George Washington wasn’t accustomed to getting mail from Black women, but one letter got his attention. It came from an African-born twenty-something named Phillis Wheatley, with an enclosed poem “To His Excellency George Washington.” At the time he received it, December 1775, Washington was more concerned with the politics of war than with the poetry of women. But Wheatley was concerned with Black equality, and she took her thoughts right to the top.
The young Black woman had arrived in Boston on the slave ship Phillis in 1761, when she was just a child—and after a long and grueling Atlantic voyage, a very skinny and frail child at that.
Given the girl’s young age and weakened condition, a wealthy Boston woman, Susanna Wheatley, bought her at a bargain price, planning on making her a domestic servant. Mrs. Wheatley and her husband, John, discarded the girl’s African name (which has been lost to history) and gave her their last name and, for a . rst name, the name of the ship that her brought her into slavery in Massachusetts. Phillis Wheatley she became.
