The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Bible, the only book which had been put in her hands, became steeped in the poetic images of which it is full, and at the age of
seventeen, published a number of poems in which there is imagination, poetry, and zeal, though no correctness nor order nor interest. I read them with some surprise.
    Jefferson begged to differ. In his response to his French correspondent’s questions, as outlined in Queries VI and XIV of the Notes , Jefferson lays out clearly his views. “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” The criticism comes in a passage setting out his views on the mental capacity of the various races of man. “In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” Jefferson writes about blacks; he continues:
    Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites, in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations
of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
    Echoing Hume and Kant, he argues that blacks are exposed daily to “countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree,” yet they have absorbed little or nothing from this exposure. “Never yet,” said Jefferson, “could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” On the other hand, Jefferson has qualified praise for the African’s musical propensities.
    In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. . . . Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.
    Jefferson’s denigration of Wheatley seems aimed at the antislavery writers who since 1773 had cited her so frequently as proof positive of the equality of the African, and therefore as a reason to abolish slavery. Jefferson’s critique of Phillis is unusually harsh:
    Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but not poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whatley [sic]; but it could not produce a poet.
    Jefferson was quite convinced that Wheatley’s finer sentiments, such as her piety, are quite separate from the “love” needed to write poetry. What Jefferson meant is quite simple. He believed that Africans have human souls, they merely lack the intellectual endowments of other races. Like his contemporaries,
he separated “what we would call intelligence from the capacity for religious experience.” This division allows for both the religious conversion of slaves, as well as for the perpetuation of the principle of black inferiority. Guilt, as well as the growing evidence that blacks are indeed Homo sapiens, meant that Africans could no longer be regarded as brutes. So Jefferson accepted the souls and humanity of slaves, while still maintaining their inferiority. Phillis is, for Jefferson, an example of a product of religion, of mindless repetition and imitation, without being the product of intellect, of reflection. True art requires a sublime combination of feeling and reflection.
    To illustrate more convincingly the inherent inferiority of the black mind, Jefferson compared the slaves in America to the ones of ancient Greece and Rome. After exposing the even greater duress under which the Roman slaves lived, Jefferson pointed to three famous, learned ones: “Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus,
were slaves. But they were of the race of whites.” From this fact, Jefferson drew his