Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) Memoir and poems of Phillis Wheatley, a native African and a slave (Boston, 1839)
Having endured the Middle Passage as a young girl, Wheatley was purchased by a Boston family in the 1760s. Her masters taught her how to read and write and were impressed when she began penning her own poetry. Wheatley's writings, which gained her freedom and fame, disproved the belief that blacks were innately intellectually inferior to whites. This edition features the first biography of Wheatley and a timely introduction that concludes, "the African shall be as the American, and the black man as the white."
*AC7.W5602.834mc (A) – Gift of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1839.