"On the Death of Love Rotch, " a New Poem Attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters) And a Speculative Attribution

"On the Death of Love Rotch," a New Poem Attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters): And a Speculative Attribution Wendy Raphael Roberts Early American Literature, Volume 58, Number 1, 2023, pp. 155-184 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2023.0008 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/881046 For content related to this article https://muse.jhu.edu/related_content?type=article&id=881046 wendy rAphAel roberts University at Albany, SUNY Archives “On the Death of Love Rotch,” a New Poem Attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters) And a Speculative Attribution Abstract: This article argues that the manuscript poem “On the Death of Love Rotch” recently recovered from a Quaker commonplace book kept in 1782 can be confidently attributed to Phillis Wheatley (Peters). The attribution of the poem provides crucial new evidence for Wheatley’s early presence and influence in Nantucket, New Bedford, and Newport; supplies new evidence for how her poems first appear in these regions that map onto Quaker ministerial routes; and bares traces of her poetic and political influence on these hotbeds for early abolitionist efforts. In addition to placing Wheatley physically closer to Obour Tanner and others in the Newport community before the Revolution, the poem’s presence points toward other communities of color Wheatley engaged with, including New Guinea and Philadelphia, and the possibility that she wrote an elegy for a Black woman named Rose. Combined the article not only makes a case for the expansion of the Wheatley canon but also demonstrates how attribution studies can inform knowledge of the author’s life, location, activities, public contributions, and influence on the larger cultural climate. keywords: Phillis Wheatley (Peters), literary attribution, new poem, early American manuscript culture, African American poetry, women’s manuscript culture, early American poetry, Quaker poetry “On the Death of Love Rotch,” written in 1767 and printed in full for the first time below, is now the earliest known full-length elegy attributed to the early American poet Phillis Wheatley (Peters).1 The unearthing of this heretofore-unknown poem in a commonplace book held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania expands the number of Wheatley poems known to survive in manuscript alone to twelve (Writings xlvii; Potts). Remarkably, the poem is not one of the twenty-six nonextant poems listed in Wheatley’s book proposals. This article primarily serves to introduce the { 155 156 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 poem “On the Death of Love Rotch” and to argue for accepting it into the Wheatley canon. I place the poem in a network of Quaker women already known to have circulated Wheatley’s writings and within which Wheatley scholars will not be surprised to learn of another. In so doing, I show how attribution enlarges not only an author’s archive but also what we know of an artist’s life, location, activities, public contributions, and influence on the larger cultural climate. By the most conservative editorial standards, attribution is assured when an author claims the writing as their own, either in manuscript or print. Yet there are many instances in literary history where scholars have accepted a work as an author’s own based on a compelling combination of external and internal evidence. The fact that Wheatley did not list “On the Death of Love Rotch” in her proposals nor sign a manuscript copy of the poem means it requires more work to assemble a case for assured or confident attribution, not that it is suspect.2 In the case of women authors in the eighteenth century, it is especially important to undertake these other routes to attribution simply because of the frequency of anonymous print and manuscript publication, as well as the paucity of authorial manuscripts, which is magnified for women writers of color. In Wheatley’s case, we know she wrote many poems we do not have— some we know about from her proposals and others we infer must exist for a writer as accomplished as Wheatley. Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta confidently attributes the first known Wheatley poem, “Phillis’s First Effort,” with no caveats, even though Wheatley never claimed it as hers and it appears only in another’s hand (Jeremy Belknap’s) eight years after she wrote it. It is accepted on the basis of Belknap’s attribution, Belknap’s embeddedness both within Wheatley’s network and the local poetry scene, the subject of the elegy’s proximity to Wheatley, and internal evidence from the poem (Writings 145–46). Fortunately, “On the Death of Love Rotch” is another such instance of a previously unknown Wheatley poem in manuscript attributed to her by a trustworthy manuscript witness embedded in Wheatley’s network and poetry scene and about a person in close proximity to Wheatley—in other words, there is extensive contextual evidence that validates its authenticity. This external evidence combined with solid internal evidence of the poem’s subject, style, and language creates a compelling case for confident attribution. For ease of use, I have organized this essay into five small sections. The first three sections serve to make a cumulative case for confident attribution “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 157 of the Love Rotch elegy through the combination of external and internal evidence. The first section introduces the poem’s copyist, Mary Powel Potts (Jones), and her poetic network; the second situates the subject of the elegy, Love Macy Rotch, in relation to Wheatley to show how correct attribution of this poem can tell us much about Wheatley’s life and influence; and the third turns from the external evidence for attribution covered in the first two sections to the poem itself for internal evidence of Wheatley authorship. After concluding my case for confident attribution of the Love Rotch elegy, I explore one important implication of this Wheatley poem that Potts copied into her commonplace book: the likelihood of another unknown Wheatley poem among its pages. This fourth section offers what would be Wheatley’s only known elegy to a Black woman as a candidate for speculative attribution. The final section prints both poems in full. The CopyisT: Mary powel poTTs (Jones) (1769–1787) It makes sense that Quaker women cherished, copied, and circulated “On the Death of Love Rotch,” which shows up in a commonplace book fifteen years after it was penned. In a broad context, the commonplace book in which it resides participated in the extensive scribal poetic culture, coteries, and salons of the Delaware Valley, which included well-known poets Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Deborah Logan, Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, and Annis Boudinot Stockton, as well as one of their primary copyists, Milcah Martha Moore, best-known for her manuscript commonplace book created during the American Revolution and her published compilation Miscellanies, Moral and Instructive (1787). As scholars have shown, these women engaged in a lively poetic manuscript culture that included sharing poems on loose sheets or several folded sheets together, as well as creating large poetic miscellanies in bound copy books embarked on by one copyist.3 More narrowly, the contextual clues from the commonplace book, as well as biographical information about the book’s owner, situate it in close proximity to the important Quaker teacher and minister Rebecca Jones and her teaching and life partner Hannah Catherall, whom scholars already know assigned early Wheatley poems—at least one that was never published—for their students to copy.4 Potts’s book is another such poetic miscellany transcribed while under their tutelage that attributes to Wheatley yet another unpublished poem from 1767, “On the Death of Love Rotch.” 