Phillis Wheatley's Gravesite

Forty-nine years after John Quelch was hanged and his body was displayed in Boston harbor, a slave ship called The Phyllis sailed through this same harbor. Aboard this ship was seven-year-old Phillis Wheatley who was sold to a wealthy Boston family in 1753. Slavery has long been regarded as one of the most notorious forms of piracy around the world, but it was also linked to classic piracy. During the Golden Age of Piracy, it wasn’t uncommon for pirates to capture slave ships and steal their valuable “cargo,” the people of African descent who were being trafficked into slavery. Not only was this “cargo” attractive to pirates, but the large physical stature of these ships was appealing to pirates, who were constantly searching for larger ships. In the world of piracy, the size of one’s ship was equivalent to the amount of fear and intimidation one could impose upon other vessels at sea. A large ship meant the probability of hand-to-hand combat was diminished, which decreased the likelihood of injury and death among pirates, and the probability of surrender was increased. There are many instances in which slave ships were hijacked by pirates, and enslaved people were even known to have joined pirate crews and have even “enjoy[ed] some of the utopian democracy” that was often a hallmark aboard pirate ships.[1]

Those many enslaved Africans who did not join pirate ships faced extreme violence and abhorrent conditions during the Middle Passage, and suffered high mortality. Tragically, at least two million Africans died during their time at sea from the inhumane conditions and treatment they suffered and, in some cases, by suicide.[2] Although many associate slavery with the southern portion of the United States, Boston was a relatively popular port for slave ships, meaning that a decent number of enslaved Africans either passed through this city or were made to work here until 1783 when the Commonwealth abolished slavery. Phillis Wheatley, buried in an unmarked grave within this burial ground, was one of the many victims of the transatlantic slave trade. The trauma of the Middle Passage is most often never discussed by those who survived it, due to their unwillingness to revisit this severe emotional and physical pain. Most commonly, survivors of the journey refer to their being “brought” to a new land in an attempt to remove some of the raw emotional pain that goes along with their past experiences.[3] Wheatley writes that, “by seeming cruel fate” she “was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat” as opposed to directly blaming those who forced her into slavery.[4] Still, Phillis Wheatley, who hated the institution of slavery, surely connected her enslavers and the Middle Passage. Like so many other enslaved people, Phillis was given a new, more ‘Americanized’ name upon her arrival in the United States; Phillis came from the name of the ship that carried her across the Atlantic Ocean, and Wheatley was the last name of her ‘masters.’ Bearing the same name as the vessel that ripped her from her family and home in Africa meant that Wheatley was forever tied to the piracy of the Middle Passage.

Unlike other slaves in the United States, Phillis received “an extraordinary education for a woman at the time, and an unprecedented one for a female slave” at the hands of the Wheatley’s daughter, Mary.[5] As an adult, Phillis was quoted as calling Susanna Wheatley her surrogate mother, but Phillis was still a black woman living in America during an increasingly contentious time between slaves and their ‘masters’. The fact that Wheatley wasn’t able to meet many other African Americans with her level of education becomes apparent within her poetry when she refers to her place of birth as a “pagan land” and thanks God for bringing “savior[s]” (or white people) to her rescue.[6] This line of thinking directly correlates with popular sentiment at the time. Many people, including Susanna Wheatley, were strong proponents of “evangelical missions” which traveled to ‘unsaved’ places, such as Africa, in an attempt to Christianize inhabitants, a practice that justified the enslavement of Africans who were deemed to be in need of salvation by white Christians.[7] Having been separated from her culture at such a young age, Wheatley had grown up knowing nothing other than the bigoted attitude that white people had surrounding race and religion. Still, it is unclear whether Phillis was brainwashed into believing that her captors had saved her soul or if she was aware of the fact that taking a strong stand against the institution of slavery would mean her work would never get published. (Indeed, it took much effort for the Wheatleys to arrange the publication of Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral [1773] in London, and it was not until the nineteenth century that Wheatley’s poems appeared in volume form in the U.S.)

Although Wheatley had been considered a prodigy, her race meant that she received very few opportunities and eventually died penniless. We believe she is buried here in Copp's Hill Burying Ground in an umarked grave. Even though her final resting place is uncertain, Wheatley’s work offers a rare glimpse into the life and mind of an enslaved woman and remains a notable achievement.

—Abigail Eastwood

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[1] “Marcus Rediker.” NPR, NPR, www.npr.org/books/authors/138282873/marcus-rediker.
[2] Digital History, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=446.
[3] Barker-Benfield, G. J. Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: History, Poetry, and the Ideals of the American Revolution. New York University Press, 2018.
[4] Wheatley. The Writings of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 40.
[5] Vincent Carretta, “Introduction” in The Writings of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Oxford University Press), xiii.
[6] Phillis Wheatley. The Writings of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Vincent Carretta (Oxford University Press, 2019), 40.
[7] Carretta, “Introduction,” xiii.

Pictured: Phillis Wheatley. Prefatory letters attesting to Wheatley's ability by her white master and a group of prominent white male Bostonians in Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (London, 1773). Memoir and Poems of Phillis Whealtey (Boston, 1835), the first US book that published Wheatley.

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