1773

 

__________

 

“Mysterious abbreviations and signs,

like some black magic.”

 

Sarah Keeler, complaining about complicated math

__________

 

 

GOVERNOR JOHN PENN of Pennsylvania announces,

 

I do hereby prohibit and forbid all His Majesty’s Subjects of this, or any other Province or Colony, on any pretense whatsoever, to intrude upon, Settle, or Possess any of the aforesaid unpurchased Lands (beyond the last Pennsylvania purchase), as they will answer the contrary at their Peril. (125/134)

 

*

 

May 1: At least one colonial lass was exposed to complicated mathematics, though perhaps not to her liking. Earle notes:

 

A manuscript sum-book in my possession is marked, “Sarah Keeler her Book, May ye 1st, A.D. 1773, Ridgbury.” There are multiplication examples of fifteen figures multiplied by fifteen, and long division examples of a dividend of quintillions, chiefly in sevens and nines, divided by a mixed divisor of billions in eights and fives – a thing to make poor Sarah turn in her grave. There are Reductions Ascending and Reductions Descending and Reductions both Ascending and Descending at the same time, as complicated as the computations of the revolutions of the celestial spheres. There are miserable catch-examples about people’s ages and others about collections of excises, with “Proofs,” and still others about I know not what, for there are within their borders mysterious abbreviations and signs, like some black magic. Sainted Sarah Keeler! a melancholy sympathy settles on me as I regard this book and all the extended sums you knew, and think of the paths of pleasantness of the present pupils of kindergartens; and wonder what kind of a mathematical song or game or allegory could be invented to disguise these very “plain figures.” (226/139)

 

*

 

“Imagination! who can sing thy force?”

 

A second colonial woman – this time a young African American named Phillis Wheatley – had a chance to show her skill another way. Wheatley, had been born in present-day Senegal and Gambia, sold into slavery and arrived in Boston in July 1761. Now, in her late teens, she was undergoing examination by eighteen men, “the most respectable characters in Boston.” Had the young slave woman written the poems that it was said she had written? They wanted to be sure.

 

Their examination proved to their satisfaction that Miss Wheatley was the author. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published soon after.

 

Even when she was young, Wheatley’s owners, John and Susanna Wheatley, recognized her brilliance. John was a wealthy Boston merchant and purchased Phillis, as they named her, as a servant for his wife. At a time when few slaves were taught to read or write at all, they provided the girl with training in several languages. As Smithsonian explains, “She became proficient in the traditional Greek and Latin texts by age 12 and fell in love with the English poet Alexander Pope, modeling her own work after his.” She had had her first poem published in 1767, in Rhode Island’s Newport Mercury, taking as her subject a near-shipwreck. And in 1770 her elegy for George Whitefield, one of the leading Methodists, was also printed.

 

Wheatley hoped to publish a second collection of her poems, but the Revolution soon exploded. Aid from several patrons in England, who had helped her with her first book, was cut off and she did not publish again. Her owners emancipated her and she married a free black man, John Peters. She had several children, all of whom died in infancy, and she herself died at age 31, in 1784.

 

One expert believes Wheatley was writing about the chains of slavery when she wrote about Prometheus, the figure from Greek mythology who angered the gods, and ended up chained to a rock for all eternity. As she wrote in one poem:

 

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

Or who describe the swiftness of thy

course?

 

 

*

 

EVE L. EWING offers a modern take on the life of the colonial poet:

 

Pretend I wrote this at your grave.

Pretend the grave is marked. Pretend we know where it is.

Copp’s Hill, say. I have been there and you might be.

Foremother, your name is the boat that brought you.

Pretend I see it in the stone, with a gruesome cherub.

Children come with thin paper and charcoal to touch you.

Pretend it drizzles and a man in an ugly plastic poncho

circles the Mathers, all but sniffing the air warily.

We don’t need to pretend for this part.

There is a plaque in the grass for Increase, and Cotton.

And Samuel, dead at 78, final son, who was there

on the day when they came looking for proof.

Eighteen of them watched you and they signed to say:

     the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe)

     written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since,

     brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa

and the abolitionists cheered at the blow to Kant

     the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling

and the  enlightened ones bellowed at the strike against Hume

     no ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences

Pretend I was there with you, Phillis, when you asked in a letter to no one:

How many iambs to be a real human girl?

Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart?

If I know of Ovid may I keep my children?

 

Pretend that on your grave there is a date

and it is so long before my heroes came along to call you a coon

for the praises you sang of your captors

who took you on discount because they assumed you would die

that it never ever hurt your feelings.

Or pretend you did not love America.

Phillis, I would like to think that after you were released unto the world,

when they jailed your husband for his debts

and you lay in the maid’s quarters at night,

a free and poor woman with your last living boy,

that you thought of the Metamorphoses,

making the sign of Arachne in the tangle of your fingers.

And here, after all, lay the proof:

The man in the plastic runs a thumb over stone. The gray is slick and tough.

Phillis Wheatley: thirty-one. Had misery enough.

 

*

 

“At New York and Philadelphia the tea-ships were forced to put to sea again without unlading.” “At Boston there was a deadlock; the people would not let this tea be landed; the governor would not let the ships leave without unlading.” (2/48)

 

Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles dies. Through his wife, Martha, the future president now inherits 40,000 acres of land and 135 slaves.