Description The dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, a free, black poet who resisted the pressures of arranged marriage, truly embodying the Ideals of the American Revolution There 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.
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\'..
In so doing, they presented themselves as freedom fighters who resisted the threat of slavery at the hands of British tyranny.
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.
Barker-Benfield considers Wheatley\'s story and Hopkins\'s plan in the broader context of the American Revolution.
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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.
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.
She was enslaved in Africa as a child and transported to Boston, where she was sold to an evangelical family.
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.
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.
Abolitionists encouraged freed Christianized slaves to return to Africa.
Meanwhile, abolitionist sentiments of the time contained contradictions as well.
Description The dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley, a free, black poet who resisted the pressures of arranged marriage, truly embodying the Ideals of the American Revolution There 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
