In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters at Old South, 1 Oct.

On Thursday, 1 October, Revolutionary Spaces’s Old South Meeting House will host a showing of Leslie Askew’s documentary In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters.

This 35-minute film “reclaims the life of Phillis Wheatley Peters, America’s first published Black poet and 18th-century congregant at the Old South Meeting House. The film illuminates a largely overlooked chapter of her story: her marriage to John Peters and the radical choices she made in pursuit of autonomy, dignity, and love.”

After the screening, there will be a panel discussion with filmmaker Askew, biographer David Waldstreicher, and Jeneé Osterheldt, the Boston Globe’s Deputy Managing Editor for Culture, Talent, and Development. Audience members will be able to pose questions to the panel.

This documentary has been shown at the American Antiquarian Society, Salem State University, U. Mass. Amherst, and other sites, but this will be the first time it is screened in the poet’s own chosen place of worship.

This program is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 6 P.M., and the program will begin at 6:30. To register for a seat, visit this webpage.

The producer’s website lists other upcoming screenings in the next several weeks.

ADDENDUM on 28 September: This event at Old South has been postponed.

William Jackson in and out of the Boston Jail

One month after he’d decided to sail out of Boston with his goods, the brazier William Jackson was locked up in the town jail, suspected of stealing from his fellow merchants.

Cdre. John Manley had captured him on the Elizabeth. Crowds in Newburyport, Salem, and Boston had jeered him. The Massachusetts Council had ordered him into prison.

Bostonians already had some reasons to dislike Jackson. The great fire of 1760 started in his shop. He defied the non-importation movement in 1770, and on top of that he hosted Capt. Thomas Preston before the Massacre.

Then in 1774 Jackson signed the complimentary Addresses to Govs. Thomas Hutchinson and Thomas Gage. He stayed in town when war broke out. He joined the Associators, the Loyalist militia formed in Boston during the siege, though he tried to explain that away:

General [William] How…isued a Proclamation for the Inhabitants to Associate themselves and bear Arm’s in defence of the Town, being what I did not thing [think] was my duty I did not sing [sign],

sometime After he Isued another recommending to the Inhabitants to Associate themselves for preserving the peace and good Order of the Town by preventing any Riotous doings by the Soldier’s or other’s which I thought Incumbent with every good Citizen to comply

The Patriot government naturally looked askance at any “associators” who fell into its hands.

At the same time, William Jackson had some local support. Unlike Crean Brush and the other merchants locked up alongside him, Jackson had grown up in Boston. His mother Mary and older brother James still lived there. His shop sign, the Brazen Head, was a long-time landmark for locals and visitors.

The jailers had been ordered not to let Jackson have pen and paper, but he could ask his family for help. He stated, “after my Committment my brother wrote Mr [Joshua] Wentworth for my Baggage.”

More surprisingly, other members of Boston’s business community spoke up for him. I already quoted Isaac Smith, Sr.’s comment that he hadn’t really done anything bad. A few years back, Chris Hurley told me that Jackson garnered letters of support from selectmen John Scollay and Samuel Austin, printer John Gill, and other Patriots. (Among those names is John Peters, who could be the future husband of Phillis Wheatley.)

Later William Jackson would tell the Loyalists Commission that he was let out of jail after 126 days, or in August 1776. Some of his fellow prisoners would be locked up for much longer.

TOMORROW: Back to Cape Ann.

Celebrations of Phillis Wheatley’s Boston Pub Date

At the end of November 1773, the ship Dartmouth was moored in Boston’s inner harbor, watched by a militia-style patrol of volunteers to ensure the tea it carried was not unloaded and taxed.

The Rotch family’s vessel, under the command of James Hall, brought other cargo as well. Among those items were copies of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Wheatley had recently become legally free, and she was counting on sales of those books for her income.

Fortunately, by 1 December the local Whigs made clear that everything could be unloaded from the Dartmouth except the East India Company tea, so the books came ashore.

Historians only recently recognized the connection between Wheatley’s book and the Boston Tea Party because no one mentioned it at the time. Wheatley may have been worried 250 years ago today, but by the time she was writing the letters that survive she had her books on dry land and was busy promoting orders.

