ARISE, my soul, on wings enraptur'd, rise
To praise the monarch of the earth and skies,
Whose goodness and benificence appear
As round its centre moves the rolling year,
Or when the morning glows with rosy charms,
Or the sun slumbers in the ocean's arms:
Of light divine be a rich portion lent
To guide my soul, and favour my intend.
Celestial muse, my arduous flight sustain
And raise my mind to a seraphic strain!

Phillis Wheatley, "Thoughts on the Works of Providence"

Frontispiece and Title Page
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,
Engraving attributed to Scipio Moorhead,
Published 1773.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

On September 1, 1773, Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London England. Wheatley's collection was the first volume of poetry by an African-American poet to be published. Often called the "Black Prodigy," she was approximately twenty-one at the time.

Born in Senegal, West Africa, the poet was sold into slavery and transported to Boston at age seven or eight. Purchased off the slave ship by prosperous merchant John Wheatley and his wife Suzanna in 1761, the young girl was soon copying the English alphabet on a wall in chalk.

Rather than fearing her precociousness, the Wheatleys encouraged it, allowing their daughter Mary to tutor the girl in reading and writing. She also studied English literature, Latin, and the Bible—a strong education for any eighteenth-century woman. In 1770, Phillis Wheatley's first published poem, "On the Death of the Reverend George Whitefield," was printed in broadside form.

Selina (Shirley) Hastings,
Countess of Huntingdon,
1707-1791.
Prints and Photographs Division

Manumitted by the Wheatley family, the poet sailed to London in 1773. Her reputation preceded her. She met many influential people, including the Lord Mayor of London who presented her with a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost. Her volume of poetry was published under the patronage of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. Learning of Mrs. Wheatley's ill-health, Phillis Wheatley returned to Boston prior to the book's appearance. Arriving in Boston in September 1773, she nursed her mistress until Suzanna Wheatley died the following March. Wheatley continued to write. In 1776, she sent her poem "To his Excellency General Washington," later published in the Pennsylvania Magazine, to the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. General Washington thanked her for the poem in a letter:

I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents. In honour of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the Poem, had I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the World this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of Vanity. This and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public Prints.

Letter, George Washington to Phillis Wheatley, February 28, 1776.
The George Washington Papers, 1741-1799

Phillis Wheatley continued to live with various members of the Wheatley family until 1778. After the death of John Wheatley and his daughter, Phillis moved to her own home. She soon married John Peters who squandered her inheritance from the Wheatley family. She bore the frequently-absent Peters three children. Beset with financial problems, she sold her volume of Milton to help pay his debts. To support herself and her only surviving child, Phillis Wheatley worked in a Boston boarding house. Both the poet and her child died there on December 5, 1784.

• Like Benjamin Banneker and Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley continued to inspire African-American achievement throughout the nineteenth century. Search the collection The African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920 on Phillis Wheatley to retrieve nineteenth-century materials including biographical sketches of the poet and an oration commemorating Wheatley's contributions to American literature.
• Wheatley's volume of Paradise Lost came eventually into the possession of Harvard University. Recently, Wheatley's work has been studied for evidence of its ongoing embrace of West African narrative as well as its reliance on English literary forms. To learn more about Wheatley, and see pages from her 1773 volume published in London, go to A Voice of Her Own in the Imagination section of the American Treasures exhibition.
• Another online exhibition, The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship highlights the Library's exceptional African-American collections which include rare books and important maps such as a mid-18th-century map of Africa covering the area that extends from present-day Gambia and Senegal in the northwest, where Phillis Wheatley was born, to Gabon in the southeast. A lithograph in the lower left of the map is illustrative of the dress, dwellings, and work of some West Africans of the period.
• Search on the word poetry in The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books to find, among a wide variety of other works, The Family Library of Poetry and Song, edited by William Cullen Bryant, and Songs of Three Centuries, edited by John Greenleaf Whittier.
• See Today in History features on other African-American literary artists including Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and James Baldwin.

The Fall of Atlanta

Atlanta is ours and fairly won.

