The Trials of Phillis Wheatley

The details of the meeting have been lost to history, but I have often imagined how it might have happened. She entered the room—perhaps in Boston’s Town Hall, the Old Colony House—carrying a manuscript consisting of twenty-odd poems that she claims to have written. No doubt the young woman would have been demure, soft-spoken, and frightened, for she was about to undergo one of the oddest oral examinations on record, one that would determine the course of her life and the fate of her work, and one that, ultimately, would determine whether she remained a slave or would be set free. The stakes, in other words, were as high as they could get for an oral exam. She is on trial and so is her race.

She would have been familiar with the names of the gentlemen assembled in this room. For there, perhaps gathered in a semicircle, would have sat an astonishingly influential group of the colony’s citizens determined to satisfy for themselves, and thus put to rest, fundamental questions about the authenticity of this woman’s literary achievements. Their interrogation of this witness, and her answers, would determine not only this woman’s fate but the subsequent direction of the antislavery movement, as well as the birth of what a later commentator would call “a new species of literature,” the literature written by slaves.

Who would this young woman have confronted that day in the early autumn of 1772? At the center no doubt would have sat His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts. Hutchinson, a colonial historian and a royal official, who would end his life in England as a loyalist refugee, was born in Boston into a wealthy family descended from merchants. (Anne Hutchinson was also an ancestor.) Young Thomas, we are told, preferred “reading history to playing with other children” and early on became an admirer of Charles I. So precocious was he that he entered Harvard College at the age of twelve, “where,” his biographer tells us, “his social standing entitled him to be ranked third in his class.” (Even back then, grade inflation loomed on the banks of the Charles River.)

Hutchinson was the governor between 1769 and 1774. Following the Boston Tea Party, Hutchinson went to London “for consultations.” His family joined him in exile in 1776. Just four years following this examination, he would receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford on, of all days, July 4, 1776. Hutchinson never returned to his beloved estate in Milton, Massachusetts.

At Hutchinson’s side in the makeshift seminar room would have sat Andrew Oliver, the colony’s lieutenant governor (and Hutchinson’s brother-in-law through his wife’s sister). Oliver, who took the A.B. and M.A. degrees from Harvard, became—along with his brother and business partners, Peter and Thomas Hutchinson—leaders of the faction that dominated provincial Massachusetts politics until the eve of the Revolution. Oliver imprudently allowed himself to be publicly identified as a supporter of the Stamp Act of