The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Read Online Free PDF Page B

early Wheatley criticism is essentially rebuttal of Jeffersonian disdain.” The most crucial aspect needing refutation was Jefferson’s claim of the black’s general inferiority to Europeans.
    If Phillis Wheatley was the mother of African-American literature, there is a sense in which Thomas Jefferson can be thought of as its midwife. Blacks took on Jefferson’s challenge immediately following the Revolution. As the historian Benjamin Quarles puts it, “Still unspent, the spirit of ’76 found new outlets among blacks. The Revolutionary War as a black declaration of independence took on a power of its own, fueled by residual revolutionary rhetoric and sustained by the memory of fallen heroes and the cloud of the living black witness.” Moreover, Jefferson’s comments
about the role of their literature in any meaningful assessment of the African-American’s civil rights became the strongest motivation for blacks to create a body of literature that would implicitly prove Jefferson wrong. This is Wheatley’s, and Jefferson’s, curious legacy in American literature.
    It must be said that part of the fascination of black intellectuals with Jefferson in the nineteenth century stemmed from rumors about his paternity of Sally Hemings’s children. Rather than attempt to wade through complex DNA data and genealogical records, I would rather point to the tradition in black letters of naming Jefferson as Sally’s lover, which had its origins in the nineteenth century. For example, at an 1860 meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, a speaker described Jefferson as “a good antislavery man.” According to the scholar Dorothy Sterling, he was interrupted by shouts that “he sold his daughter!” The man who took the floor was Robert Purvis, who had inherited “a substantial fortune” from his white
father, a successful cotton broker, and had attended both Pittsfield and Amherst academies. He was a major figure in the abolitionist movement, becoming in 1839 the first president of the Vigilant Committee, which was in his words, “the first organized society of the Underground Railroad.” He was well educated, articulate, and militant about black rights. He stood up and declared:
    Mr. Chairman, I am astonished at the audacity of the gentleman from Long Island in claiming Thomas Jefferson to be an anti-slavery man. Sir, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and I hold all slaveholders to be tyrants and robbers. It is said that Thomas Jefferson sold his own daughter. This if true proves him to have been a scoundrel as well as a tyrant!
    Sir, I am free to confess that I have no veneration for the founders of this government, I do not share with others in their veneration for the “father of our country.”
General Washington was a slaveholder, General Washington as President of the United States signed the fugitive Slave bill. General Washington tries, under the bill, to recover a poor woman flying through the perils and toils (thereby showing a truer courage than ever he did) that she might escape the yoke of slavery on his plantation.
    When a man professing to be an Abolitionist has the—has the—Sir, I don’t want to say audacity, but I can’t think of any other word—to come here and hold a slaveholder as a good antislavery man, I forget all my resolutions to be guarded and speak with a vehemence which I afterwards regret.
    Purvis must later have regretted calling Jefferson a “scoundrel” in his spoken remarks, because he deleted that word from the printed version.
    The subject of Jefferson’s black children assumed one of its first and most popular outlets
in 1853, in William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter . Published in London, as Wheatley’s poem had been, it was the first novel to be published by an African American. Brown, the author of a slave narrative second only in