158 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 The commonplace book, written primarily in one hand, belonged to Mary Powel Potts (Jones) (1769–87), sometimes spelled Powell, who was born in Plymouth Township, Pennsylvania, to Quaker minister Joseph Potts and his second wife Sarah Powell, both of whom were received in the Gwynedd Monthly Meeting in Montgomery, Pennsylvania, when Mary was eight months old.5 At age seventeen, Mary Powel Potts married Jonathan Jones (1762–1821), whose family established the first Quaker meeting in Merion, Pennsylvania. Jonathan Jones was a successful Philadelphian merchant, along with his brother Owen Jones, and they had two businesses with the Foulke brothers.6 The couple were members of the Exeter Monthly Meeting and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Tragically, Mary died in childbirth in Berks, Pennsylvania, on March 17, 1787, a little over nine months after her marriage, and was buried in the Friends Burying Ground.7 Though Potts lived a short life, important women in the Quaker poetic scribal network already associated with Wheatley’s early manuscript poetry knew her well. Those who signed as witnesses to Mary Powel Potts and Jonathan Jones’s wedding, as well as the poems in her commonplace book, bear this out. In addition to the expected witnesses, such as family members of both the bride and groom, the aforementioned Quaker teachers Rebecca Jones and Hannah Catherall appear, as well as families who were the subject of verse circulated in commonplace books connected either to their school or to the copyists of the poetry. These include members of the Haines, the Wister, the Waln, and the Morris families, and most notably Margaret Hill Morris, who was Milcah Martha Moore’s sister.8 Though the poet Hannah Griffitts, also the cousin of Margaret and Milcah, is not listed as a witness, there are two other people with whom she shares a relation—Abigail Griffitts and Samuel Powell Griffitts—both of whom are also related to Mary Powel Potts.9 Significantly, there are two manuscript elegies written for Mary Powel Potts (Jones)—one penned by Jonathan Jones’s niece and the other by Hannah Griffitts—both copied in a book by Potts’s sister, who gives a short account of Potts’s death in childbirth to which she was witness.10 Griffitts also kept a copy of her elegy to “Molly Jones (formerly Potts)” among her own verse manuscripts (“Serious Reflections”). In other words, Potts was well-known to this Quaker community and to those active in its poetic manuscript culture her entire life. “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 159 It is very likely Potts received instruction from Jones and Catherall, even if informally, through their common social network. Mary was thirteen years old when she embellished her name “Mary Powel Potts,” adorned the page with a large swan, and dated her commonplace book October 28, 1782. Many of the poems she copied into the almost filled 156 pages are common to the Moore-Logan-Griffitts coterie and scribal networks—poems that often appear in commonplace books connected to Quaker women’s education in this region. Karin A. Wulf has highlighted the similarities of the commonplace books produced in 1775 by students Catherine Haines and Sarah Sandwith Drinker, who both took classes at the school of Jones and Catherall (31). The influence of Jones and Catherall can still be seen in Potts’s book copied seven years after Haines and Drinker, which shares a good deal of overlap with them.11 The most notable of those shared poems are an elegy by Fidelia (Griffitts’s cognomen) to Daniel Stanton, who died in 1770, and “A Farewell to Rachel Wilson” by John Drinker.12 In addition to other Griffitts poems, Potts’s book also includes a poem by “Laura” (Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s pseudonym) and many poems and letters commonly copied by Quakers. Perhaps most importantly, as Brooks points out, Jones and Catherall assigned Griffitts’s poems to copy, and at least one of their students, Catherine Haines, copied Wheatley’s poem “Atheism,” which was never published (9). This was not the only Wheatley poem Haines copied in her commonplace book, but it was the only poem attributed to her by Haines, which is why the other two have gone unnoticed until now. The other two poems are “To Mrs. Ellis on her remarkable Deliverance in the hurrican [sic] in North Carolina,” a variant of the one published in Poems (1773), and “To the Honorable Commadore [sic] Hood on his Pardoning a Deserter,” which exists only in manuscript and is a variant of the known manuscript at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In other words, Haines copied from manuscript poems circulating within this Quaker community even after Wheatley’s published book appeared; and the one poem of these three that had been published included specialized information from this manuscript network—the subject’s name (Mrs. Maria Ellis)—which the printed version did not.13 It is not at all surprising, then, that another young woman within the Quaker community connected to Jones, Catherall, and Griffitts would copy yet another Wheatley poem that exists in manuscript alone. 160 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 Nor is it surprising that Jones would have the Love Rotch elegy, given how closely she worked with the Rotches of Nantucket (later New Bedford) and other leaders in Quaker abolitionist efforts, to which I will turn in the next section. Quaker ministers like Rachel Wilson and Rebecca Jones often traveled between Nantucket, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. That Wheatley’s early poems show up in relation to this same geography makes complete sense. Though Wheatley never claimed the Rotch elegy (the most conservative standard for assured attribution), a poetic manuscript network that clearly knew and circulated Wheatley’s early work attributes the poem to her. Potts attributes the elegy “On the Death of Love Rotch” to “a Negro Girl about 15 years of Age,” the same biographical attribution used by other Quakers within this specific network who copied Wheatley’s manuscript poems written in 1767 and different from the age given by those outside this Quaker network.14 This community had access to other early Wheatley poems—and ones specifically from 1767 that were never published and give insider information not shared in print (such as the name of Maria Ellis). In addition, Potts reliably transmits other poems from this Quaker network. Specifically, she provides another attribution of a poem series titled “A Letter from a Clergyman” and “Lavinia’s Answer” often circulated within networks connected to Rebecca Jones, both in America and in England, that scholars who work on these women’s scribal networks have yet to be able to identify.15 The dates and names assigned to other poems in Potts’s book are consistent with other commonplace books. It is simply not plausible that a well-respected member of this poetic network would intentionally deceive their close familial and social ties about Wheatley’s authorship, especially given that these social ties were so often created and sustained through scribal publication and manuscript circulation (Wigginton). Under the mentorship of the revered teacher and Quaker minister Rebecca Jones, such an error would have been noticed and corrected. Local networks often know much more than appears in print—even if print is often treated as the authority (as in the case of the attestations to Wheatley’s printed book, which sidelined manuscript culture and women’s networks in scholarship for years). Finally, the standards for attribution are not so inflexible that all potential doubt must be put to rest. Even authors themselves can lie about attribution—yet this is rarely the case, and scholars do not have to prove authors are not lying when there is “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 161 no obvious reason to suspect them. The context and available corroboration must reasonably and convincingly support the attribution. In this case, it most certainly does. The elegized: love Macy RoTch (1713–1767) In the elegy “On the Death of Love Rotch,” the poet includes herself as one of the friends left bereft, as part of the community of mourners. Who was Love Rotch and how did Wheatley know her? Now that the copyist’s context and credibility have been established, we can address these two basic questions, because the copyist, in fact, weighs in on them: according to Potts (and by inference the scribal network within which she was embedded), Love Rotch was Wheatley’s “mistress.” This information at first appears at odds with all that is known about Wheatley, but given the reliability of the copyist and the larger contexts of Wheatley’s writings, it should be evaluated seriously. In what follows, I provide further evidence for the poem’s confident attribution from external contexts (as I did in the first section). These contexts also add credence to the copyist’s claim that Love Rotch was the poet’s “mistress.” However, to be clear, the confident attribution of the poem does not depend on Love Rotch having been Wheatley’s “mistress” for a time. One could reasonably accept the poem as Wheatley’s while holding that Wheatley’s exact relationship to Love Rotch is still speculative. The history of Nantucket and New Bedford cannot be told without the Rotch family, a powerful force in the whaling industry. The families from which Love Macy Rotch (1713–67) descended, the Coffins and the Macys, were founding families of Nantucket and crucial to its status as a whaling empire. In fact, it was Love Rotch’s marriage to Joseph Rotch Sr. (1704–84) that significantly helped