Wheatley wrote that her books would arrive “in Capt. Hall,” using the common way of referring to a ship by its master rather than its name. About ten years ago Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta, researcher Richard Kigel, and others realized that the captain of that name arriving in Boston around that time had to be James Hall on the Dartmouth.

The sestercentennial of the Tea Party thus coincides with the sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s book in America, and both events are being commemorated this season.

Ada Solanke’s play Phillis in Boston will have its last performances for the year in Old South Meeting House, the poet’s own church, on Sunday, 3 December. That site-specific drama depicts the poet, her friend Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, her recent owner Susannah Wheatley, and abolitionist Prince Hall. Order tickets here.

The next evening, 4 December, the Boston Public Library will host “Faces of Phillis,” a free program discussing the poet from various perspectives. It will start with a staged reading of parts of Solanke’s plays about Wheatley. Then there will be a panel featuring Solanke, sculptor Meredith Bergmann, and Kyera Singleton of the Royall House & Slave Quarters museum. The evening will conclude with Boston’s Poet Laureate, Porsha Olayiwola, performing a dramatic reading of her own work and one of Wheatley’s poems.

“Faces of Phillis” is scheduled to last from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. Register for that event here.

Learning about Phillis Wheatley in London and Boston

Ade Solanke is a British playwright of Nigerian descent. She earned an M.F.A. in screenwriting at U.S.C. on top of British degrees, and she’s now a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London.

Solanke specializes in stories about the African diaspora. In 2018 her play Phillis in London debuted at the Greenwich Book Festival. It dramatized the experiences of Phillis Wheatley in the summer of 1773, visiting the imperial capital to promote the publication of her book of poetry.

On Monday, 30 October, Solanke will be at the Massachusetts Historical Society for a reading from that play and a panel discussion about researching it, titled “Bringing Phillis to Life.” The other panelists will be:

• Tara Bynum, author of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America.
• David Waldstreicher, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley.

That event starts at 5:30 with a reception, and the program will begin at 6:00. Admission is $10, free to members. People can also watch online for free. Register to attend one way or the other through this page.

On Friday, 3 November, Solanke’s new play Phillis in Boston will premiere at the Old South Meeting-House—no doubt the event that’s bringing the playwright to Boston. (There will be preview performances the previous two nights.)

Directed by Regge Life, Phillis in Boston explores the life of the poet soon after she returned from London. Revolutionary Spaces says:

The play celebrates friendship, love, community, and joy by centering Wheatley’s relationships with her friend and confidant Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, and the dynamic abolitionist Prince Hall. Phillis in Boston examines slavery in New England through the lens of Wheatley’s complex relationship with her enslaver Susanna Wheatley, who supported Wheatley’s literary ambitions even as she kept her in bondage.

Phillis in Boston is designed to be performed in the meetinghouse where Wheatley and other revolutionaries were congregants.

Solanke’s play will run in that space through Sunday, 3 December, on evenings from Wednesday through Sunday. Tickets cost $15–35. For more information and to reserve seats, visit this page.

(The striking image above comes from the webpage of an event at the British Library earlier this month, all inspired by the sestercentennial of Wheatley’s book.)

“Lost Years Recovered” Panel Discussion, 21 Sept.

In 1834 Margaretta Matilda Odell anonymously published a book called Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave.

Odell was related to the Wheatley family that enslaved the little African girl named Phillis, educated her, encouraged her writing while still keeping her in bondage, and finally emancipated her in 1774.

That family connection was how Odell got most of her information, but also her biases. She portrayed the Wheatleys in a highly positive light and suggested the worst thing that ever happened to Phillis Wheatley was going off on her own and marrying John Peters.

In discussing the years after the British evacuation, while the war was still going on, Odell wrote:

The inhabitants of Boston were fleeing in all directions; and Phillis accompanied her husband to Wilmington, in this state. In an obscure country village, the necessaries of life are always obtained with more difficulty than in a populous town, and in this season of scarcity, Phillis suffered much from privation—from absolute want—and from painful exertions to which she was unaccustomed, and for which her frail constitution unfitted her.

Wheatley scholars have relied on that sparse information for decades because it was the only thing available. But the latest issue of the New England Quarterly contains a study by Cornelia H. Dayton, professor at the University of Connecticut, which makes a major correction to that record and fills it out in surprising ways.

