Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is the first
published volume of poetry by an African-American author. This
fact in itself would make the book significant, but Phillis
Wheatley’s Poems has a complicated and fascinating history of
its own. Readers of the 1773 first edition would have been
familiar with biographical details of Wheatley’s life. Born
around 1754, the future poet was kidnapped from some part of
Africa and transported to Boston aboard the slave ship Phillis
in 1761. A frail child of not more than seven, she miraculously
survived a transatlantic journey that killed nearly a quarter of
her fellow-passengers (a figure slightly higher than average for
slave ships of that time). Most of the Phillis’s human cargo was
sold in the Caribbean. Only those unfit for work on the
plantations—women, children, the elderly, sick, or
disabled—continued on to Boston to be sold as domestic servants.
Slavery was legal in all of the British colonies in the mid-18th
century, but African slaves were fairly