Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: History, Poetry, and the Ideals of the American Revolution by G. J. Barker-Benfield

Abstract

Reviewed by: Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: History, Poetry, and the Ideals of the American Revolution by G. J. Barker-Benfield John Saillant (bio) Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: History, Poetry, and the Ideals of the American Revolution g. j. barker-benfield New York: New York University Press, 2018 240 pp. Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom is a new high-water mark in Wheatley scholarship. Six chapters of the book circle around Wheatley's refusal to marry a stranger and accompany him as a missionary to West [End Page 847] Africa. As suggested in the book's title, she chose the life of a free poet expressing and probing the ideals of Revolutionary America over that of a missionary's wife charged with supporting and furthering her husband's evangelical work. Sometime in the winter of 1773–74, Samuel Hopkins mailed Wheatley material about a proposed Christian mission of black Rhode Islanders John Quamine and Bristol Yamma to West Africa. Along with the material was Hopkins's proposal that Wheatley marry one of those black men and accompany him to his mission. Samson Occom voiced the same opinion. The location of the would-be mission was imprecise, to say the least. Hopkins and Ezra Stiles (his theological nemesis but missiological partner) had been collecting information on the Cape Coast mission (in today's Ghana) but did not propose any specific location. It was not until the late 1780s that Granville Town, in the Province of Freedom (later Freetown, Sierra Leone), became the focus of English colonizationist efforts. In several letters of 1774, Wheatley demurred to marry an African-bound man chosen for her. Barker-Benfield explores this choice, elucidating the stakes for Wheatley and, indeed, for the racial unfolding of the American Revolution. His primary sources include Wheatley and those connected to her by religion, such as Hopkins, Occom, and John Thornton. His scholarly company includes Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta and commentators on her poetry, such as (to name a few who have made recent contributions) Christine Levecq, John C. Shields, and Jennifer Thorn. This review summarizes the chapters and offers a few critiques and further observations on the intersection of race and revolutionary ideology. Chapters 1 and 2 treat the life and mission of Philip Quaque, born into a Feta or Fante family, converted to Christianity, and, in 1765, ordained in England, then sent as a Church of England missionary to Cape Coast. Quaque corresponded with Hopkins, and Wheatley knew some details of the letters. These chapters contain important elements of the context in which Wheatley found herself confronting a proposal that she marry and relocate to Africa. One is that an older ideal of a mission to non-Christians was transmuting in the 1770s into a notion of free blacks (some freed-people, some born free in the English American colonies) resettled in a distant location. What came to be called "colonization" around 1820 was broached in the 1770s. A second is that Quaque was hamstrung by his inability to speak the language of the Africans he was to convert (he was [End Page 848] also chaplain to Cape Coast Castle, but white Englishmen rarely heard his message). As a poet, particularly one marketing her own work, Wheatley was sensitive to hardships she would suffer in an unfamiliar language environment. A third is that Quaque's criticism of the slave trade was embedded in a broader critique of immorality, including of fornication and drunkenness. Barker-Benfield all but ridicules Quaque for setting the slave trade and fornication as moral equivalents, but similar views were universal among early Anglo-American abolitionists, black and white. Abolitionism was created piece by piece in the eighteenth century within religious and ideological contexts, so it was never fully formed at birth or disconnected from other agendas. Chapters 3 and 4 cover Wheatley's elegies and her early interactions with the Countess of Huntingdon and several of the countess's emissaries. Barker-Benfield sensibly opines that Wheatley's famed elegies mourned both the deaths of Anglo-Americans within her horizon and the disruptions by the slave trade of the family of the African girl (probably Senegambian) who would in Massachusetts become Phillis Wheatley. In Wheatley's religious...