In the spring of 1772, wealthy Bostonians John and Susannah Wheatley sent a frail teenage girl to the fresh air of the countryside, hoping that the change of locale would spare her from maladies afflicting Bostonians. During her stay in the country, which to many colonial Bostonians was Dorchester, she grew stronger. Her name was Phillis, and she was a slave who would become the first black poetess in America to publish her work.

Susannah Wheatley first spied the girl, a native of Senegal, on the auction block of Boston’s slave market one day in 1761. She and John purchased the little girl, and brought her to their comfortable house on King Street. They named her Phillis.

Susannah was preoccupied with Phillis’s fragile health, and as the days passed, the Wheatleys and their teenage twins, Mary and Nathaniel, began regarding the frail African as if she were an adopted child, not a slave. The twins taught Phillis to read and write English.

By the time Phillis was in her mid-teens, the family realized she was a prodigy; she had begun composing poetry that teemed with Biblical and classical imagery.

In 1767, the thirteen-year-old slave penned her first poem of note: “To the University of Cambridge [Harvard].” It criticized the nemesis of neighborhoods past and present – rowdy college students. She referred to herself in the poem as an “Ethiop.”

Her quill soon penned the poems “On Friendship” and “On Atheism.” In 1769, her “On the Death on Mr. Seider, Murder’d by Richardson” was inspired by the tragic death of a youth named Christopher Seider, who had been cut down by a Tory customs official named Richardson. Many eulogized the unfortunate Seider as the first Patriot martyr.

In 1770, a short distance from her owner’s front stoop, the Boston Massacre erupted, deeply affecting her. Another 1770 event, the death of the famed preacher George Whitefield, compelled her to write an elegy that paid tribute to the cleric, who had asserted that God’s salvation was for blacks as well as whites. She signed her work “Phillis, a Servant girl of seventeen years of Age, Belong to Mr. J. Wheatley…but 9 years in this Country from Africa.”

John Wheatley paid for Phillis’s elegiac to be sold on broadsides through an advertisement in the Massachusetts Spy. By 1772, Phillis was gathering her poems into a book. Her owners decided to publish them with an English printer and sent her to London with Nathaniel to put her work together. They returned in October 1773. Her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, would follow. Then, with a swiftness the poetess could have likened to the Greek tragedies she had read, Susannah Wheatley died in March 1774.

For Phillis, the loss of the woman who had been more mother and friend than owner was incalculable. John Wheatley died a few years after his wife, but not before he had had freed the poetess.

Shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill, on June 17, 1775, Phillis fled from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island, and the Patriots’ cause sent words spewing from her quill. She sent a letter and a poem to Gen. George Washington in October 1775. Some historians contend that she actually met him, but the jury remains out on the story. By 1778 Wheatley was back in Boston, finding that life for ex-slaves was not easy. She was married that year to a freed slave named John Peters, but when Peters was reportedly jailed for failure to pay his debts, a common enough ordeal for many men of the day, white or black, Phillis took a job at a local boardinghouse to support her children (she had three, with two dying at early ages) and her health inevitably eroded from the physical and emotional strains.

Despite all, Phillis kept writing, her work occasionally appearing in various pamphlets, but she could not find a publisher for her second book of poems. Her byline appeared for the final time In September 1784, her poem’s theme one she had experienced – the death of a baby.
The Massachusetts Centinel ran a small announcement on Dec. 8, 1784: “Last Lord’s day died, Mrs. Phillis Peters, aged 31, known to the literary world by her celebrated miscellaneous Poems.” In an unmarked grave were buried the remains of the slave-poetess and one of her children.

Another unique woman’s voice came to Dorchester roughly a century after Phillis Wheatley sought her muse in meadows now filling with homes. When Lucy Stone arrived in Dorchester around 1870, she was already one of America’s most famous suffragettes.

Stone was born in 1818 into a wealthy family near West Brookfield, Massachusetts, the eighth of nine children. Her father, Francis Stone, ruled the home roost; as historian Louis Filler writes, “Her mother, Hannah, accepted his [Francis’s] view that a husband ruled his family by divine right.”

From the start, Lucy resented females’ secondary status, early in her life “expressing indignation at the preference shown an older brother despite the fact that she could learn and run faster than he.” At the age of sixteen, she turned to one of the few careers open to women – teaching – and took a post at a district school. She graduated from Oberlin College, in Ohio, in 1847, with, Filler notes, “a reputation as a dangerous radical…an ardent abolitionist…uncompromising on the question of women’s rights.”

By the time Stone and her social activist husband, Henry Blackwell, settled in Dorchester, she was lauded, Filler writes, as “the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question.” Lecturing across the nation, she had amassed the huge sum of $7,000 in three years from her speaking engagements.

Lucy Stone kept her own name rather than assuming her spouse’s. In her view, “a woman’s abandonment of her name upon taking a husband was symbolical of her loss of individuality.”

In Dorchester, she found many recruits for the New England Woman Suffrage Association. Her Pope’s Hill mansion served as the headquarters for the Woman’s Journal, which she edited. Stone’s only child, Alice, remembered: “The general idea of a woman’s rights advocate…was a tall, gaunt, angular woman, with aggressive manners, a masculine air, and a strident voice, scolding at the men. Instead, they found [Lucy Stone] a tiny woman with quiet unassuming manners, a winning presence, and the sweetest voice ever possessed by a public speaker.”

Stone’s “radical” views on the vote for women were not echoed in her conservatism regarding labor unions and strikes. A staunch Republican, Stone mistrusted the labor movement.

Suffering from a stomach tumor, Lucy Stone passed away on Oct. 18, 1893, at the age of 75. A throng of women and men alike attended her funeral, which, a friend remarked, was “like a coronation.” Just days before her death, she had urged her daughter, Alice, “to make the world better.”

Peter F. Stevens is a veteran journalist with a specialty in historical writing. His has published ten books, including The Voyage of the Catalpa: A Perilous Journey and Six Irish Rebels’ Escape to Freedom and Hidden History of the Boston Irish.