the latter realize his business aspirations and dominate the area, including expansion in New Bedford by 1767 (Dolin 116).16 Composing a poem on Love Rotch, then, conforms to Wheatley’s focus on elegizing important persons in the community. Astoundingly, scholars already know two poems that Wheatley wrote to people directly connected to Love Rotch—one of which was in the same year as the Love Rotch elegy. First, Love Rotch was the mother of Joseph Rotch Jr. (1743–72), who is the subject of Wheatley’s poem “To a Gentleman on his Voyage to Great-Britain for the Recovery of his Health” written 162 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 in 1772 and published in Wheatley’s Poems (1773).17 Second, Love Rotch was the daughter of Deborah Coffin Macy (1685–1760), which links her family directly to the poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin.”18 This poem, which appeared in the Newport Mercury on December 21, 1767, commemorated the survival of “two friends, who were cast away” when Captain Coffin’s schooner, along with many others that day, were blown ashore in one of the most severe storms the area had experienced (Writings 27).19 Carretta identifies Hussey as one of the sons of the Quaker merchant in Nantucket, George Hussey (1694–1782), and Captain Coffin as Nathaniel Coffin (1725–80), a Loyalist and “an Anglican Boston merchant” (Biography 66). Additionally, this Nathaniel Coffin also descended from the prominent line of Nantucket Quaker Coffins, which is most likely why both the newspaper and Wheatley’s title for the poem in her proposal describe the castaways as “friends”: that is, Quakers. Specifically, Nathaniel Coffin descends from Tristram Coffin (1609–81), one of the primary founders of Nantucket who secured land rights from Thomas Mayhew and became the first chief magistrate. Love’s mother, Deborah Coffin Macy, also descends directly from Tristram Coffin.20 This founding Nantucket family seemed to be on Wheatley’s mind near the end of 1767, as she first wrote the elegy to Love Rotch in mid- November and then turned to pen “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” the following month. Taking up Quakers in “Hussey and Coffin” in 1767 was not an outlier for Wheatley. In fact, all four of the extant poems from 1767 are connected (in varying degrees) to Quaker poetic manuscript culture. In addition to “Hussey and Coffin,” there are two other 1767 poems that exist only in manuscript (multiple versions of her poems “Atheism” and “Deism”). “Atheism,” like “Hussey and Coffin,” is connected to the same network in which the Love Rotch elegy circulated. As previously mentioned, the copyist of the Love Rotch elegy, Mary Potts, was well-known to women in this poetic network—including Hannah Griffitts, who circulated Wheatley’s “Atheism” under the cognomen “Africania.” A manuscript copy of Wheatley’s “Deism” at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania may or may not be connected to Philadelphia manuscript culture, but in at least one manuscript held at the Massachusetts Historical Society, versions of the “Deism” and “Atheism” poems circulated together, which may mean the “Deism” poem also circulated with the “Atheism” poem among Quakers. Additionally, the topic matter, though not exclusive to Quakers, was in keeping with Quaker women’s “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 163 poetry, such as Griffitts’s poems on the subjects of atheism and deism. “To the University of Cambridge,” the only one of the four 1767 poems that was later included in Wheatley’s Poems (1773), is centered on Boston and Congregationalists and seems the least connected to this Quaker network. Yet it too seems to share similarities with this Quaker manuscript culture. Among loose Quaker manuscript poems circulated within this same Quaker network is a poem “by a student” addressed “To the Students” at the “Quakers Meeting . . . 1759 at Oxford.” Like Wheatley’s “To the University at Cambridge,” it takes an authoritative stance from an outsider position (woman and Quaker) and chides the “Sons of Science, Candidates for the Arts” at Oxford for their spiritual lack, and counsels them how to do better. Even without Potts’s assertion that Love Rotch was Wheatley’s “mistress,” it is clear that Wheatley knew the Rotch family, at the very least through Nathaniel Wheatley’s (her enslaver’s son) business dealings. In Carretta’s words, Nathaniel acted as “a middleman between American whalers and London merchants” and had many points of contact with the Rotch family, which included their three sons, William, Francis, and Joseph Jr. (Biography 18). By 1765, Nathaniel was handling accounts for Love Rotch’s husband (Joseph Sr.) and two of her sons (William and Joseph Jr.) (Boston 2). Joseph Sr. was one of the owners of the schooner the London Packet commanded by Robert Calef, which Nathaniel used for most of his trade (Carretta, Biography 17). When Wheatley’s soon-to-be-published book traveled to London under Captain Calef ’s care in 1772, when Wheatley and Nathaniel sailed to London in 1773, and when her first edition of Poems (1773) shipped from London to the colonies, they were all on vessels owned by the Rotch family (Carretta, Biography 92, 96; Writings 173). Francis Rotch even lived next to the Wheatley’s in Boston on King Street. (Writings 173; Bullard 45). In other words, the Wheatley family’s finances were tied to the Rotch’s and their industry, and they had plenty of opportunity to interact. But, could Wheatley have known Love Rotch in a more direct and specific capacity? It is certainly possible that Potts was simply mistaken when she wrote that Rotch was Wheatley’s “mistress” at some point before the time of Rotch’s death in 1767. However, it would be a strange mistake since Wheatley’s enslavers were well-known both to the general public and to this particular scribal network as John and Susannah Wheatley of Boston. It is likely that Potts, so closely affiliated with the Nantucket shipping community—including the Rotch family—and the Philadelphian merchant 164 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 and Quaker communities, knew more details about Wheatley’s first years in America than print publications cared to highlight. Print performed particular work for those supporting Wheatley’s publications. What incentive would there be for the Wheatley family while showing off their genius enslaved poet to highlight times when she was hired out or taught by others? It would not be out of the question for Wheatley’s enslavers to have loaned her out to the Rotch family for a time, especially to provide comfort and company or to serve as an amanuensis for an ailing Love Rotch while her husband and sons were making plans to move to New Bedford.21 The Wheatley’s, after all, had business incentives for the Rotches to do well and to expand even if Love Rotch did not want to move (McDevitt 144–45). This seems to be the most compelling explanation. Or perhaps Wheatley stayed with her for a time for another reason, such as to escape the city if Wheatley herself was ill.22 Maybe another incentive thrown into the equation was education; the term mistress, after all, often referred to one’s teacher in this period, and the Rotch family and the later Quaker network that circulated the poem might have been more likely to highlight this aspect of Love Rotch’s relationship to Wheatley given their position on slavery. Love Rotch’s family was associated with children’s education on Nantucket; her sister’s husband, Benjamin Coffin,23 ran a long-established and flourishing school. It would be highly unlikely that Love Rotch left Nantucket for any length of time given her responsibilities while her husband was away and her own attachment to the place, so any teaching would have had to have been in Nantucket or through letters.24 There is also a distant but doubtful possibility that the copyist meant “mistress” as a woman patron. Though Wheatley sought out patrons, including the Countess of Huntingdon, by the beginning of the eighteenth century this definition had become obsolete. Unfortunately, there is no known record yet that would conclusively confirm Wheatley’s exact relationship to Love Rotch. Though historians of the Rotch family describe Love Rotch’s piety and active participation among Nantucket Quakers, there are scant records of her individual activities or thoughts and no mention of how she died. In fact, Wheatley’s poem is one of the only personal pieces of paper that testify to her life.25 But her few extant letters do tell us some things by which we can infer why the two women may have taken an interest in each other. A year before her own death, Love Rotch was fretting over the health of her son Joseph Jr., who “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 165 was in Boston, giving him extensive directions on how to