About
This project’s goal is to make accessible key documents about Phillis Wheatley Peters and John Peters, focusing on their experiences in Middleton. The documents are in the public record, but most are written in eighteenth-century handwriting that is unfamiliar to today’s readers. In addition, most are in digital collections that are not word-searchable or easily navigable except by reading page-by-page.
Educators and members of the general public have long been interested in Phillis Wheatley. At the turn of the twentieth century, Black women named clubs and organizations after her. Artists like Elizabeth Catlett, June Jordan, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers have created art in conversation with her.
John Peters is fascinating in his own right as a self-educated entrepreneur who pursued many vocations, including law and medicine. He lived 17 years longer than his wife and never remarried. Details about his early life as revealed in the Project documents provide leads for pursuing further documentation of his life and networks.
Until recently, many biographical sketches of Phillis Wheatley Peters have been influenced by a harshly negative portrait of John Peters authored by Margaretta Odell in 1834. A White descendant of the Wheatleys who enslaved Phillis, she depicted him as an inept businessman and neglectful husband.
The research and scholarship underpinning the Wheatley Peters Project are by Cornelia H. Dayton, a historian at the University of Connecticut. She came across John Peters’ appeal of his former enslaver Lt. John Wilkins’ will when researching testamentary capacity cases in New England. Realizing that the case contained valuable new information on Phillis Wheatley’s husband and their marriage, she followed the paper trail and eventually located seven related legal cases that all together generated 120 documents. Dayton’s analysis of the complicated events is laid out in her article, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” The New England Quarterly 94: 3 (2021): 309-351. A shorter version can be found in the Spring 2022 issue of American Ancestors magazine.
We are in the midst of an exciting upsurge in public interest in Black peoples, cultures, and communities in New England. For more on these discoveries and where to look in “hidden” archives, see the Resources page.