ABSTRACT
This chapter describes eighteenth-century New England “family slavery” in order to track both the ways that Phillis Wheatley’s experiences as an enslaved child and young person living in Boston shaped her experience and poetry, and also the ways that her reception has been distorted by inattention to the specificity of New England slavery. The publication in London of her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) marks Wheatley as exceptional: this event made her the first African American, and the second American woman, to publish a book in what would become the United States. But Wheatley was also typical in that she was purchased as a child in Boston, under the “family slavery” model that encouraged the purchase of children, and began publishing poems while she was a teenager. Her work thus rewards close reading in relation to specifically New England Protestant forms of print produced for children in the era, such as the New-England Primer, with its depictions of happily dying pious children. To consider the renewed interest in Wheatley in the 1830s and the 1950s is to see indirectly the success of New England’s efforts to disavow its slave-owning past: these readings often reflect the distorting assumption that Southern slavery defined slavery.