prepare medicine to care for his cough and imploring him to come home to visit with his brother when William next came. Rotch spends a page exhorting Joseph to understand his present circumstances in a spiritual light. At this point, though Love Rotch seems to know a good deal about medicinal herbs and when and how to administer them, and mentions trouble receiving bottles in relation to Dr. Jonathan Coffin, she does not directly mention suffering from any illness. Additionally, the writing appears to be her own; it does not resemble Wheatley’s. The letter does not help rule in or out the possibility of Wheatley’s time in her home. It is, however, easy to see how, if Wheatley did know her, and cared to write an elegy for her, that Wheatley writing the poem “To a Gentleman on His Voyage to Great-Britain for the Recovery of His Health,” in which the poet hopes for the health and return of Joseph Jr. in 1772, would be something that Love Rotch would have cherished and that would have implicitly honored her memory. The letter also points broadly toward Love Rotch’s active engagement with her family’s business, which may be how Wheatley came to her attention. A good part of the letter is unreadable, but mentions Capt. Calef and the receipt of goods Joseph Rotch Jr. sent to her, which suggests that Love Rotch, like many other Nantucket Quaker women, knew the ins and outs of business and tended to it while her husband was away, which would include the close business with Nathaniel Wheatley.26 Love Rotch’s engagement with the family business is again evident in a second letter that she wrote in 1762 while her husband was absent. In the letter, which was to the Philadelphia Quaker merchant, minister, and abolitionist John Pemberton (brother of James Pemberton, later president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society), she expresses her love and friendship to him, his family, and all their shared European friends through a parting gift of spermaceti, the waxy whale substance used for candles that the Rotches harvested—a gift that represented their expanding economic power. The relationship expressed between the families (both religious and economic) and the admiration Love Rotch shows to John Pemberton is a place to pause and speculate. Quakers exhorted each other to act in Godly ways in the world, and they emulated those they held in high esteem. In the few papers we have from Love Rotch, she made it clear that she admired and encouraged those with abolitionist sympathies. Perhaps she gained Wheatley’s affection and trust as expressed in the elegy because of her son’s 166 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 (and by inference her own) respect for enslaved people. In 1767, James Oronoko Dexter, an important figure in the Philadelphia Black community, bought his own freedom. Love Rotch would have admired that John Pemberton, for whom Dexter worked as a coachman, assisted Dexter to buy his future wife’s freedom (Newman et al. 163; Toogood). In addition to the increasingly outspoken abolitionist ministers that she admired, Love Rotch’s own son William was known to pay his hired laborers who were enslaved directly to the person he hired and never to their enslavers as a matter of principle. Famously, William helped Prince Boston (1750– ), an enslaved man from Nantucket, sue for the wages he earned in 1769–70 aboard Rotch’s ship and gain his immediate freedom. The case settled in 1773 and resulted in Boston’s manumission—the first enslaved person in Massachusetts to win his freedom through a lawsuit (Nantucket Historical Society, “History”).27 Love Rotch was well aware of her son’s doings while she was alive and counseled him in his spiritual growth, which included efforts to aid enslaved people and Black leaders. Given the actions of Quaker abolitionists she admired, and the commitment to paying enslaved laborers by her own son, it would make sense for Love Rotch to take a sympathetic interest in Wheatley and to employ her for a time. It is fortunate that there is a paper trail for Prince Boston and James Oronoko Dexter in relation to John Pemberton and William Rotch, but this archival evidence is not the norm. For instance, in the city of Boston, it was most often a word-of-mouth arrangement when someone hired an enslaved person (Hardesty 75). This is what we would expect if Wheatley was hired by the Rotch family—and that others in their network (such as Rebecca Jones) might refer to it in passing, as Potts’s commonplace book bears out. In fact, it would not be the first time a Quaker family hired Wheatley. By word of mouth (and a tradition handed down by the Ver Planck family of New York), we are told that the Newlin family of Boston did so as well.28 If this was the arrangement between Wheatley and the Rotches, it would place Wheatley within the ocean community of southern Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island, much earlier than when the Wheatleys fled to Newport during the Revolution. This would have many implications, including for understanding why Wheatley’s poem “Hussey and Coffin” appeared when and where it did. Though scholars, including myself, have often turned to the evangelical revivals occurring in Newport for the likely placement of the poem, it is equally likely to have been someone within “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 167 the Nantucket Quaker abolitionist network. Wheatley might have become acquainted with Obour Tanner and others in the Newport community, as well as formed connections to New Guinea’s growing community of color in Nantucket. The time with Love Rotch would also mean that this thriving Quaker poetic coterie would have had an earlier and more direct influence on Wheatley and her engagement with verse—and, more importantly, underscore the influence Wheatley would have had on their poetics and their changing relationship to abolition. Wheatley would be more central to the later story of Black and white nineteenth-century abolitionists working in and visiting this region. It would also add to the complexity of her political work in the midst of revolutionary fervor given that the Rotches were not only Loyalists but also owned two of the ships boarded during the Boston Tea Party. And, it may have something to do with why Wheatley and John Peters went to Salem, Massachusetts, the town where Joseph Rotch Sr. (Love Rotch’s husband) started out as a cordwainer. However, even if Wheatley did not spend time in person on Nantucket with Love Rotch, the poem and her early involvement with this family nonetheless points toward her investment in the enslaved and free communities of color there. This early elegy adds to the accumulating evidence of Wheatley’s immersion in a women’s manuscript scribal culture in which, Joanna Brooks argues, Wheatley cultivated networks of white women through her elegiac productions. Caroline Wigginton extends and redirects this argument to show how “relational publication” (a combination of elegies, mourning rituals, material exchanges, and print) reimagined neighborly affiliations for enslaved people into “consolatory neighborhoods” that “refigure[d] their experience of coerced dislocation” (88). That is, even Wheatley’s elegies for white subjects could perform important work for communities of color. With the introduction of this new elegy, it is crucial to mark that one of the earliest relations of mourners Wheatley mobilized occurred in the Quaker and diasporic communities of Nantucket, which quickly spilled out into the close network of relations and friends in New Bedford, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia. “On LOve ROtch”: InteRnaL evIdence Imagine that in 1767 Wheatley’s poem “On Hussey and Coffin” never ran in the Newport Mercury and remained for the time in manuscript— like all her other known poems from that year. Instead, a Quaker copied 168 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 it down by hand and shared it with an extensive network of friends to commemorate the grace of God—both for saving Hussey and Coffin and for the virtuous writing of an enslaved young woman. Then imagine that, unlike the other poems from 1767, the title never appeared in her book proposal (as we know many of her poems must not have). There would be no way to verify the poem was Wheatley’s except through an attribution by the Quaker copyist (if she included one) and by internal evidence (style and ideas) from the poem.29 It would be difficult to show definitively the poem was a Wheatley poem by internal evidence alone. Perhaps the biggest drawback would be the prose interruption before the two last lines of the poem—“Had I the Tongue of a Seraphim, how would I exalt thy Praise; thy Name as Incense to the Heavens should fly, and the Remembrance of thy Goodness to the shoreless Ocean of Beatitude!