Phillis Wheatley Peters, Liberty and Peace, a Poem. Boston: Warden & Russell, 1784.
With memories of the Revolution lingering after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, poet Phillis Wheatley Peters reflects on its outcome in her poem Liberty and Peace, a series of couplets published in 1784. She looks forward to a postwar America, writing, “In smiling Peace resolves the din of War.” Wheatley Peters, whom scholars have described as the “poet laureate of the American Revolution,” also wrote poems decrying the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre, as well as an ode celebrating George Washington’s leadership. Enslaved and brought to Boston from the Gambia–Senegal region of Africa at the age of seven, Wheatley Peters negotiated her own manumission in 1775, when she was just twenty-two years old. She published 145 poems before her death in 1784.
