Robert
BROPHY Classics, A Clever Wench & Columbia
for the USA: Phillis Wheatley
This paper discusses the creation of the
neo-Latin Columbia (Gem of the Ocean) for the USA. It
shows that Columbia for the USA was first penned by the
slave-poet Phillis Wheatley in 1775. She learned at least
four languages and earned her freedom by her translations
of the Classics and her poetry; hence, a "clever wench"
to Jefferson and other racist Rationalists. Admired by
Hancock and Washington, she exchanged flirtatious dueling
verses with John Paul Jones. To the poetry where she
created Columbia, she also added the theme that American
freedom must be universal, for black and white Americans
alike. She demanded an end to slavery in the new country
"conceived in liberty." She stressed this demand in all
her Columbian poems. The same themes appear in her
teenage translation of Ovid Metamorphoses 6 on
Niobe. Her version of Ovid in neo-Classic verse parallels
her own poetic cries for freedom, lamenting the forcible
loss of children cruelly torn from their mother. Phillis'
own mother and countless other Africans were reduced like
Niobe, to living death, sin lavery. Wheatley uniquely
stresses Niobe's African connection, and implies that
Niobe is a mother like Africa, children taken away from
her forever, by the slave trade. Her later poems pleads
with Columbia that this same injustice end.
Enslaved in Senegambia at 4 years old, she
was named Phillis for the ship she crossed on, and
Wheatley for the Boston merchant family who bought her,
pronounced "Whately" as Jefferson spelled it. She became
a devout New England Christian, and multi-lingual poet.
She learned English, her original West African language,
Latin, Hebrew and possibly Greek. The popularity and
neo-Classical skill of her verses earned her freedom as a
young woman, at the same time that a full volume of her
verse was published in London in mid-1773. She and her
mistress returned to America, Phillis more devoted to the
American cause than the older Wheatleys. By mid-October
1773 at latest she was free, by 1778 she married an
"uppity" free black man, John Peters; he may have fought
in the Revolution; I use her full name Wheatley Peters.
By Christmas 1784 after her final Columbian poem, Liberty
and Peace appeared, she and their three children were
dead.
This
paper shows that she most probably created the use and
description of Columbia, why she was denied her priority.
The other candidates are a Princeton graduate, classmate
of James Madison, and called the Poet of the American
Revolution, who used the word around the same time, and
Mercy Otis Warren, a wealthy, independent woman of two
great patriot families, Otis by birth and Warren by
marriage. Ex-slave Phillis Wheatley had little chance to
be considered creator of poetic names for America over
those higher-status patriots.