AS THOMAS JEFFERSON supervised the building of his plantation near Charlottesville in October 1772, an enslaved nineteen-year-old woman up the coast gazed anxiously at eighteen gentlemen who identified publicly “as the most respectable characters in Boston.” They all had been instructed to judge whether she had actually authored her famous poetry, especially its sophisticated Greek and Latin imagery. She saw familiar faces: Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, future governor James Bowdoin, mega-slaveholder John Hancock, and Cotton Mather’s son Samuel, who is remembered as the last in the line of illustrious Mathers after Richard, Increase, and Cotton. Phillis Wheatley, the poet making her case before Samuel Mather and the other Bostonians, is now remembered as the first in the line of illustrious African American writers.1
Her enslavement story did not begin like that of many other African people. In 1761, Susanna Wheatley, the wife of tailor and financier John Wheatley, visited the newest storehouse of chained humanity in southwest Boston, not far from where Cotton Mather used to live. Captain Peter Gwinn of the Phillis had just arrived in Boston with seventy-five captives from Senegambia. Looking for a domestic servant, Susanna Wheatley scanned past the “several robust, healthy females” and laid her eyes on a sickly, naked little girl, covered by a dirty carpet. Some of the seven-year-old captive’s front baby teeth had come out, possibly reminding Wheatley of her seven-year-old daughter, who had died. Susanna Wheatley was mourning the ninth anniversary of Sarah Wheatley’s tragic death.2
Well before she became the most famous Black exhibit in the Western world, the young African girl was most likely purchased by Susanna and John to serve as a living reminder of Sarah Wheatley. Whatever name her Wolof relatives had given her, it was now lost to gray chains, bloody blue waters, and scribbled history. The Wheatleys renamed her after the slave ship that had brought her to them. From the beginning, Phillis Wheatley “had a child’s place,” suggested an early biographer, in the Wheatley’s “house and in their hearts.” Homeschooled, Phillis “never was looked on as a slave,” explained Hannah Mather Crocker, the granddaughter of Cotton Mather.3
About four years after her arrival, eleven-year-old Phillis jotted down her first poem in English. It was a four-line tribute to the 1764 death (from smallpox) of the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Thachers, a distinguished Puritan family. Phillis was moved to write the poem after overhearing the Wheatleys lament the tragic death of Sarah Thacher.
By age twelve, Phillis had no problem reading Latin and Greek classics, English literature, and the Bible. She published her first poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” in a December 1767 issue of the Newport Mercury. A storm had almost caused two local merchants to shipwreck off the Boston coast. The Wheatleys had one or both of the merchants over for dinner. Phillis listened intently as the merchant(s) told the story of “their narrow Escape.”
In 1767, the fifteen-year-old composed “To the University of Cambridge,” a poem that signified her longing to enter the all-White, all-male Harvard. She had already consumed the assimilationist ideas about her race that had probably been fed to her by the Wheatley family, saying, for instance, “’Twas but e’en now I left my native Shore / The sable Land of error’s darkest night.” Assimilationists were producing the racist idea of unenlightened Africa, and telling Wheatley and other Blacks that the light of America was a gift. The next year, Wheatley continued to marvel in her assimilation—and attack segregationist curse theory—in the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.”
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their coulour is a diabolical die”,
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
In 1771, Phillis Wheatley began assembling her work into a collection, including a number of inspirational poems on the increasing tensions between Britain and colonial America in the 1760s, which became her claim to fame. The Wheatleys figured that prospective publishers and buyers would need to be assured of Phillis’s authenticity. This is why John Wheatley assembled such a powerhouse of Boston elites in 1772.4
Hardly believing an enslaved Black girl could fathom Greek and Latin, the eighteen men probably asked her to unpack the classical allusions in her poems. Whatever their questions were, Wheatley dazzled the skeptical tribunal of eighteen men. They signed the following assimilationist attestation: “We whose Names are under-written do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”5
The Wheatleys were delighted. But even with this attestation in hand, no American publisher was willing to alienate slaveholding consumers by publishing her by now famous poems, which were entering the abolitionist literature of the Revolutionary era. Phillis Wheatley had auditioned and proven the capability of Black humanity to the assimilationist scions of Boston. But unlike the publishers, these men did not have much to lose.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY WAS not the first so-called “uncultivated Barbarian” to be examined and exhibited. Throughout the eighteenth century’s race for Enlightenment, assimilationists galloped around seeking out human experiments—“barbarians” to civilize into the “superior” ways of Europeans—to prove segregationists wrong, and sometimes to prove slaveholders wrong. As trained exotic creatures in the racist circus, Black people could showcase Black capacity for Whiteness, for human equality, for something other than slavery. They could show they were capable of freedom—someday. Few worked as passionately to provide this human evidence, or put up as much money to experiment, as John Montagu, England’s Second Duke of Montagu.