Odell was wrong in stating that John and Phillis Peters moved to Wilmington. In fact, in 1780 they moved to Middleton, in a different county. Furthermore, Essex County court records reveal why John Peters moved there and why he later had to move the family back to Boston. Read more here.

On Tuesday, 21 September, the first session of this year’s Maier seminar series at the Massachusetts Historical Society will be an online panel discussion of Dayton’s article featuring her, Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta, literary scholar Tara Bynum, and moderator Joseph Rezek of Boston University.

Here is the page for signing up for this seminar. It’s scheduled to start at 5:15 P.M.

Vincent Carretta on John Peters

One of the many notable achievements of Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage is its picture of the man Wheatley married, John Peters.

As Carretta writes in a recent blog post at the Oxford University Press website:

Until very recently, all we’ve had to go on were two very brief nineteenth-century accounts of John Peters (1746?–1801). The first depicts him as a failed grocer with an aspiration to gentility, who married Phillis in April 1778, and who abandoned her as she lay dying in desperate poverty 6 years later. He was also said to have been something of a handsome ne’er-do-well con man, who fraudulently posed as a lawyer or physician. We’re left with the image of a Dickensian villain in a tale of the decline and death of a duped sentimental heroine. But how reliable are those accounts?

Carretta found much more about Peters in local records that previous authors didn’t dig out because the early picture seemed so clear and unappealing. Carretta writes about John Peters and Phillis Wheatley:

Their marriage was initially prosperous and promising, according to tax and court records. Phillis and John Peters lived in a relatively upscale section of Boston. Peters and his white business partner sold rye, wheat, tea, nails, sugar, and other goods in the counties of western Massachusetts during the spring and summer of 1779. At a time when creditors often had to take debtors to court to collect what was owed them, Peters won one lawsuit against a debtor. But he simultaneously lost a much larger lawsuit by one of his own creditors in 1780. . . .

Phillis and John were definitely back in Boston by June 1784, when John Peters, “Labourer,” won another lawsuit against the debtor he had first sued in 1776. Winning, however, gained him nothing because his debtor had fled to England.

The post-war economy hurt lots of people that year. For John and Phillis Peters, the color line made that the situation more dire. John was jailed in September. Phillis died in December.

However, as the economy stabilized, widower Peters began to rise in society once more. In 1791 the town tax records identified him as “Lawyer Physician Gent pintlesmith.” A prosecution for barratry shut down Peters’s practice of taking people to court, but when he died in 1801 the newspaper still referred to him as “Dr John Peters.”

As for “pintlesmith,” Carretta defines that as a skilled craftsman making “the pins or bolts on which other parts, such as rudders or hinges, turn.” However, Francis Grose’s 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue says it was a slang term for a surgeon. More particularly, other references make clear, it meant a surgeon specializing in the effects of venereal diseases on the male member. So that tax identification might have been a way of acknowledging that Peters practiced medicine while giving him low status.

Vincent Carretta on Phillis Wheatley, 2 Nov.

I hope folks have been enjoying the postings on Phillis Wheatley’s path to publication, and how she was regarded in Boston. To learn a lot more, I recommend attending Vincent Carretta’s talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Wednesday, 2 November, at 6:00 P.M., about his new book, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. (Refreshments available for a half-hour before; book signing afterward.)

Carretta has already edited an edition of Wheatley’s poetry for Penguin. This book is, its publisher says, “the first full-length biography” of the poet. “First full-length” is in the eyes of a publisher’s marketing department, but in this case I know the book will have information not in any previous study.

In particular, Carretta has uncovered solid evidence about the black businessman Phillis married in 1778, John Peters. Most of what we’ve known about him came from relatives of the white Wheatleys, who appear to have been somewhat miffed that he became more important to her than they were. Carretta has found documents from Peters himself.

This book follows Carretta’s discoveries about Olaudah Equiano, another very important figure in African-American literature. He found two documents that say Equiano was born in South Carolina, not Africa as described in his autobiography. Not every scholars accepts those documents as more reliable, but Carretta’s book prompted fresh discussion and interpretations of the man.

Carretta also built up the record of Francis Williams’s life as a black man of property and learning in Jamaica, replacing legend and hearsay, as I summarized here. Like Wheatley, Williams became known for his intellectual achievements, making him a symbol for people on both sides of the British-American argument over slavery and racial quality; details about the real person got lost in the shuffle.