—Then should the Earth glow with seraphick Ardour”—as it seems to be an anomaly among her poems (“On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin”). Where else does she do it? Certainly not in Poems on Various Subjects. If in this thought experiment we are lucky enough to have the manuscript version of “Deism” held at the Library Company of Philadelphia, our fortunes turn. Here we have another poem from 1767 that follows the same style as “Hussey and Coffin”—a prose interruption followed by the final two lines of the poem. This unusual element would turn out to be extremely helpful for identifying “Hussey and Coffin” as Wheatley’s verse, but such telltale signs are difficult to identify, and without the “Deism” poem, we might find ourselves at an impasse, especially because an usual element might be interpreted as strong evidence against her authorship. When approaching internal evidence, it’s important to remember that the known works of Wheatley are relatively small—and even smaller are those from her earliest years when, we might assume, her poetry would look different from her edited 1773 book. Additionally, internal evidence is particularly difficult with poetry of this period because it often intentionally shares a common language, and even more so when participating in the same coterie. In other words, internal evidence—apart from the poet declaring herself the “Afric muse” or a similar Wheatley identifier—will not likely be determinative on its own and remain in the realm of speculative attribution. However, we would expect that the poem would fall within some reasonable likelihood of authorship in terms of style, subject, and word choice or it would be ruled out by most scholars. The elegy on Love “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 169 Rotch cannot be ruled out on any of these. In fact, there are good reasons to suggest Wheatley authorship. First, the Love Rotch elegy does not contain a clear Wheatley identifier, such as in “To the University of Cambridge” (1767) in which the speaker declares, “An Ethiop tells you” (Writings 55). However, this is to be expected because most of her poems do not do this. The poem does use language and phrases consistent with her oeuvre, but assessing these out of context in relation to the rest of the poem can be tricky. If looking at just words alone, it is worth noting that there are many words that are original to each Wheatley poem. For instance, there are twenty-two words in “Hussey and Coffin” (excluding forms of the same basic word) not included in Wheatley’s other known poems; there are only ten words in the elegy to Love Rotch that are not found in Wheatley’s known poetry.30 However, this does not decide anything. Nothing in the poem says it is definitively her vocabulary; but, most importantly for the overall case, nothing says it is not. At the most basic level, this elegy for an important person in the community written in heroic couplets matches our expectations of the poetic genre, style, and situation in which Wheatley often wrote. From a broad view, the poem is consistent with crucial aspects of Wheatley’s elegiac style observed by Mukhtar Ali Isani: it comforts those closest to the deceased over lamentation, it speaks from an omniscient authority, and it claims agency for herself (210).31 For instance, the poem closes with comfort rather than lamentation; the poem employs a voice that seems shaken with mourning in the beginning of the verse, but grows more omniscient by the second half of the poem; and the poet claims agency with the line “That Love Emmerce32 that now Inspires the Pen.” “On Love Rotch” shares both language and form with the next known elegy Wheatley wrote in 1769, this one for Reverend Joseph Sewell, pastor of Old South Church in Boston. There, as in the Love Rotch elegy, Wheatley uses her common phrase “Thrice happy,” as well as the phrase “bliss and happiness,” as she turns mourners away from their grief and toward their own personal renewal in heaven (Writings 15–20).33 In her other two earliest elegies, “Mrs. Thatcher’s Son” (1765) and “On the Decease of the Rev’d Doctr Sewell” (1769), she inserts her own perspective and emotional response. In her latest known elegy (1784), to Reverend Cooper—her own minister, with whom she was close—she describes herself sitting, writing, and weeping “by turns” mourning that she lost someone who “Encourage’d 170 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 oft, and oft approv’d her lays” (Writings 141). In other words, it is in keeping with Wheatley’s style to include herself in the mourning, as the Love Rotch elegy does—and to insert herself more so when the person is someone with whom she shares closer ties, as the copyist says she did with Rotch. The endings of the Rotch and Sewell elegies are also similar. At the end of Sewell, the poet wonders when those left behind will arrive at Sewell’s “blessd State” (Writings 16). To which her succinct answer (“When the Same graces in Our hearts do thrive”) swells in two directions at once: when we get there and also when the logic of heaven comes to earth (Writings 16). The Love Rotch elegy ends with a similar rejoinder that seems to point the reader to heaven but just as quickly asks them to refocus and bring the heavenly virtues to the earthly present: “There vast profuse Humanity doth flow / All these enjoyed is Happiness Below.” There are, however, some important differences between the elegy to Love Rotch and the elegy to Sewell, which signal variances in contexts. In the Sewell elegy, the poet pronounces, “Then let each one, behold with wishful eyes / The saint ascending to his native skies” (Writings 17). In the elegy to Love Rotch, the poem follows the general movement one would expect from a Wheatley elegy—the deceased already up in heaven, the response and loss, and either a rebuke or a lesson for one’s own future state— but it emphasizes the poet’s emotion earlier in the process and spends more time addressing the loss of the bereaved (importantly, named Friend, i.e., Quaker). The poem reads as one enmeshed in Quaker women’s culture and verse, with addresses like “O Friend,” “Love and Friendship Universal Give,” and an emphasis on relationship and loss and how these evolve in meaning over time (“each tedious Night”). This would all make sense given the Quaker subject of the poem, especially if Wheatley was also reading, copying, and learning from this Quaker poetic network or Rotch specifically.34 Perhaps the most convincing pieces of internal evidence are the Love Rotch elegy’s employment of the imperative to command the mourner to cease mourning, as well as how similar it is to the other known poems from 1767. Wheatley regularly told mourners to cease. In “Mrs. Leonard, On the Death of Her Husband,” the first Wheatley elegy dedicated to a bereaved white woman, the poet tells her to “cease ye sighs” and “Cease thy complaints” (Writings 24–25) In “Love Rotch” the poet repeatedly commands the mourners to “Repine not,” “Weep not,” “Let not the Loss / . . . Distress thy mind / . . . Nor tremble.” In this, the poet even includes herself. The “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 171 poem is also similar to other 1767 poems in that it, like them, is heavy on theology and also begins with a question (only one in 1767 does not). But, most striking is the similar disruption or break the poet inserts in both “Hussey and Coffin” and “Love Rotch.” “Hussey and Coffin,” which is also about Quakers, includes a subjunctive prose and typographical break within the poem, which I noted at the beginning of this section—“Had I the Tongue of a Seraphim, how would I exalt thy Praise.” This line from “Hussey and Coffin” works in a similar register to a line in the Love Rotch elegy: “I opened not my Mouth, O Lord because—.”35 Both are the poet speaking, at the same time that the poet withholds speech. Additionally, both withhold speech to God and justify this deferral through an appeal to divine authority: either a divinely inspired being found in scripture (“the Tongue of a Seraphim”) or scripture itself (“I opened not my Mouth” is from Psalm 39:9, King James Version). Katherine Clay Bassard’s argument that Wheatley’s diasporic subjectivity comes through in her multivalent elegiac utterances that should be read as her displaced grief, seems forcefully present in the phrase “I opened not my Mouth, O Lord because—.” The unsaid and cannot-be-said are made palpable through the dash. There is no internal evidence from “Love Rotch” that rules the poem out of contention and there are many good reasons from within the poem to suggest Wheatley authorship. This, combined with extensive contextual evidence, which includes the trustworthy manuscript witness Potts, closely connected to Wheatley’s known networks, should compel scholars to accept the poem with confidence. I now turn to consider the