Early in the 1700s, the duke experimented on the youngest son of Jamaica’s first freed Blacks to see if he could match the intellectual achievements of his White peers. The duke sent Francis Williams to an English academy and Cambridge University, where Francis equaled in intellectual attainments his peers who were similarly educated.
Sometime between 1738 and 1740, Williams returned home, probably donning a white wig of curls over his dark skin and assimilated mind. He opened a grammar school for slaveholders’ children and penned fawning Latin odes to every colonial governor of Jamaica. His 1758 anti-Black poem to Governor George Haldane read: “Tho’ dark the stream on which the tribute flows, / Not from the skin, but from the heart it rose.”6
Celebrity Scottish philosopher David Hume learned about the Cambridge-trained Francis Williams. But neither Williams, nor the growing fashion of having Black boys as servants in England, nor Buffon’s climate theory could change his mind about natural human hierarchy and Blacks’ incapability for Whiteness. Hume declared his segregationist position emphatically. In 1753, he updated his popular critique of climate theory, “Of Natural Characters,” adding the most infamous footnote in the history of racist ideas:
I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites . . . have still something eminent about them. . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. . . . In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.7
Hume strongly opposed slavery, but like many other abolitionists of the Enlightenment period, he never saw his segregationist thinking as contradicting his antislavery stance. Ignoring his antislavery position, proslavery theorists over the next few decades used David Hume as a model, adopting his footnote to “Of Natural Characters” as their international anthem.8
SIMILAR EXPERIMENTS OF educating young Black males were carried out in America, and while some segregationists began to accept assimilationist ideas and even oppose slavery, few White Americans rejected racist thinking altogether. On a visit home in 1763 during his nearly two decades of residence in Europe, Benjamin Franklin saw some Black exhibits at a Philadelphia school run by the Associates of Dr. Thomas Bray. The London-based educational group had been named in 1731 after the deceased organizer of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Assessing the pupils, Franklin gained “a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black Race.” Some Blacks could “adopt our Language or Customs,” he admitted. But that seemed to be all Franklin could concede, probably recognizing that the production of racist ideas was essential to substantiating slavery. Seven years later, in lobbying the crown for Georgia’s harsh slave code, Franklin argued that the “majority” of slaves was “of a plotting Disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful, and cruel in the highest Degree.”9
For racists like Franklin, it proved difficult to believe that many Blacks were capable of becoming another Francis Williams or Phillis Wheatley. Racists often understood this capable handful to be “extraordinary Negroes.” Joseph Jekyll actually began his 1805 biography of popular Afro-British writer and Duke of Montague protégé Ignatius Sancho identifying him as “this extraordinary Negro.” These extraordinary Negros supposedly defied the laws of nature or nurture that standardized Black decadence. They were not ordinarily inferior like the “majority.” This mind game allowed racists to maintain their racist ideas in the midst of individual Africans defying its precepts. It doomed from the start the strategy of exhibiting excelling Blacks to change racist minds. But this strategy of persuasion endured.10
After the Duke of Montagu died in 1749, Selina Hastings, known as the Countess of Huntingdon, replaced him as the principal shepherd of Black exhibits in the English-speaking world. If she had been a Puritan male, Cotton Mather would have adored this Methodist trailblazer, who promoted the writings of Christian Blacks as a testament of Black capability for conversion. Two years before her death, the countess sponsored Olaudah Equiano’s aptly titled Interesting Narrative of his Nigerian birth, capture, enslavement, education, and emancipation in 1789. Her first and potentially most rewarding campaign was shepherding the inaugural slave narrative of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (James Albert) into print in 1772. The countess almost certainly adored Gronniosaw’s assimilationist plot: the more he conformed to slavery, superior European culture, and Christianity, and left behind his heathen, inferior upbringing in West Africa, the happier and holier he became. Since freedom had been colored white, Gronniosaw believed that in order to be truly free, he had to abandon his Nigerian traditions and become White.11
Britain’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield, went further than the Duke of Montagu and Selina Hastings and freed a Virginia runaway, James Somerset, overshadowing Gronniosaw’s pioneering slave narrative and Wheatley’s tribunal in Boston in 1772. No one could be enslaved in England, Mansfield ruled, raising antislavery English law over proslavery colonial law. Fearing Mansfield’s ruling could one day extend to the British colonies, the Somerset case prodded proslavery theorists out into the open and roused the transatlantic abolitionist movement. University of Pennsylvania professor and pioneering American physician Benjamin Rush anonymously issued a stinging antislavery pamphlet in Philadelphia in February 1773, using Phillis Wheatley’s work to push the abolitionist case in America.
