From the earliest reviews of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s poems until the last quarter of the twentieth century, many commentators on her works were concerned as much, if not more, with the fact that she wrote, as they were with what she wrote. Both sides cited Phillis’s humanity and writings to support their respective positions in the eighteenth-century debate over the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, in the nineteenth-century argument over the abolition of slavery, and in the twentieth-century struggle for racial equality. Thomas Jefferson infamously dismissed her and her work. From the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, many Black as well as white literary critics expressed neo-Jeffersonian denunciations of Phillis’s literary achievement and racial loyalty. Black women have led the resistance to such attacks. A renaissance of interest in recovering the life and work of Phillis Wheatley Peters, and a revolution in the critical evaluation of both, have been underway since the 1980s.