implications of this Wheatley poem within Potts’s commonplace book. A SpeculAtive Attribution: the elegy “blAck roSe” Recent work by Tara Bynum emphasizes Wheatley’s full spectrum of experience, pleasure, and connection with other friends and acquaintances of color, as well as stresses the larger networks she cultivated within the diasporic Black community. Though not the focus of Potts, her commonplace book nevertheless leaves traces of Wheatley’s life and the relations that were most important to Wheatley. Given how deeply connected both the elegized, Love Rotch, and the copyist, Mary Potts, were to Wheatley and to networks cultivated through the circulation of her poetry, I want to conclude by dwelling on one other poem within Potts’s commonplace book. 172 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 An anonymous elegy in Potts’s commonplace book is tethered to the Quaker teacher Rebecca Jones—“The Black Rose, A Negro woman of that name lately deceas’d being remarkable for her innocent and sincerely pious life Philadelphia 9th month 3rd 1772.”36 According to the Memorials of Rebecca Jones, a woman called “black Rose” described as “a goodly colored woman” “sat on a bench near the door, and Rebecca in her humility, occupied the vacant seat beside her” at meeting (Allinson 18). While it is entirely speculative at this point, the poem could plausibly be one of Wheatley’s, especially given that Jones had assigned Wheatley poems before and her student Catherine Haines attributed just one of the three Wheatley poems she copied into her book. Poetic coteries often copied poems anonymously, or used cognomens, while knowing the author’s identity. Haines’s commonplace book shows that this poetic coterie did not always identify Wheatley as the author of her poems as has been assumed. I offer the transcription of the poem below and a few observations to begin this conversation among Wheatley scholars. The external circumstances for authorship offered in the first two sections of this essay do not confirm Wheatley’s authorship for the “Black Rose” elegy, but they do make it plausible. It is worth noting that Joseph Rotch Jr., for whom Wheatley wrote a poem on his departure to England, died in 1772, just three months after Rose. In other words, we know that Wheatley was still actively thinking and writing about the Rotches and their extended Quaker network, which included Philadelphia, around the period of Rose’s death. Of course, without the copyist’s explicit attribution, the case for authorship would need to be cumulative, combining a variety of external and internal factors, and remain speculative. Keeping this in mind, the particular word choice of the poem does not rule the poem in or out. Most of the words appear in other Wheatley poems; however, three words of special interest—Brute, sooty, and swarthy—never appear in Wheatley’s known poems, and a fourth word, black, does not appear in other Wheatley poems as a noun to describe a person of African descent. These would tend toward disconfirming authorship. Yet this poem also uses the words Ethiopian and Afric, which are strong indicators of Wheatley authorship. The use of Black as a noun (“noble Black”) in the poem plays on the name Rose was known by, which could account for the change in diction. Additionally, the former three words, which are derogatory, create a rhetorical contrast “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 173 in the poem that indicts the words, consistent with Wheatley’s poetic strategies elsewhere. In fact, the subject matter and its treatment are the strongest reasons to suspect Wheatley authorship. The poem’s employment of theology to critique the inhumane laws of slavery buttressed by supposed “Reason,” as well as the moral imperative to incorporate Black people as equals into the social fabric, are central themes of Wheatley’s oeuvre. Of particular note is the idea of God washing the Ethiopian white, often used by Quakers, which Wheatley deconstructs in “On Being Brought from Africa to America”; like that poem, the poet couples the image with a threat to whites who misuse their power by supporting slavery. The theme of the little and despised confounding and overcoming the wise and powerful also appears in her poem “Goliath of Gath.” The attention to “my Pen” is consistent with Wheatley’s many invocations to the muses and to God to direct her pen. In this poem, the poet implies that she writes many elegies, which Wheatley did, while also distinguishing herself from the many “servile pen[s]” always at the ready to praise the rich. Instead, she declares her intention to let “no low purpose e’er direct my Pen.” Many Wheatley scholars have shown how Wheatley praised virtue and called out misuses of power in her poems. As a whole, the poem seems to diverge from a usual pattern identified in other Wheatley elegies, which might point toward disconfirming her authorship. However, the fact that this would be her only known elegy for a Black woman could account for how it differs from the movement common to other Wheatley elegies. For instance, the poem does not start with the deceased in heaven. Instead, this is delayed because the poem must first justify the unusual subject of her elegy—a Black woman. That the poet begins the poem by explaining theology to an educated audience places it closer to poems like “Atheism” and “To the University of Cambridge.” Likewise, while Wheatley normally spends time consoling the mourners (and instructing them not to mourn), “The Black Rose” instead critiques a society that refuses to mourn the enslaved and the oppressed. Importantly, while admonishing this sin, the poet identifies with the “honest Rose” through her claim to take inspiration from an “honest Muse.” The phrase “‘Rise honest muse; and sing’” is in quotation marks, which highlights it as a variation of Alexander Pope’s line “Rise, honest muse! and sing the Man of Ross,” in which Pope too questioned why “all our praises . . . should Lords engross” (34).37 174 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 This poet highlights Rose’s life as “illustrious” of the virtuous life enmeshed in the social relations of wife, mother, sister, and friend, which Wheatley’s elegies pertaining to white women usually emphasized. Wheatley also uses the word illustrious in her other poems to make political interventions, such as in “Goliath of Gath” with David “th’ illustrious victor” (whom scholars have argued stands in for the oppressed), and in the elegy “On the Death of Mr. Snider Murder’d by Richardson,” in which Wheatley describes “the first martyr” for the cause of the American Revolution as part of an “Illustrious retinue” (Writings 67, 20, 21). The poem for Rose ends where most of Wheatley’s elegies begin—with the eulogized in heaven—which is made possible by the end of this poem only after the poet has justified the existence of an elegy to one such as Rose. Rather than addressing mourners, the speaker closes with a pronouncement about the broad condition of the world in sin—“this sorrowing Vale of mortal Woes”—and “faithful Rose” called out of it and into heaven. This is similar to the language (“dark vale below”) found in the first stanza of “On the Death of a young Lady of Five Years of Age” (Writings 60). Ending with the adjective faithful (as in honest) to describe Rose perhaps at first sounds like the language of a white speaker praising an “honest slave” and a faithful servant. But in Wheatley’s oeuvre “faithful” appears in tandem with powerful and moral forces and people—such as to describe her own tongue entrusted with the glories of imagination (“On Imagination”) or to describe Rev. Samuel Cooper—“faithful PASTOR”—whom she revered for his support of her work and Black freedom (Writings 140). Though elegizing a Black woman would be new for Wheatley’s known work, given how important Rebecca Jones was to a network of white women who circulated poems and were increasingly committed to abolitionist thought and action, it would seem a very good choice for Wheatley to uplift this specific Black woman. Of course, it may very well be that Rose appears in the Memorials of Rebecca Jones precisely because of this elegy, which circulated and increased the importance of Rose.38 There were affiliations and advantages that could only come with scribal participation and circulation, and how Wheatley moved in and through these is not well understood.39 The overwhelming number of elegies produced in eighteenth-century America never saw print—because most never sought print. As soon as scholars do not assume print as the telos of Wheatley’s “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 175 writings or pursue, in Waldstreicher’s words, “book-ended” methodologies, her participation in scribal culture may well lead to a whole new appreciation for the breadth of her work and its influence. No