When the evangelical poet Phillis Wheatley published an pamphlet-length elegy on George Whitefield upon the great itinerant’s death in 1770, she gained renown as the first published African American woman in history. She was still a slave in Boston at the time, and (perhaps predictably, if she was going to be published) there were only glimmers of anti-slavery sentiment in the elegy. Whitefield himself died a slave owner, and did not free his slaves upon his death. Wheatley, however, focused on Whitefield’s commitment to the gospel:
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