“Slavery” and “To Mrs. Eliot on the Death of Her Child”Two New Manuscript Poems Connected to Phillis Wheatley by the Bostonian Poet Ruth Barrell Andrews Wendy Raphael Roberts (bio) A commonplace book containing two previously unknown poems connected to Phillis Wheatley is a significant recent discovery that sheds fresh light on Wheatley’s reception and participation in the local manuscript culture of Boston. The poems, entitled “Slavery” and “To Mrs. Eliot on the Death of Her Child,” reveal that poetic coteries in Boston, and specific manuscript poets in particular, were more active in Wheatley’s career than has been understood. This essay introduces the lately uncovered poet Ruth Barrell Andrews (1749–1831) and two of her poems that relate directly to Wheatley. Ruth Barrell Andrews wrote the poem “Slavery” at a crucial junction in Phillis Wheatley’s career: on December 1, 1772, while Wheatley’s manuscript was en route to London. With the encouragement of friends, one of whom might well have been Andrews, the determined Wheatley had just pulled her fledgling subscription drive from the local printer in Boston and set her sights on the more prestigious London press. Just weeks earlier, Wheatley had secured the necessary documentation she needed to ensure her manuscript’s publication in London, which included an attestation to confirm her authorship signed by the elite men of Boston. A flurry of activity to promote the sable muse and secure the Countess of Hunting-don as her patron had already begun, and supporters at home were anxious to see the poems in print. John Andrews, a Boston lawyer and Ruth’s husband, had already expressed impatience earlier that spring with the doomed Boston printing. In a letter to Ruth’s brother, the Philadelphian merchant William Barrell, John complained, “Its above two months since [End Page 665] I subscribed for Phillis’s poems, which I expected to have sent you long ago, but the want of Spirit to carry on any thing of the kind here has prevented it, as they are not yet publish’d” (May 29, 1772). In contrast to this “want of Spirit” in her local Bostonians, the well-connected poet Ruth Barrell Andrews was subsequently inspired to promote and to celebrate Wheatley’s book, as well as to proclaim the meaning of its imminent publication. The discovery of Andrews’s poem “Slavery” is particularly important because it inverts the story of Wheatley’s success that scholars have often told through documents authored by her male supporters. Because the oft-cited correspondence concerning Wheatley’s forthcoming volume of poetry took place between two men close to Ruth Barrell Andrews, John Andrews and William Barrell, her own significant role has been overlooked. However, apparently at least one woman in the background of their letters was much more important to the story than has been understood. Following Joanna Brooks’s research, which effectively established that Wheatley made her career “not by securing a single endorsement by powerful men, but by cultivating an intricate network of relationships among white women,” one might well expect that at least one of these white women who had judged Wheatley’s verse favorably and circulated it widely would have publicly claimed some stake in the poet’s approaching success (7–8).1 Andrews’s poem “Slavery,” which survives in a manuscript volume of her poetry at the Boston Public Library, as well as in a handwritten copy made by her nephew at the Massachusetts Historical Society, seems to have done just that.2 The fact that Andrews authored the poem is no small matter. Though her verse, which seems to have been primarily, if not exclusively, in manuscript, has been unknown to literary scholars until now, it was well known to the upper echelon of Boston, as she was the sister to several successful merchants, including one of the city’s wealthiest, Joseph Barrell. More importantly, she descended from a family of esteemed Boston writers. Ruth Barrell Andrews was the daughter of Ruth Green Barrell, a poet in her own right, whose brother, the rum distiller Joseph Green, was the archpoet of the tavern literati and the most celebrated wit of Boston. Ruth Green Barrell, along with her husband...