matter the authorship of the elegy to Black Rose, we can underscore now that Wheatley had already called Rose into a consolatory community through the circulation and reading of the Love Rotch elegy and become “part of the technology of communal reconstitution” for diasporic Black communities (Wigginton 100). That is, Wheatley’s poems always exceeded the predominantly white spaces within which they were often copied, archived, lost, and recovered. A few lines Written by a Negro Girl about 15 Years of Age on the Death of Love Rotch her Mistress. What? Gone and left us all in Misery— While thou are fled up to the Regions High? Repine not, but Adore the Righteous Hand That gives the Stroke, Recall the Great Command. Weep not. I opened not my Mouth, O Lord because— We are Instructed by thy Sacred Laws,— Patience waits Entrance at the mourners Door We hope she’s happy but the Loss Explore— Let not the Loss, O Friend, Distress thy mind— All worldly sorrows Volatile as Wind Nor tremble Thou, because each tedious Night Brings fresh Afflictions to the Christian’s Sight That Love Emmerce that now Inspires the Pen And speakes those words thou must resume again Ye know not Friends you yet may meet with Joy At Consummation every one reply. Happy thrice Happy, thou thyself shall view Of Grace and virtue ev’ry Soft’ning dew There bliss and happiness forever Reign And uncontrouled Sing a Celestial Strain There peace and virtue never ending Live Where Love and Friendship Universal Give. There vast profuse Humanity doth flow All these enjoyed is Happiness Below.40 176 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 The Black Rose A Negro Woman of that Name lately deceas’d, being remarkable for her Innocent & sincerely pious Life Philad.a 9th mo 3rd 1772 Reason distinguishing ’twixt Man & Brute, One Flesh, One Blood all Nations constitute, The same the sooty Maid on Afric’s Coast, As in the British Court, the brilliant Toast; Objects alike of the Creator’s Care, Alike belov’d, the swarthy and the Fair, Precious alike is each immortal Soul, To the great Lord and Father of the whole Through whose effectual, all sufficient Grace; The faithful still inherit perfect Peace; Free, or in Bonds, of Jew or Gentile Race, Few want (who dye and leave a large Estate) Some Servile Pen to hail them Good and Great, The humble Poor unnotic’d sink to Dust, Tho’ amicably Good and nobly just, While Adulation, in obsequious Lays, To Wealth not Virtue, Chants the Song of Praise. May no low purpose e’er direct my Pen, Reverence, undue, to pay to mortal Men; But, sordid Views, degenerate Custom’s Laws, Contemning, in the righteous Bond-Maid’s Cause (Lett41 Worth unfeign’d its just Eloguim lack) “Rise honest muse; and sing” the noble Black. If to be faithful in a low Estate Wise without Learning, Without Riches great. If where those Relatives united blend; The Tender Mother, Daughter, Sister, Friend, If where th’ harmonious social Virtues meet, And Piety untainted with Deceit; If in so rich a Garden Honour blows Illustrious then the Life of honest Rose. He who from Guilt delivers the Contrite, “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 177 Whose Love can wash the Ethiopean white; Whose Wisdom can the thing of nought prepare, To bring to nought the boasted things that are, Exalt his little Ones whom Men despise, And thus confound the Wisdom of the Wise, Hath from this sorrowing Vale of mortal Woes, Call’d to immortal joys his faithful Rose.42 notes Thank you to Sarah Horowitz at Haverford Quaker Special Collections and Jordan Landes at Swarthmore Friends Historical Society for quickly accommodating last-minute requests for materials. Thank you to Michelle Levy, who shared her article in progress on Wheatley’s book proposals, which tabulated and made easily accessible the status of all the known poems. Thank you to my colleague Laura Wilder and my writing group—Angela Calcaterra, Travis Foster, Greta LaFleur, Michele Navakas, Kacy Tillman, Caroline Wigginton, and Abram Van Engen—for reading an early draft, to Vin Carretta for salient critique of an early version of this article, to David Waldstreicher for generously sharing his forthcoming work, and to Marion Rust for sharp editorial guidance. 1. The earliest extant poem, labeled “Phillis Wheatley’s first Effort—A.D. 1765. [Age] 11” by Reverend Jeremy Belknap, is a four-line elegy in rough form recovered by Vincent Carretta in 2010. In 1999, Julian Mason brought to scholarly attention Wheatley’s poem “Ocean,” written in 1773. For a brief, but thorough, history of the expansion of the Wheatley canon, which begins in 1931 with Thomas Fortune Fletcher finding new Wheatley poems in the Rush Papers at the Library Company and Historical Society of Pennsylvania, see Waldstreicher. 2. Harold Love offers the categories of assured attribution, confident attribution, tentative attribution, and plausible speculation (216). 3. On these women’s verse manuscript coteries and networks, see Cowell; Mulford; Blecki and Wulf; Stabile; Ousterhout; Wigginton; Rosen; Tillman; Cillerai. 4. Joanna Brooks made this clear in her groundbreaking article on Wheatley’s manuscript circulation. For more on Jones and Catherall, see Wulf; Tarter; and Bouldin. 5. Gwynedd Monthly Meeting, Montgomery, Penn. P43, U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681–1935, Ancestry.com. 6. For more on the Jones family see the Finding Aid for their papers held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 7. U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681–1935, Ancestry.com; Burial record for Mary P Jones, Find a Grave Index for Burials at Sea and Other Select Burial Locations, 1300s–Current, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/148275716/mary 178 } Early American Literature: Volume 58, Number 1 -p-jones, accessed 23 Jan. 2022; Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections, Morris-Shinn-Maier Collection, Papers for Owen Jones from Mary Jones’ Estate, box 7, folder 5. 8. Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681–1935, Ancestry.com. 9. Hannah Griffitts seems to be related to Mary Powel Potts as, Mary Powel Potts’s mother, Sarah Powell Potts (1747–73) was the daughter of Mary Morris Powell (1713–59) and Samuel Powell Jr. (1704–59). Mary Morris Powell’s (1713–59) brother was Samuel Powell (1738–93) and her sister was Abigail Powell Griffitts (1735–97), and this Abigail’s son was Dr. Samuel Powell Griffitts (1759–1826). Mary Morris Powell’s will details some of these relations. Hannah Griffitts’s will names the executors as “Kinsman, Joseph Parker Norris and Dr. Samuel Powel Griffitts.” Philadelphia County Wills, 1682–1819, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1900, Ancestry.com. 10. The manuscript lists the two poems as “Elegy Written by Hannah Griffitts on the Death of my dear Sister Mary P. Jones” and “An Elegy Inscribed to Lorenzo by E. Wister” and next to “Lorenzo” writes “Jonathan Jones His Niece on the death of his first wife Mary Jones” and along the edge “Mary Jones the 2d wife of JJ.” Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections, Morris-Shinn-Maier Collection, Papers for Owen Jones from Mary Jones’ Estate, box 7, folder 5. 11. Jones was lifelong friends with Catherine Haines’s mother, Margaret Haines, and she wrote Catherine and her brother on their mother’s death (Memorials 205–7). She still wrote letters to the Rotch family even when some parts of the family moved to Ohio. I have not yet confirmed letters to Mary Potts’s family. 12. Wilson was a revered Quaker minister who, during her thirteen-month visit to the colonies, addressed John Woolman in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1769 to support his stand against slavery. 13. It is not clear who Maria Ellis was, but given the early context of these poems and their circulation, she was most likely a Quaker. One possibility is a Mary Ellis referred to in the Gwynedd Monthly Meeting (Jan. 1772) who does not yet have her certificate delivered from Providence. U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681–1935, Ancestry.com. 14. The attribution fits the biography of Wheatley, who would have been about fourteen or fifteen years old. “Atheism,” one of her earliest poems in manuscript, exists in at least four manuscript variations, and copyists vacillate regarding her age. The Library Company of Philadelphia manuscript held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the Rush Family Papers attributes the poem to “a Native of Africa, about 15 years of age—of who a few years ago could not speak one word of English—she belong’d to John Wheatley of Boston.” Another Library Company of Philadelphia manuscript held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the Hannah Griffitt’s manuscripts attributes the poem to “Africania” and adds, “The following Lines are said to be Composed by a Native of Africa, about 15 years of age.” A third version of the poem titled “An Address to the Atheist” held at “On the Death of Love Rotch” the Massachusetts Historical Society (Robie-Sewell Family Papers) includes the attribution “by P. Wheatley at the Age of 14 Years—1767.” A fourth variant held at Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College (Catherine Haines Commonplace Book) attributes the poem “On Atheism” to “a Negrow [sic] girl of above Fifteen year [sic] of age in the space of two hours.” 