Phillis’s brief life coincided with one of the most consequential periods in American – indeed world – history, spanning the years between the accession of George III and the establishment of the United States. She survived the Middle Passage. The vessel that brought her from Africa to America became her namesake when John and Susanna Wheatley purchased her. Phillis arrived in Boston at the beginning of the reign of George III and during the transatlantic evangelical Christian movement known as the Great Awakening. Susanna Wheatley felt obligated her to enable Phillis to read the Bible and to become an evangelist herself. Colonial demands during the American Revolution for liberty from tyranny, based on natural rights, were often expressed as calls for freedom from political enslavement. Challenges to metaphorical enslavement inevitably led to questions about whether colonial enslavers could justify the actual chattel enslavement of people of African descent.