TY - DATA AU - Barker-Benfield,G.J. TI - Phillis Wheatley Chooses Freedom: History, Poetry, and the Ideals of the American Revolution SN - 9781479875672 U1 - 811/.1 23 PY - 2018///] CY - New York, NY PB - New York University Press KW - African American women poets KW - Biography KW - Enslaved women KW - United States KW - Poets, American KW - Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 KW - Women slaves KW - HISTORY / African American KW - bisacsh KW - African poet KW - African slaves KW - African-American poet KW - American Revolution KW - Anglican KW - Cape Coast KW - Christian missionary KW - Christian poetry KW - Christian slave conversion KW - Christianized African KW - Cuaco KW - England KW - George Washington KW - Lady Huntingdon KW - Phillis Wheatley KW - Rev Samuel Hopkins KW - Samuel Hopkins KW - Selina Countess of Huntingdon KW - United States slavery KW - Whitefield KW - black poetry KW - emancipated slaves KW - freed slaves KW - freedom from slavery KW - liberty for all KW - patronage KW - slave fort KW - slave trade N1 - restricted access N2 - The dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, a free, black poet who resisted the pressures of arranged marriage, truly embodying the ideals of the American RevolutionThere is an uncomfortable paradox at the heart of the American Revolution: many of the men leading the war for independence were slave owners, contradicting the ideal of freedom that they claimed to represent. Meanwhile, abolitionist sentiments of the time contained contradictions as well. Abolitionists encouraged freed Christianized slaves to return to Africa. In this way, they hoped to send more missionaries to Africa in order to Christianize the continent and, at the same time, to send free blacks away from America. This tension is revealed through the dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, an African-American poet who refused to marry a man she had never met and return with him to Africa as a missionary. She was enslaved in Africa as a child and transported to Boston, where she was sold to an evangelical family. Agreeing to the proposed marriage – arranged by Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins – would have echoed the social mores of the time, particularly those for enslaved black women. However, due to her prodigious talents as a poet, Wheatley won her freedom a year prior to Hopkins’ arrangement, allowing her to take her future into her own hands. G.J. Barker-Benfield considers Wheatley’s story and Hopkins’s plan in the broader context of the American Revolution. The ideals of the revolution motivated Hopkins and some of his contemporaries to propose freeing African slaves and thus address the “monstrous inconsistency” fundamental to the white slave owners leading the revolution. In so doing, they presented themselves as freedom fighters who resisted the threat of slavery at the hands of British tyranny. Wheatley challenged this inconsistency and, taking the revolutionaries’ rhetoric seriously, called for liberty for all human hearts: women’s and men’s, blacks’ and whites’ UR - https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479875672.001.0001 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781479875672 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781479875672/original ER -