Rush praised the “singular genius” of Wheatley (without naming her). All the vices attributed to Black people, from idleness to treachery to theft, were “the offspring of slavery,” Rush wrote. In fact, those unsubstantiated vices attributed to Black people were the offspring of the illogically racist mind. Were captives really lazier, more deceitful, and more crooked than their enslavers? It was the latter who forced others to work for them, treacherously whipping them when they did not, and stealing the proceeds of their labor when they did. In any case, Rush was the first activist to commercialize the persuasive, though racist, abolitionist theory that slavery made Black people inferior. Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea. Slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, snatching precious time, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior.
Benjamin Rush whacked down curse theory and pushed against a century of American theology, from Cotton Mather to Samuel Davies, in his pamphlet. “A Christian slave is a contradiction in terms,” he argued, demanding that America “put a stop to slavery!” Reprinted and circulated in New York, Boston, London, and Paris, Rush’s words consolidated the forces that in 1774 organized the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first known antislavery society of non-Africans in North America.12
TO FIND A publisher for her Poems on Various Subjects, Wheatley had to journey to London in the summer of 1773—where she was greeted and paraded and exhibited like an exotic rock star. There, she secured the financial support of the Countess of Huntingdon. In thanks, Wheatley dedicated her book, the first ever by an African American woman and the second by an American woman, to the countess. The publication of her poems in September 1773, a year after slavery had been outlawed in England and a few months after Rush’s abolitionist pamphlet reached England, set off a social earthquake in London. Londoners condemned American slavery, and American slaveholders resisted the Londoners. And then abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic more firmly resisted the rule of slaveholders in the colonies. In December 1773, the Boston Tea Party set off a political earthquake, and then England’s Coercive Acts, and then the Patriots’ resistance to British rule in the colonies. As the American Revolution budded, British commentators slammed the hypocrisy of Bostonians’ boasts of Wheatley’s ingenuity while keeping her enslaved. The poet was quickly freed.13
George Washington praised the talents of Phillis Wheatley. In France, Voltaire somehow got his hands on Poems on Various Subjects. Wheatley proved, Voltaire confessed, that Blacks could write poetry. This from a man who a few years prior had not been able to decide whether Blacks had developed from monkeys, or monkeys had developed from Blacks. Still, neither Wheatley nor Benjamin Rush nor any Enlightenment abolitionist was able to alter the position of proslavery segregationists. So long as there was slavery, there would be racist ideas justifying it. And there was nothing Wheatley and Rush could do to stop the production of racist proslavery ideas other than end slavery.
In September 1773, Philadelphia-based Caribbean absentee planter Richard Nisbet attacked Benjamin Rush for peddling “a single example of a negro girl writing a few silly poems, to prove that the blacks are not deficient to us in understanding.” On November 15, 1773, a short, satirical essay appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet containing a rewritten biblical passage as evidence that God had fitted Africans for slavery. A few weeks later, someone released Personal Slavery Established. In attacking Rush (or satirizing Nisbet), the anonymous author plagiarized David Hume’s footnote and wrote of the “five classes” of “Africans”: “1st, Negroes, 2d, Ourang Outangs, 3d, Apes, 4th, Baboons, and 5th Monkeys.”14
THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS spending even more time away from law in 1773 to oversee the building of his plantation, Monticello. But his mind, like the minds of many rich men in the colonies, remained on building a new nation. They were reeling from British debt, taxes, and mandates to trade within the empire. They had the most to gain in independence and the most to lose under British colonialism. Politically, they could not help but fear all those British abolitionists opposing American slavery, toasting Phillis Wheatley, and freeing the Virginia runaways. Financially, they could not help but salivate over all those non-British markets for their goods, and all those non-British products they could consume, like the world-renowned sugar that French enslavers forced Africans to grow in what is now Haiti. Rebel Virginia legislators met in Williamsburg in 1774.
One of Virginia’s staunchest rebel legislators sent in a scorching freedom manifesto, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 [British] electors” should make laws for 4 million equal Americans? His majesty, said the author, had rejected our “great object of desire” to abolish slavery and the slave trade, and thus disregarded “the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.” Some politicians folded over in disgust as they took in Thomas Jefferson’s rhetorical gunshot at slavery. But “several of the author’s admirers” loved his clever turn: he had blamed England for American slavery. Printed and circulated, Summary View piloted Jefferson into the clouds of national recognition.15
The British (and some Americans) immediately began questioning the authenticity of a slaveholder throwing a freedom manifesto at the world. No one could question the authenticity of Phillis Wheatley’s 1774 words—“in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call love of freedom”—or the Connecticut Blacks, who a few years later had proclaimed, “We perceive by our own Reflection, that we are endowed with the same Faculties with our masters, and there is nothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us.” All over Revolutionary America, African people were rejecting the racist compact that asserted that they were meant to be enslaved.16
Edward Long watched the rising tidal wave of abolitionism and antiracism from his massive sugar plantation in Jamaica. He realized that a new racial justification was badly needed to save slavery from being abolished. So, in 1774, he breathed new life into polygenesis by issuing his massive book History of Jamaica. Why did it remain so difficult to see that Black people constituted “a different species”? he asked. The ape had “in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negroe race, than the latter bear to White men.” Just as Black people conceived a passion for White people, apes “conceive[d] a passion for the Negroe women,” Long reasoned, as John Locke once had.
