A Likely Addition to Phillis Wheatley’s Works

Prof. Wendy Raphael Roberts of the University of Albany has announced the discovery of a previously unknown poem by Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of Love Rotch.”

Or, as this press release from the university says, Roberts found a poem in the 1782 commonplace book of Mary Powel Potts (1769–1787) of Pennsylvania, the lines dated to 1767 and attributed to “A Negro Girl about 15 years of age.”

Since we know of only one teen-aged girl of African descent writing poetry in British North America at the time, Phillis Wheatley is the most likely candidate.

Of course, a few years ago we assumed that the black portrait artist advertising in Boston newspapers 250 years ago this season had to be Scipio Moorhead, since he was the only possibility to appear in the published sources. (In fact, one of the main sources about him is a poem by Phillis Wheatley.)

But then Paula Bagger put together manuscript sources (including letters I quoted back here) to bring out the life of Prince Demah, now almost certainly the portraitist in those advertisements.

Thus, while it would be unlikely that two African girls were writing poetry in New England in 1767, it’s not impossible.

There are, however, some additional clues pointing to Wheatley:

• Wheatley often wrote memorial verse like this elegy, particularly when she was starting out. She didn’t necessarily know the people she wrote about.
• The title and date of this poem match the details of Love (Macy) Rotch, a Quaker on Nantucket, who died 14 Nov 1767.
• Wheatley wrote “To a Gentleman on his Voyage to Great Britain for the Recovery of his Health” to Love Rotch’s son Joseph, Jr., reportedly in or before 1767. (Boston newspapers reported in March 1773 that he had died in England.)
• Love Rotch’s other sons, William and Francis, owned the ship Dartmouth, which carried the first edition of Wheatley’s poems back to Boston in 1773.
• We know Wheatley’s poems circulated in manuscript and commonplace books among Philadelphia Quaker women like Mary Powel Potts.

And here’s a new bread crumb: In the 25 Apr 1765 Boston News-Letter and several other newspapers that spring, Love Rotch’s husband and two of her sons, William and Joseph, Jr., asked anyone indebted to the late John Morley to pay up “at the store of Nathaniel Wheatley, in King-Street, Boston.” They authorized Wheatley to collect money due to Morley’s widow. That shows a close business relationship between the Wheatley and Rotch households a couple of years before Phillis wrote her poems.

There are still some mysteries. For one:

The only thing that didn’t make sense to Roberts was the copyist’s claim that Love Rotch was the poet’s mistress, since it was widely known that Susanna Wheatley held that role.

Roberts apparently suggests that the Wheatley family loaned or rented Phillis to the Rotch family. That strikes me as a more complex, less likely explanation than that Potts or her teacher misunderstood the origin of the poem and assumed it reflected the author’s lament for someone she knew well.

Another open question:

Roberts found another anonymous poem in the Potts book that she believes Wheatley wrote but can only speculatively attribute to her. Titled “The Black Rose,” it mourns the death of a Black woman named Rose and uses theology to critique a society that refused to mourn the enslaved and oppressed. It would be the only known elegy Wheatley wrote for a Black woman.

Also a mystery in the press release is the actual text of these poems. Those will presumably appear with Prof. Roberts’s analysis in the upcoming Early American Literature article. On Thursday, 26 January, at 6:00 P.M., the Library Company of Philadelphia will host a virtual talk by Roberts on “A Newly Unearthed Poem by Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and the Future of the Wheatley Canon.”

Scipio Moorhead’s “natural genius for painting”

Back in this post I mused on the mysteries of Scipio Moorhead, subject of Eric Slauter’s article “Looking for Scipio Moorhead” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. I wrote:

Slauter also notes that the only evidence we have for Scipio Moorhead as an artist is Phillis Wheatley’s poem “To S.M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works.” A note on an early copy gives that painter’s full name, and Wheatley addressed another poem to the Moorhead family. But no one else mentioned Scipio Moorhead’s art in surviving documents, and no known examples have survived.

I still haven’t come across any Scipio Moorhead artwork, but I did find another contemporaneous remark about his artistic talent and activity.

The Rev. John Moorhead died in December 1773. Boston’s Presbyterian meetinghouse invited the Rev. David McClure to preach in his place for a while. McClure’s diary entry for 4 May 1774 reads:

Put up at the Widow [Sarah] Moorhead’s. Found the place convenient for study. The family small. The Widow is unhappily deranged. The distraction is of the melancholy cast, silent & averse to company or society. She was once an accomplished wit & beauty, tenderly beloved by her husband. Her distraction was thought to be the effect of an uncommon flow of spirits, and lively imagination, too intensely applied to reading and study.

One son and two daughters survive. The son, (Alexander) is now a surgeon in the british navy in Boston harbour. Her daughter Mary takes care of her poor mother, a negro young man does the housework. Scipio is an ingenious and serious African. He possesses a natural genius for painting, and has taken several tolerable likenesses.

Slauter noted conflicting hints about Scipio’s age, starting with his baptism in 1760. McClure’s reference to him as a “young man” in spring 1774 now stands alongside a reference to him as a “Negro man” late that year and a “likely Negro Lad” in a 1775 advertisement.

Sarah Moorhead was indeed a woman of intellect and talents. Her name appears on a pen portrait of the Rev. Cotton Mather (reproduction from Justin Winsor’s magisterial history of Boston shown above). People have often therefore speculated that she tutored Scipio in art.

