Evangelical Christianity gave Phillis the means, motive, and opportunity to become a poet. She was writing poetry by 1765, a mere four years after she arrived in America. The poems she wrote in the next few years display an almost incredibly rapid improvement in her skills in versification. As a recently converted “Ethiop” she assumes the role of a lay preacher. Phillis experimented with various literary forms, such as allegory, as well as with rhyme patterns besides the rhymed couplets she uses in almost all her later poems. In response to the growing tensions between Britain and its North American colonies during the 1760s, Phillis began writing overtly political poems, creating what I call a proto-national American voice. Phillis’s persona alternates between identifying as African and as American in Phillis’s elegy on the death of George Whitefield in 1770. She uses the occasion to address contemporaneous religious and political issues. Republication of her elegy brought Phillis transatlantic recognition.

This chapter considers some of the earliest writers in the Black literary tradition in order to explore the limitations of print publication. Books by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant were funded by proslavery British evangelicals associated with Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. As she was publishing Black authors, Huntingdon also invested huge sums in the African slave trade and enslaved dozens of people on her plantation in Georgia. I argue that Huntingdon’s patronage helps explain troubling opinions about slavery voiced by the writers she promoted, most notoriously those in Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The chapter compares books like Wheatley’s with the writings of an unknown Black writer also associated with Huntingdon: the preacher David Margrett. Huntingdon funded Margrett on a missionary trip to Georgia but fired him after he gave a radical antislavery sermon declaring that “God will deliver his own people from slavery.” Margrett’s sermon survives only in private letters written by white people who sought to silence him. Comparing Margrett’s unpublished sermon with the books Huntingdon promoted illuminates the pressures Black authors strategically faced when they argued for their humanity in a medium controlled by white patrons.