Colonial and Revolution-Era Voices: Franklin and Wheatley

Whose voice got recorded at all is itself part of American history. Two people living in the same colonial-era America could have almost unimaginably different lives, and the writing each left behind reveals both a personality and an entire social world. This week sets a free, famous printer and statesman beside a poet who wrote her most remarkable work while enslaved.

In his twenties, Benjamin Franklin designed a personal system of thirteen virtues, including temperance, order, industry, and sincerity, and tracked his daily progress in a small book, focusing on one virtue per week in rotation and marking a dot every time he slipped. It is a practical, almost engineering-minded approach to becoming a better person, and it worked well enough that Franklin credited it, decades later, with much of his success. Phillis Wheatley's path to writing looked nothing like Franklin's freely chosen self-improvement project. Brought to Boston as a child and enslaved by the Wheatley family, she was taught to read and write by them, and by 1773 had become the first African American, and one of the first women in the American colonies, to publish a book of poetry. Because many white readers refused to believe an enslaved person could have written such polished verse, a group of prominent Bostonians examined her directly before her book could be published, and signed a statement confirming she was truly its author.