15. The M. Morris of Milcah Martha Moore’s commonplace book is unidentified in Blecki and Wulf 223. Potts identifies the poet as Molly Morris, who may be Moore’s sister Margaret Morris. Potts copies the title “A Letter from a Clergyman to Molly Morris” and then “Lavinia’s Answer” by “M. Morris.” It is attributed to “Molley Morris” in another English Quaker commonplace book (John Jackson, Commonplace Concerning Quakers, 1773–1814, Beinecke Library.) The poem also appears in manuscript networks associated with Ackworth School, perhaps due to Rebecca Jones’s influence during her travels in England as a Quaker minister (for example, Mary Allcard Commonplace Book, Beinecke Library). 16. Her successful family of whale oil merchants owned warehouses in Nantucket and in Newport, Rhode Island. Nantucket and Newport Quakers were close; Love Rotch’s son William, for instance, had three children who married into the Rodman family of Newport (McDevitt 43, 96). 17. Daniel Ricketson gives Joseph Rotch Jr. as the subject of Wheatley’s poem in The History of New Bedford (1858) but gives no source. There are some errors in the recording of Joseph Rotch’s death date in some sources, which place it as 1767. But the most reliable record, England & Wales, Quaker Birth, Marriage, and Death Registers, 1578–1837, for the Monthly Meeting of Bristol lists his death date as 29 Dec. 1772 and his burial date as 5 Jan. 1773 in The Fryers, England. Samuel Dyer, who helped attend to Joseph Rotch Jr. during his final days in Bristol, wrote a letter dated 1 Feb. 1773, detailing the final days and enclosing Joseph Jr.’s daily log of events (Nantucket Historical Association, Rotch Family Papers, MS 101, folder 2). 18. She appears to have been named after her aunt, Love Coffin, Deborah Coffin Macy’s sister. Deborah Coffin Macy was the great-grandmother of the later wellknown women’s rights activist and abolitionist, Lucretia Coffin Mott; Love Rotch her great-aunt. Barney Genealogical Record, Nantucket Historical Association, accessed 21 Jan. 2022. 19. It was reprinted in the Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser on 11 Jan. 1768. The title of the poem listed in Wheatley’s book proposal published in the Boston Censor in February 1772, is “On two Friends, who were cast away.” 20. Love Rotch and Nathaniel Coffin were second cousins once removed. Barney Genealogical Record, Nantucket Historical Association, accessed 21 Jan. 2022. 21. See Chiles for more on Wheatley as an amanuensis for Susannah Wheatley. 22. Wheatley wrote to Obour Tanner on 19 July 1772 that she had “been in a very poor state of health all the past winter and spring, and now reside in the country for the benefit of its more wholesome air” (Writings, 36). Susannah Wheatley’s treatment of the young Wheatley as a surrogate child is not unrelated to the kind of comfort that both ladies may have expected to receive from time with Wheatley caring for them. { 179 180 } Early amErican litEraturE: VolumE 58, numbEr 1 23. Benjamin Coffin’s second wife was Deborah Macy. Before they married, Benjamin Coffin was simply Love Rotch’s cousin. Barney Genealogical Record, NHA. 24. Love Rotch refused to leave Nantucket, and according to McDevitt this is probably why the family waited to move to New Bedford (144). 25. Love Rotch’s papers have eluded Rotch family historians. Though she descended from two of the most influential Nantucket families, we don’t even know how she died. We don’t have Susannah Wheatley’s papers either. And, of course, Wheatley’s second book manuscript and her other papers have not yet been found. In other words, scholars are working despite a great number of gaps in historical documentation and scribal networks are one way to fill in these relationships. 26. In addition to Wulf, see also Heen, who specifically addresses women in the Coffin and Macy families. 27. Additionally, William Rotch was a trusted business partner and friend of Captain Paul Cuffe, perhaps the wealthiest Black whaler and maritime merchant, who worked tirelessly for his vision of a free Black colony in Sierra Leone. 28. At least the early nineteenth-century Newlins who married into the Ver Plancks of New York were Quaker. Dr. Randall Burkett, retired Curator for African American History and Culture at Emory University’s Rose Library, indicates that Wheatley had worked for the Newlin family of Boston (see “Uncovering the Archive: Phillis Wheatley Collection, 1757–1773, Emory University,” https:// k-saa.org/uncovering-the-archive-phillis-wheatley-collection-1757-1773-emory -university/). 29. Love addresses internal evidence through these two categories, which he takes from an essay by Arthur Sherbo titled “The Uses and Abuses of Internal Evidence” (79). 30. These numbers are based on searching the digitized Penguin 2001 edition of Phillis Wheatley’s works by Vincent Carretta, which does not include all variants. Therefore, the numbers cannot be considered a final number; rather, they are a good estimate. 31. In addition to Isani, Bassard, Brooks, and Wigginton cited in this article, there have been many important contributions to the study of Wheatley’s elegies, including those by Gregory Rigsby, Paula Bennett, Astrid Franke, James A. Levernier, Max Cavitch, Jennifer Thorn, Antonio T. Bly, and Cole Murphy. 32. A misspelling or variant spelling of emersed, listed in the OED as a variant spelling of immersed. 33. It is worth noting that this line pays homage to Pope’s Essay on Man, often quoted by Quakers: “Know then this truth (enough for man to know) / Virtue alone is happiness below” (15). “Thrice Happy” was, of course, a common locution among elegists after Pope. 34. Waldstreicher, building on Bynum, argues that “friend” is a key word for Wheatley authorship. 35. “Love Rotch” is also similar to the previously first-known elegy to a white woman, “To Mrs. Leonard,” in which Wheatley accuses the “Grim Monarch” as “On the Death of Love Rotch” { 181 this scripture does—saying, essentially, “I open not my mouth because of what you, God, have done” (Writings 24). See Bly for Wheatley’s employment of “sass” through typography in her elegies. 36. The poem appears in The Evening Fire-Side (1805) titled “Panegyric upon a Black Woman, Written after Her Death” with no other contextual information on the date of writing, the author, or the subject of the poem. It is worth noting that the same issue includes the poem by Molly Morris (Lavinia) also found in Potts’s commonplace book. 37. Interestingly, another manuscript copy of the poem includes only one single mark after “sing” and before “the”—“Rise honest muse, and sing ‘ the noble black,” making it unclear if the copyist left off the opening or the closing quotation mark. When the poem appears in print in 1805 the quotations have shifted to enclose the phrase “‘the noble Black’” rather than Pope’s phrase (Evening Fire-Side 114). 38. For instance, before the elegy to Black Rose appeared in print, it was copied into another commonplace book loosely connected to the Rotch family. Love Macy Rotch was the sister of Lydia Macy who married Jethro Coleman in 1747 and whose son, Jethro Coleman Jr. (1755–1814), married Deborah Russell (whose first marriage was to Abel Coffin) in the Nine Partners Meeting in Duchess, New York, in 1783. This genealogy provides some window into how Wheatley’s poems might have been circulated, copied, and preserved by the New York Yearly Meeting of Quakers. It also suggests one avenue for how the elegy to Black Rose appeared in Aaron Baker’s commonplace book around 1799 as a student in Nine Partners boarding school. Aaron Baker’s commonplace book, New York Yearly Meeting Collection of Quaker Poetry, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. 39. For recent work on manuscript’s relationship to print, see King. 40. Transcribed from Mary Powel Potts commonplace book, pp. 88–89. 41. Published version is “Lest.” Aaron Baker’s copy is also “Let.” 42. Transcribed from Mary Powel Potts commonplace book, pp. 16–18. works cited Allinson, William J., ed. Memorials of Rebecca Jones. Henry Longstreet II, 1849. Anon. “To the Students . . . Quakers Meeting . . . 1759 at Oxford.” Gulielma M. Howland Collection, Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections. Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton UP, 1999. 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