Phillis rose from an obscure origin in Africa to become an internationally celebrated author before she was twenty years old. The Great Awakening, the transatlantic slave trade, the abolitionist movement, and the American Revolution, affected Wheatley Peters’s life and writings. Recent discoveries about Phillis’s marriage to John Peters may give us significant insight into her personality and ambitions. Phillis’s trip to London in 1773 enabled her to transform her legal, social, and political identities as well as her literary identity. Rather than seeing her works, including her surviving correspondence, as transparently autobiographical, we must remember that she is always a rhetorician. Particularly noteworthy are her shifts in agency, voice, and subjects in her writings before and after she gained her freedom in 1773. Phillis played a far more active role is establishing her African American identity than has previously been recognized.