Smithsonian’s Phillis Wheatley Peters Collection Now Online

Last month the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., announced the acquisition of the Phillis Wheatley Peters Collection of materials related to the Revolutionary-era poet.

The unique jewel in this collection is the poem “Ocean” in the poet’s own handwriting. This was one of the poems listed for Phillis Peters’s second collection in 1781, but during the war that announcement didn’t attract enough subscriptions for the book to be printed.

The manuscript of that collection is lost, but some individual poems survive. “Ocean” was first published in 1998. Scholars speculate that Phillis Wheatley wrote it during her third transatlantic crossing 250 years ago as she came back from London.

The collection of thirty objects includes six published in Wheatley’s lifetime, including:

• her collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
• short items that her publisher placed in the May 1773 Gentleman’s Magazine ahead of publication.
• the December 1774 issue of the Royal American Magazine, published in Boston by Joseph Greenleaf, printing “To a Gentleman of the Navy.”
• A shortened version of “On the Death of a Child” printed in the Rev. John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine in 1781.

Other items show Wheatley’s legacy as an author and a symbol of African-American achievement:

• Isaiah Thomas’s 1791 proposal to reprint Wheatley’s first collection with additional material, also unsuccessful.
• reprints of individual poems in the early 1800s. 
• scholarly studies.
• a booklet issued by the Phillis Wheatley Club of Waycross, Georgia, a women’s club, in 1930, shown above.

All of that material is already digitized and available for viewing on the Smithsonian’s website and through the Digital Public Library of America.