1753-1784
Poet

On the eve of the American Revolution an amazing twenty-year-old named Phillis Wheatly wrote about slave owners:

...In every human breast God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; It is impatient of oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle Lives in us. God grant Deliverance in His own Way and Time, and get him honour upon Those whose avarice impels them to countenance and help forward that Calamities of their fellow creatures. This I desire not For their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are So diametrically opposite. How well the cry for liberty, And the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree....

When Phillis Wheatley wrote the above letter to Samson Occom, in February 1774, she was barely twenty years old. These blisteringly direct and condemning words are uncharacteristic of the "face" that the young poet had on most occasions shown to her world. Wheatley had been in the strange new world for most of her life and had seen and suffered much in her short time. Stolen from her African homeland, Wheatley was sold on the slave block in Boston. Educated in the pious home of John and Susanna Wheatley, she accepted the Christian faith offered her in the Old South Church. She had won national and international acclaim as a gifted writer of poetry, and she had made the voyage across the Atlantic three times. But her greatest accomplishment of all was that she survived.