On this day 250 years ago in Boston, the young African-American poet Phillis Wheatley wrote to the Reverend Samuel Occum to commend him for an open letter he had written criticizing Christian ministers who enslaved Africans. Wheatley wrote:
I have this day received your obliging kind Epistle, and am greatly satisfied with your Reasons respecting the Negroes, and think highly reasonable what you offer in Vindication of their natural Rights: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light . . . [r]eveals more and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other . . . for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance, and . . . I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant deliverance . . . [from] those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Works and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse disposition for the Exercise of Oppressive Power over others agree, — I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.
On This Day In The Revolution 