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  • An “Impartial Savior”:Religious Pluralism in an Age of Revolution
  • Antonio T. Bly
Vincent Carretta , Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Pp. xiv + 304. Illus. Index. $31.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Thomas S. Kidd , God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Pp. vi + 298. Index. $26.00.

“Take him, ye wretched, for your only good,“Take him ye starving sinners, for your food;“Ye thirsty, come to this life-giving stream,“Ye preachers, take him for your joyful theme;“Take him my dear Americans, he said,“Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid:“Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you,Impartial Saviour is his title due:“Wash’d in the fountain of redeeming blood,“You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God”

—Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Archibald Bell, 1773), 23.

Shortly after George Whitefield’s death on 30 September 1770, Phillis Wheatley wrote an elegy that celebrated the life of the Great Awakening firebrand. Besides acknowledging the influence of the minister’s oratory, the slave-poet’s “song” captured unwittingly the spirit of an age in American history. Between 1740 and 1776, evangelical fire had burned across British North America, stirring the passions of the people irrespective of their race or gender, class or creed. At the center of the firestorm lay millennialism—the idea that an “Impartial Savior” promised everyone, be he low or wretched sinner or downtrodden African, grace and therefore paradise. Judging from Vincent Carretta’s biography, Phillis Wheatley embraced that promise; in Thomas Kidd’s history of the American Revolution, so, too, did the founding fathers.

Based on an extensive body of archival sources, Carretta, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, tells a compelling story about the mother of the African American belletristic tradition, thus adding to the Wheatley canon. Building on the work of Merle A. Richmond, William H. Robinson, Julian D. Mason Jr., and, more recently, John C. Shields, this full-length biography explores a series of intertwined questions regarding the first person of African descent to publish a book in British North America: “Where did she come from? How did Wheatley overcome the odds against her to gain transatlantic fame? How active a role did she play in the production and distribution of her writings? How was she able to establish a network of associations that included many of the most important people in North American and British military, political, religious, and social life? What more can be found about Phillis Wheatley’s husband, John Peters? Did Phillis die a celebrity or in desperate obscurity?” (x). Examining these questions and others, Carretta explicates the life of the slave-poet once thought too African or too black for a number of her contemporary critics, and too accommodating or too whitewashed for many of her modern ones. [End Page 443]

For Carretta, however, the truth about the historical person who was Phillis Wheatley resides somewhere in the middle of these conflicting views. Shortly after being brought from Africa to America in 1761, the seven- or eight-year-old girl attracted the attention of Susana Wheatley, a pious Congregationalist, who pitied the child partly because she reminded her of her own deceased daughter (14). In the Wheatley household, the African native’s exposure to Christianity afforded her the opportunity to learn to read and write. “Phillis Wheatley’s writings,” Carretta explains, reveal “a familiarity with Classical literature, at least in translation, as well as geography, history, politics, and English literature” (23). Although such training had been considered “unusual subjects for girls at the time,” the Wheatleys’ treatment of their bondservant “enabled them to publicize their status, piety, and charity. They also used her to display their commitment to evangelical Christianity” (40). As the protégée of her mistress, Phillis also benefited significantly from the Wheatleys’ coterie of friends. By Carretta’s account, she “employed evangelical Christianity as both the means and the end for getting into print” (44). In this setting, Phillis wrote often of the death and apotheosis of heralded Bostonians or other noteworthy subjects...

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