made him “determined to make every exertion to obtain my freedom and to return to Old England.”

In 1766 while the colonists were stiffening their resistance to the Stamp Act, Equiano finally accumulated enough money by trading goods to buy his freedom from King but agreed to continue working for him as a free “ablebodied sailor at thirty-six shillings per month.” In this capacity he made several trips to America and experienced the precarious existence of a free black in the colonies. In Savannah, Georgia, for instance, he was severely beaten one night and left for dead by white men. The next morning he was carted off to jail. A similar fate occurred to a free black carpenter he knew, “who, for asking a gentleman that he worked for for the money he had earned, was put into gaol; and afterwards this oppressed man was sent from Georgia, with false accusations, of an intention to set the gentleman's house on fire, and run away with his slaves.” On another occasion only his intelligence, facility in English, and independent spirit prevented his kidnapping by “white ruffians.” As a free, acculturated black (he became a hairdresser, played the French horn, and went to night school), Equiano was a restless man who continued to respond to the call of the sea and different cultures: Madeira, Jamaica, Barbados, Smyrna, Genoa, Portugal, Spain, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In the 1780s he became London's most celebrated black abolitionist, culminating his fight against oppression with the first publication of the Narrative in 1789, the same year that George Washington was inaugurated first president of the United States. Until his death on April 31, 1797, Olaudah Equiano's vision of himself and the world was that of a European-African Christian convert.

IV

In the beginning of A History of American Literature (1878), Moses Coit Tyler writes: “The American people, starting into life in the early part of the seventeenth century, have been busy ever since in recording their intellectual history in laws, manners, institutions, in battles with man and beast and nature, in highways, excavations, edifices, in pictures, in statues, in written words. It is in written words that this people, from the very beginning, have made the most confidential and explicit record of their minds.” In contrast, as descendants of Africa and bearers of the legacy of an oral tradition, black petitioners for freedom, Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano were more attuned to the power of the spoken word and the wonder of man as a child of God. Confronted by the paradox of their situation as slaves in a largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society that had waged a war to realize its belief in the equality and inalienable rights of man, colonial African-American writers, with the exception of Hammon, were more interested in struggling for physical and spiritual freedom than political and economic independence. Their introduction to the written word was primarily to make them better servants, yet they used their acquired knowledge of reading and writing to solicit the good will of the larger white society. Since it was the Bible that served as the principal tool of cultural assimilation and the Protestant church that allowed partial social assimilation, the most striking quality of the writings of African-Americans between 1764 and 1789 is their Christian piety, faith in the philosophy of natural rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and dual vision of the writers themselves as African-Americans.

In the colonial African-American writer's efforts to resolve his double-consciousness and attain recognition of his freedom and human rights, he did not, as many black writers of the 1960s sought to do, voluntarily seek to reject either aspect of his identity. In the words of Du Bois, “he would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.” He wanted simply “to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” Of early white American writings, Tyler says: “Literature as a fine art, literature as the voice and the ministress of aesthetic delight, they had perhaps little regard for; but literature as an instrument of humane and immediate utility, they honored, and at this wrought with all the earnestness that was born in their blood.” No less is true of the writings of early black Americans.

Notes

1. Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, pp. 7-9.

2. Quotations are from Oscar Wegelin's edition of Jupiter Hammon, American Negro Poet.

3. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Hammon's prose are from Sidney Kaplan's The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution.

4. William H. Robinson, Jr., ed., Early Black American Prose, p. 42.

5. Quotations from Phillis Wheatley are from Julian D. Mason, Jr.'s, edition of The Poems of Phillis Wheatley.

6. George Washington, Writings, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931-44) 4: 360-61.

7. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 140.

8. Quotations are from Arna Bontemps's edition of Equiano's Narrative in Great Slave Narratives.