Telegram from Union General William T. Sherman
to President Abraham Lincoln, September 1, 1864.

William T. Sherman,
Leaning on Breach of Gun,
Atlanta, Georgia,
George N. Barnard, photographer, 1864.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865

On September 1, 1864, Confederate General John B. Hood evacuated Atlanta, leaving the city, a crucial supply center for the Confederacy, in Union hands. Union General William T. Sherman's victory helped ensure Lincoln's reelection two months later. With 110,000 men under his command, Sherman began moving toward Atlanta on May 5, 1864. By July 6, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, who was defending the city with half as many men, had retreated south of the Chattahoochee River onto Peachtree Creek. General Hood relieved Johnston and attacked Sherman on July 20, but was forced to retreat with a large number of casualties. By August 31, Sherman had crossed Hood's supply line, forcing him to evacuate the city the following day. In response, Hood moved toward Nashville where he met defeat at the hands of General George H. Thomas

On November 16, Sherman began his famous march from Atlanta to the sea, leaving devastation and social transformation in his wake. Although many Southerners vilified Sherman for the destruction wrought upon their homeland, others saw him as a liberator. E.W. Evans was nine when Sherman's troops passed by the plantation where he was born. As was the custom of the day, interviewer Geneva Tonsill transcribed his words in dialect. Evans remembered Sherman as the herald of his family's freedom.

He [Sherman] come through Madison on his march to the sea and we chillun hung out on the front fence from early morning unil late in the evening, watching the soldiers go by. It took most of the day…The next week…Miss Emily called the five women that wuz on the place and tole them to stay 'round the house…She said they were free and could go wherever they wanted to.

"E.W. Evans, Brick Layer & Plasterer,"
Atlanta, Georgia,
Geneva Tonsill, interviewer,
circa 1936 - 1940.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

By the 1930s, Evans, who started out in 1877 as a bricklayer and plasterer, owned a twelve-room Atlanta home that was, he noted, "somewhat larger than Colonel Hill's house where the family lived who owned us as slaves."

Union veteran L.C. McBride fought with Sherman in the siege of Atlanta and remembered his venture into the South as the event that made him a Republican. Ninety-two-year-old McBride, wounded fighting in southeast Tennessee after the fall of Atlanta, recalled the taunts he endured at the hands of Confederates while recuperating in a Murphysboro [Tennessee] hospital:

There were four Rebels in there and they used to roast me something fierce. 'What did you'uns come down here to fit weuns for? I can hear them saying it yet. I had always been a Democrat but after that I turned Republican and have been so ever since. These Rebels are Democrats.

"L.C. McBride,"
Lincoln, Nebraska,
Harold J. Moss, interviewer,
March 21, 1939.
American Life Histories,1936-1940

Atlanta, Before Being Burnt: by Order of Gen'l. Sherman, from the Cupola of the Female Seminary,
Atlanta, Georgia, 1864.
Taking the Long View, 1851-1991

Learn more about the Civil War. Explore the following American Memory collections.

• First Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 presents the culture of the American South from the viewpoint of Southerners, during and after the Civil War. A Woman's Wartime Journal: An Account of the Passage Over Georgia's Plantation of Sherman's Army on the March to the Sea is Dolly Lunt Burge's wartime tale. Read this and other Southern perspectives on the campaign. Search the collection on Sherman's march.

  
  "Marching Through Georgia"
  In honor of Maj. Gen. Sherman's Famous March
  "From Atlanta to the Sea," by Henry C. Work
  1865.
  Historic American Sheet Music: 1850-1920

• Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865 contains several photographs of Atlanta during the siege of 1864, including a view of refugees evacuating the city. Search the collection on Atlanta to find more photographs documenting this pivotal event in the history of the Civil War.
• Read about additional Civil War events. Search the Today in History Archive on Civil War.
• Prior to the Civil War, William T. Sherman spent more than a decade in California. Read Recollections of California, 1846-1861, Sherman's memoir of his experiences there available through the collection California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives, 1849-1900.
• Search Map Collections (1500-Present) on Atlanta or Civil War to find maps made during the war.