It’s a pity that McClure attributed Sarah Moorhead’s depression to too much “reading and study” rather than, say, the death of her husband less than six months before.

The Mysteries of Scipio Moorhead

On 7 Jan 1773 and nine more times that year, the Boston News-Letter ran this advertisement:

At Mr. M’Lean’s, Watch-Maker, near the Town-House, is a Negro Man whose extraordinary Genius has been assisted by one of the best Masters in London; he takes Faces at the lowest Rates. Specimens of his Performances may be seen at said Place.

Some authors have linked that ad to Scipio Moorhead, the only black artist known to be active in Boston around that time.

However, Eric Slauter, author of the article “Looking for Scipio Moorhead” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, thinks that his subject was still an adolescent at that time, not “a Negro Man.”

According to the sources Slauter has lined up, Scipio Moorhead was baptized as a child in King’s Chapel on 11 June 1760. He was still enslaved to the Moorhead family in late 1773 and 1774, and advertised in the 2 Jan 1775 Boston Gazette as “a likely Negro Lad” in an estate sale to be held ironically “not far from Liberty Tree.” (Slauter acknowledges that a late 1774 estate inventory listed “a Negro man, named Scipio,” but the preponderance of evidence suggests he was still in his teens.)

Slauter also notes that the only evidence we have for Scipio Moorhead as an artist is Phillis Wheatley’s poem “To S.M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works.” A note on an early copy gives that painter’s full name, and Wheatley addressed another poem to the Moorhead family. But no one else mentioned Scipio Moorhead’s art in surviving documents, and no known examples have survived.

Many people assume the portrait of Wheatley engraved for the frontispiece of her book, shown above, was based on a painting by Scipio Moorhead, but that’s just a guess based on their acquaintance. All we know for sure is that the Countess of Huntingdon suggested having a picture of Wheatley as the frontispiece, and, since the countess was supporting the printing, the Wheatley family adopted the idea in the spring of 1773.

We now have strong evidence of a black portrait artist working in Boston in early 1773 with three paintings ascribed to him: Prince Demah (Barnes). The one portrait signed with his name—showing Scottish importer William Duguid is dated “February 1773,” just weeks after that newspaper ad first ran. It therefore appears that Prince Demah, not Scipio Moorhead, was that “Negro Man” painting “Faces at the lowest Rates.” And Prince Demah may also have painted Phillis Wheatley.

TOMORROW: Training in London.

The Wheatleys’ Men in London

On 19 Nov 1772, Robert Calef, captain of the Wheatley family’s ship London, set sail from Massachusetts to England. He carried:

• a document signed by eighteen local notables attesting to the genuine poetic talent of the family’s slave Phillis.
• a short biography of Phillis, probably drafted by herself and signed by John Wheatley on 14 November.
• a manuscript collection of her poems, possibly the same one he had failed to sell in London earlier that year.

In London, Calef met with the printer Archibald Bell. According to a letter that Calef sent back to Boston on 7 Jan 1773, about five weeks earlier the printer has met with Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon and read out copies of Phillis Wheatley’s poems. (It’s possible that Calef got the timing wrong, and Bell read from the new manuscript.)

Calef wrote:

he waited upon the Countess of Huntingdon with the Poems, who was greatly pleas’d with them, and pray’d him to Read them; and often would break in upon him and Say, “is not this, or that, very fine? do read another,” and then expressd herself, She found her heart to knit with her and Questioned him much, whether she was Real without a deception? He then Convinc’d her by bringing my Name in question.

Again, this was a person outside Boston, who had never had the chance of meeting Phillis Wheatley, needing assurances about her talents.

Bell planned to meet with the countess when she was in London that January, and to bring Calef (and the Bostonians’ testimonial) along. Lady Huntingdon was clearly leaning toward letting the book be dedicated to her, which would attract attention, and she had made one request:

She desir’d which She Said She hardly tho’t would be denied her, that was to have Phillis’ picture in the frontispiece. So that, if you would get it done it can be Engrav’d here, I do imagine it can be Easily done, and think would contribute greatly to the Sale of the Book.

That news got back to Boston by March 1773. The Wheatleys quickly commissioned a portrait of their slave, most likely painted by another artistically talented slave named Scipio Moorhead. His legal owner was the Rev. John Moorhead, a Presbyterian minister who had signed the attestation.

On 16 April, the Boston News-Letter carried this new advertisement:

PROPOSALS
From Printing in London by SUBSCRIPTION,
A Volume of POEMS,
Dedicated by Permission to the Right Hon. the COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON,
Written by PHILLIS,
A Negro Servant to Mr. Wheatley, of Boston in New-England.

Terms of Subscription.
I. The Book to be neatly printed in 12mo. [duodecimo], on a new Type and a fine Paper, adorned with an elegant Frontispiece, representing the Author.
II. That the Price to Subscribers shall be Two Shillings sewed, or Two Shillings and Six-pence neatly bound.
II [sic]. That every Subscriber deposit One Shilling at the Time of subscribing; and the Remainder to be paid on the Delivery of the Book.
Subscriptions are received by COX & BERRY, in Boston.

Cox and Berry ran a bookstore. Even though this book would include an engraving and be shipped across the Atlantic, its price was about a third less than what Ezekiel Russell had proposed, and thus closer to what Bostonians were used to paying for poetry.

TOMORROW: Boston’s response to this news.