Early American Literature

Abstract:

This article reevaluates Phillis Wheatley as a theological thinker whose evangelical conception of disinterestedness informed her evolving position on slavery. By reading Wheatley's poetry and letters alongside her correspondent Samuel Hopkins's sermons and antislavery treatises, I argue that Wheatley's shift toward writing against slavery after 1770 reflects a similar change in her theology: that she, like Hopkins, stopped discussing slavery as an "advantageous sin" as she formulated an evangelical ethical theory of disinterestedness that anticipated Hopkins's philosophy of "disinterested benevolence." In contrast to the civic republican conception of disinterestedness, which argues that persons can only promote the general public's interests after they have set aside private passions, evangelical disinterestedness requires persons to radically abandon their individual will through conversion and work on God's behalf to alleviate others'—and particularly marginalized figures'—suffering. Departing from the scholarship that argues that she was apathetic about her own enslaved condition, this article posits that because evangelical disinterestedness allowed Wheatley to present herself as a devout subject who cared for others' needs more than her own, she was able to base her post-1770 critique of slavery entirely on accounts of other African persons' suffering.