Who is phillis wheatleys husband

In she published a poem dedicated to George Washington and even visited the general's headquarters in Cambridge. When death struck the Wheatley family in , however, Phillis's life began spiraling downward. She continued to write and produced a page book of poetry now lost , but she could not find a publisher for it. Her unhappy marriage to John Peters, a Boston free black, produced three children, two of whom soon died.

How or when the couple met is unclear. Historians speculate the two had children, and if they did, all of them predeceased the couple. Those who have sought to cast him as such point to his imprisonment for debt on multiple occasions and his name appearing in various legal documents and court cases.

However, these cannot serve as a true indication of his character. At this time, involvement in court cases was not unusual since legal petitions were the only recourse for recovering disputed monies or obtaining sales licenses. Moreover, it is highly likely that the Peterses, like so many others, were swept up in the financial depression that followed the American Revolution, a time when promises of payment for goods were indefinitely disrupted.

Links to documents and artifacts relating to the moment and events referenced in the poem. Abstract A cache of Essex County legal papers reveals that when Phillis Wheatley Peters and her husband left Boston in , they moved to Middleton where John became a landowner on a farm where he had been enslaved.

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Buy This Article. Email alerts Article Activity Alert. The manuscripts of her proposal were never found. The couple had three children, none of them survived. She had given him all she had from the sale of her book, he was eventually incarcerated for debt. It is ironic that as a slave Phillis had the freedom and support to be creative but as a free married woman she had none of it.

Phillis was pregnant at the time her husband abandoned her and lived the rest of her life in poverty. Phillis stopped writing in order to support herself and her soon to be born child.