In his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of Wheatley’s complete writings, Professor Vincent Carretta discusses the way her poems were used for decades to support both sides of arguments about the intellectual equality first of Africans and then of African Americans. At the insistence of the printer who was determined to allay the doubts of many potential readers who “would be ready to suspect they were not really the Writings of PHILLIS,” the wise men of Boston stated that the poems truly were written by a “young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”
Abolitionists, including George Gregory and Thomas Clarkson, cited Wheatley’s “genius” to assail racist assumptions about inequality, while others—including, most famously, Thomas Jefferson—insisted that, Wheatley notwithstanding, there were no good black poets. “Among the blacks,” Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), “is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” Later African American writers continued to grapple with this corrosive bias. When David Walker (1785–1830), a free black Bostonian, published his radical Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829, he insisted that education especially in grammar and writing were key to the development of black children whose potential was not being realized. “It is a notorious fact,” Walker wrote, “that the major part of white Americans, have, ever since we have been among them, tried to keep us ignorant.” In an introductory note to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (published in Boston in 1861), the editor (Lydia Maria Child) addressed the issue when she felt the need to explain how Jacobs (1813–97), who published under the name Linda Brent, could “write so well.” Child argued that “nature endowed [Jacobs] with quick perceptions,” that “the mistress, with whom she lived till she was twelve years old, was a kind, considerate friend, who taught her to read and spell,” and that after she came to the North, she had “opportunities for self-improvement.”
Wheatley and Jacobs confronted prejudice based on their identities as both slaves or former slaves and women. In her groundbreaking four-part essay on the equality of female abilities (1798), Judith Sargent Murray offered detailed evidence to prove that women “are equally susceptible of every literary acquirement,” a point to which Margaret Fuller (1810–50) returned a few decades later.
And then there’s the story of what happened in 1835 to the newspaper that would eventually be called The Pilot. At a time of intense, even violent, anti-Catholicism in Boston, the paper took a new turn toward literature and culture. While continuing to explain Catholic theology and to attack “illiberal” Protestant editors and ministers, the paper not only changed its name and masthead logo but also started to feature poems by Irish authors and review essays on Catholic literature, music, and art. The effort was clearly intended to demonstrate the excellence of Irish and Catholic culture.
Taken together, these examples suggest that the turn to literature was central to making the case for the equality, liberation, and potential of poorly treated and disrespected minority groups. Literary achievement requires not only literacy and intelligence but also creativity, discernment, insight, logic and passion. That members of these different and not always mutually supportive groups used this argument to demonstrate their equal potential and impressive accomplishments made sense at a time when it was acceptable for majority-group members to justify discriminatory practices on the grounds of intellectual inferiority.
In 1772, Phillis Wheatley (1753–84), the first English-speaking black writer to publish a book, proved that she was capable of writing her poems by responding to questions from a group of prominent male Bostonians. In 1798, Bostonian Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) bolstered her feminist argument by proving that women are just as “susceptible of every literary acquirement” as men. And for one year, 1835, the newspaper published at 11 Devonshire Street that would eventually be called The Pilot but that was in 1833 and 1834 called The Jesuit, or Catholic Sentinel, went by the name Literary and Catholic Sentinel. Perhaps not coincidentally, the addition of the word “literary” came only months after an anti-Catholic mob destroyed the Ursuline convent in Charlestown (August 1834). Was there a connection? Was the “move” to literature strategic, an effort to reach across boundaries by demonstrating the equality of Boston’s Irish and Catholic citizens? If so, was this strategy similar to claims made in the period by other groups in Boston—notably women and African Americans—about their equal ability to think and write?
In his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of Wheatley’s complete writings, Professor Vincent Carretta discusses the way her poems were used for decades to support both sides of arguments about the intellectual equality first of Africans and then of African Americans. At the insistence of the printer who was determined to allay the doubts of many potential readers who “would be ready to suspect they were not really the Writings of PHILLIS,” the wise men of Boston stated that the poems truly were written by a “young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”
Abolitionists, including George Gregory and Thomas Clarkson, cited Wheatley’s “genius” to assail racist assumptions about inequality, while others—including, most famously, Thomas Jefferson—insisted that, Wheatley notwithstanding, there were no good black poets. “Among the blacks,” Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), “is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” Later African American writers continued to grapple with this corrosive bias. When David Walker (1785–1830), a free black Bostonian, published his radical Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829, he insisted that education especially in grammar and writing were key to the development of black children whose potential was not being realized. “It is a notorious fact,” Walker wrote, “that the major part of white Americans, have, ever since we have been among them, tried to keep us ignorant.” In an introductory note to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (published in Boston in 1861), the editor (Lydia Maria Child) addressed the issue when she felt the need to explain how Jacobs (1813–97), who published under the name Linda Brent, could “write so well.” Child argued that “nature endowed [Jacobs] with quick perceptions,” that “the mistress, with whom she lived till she was twelve years old, was a kind, considerate friend, who taught her to read and spell,” and that after she came to the North, she had “opportunities for self-improvement.”
Wheatley and Jacobs confronted prejudice based on their identities as both slaves or former slaves and women. In her groundbreaking four-part essay on the equality of female abilities (1798), Judith Sargent Murray offered detailed evidence to prove that women “are equally susceptible of every literary acquirement,” a point to which Margaret Fuller (1810–50) returned a few decades later.
And then there’s the story of what happened in 1835 to the newspaper that would eventually be called The Pilot. At a time of intense, even violent, anti-Catholicism in Boston, the paper took a new turn toward literature and culture. While continuing to explain Catholic theology and to attack “illiberal” Protestant editors and ministers, the paper not only changed its name and masthead logo but also started to feature poems by Irish authors and review essays on Catholic literature, music, and art. The effort was clearly intended to demonstrate the excellence of Irish and Catholic culture.
Taken together, these examples suggest that the turn to literature was central to making the case for the equality, liberation, and potential of poorly treated and disrespected minority groups. Literary achievement requires not only literacy and intelligence but also creativity, discernment, insight, logic and passion. That members of these different and not always mutually supportive groups used this argument to demonstrate their equal potential and impressive accomplishments made sense at a time when it was acceptable for majority-group members to justify discriminatory practices on the grounds of intellectual inferiority.