Long dedicated a full chapter to discrediting the ability of Jamaica’s old Francis Williams, with, he assured, “the impartiality that becomes me.” Williams’s talents were the result of “the Northern air” of Europe, he said. Long then contradictorily questioned Williams’s talents, quoting Hume’s footnote. Long assailed Williams for looking “down with sovereign contempt on his fellow Blacks,” as if Long did not share that contempt. Williams self-identified as “a white man acting under a black skin,” as Long described it. Williams’s proverbial saying, he said, was, “Shew me a Negroe, and I will shew you a thief.”17
Later that year, Lord Kames, a Scottish judge and philosopher and one of the engines of the Scottish Enlightenment, followed Long’s History with Sketches of the History of Man. The devastating treatise attacked assimilationist thinking and tore apart monogenesis, which assumed that all the races were one species. Kames’s book carried more force than Long’s. Few thinkers in the Western world had the intellectual pedigree of Lord Kames in 1774. He paraphrased Voltaire, another supporter of polygenesis, explaining, “There are different [species] of men as well as of dogs: a mastiff differs not more from a spaniel, than a white man from a negro.” Climates created the species, but they could not change one color to another, Kames maintained. Dismissing Adam and Eve, Kames based his multiple creations on the Tower of Babel story in Genesis.18
Polygenesists loved Sketches. Christian monogenesists bristled at its blasphemy. But the concept of different creation stories and different species started making sense to more and more people in the late eighteenth century as they tried to come to grips with racial difference. How else could they explain such glaring differences in skin color, in culture, in wealth, and in the degree of freedom people enjoyed?
If someone had told Lord Kames that a German doctoral student, fifty-six years his junior, would lead the initial charge against his theory of polygenesis, the old jurist would probably have laughed. And he was known for his sense of humor. Unlike Lord Kames, “I have written this book quite unprejudiced,” the audacious young Johann Friedrich Blumenbach claimed in On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Environment—not separate creations—caused the “variety in humans,” the German wrote in 1775. Blumenbach followed Linnaeus in allotting four “classes of inhabitants,” or races. “The first and most important to us . . . is that of Europe,” he theorized. “All these nations regarded as a whole are white in colour, and if compared with the rest, beautiful in form.”19
A full-blown debate on the origins of humans had exploded into the European world during the American Revolution. Backing up Blumenbach against Long and Lord Kames was none other than the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, soon to be widely heralded for his legendary Critique of Pure Reason. Kant lectured on “the rule of Buffon,” that all humans were one species from the “same natural genus.” Europe was the cradle of humanity, “where man . . . must have departed the least from his original formation.” The inhabitant of Europe had a “more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world,” Kant lectured. “Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of whites.”20
American intellectuals followed this debate between monogenesis and polygenesis in the same way students would follow the debates of their professors. And in following the racist debate, American intellectuals followed the racist debaters. American enslavers and secular intellectuals most likely lined up behind Lord Kames and other polygenesists. Abolitionists and theologians more likely lined up behind Immanuel Kant and other monogenesists. But these American polygenesists and monogenesists had no problem coming together to inflame public sentiment against England and dismiss their own atrocities against enslaved Africans.
One man, Samuel Johnson, had no problem calling out Americans on this hypocrisy. Johnson was perhaps the most illustrious literary voice in British history. When he opined about public debates, intellectuals in America and England alike paid attention. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were among those who admired Johnson’s writings. Johnson did not return the admiration. He loathed Americans’ hatred of authority, their greedy rushes for wealth, their dependence on enslavement, and their way of teaching Christianity to make Blacks docile: “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American,” he once said.21
Benjamin Franklin had spent years across the water lobbying English power for a relaxation of its colonial policies. He was arguing that England was enslaving Americans, and regularly using the analogy that England was making “American whites black.” All along, Samuel Johnson hated this racist analogy. As Franklin sailed back to America at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, Johnson released Taxation No Tyranny. He defended the Coercive Acts, judged Americans as inferior to the British, and advocated the arming of enslaved Africans. “How is it,” Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Someone in the colonies had to officially answer the great Samuel Johnson. That someone was Thomas Jefferson.22