Acquired by the department of rare books and special collections in Thomas Cooper Library, the book is the first copy of Wheatley’s “Poems” on record for any library in South Carolina. The university’s library is the first to make a fully searchable digital copy of the first edition available online for use by students in grades 6 – 12 and college. It is available at the Web site: www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/wheatley/wheatleyp.html

Mary Lu Dalton, chairman of the English department at Dreher High School in Columbia, said having access to Wheatley’s book online will greatly enhance the teaching of the text in literature and history classrooms throughout South Carolina.

“Students in Columbia have grown up visiting the Wheatley branch of the Richland County Public Library and have learned about Wheatley and her writing,” Dalton said. “Being able to see and read ‘Poems’ online will appeal to our students, who today are drawn by multi-media. It will bring her work alive in new ways and give greater meaning to our classroom discussions about the significance of her poems and their imagery and her use of poetic devices. It is a primary source that will make her book real for students. This is exciting news.”

The poems of Phillis Wheatley (1753-84) are read and studied by students and scholars in various disciplines, most notably American literature, African-American studies and women’s studies. The portrait of Wheatley on the book’s title page is the only surviving work attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an African-American slave artist who lived in Boston in the 1700s.

University of Maryland English professor Dr. Vincent Carretta, a leading scholar of 18th-century African and African-American literature, wrote the introduction for the university’s digital copy of Wheatley’s “Poems.” Carretta describes Wheatley as “the mother of African-American literature.”

The library’s first-edition copy of “Poems” was acquired with support from the university’s College of Arts & Sciences and from library endowments. The university’s newly established African American Research Program, under the direction of historian Dr. Daniel Littlefield, played an instrumental role in the book’s acquisition.

“The library is proud to partner with the College of Arts & Sciences and its African American Research Program to make this very significant acquisition possible,” Tom McNally, interim dean of the libraries, said. “The acquisition and facsimile are among several initiatives by the African American Research Program, which is housed in new offices in Thomas Cooper Library.”

Littlefield said making Wheatley’s book available in a digital form will give scholars the opportunity to understand more fully the enslaved black woman and the response her writings received in 18th-century America.

“As one of the first published African-American writers, Phillis Wheatley achieved unusual stature in the 18th-century Atlantic world,” Littlefield said. “USC’s offering of a searchable digital rendering of her work will be of immense importance to scholars of American and African-American literature, history and society.”

1753 -- Born in West Africa, in the Gambia region.
1761 -- Brought on the slave ship, “Phillis,” to Boston, Mass., and bought by merchant John Wheatley for his wife, Susanna.
1761-63 -- Taught to read and write English by the Wheatley’s 18-year-old daughter, Mary.
1767 -- Published first poem in a newspaper, the “Newport Mercury.”
1770 -- Wrote an elegy on the death of the Calvinist preacher, George Whitfield, which was published in Boston and London the next year.
1771 -- Baptized in the Old South Church, Boston.
1772 -- Susanna Wheatley seeks supporters for publishing Wheatley’s poems in a book.
1773 -- In June, Wheatley sails to London, where her book is published in August. The book is dedicated to Whitfield’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, and contains a prefatory notice by prominent Bostonians certifying that the work is Wheatley’s. In September, Wheatley returns to Boston and in October is given her freedom, though she remains with the Wheatleys.
1774 -- Susanna Wheatley dies.
1775 -- John Wheatley, a loyalist, leaves Boston, and Phillis moves to Providence, Rhode Island, with Mary Wheatley (now married). In October, Wheatley publishes a poem to Gen. Washington.
1778 -- Wheatley marries John Peters, a free black.
1779 -- Tries unsuccessfully to recruit subscribers for her second volume of poems.
1784 -- Wheatley dies after the birth of her third child. All three of her children died early.
1786 -- First American edition of Wheatley’s “Poems” is published in Philadelphia.

The engraved portrait of Wheatley that introduces her “Poems” (1773) is attributed to the African American artist Scipio Moorhead. The portrait was probably drawn in Boston by Moorhead and engraved in London. Moorhead was slave to a Boston clergyman, the Rev. John Moorhead, whose wife, Sarah, taught drawing and encouraged Moorhead’s art. Wheatley included a poem “To S.M., a young African painter, on seeing his works.” In her book, she writes of her first response to his work:

When first thy pencil did those beauties give, And breathing figures learnt from thee to live, How did those prospects give my soul delight, A new creation rushing on my sight!

For more information on Wheatley and “Poems,” visit the university library Web site: www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/wheatley/carretta.html . The Web site features an essay by Dr. Vincent Carretta, as well as the digital facsimile of the “Poems.”