American Antiquarian Society | "Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory"
Early today — Wednesday, March 22 — at 4:00 p.m., I attended the webinar “Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory” hosted by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, MA. This talk featured five speakers who each held a unique perspective on the life and work of Revolutionary War era African-American poet Phillis Wheatley Peters.
The first presentation was given by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, an English professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of The Age of Phillis, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020 and long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry. Jeffers described her first encounter with the works of Wheatley Peters while an English student at Talladega College, an HBCU in Alabama. In 2003, she read The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. When Jeffers became a Robert and Charlotte Baron Artist Fellow at the AAS in July 2009, she read the memoir of Margaretta Matilda Odell, a White woman and friend of the Wheatley family who created an unflattering and likely untrue portrait of Wheatley Peters and her husband, John Peters. The experience, along with the chance to hold a first edition printing of Wheatley Peters’ poems, inspired Jeffers to write her own book.
The second presenter was Dr. Barbara McCaskill, an English professor at the University of Georgia and author on multiple books on African American Literature. Dr. McCaskill explained how the work of Wheatley Peters differed from works of similar authors. While many books published during the late 18th and early 19th century included a quotation from Old Testament prophets telling readers to heed an angry God, and books written by abolitionist or African American authors quoted other abolitionists, Wheatley Peters quoted herself. Dr. McCaskill described this decision as a “subversive strategy” for Wheatley Peters to prove that she had authority and the power to speak for herself. This strategy was mimicked by later writers, especially those who wrote slave narratives or fugitive narratives. Author Harriet Ann Jacobs included her own words alongside those from the book of Isaiah in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Admirers of Wheatley Peters’ poetry included printer and bookseller Isaac Knapps, an abolitionist and collaborator with William Lloyd Garrison in Boston. Knapps sold books written by Olaudah Equiano, Charles Ball, and John Gabriel Stedman. Knapp and Garrison reprinted most of Wheatley Peters’ poems in the Liberator, their abolitionist newspaper, along with works of other women, including Sarah Moore Grimké and Lydia Maria Child. Dr. McCaskill emphasized how “19th century activism and reform benefited from participation of American women”.
Dr. Sarah Ruffing Robbins, a professor of English Literature at Texas Christian University (TCU), served as the third speaker. Thanks in part to the work of Dr. Robbins, the Mary Couts Burnett Library at TCU hosts an extensive overview on the life and work of Wheatley Peters. Dr. Robbins’ focused on the work of Charles F. Heartman, a German-American immigrant who may have felt a kinship with Wheatley because of his struggles. In Heartman’s reprints, he refers to the author as both Phillis Wheatley and Phillis Peters, acknowledging that she was married and free by the end of her life. Archives of the Heartman editions are found in archives around the United States, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Historical Society, New York Historical Society, and Connecticut Historical Society. Heartman used recovered, earlier versions of Wheatley Peters poems, emphasizing that she wrote for people in her community. Expanding on a six-page listing from Heartman’s bibliography of Wheatley Peters’s writing, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, for whom the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library is named, included her in his book listing contributors to “American Negro Poetry”. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, an African American writer and activist, reprinted Wheatley Peters’s poetry to enable “children of the race to read and learn about their own people”.
Curator Elizabeth Watts Pope used a document camera to show materials from the AAS collections. They have three first-edition copies of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Wheatley Peters’ book published in 1773. AAS prefers to have multiple copies of the books to show variants in publications. For example, the portrait of the Wheatley Peters and the front of the book sometimes had crosshatches in the background, while other versions have a smoother background. The first copy of the book is in great condition considering its age, with an original binding and gilded edges. The second copy has a newer binding with many handwritten annotations. The notes reference Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved African-American artist from Boston who may have painted the original portrait on which the engravings of Wheatley Peters are based. He was memorialized in Wheatley Peters’ poem “To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works”; in fact, Moorhead’s name would not have been remembered if not from this note. One past owner, based on a name written on an early page, was K.B. Stratford, a nephew of Thomas Walcott who donated an extraordinarily large number of materials to AAS. The third copy was donated to AAS by former staff member Nancy Burkett. The book had a binding repair sewn by an amateur, and several missing pieces to the title page, but it is a signed copy of the book. Wheatley Peters had signed all copies sent to America from the London publisher to mark it as a genuine first edition. This book may have been sold by Reverend Samson Occum, an ordained Presbyterian minister, bookseller, and member of the Mohegan Tribe. Alternatively, enslaved African woman Obour Tanner of Newport, RI was also permitted to sell Wheatley Peters’ book.
Next, curator Ashley Cataldo took over the document camera to show original manuscript poems written by Wheatley Peters. These items were also from the collection donated by Thomas Walcott and catalogued by librarian Christopher Columbus Baldwin (who kept an intricate diary until moments before his sudden death in a stagecoach accident at age 35, won the best name award for today, and shared the name with multiple people). The works of Wheatley Peters appear in multiple print materials owned by AAS, including copies of the Massachusetts Spy, a newspaper published by Isaiah Thomas, Sr. and Ebenezer Turell Andrews. They also printed a second edition of Poems at the request of John Peters in 1802. Other editions of the book, printed in 1804 and 1816, came from the library of book collector George Brinley during the 1870s. Poems made appearances in the 1848 anthology The American Female Poets compiled by Caroline May and the 1855 anthology Cyclopedia of American Literature, while brief a brief biography was printed in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution by William Cooper Null.
Wrapping up the end of the talk, AAS programs coordinator Amanda Kondek moderated the chat and led a quick Q&A. Dr. McCaskill and Dr. Robbins reminded viewers that they part of the Wheatley Peters Project, a series of events taking place this year, the 250th anniversary of the publication of Poems. I will be on the lookout for future events related to this project, as I am excited to learn more about Phillis Wheatley Peters and the writers whom she inspired.