Phillis Wheatley was captured in Africa as a young child, and brought to Boston, Massachusetts. There, she was sold as a slave to John Wheatley, who was immediately impressed by her intellect. Wheatley encouraged Phillis to learn to read English so that she might study the Bible. “As to her WRITING, her own Curiosity led her to it,” he later recalled.

In this poem, Wheatley confronted the tangle of the popular eighteenth-century characterization of virtue as a woman, as well as the complications of her own status as an enslaved woman. While Wheatley silently presumed that she would be able to approach Virtue, and eventually salvation, on equal terms with anyone else in evangelical Christian circles, this assumption would surely have challenged some of her readers, who likely viewed both women and persons of African descent as inferior. Although she did not expressly challenge the institution of slavery or social conventions regarding gender, her bold claim to the equality of all people in the eyes of God can be viewed as an attempt to undermine the racial and gendered construction of power in eighteenth-century American society.