To His Excellency General Washington

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1773

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

An American Mythology

Historically, verse has been wielded to forge and reforge national identity: recounting harrowing battles, and heroic lineages to generate the pathos of national pride. Famously, Virgil (a poet cited among Wheatley’s influences) was commissioned by the Romans to pen the Aeneid—the epic linking the Roman people as direct descendants to the Homeric conflict at the fall of Troy. Wheatley mythologizes Columbia in similar fashion by borrowing Roman and Hellenistic imagery in the creation of the poem’s centerpiece and metaphorical construction, “Columbia” (Line 2) "The Goddess" (Line 9). The speaker implores the goddess to act as a guide for General Washington’s every action.

“Columbia” embodies the early spirit of America as a goddess of the classical era. The name Columbia was first coined in the 1730s, in allusion to the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, and referred to the American commonwealth of colonies. Prior to any final declaration of independence from English rule, representatives from each colony considered themselves disparate bodies—even referring to themselves as separate countries. In “To His Excellency General Washington,” Wheatley’s dramatic gesture succeeds in creating a mythology for the burgeoning country. Ultimately, Wheatley’s images and rationalist ideals put forth in the poem solidified several of the touchstones held today as icons of American patriotism.

Imperialism

Wheatley was a deeply political writer and known abolitionist, becoming increasingly vocal following her manumission. A central conceit of the poem is the greed of imperialist power. While many of the lines work in a gesture of high heroism, fanfare, and the bombastic imagery of war, Wheatley also presents the epidemic imperialism of her age as a corrosive and unsustainable force. In one of the poem’s more striking images, Wheatley draws a proportional relationship between the greed of Britain’s imperialist interest and the “rising hills of dead” (Line 36). Wheatley’s poem also imagines a global arena where “nations gaze at scenes before unknown” (Line 6). By creating a sense of impending judgement and spectacle as well as a global community to act as witness, Wheatley’s poem is a call to action, calling her transatlantic audience to reexamine its own role in the cost of human carnage where she warns, “Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late” (Line 38).

Freedom

Freedom is mentioned only twice in the poem, but for Wheatley, the stakes of an American Revolution were known firsthand. In an extended metaphor, Wheatley creates an image of the goddess Columbia, leaping to the defense of freedom: “While freedom's cause her anxious breast alarms, / She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms” (Lines 3-4).

Later in the poem, Wheatley proclaims that the land itself is a “land of freedom” (Line 32), evoking the imaginative construction of freedom as a resource that endemically grows for the colonists: “And so may you, whoever dares disgrace / The land of freedom's heaven-defended race” (Lines 31-32). Through these constructions, Wheatley evangelizes the concept of freedom. By asserting that the colonists are “heaven-defended” (Line 32) in their fight for freedom, Wheatley capitalizes on a recent religious movement that swept through the colonies: the Great Awakening (1720-1730), a revival of Christianity through Calvinist concepts. Among the movement’s notable voices was George Whitefield, a British minister whose long marches and sermons energized a waning Christian presence in the colonies before his death in 1770, which Wheatley elegized in her poem “On the Death of George Whitefield.”

By insinuating that Christianity and freedom go hand-in-hand, Wheatley would have known she was speaking to a vast audience both in North America and across the Atlantic. Furthermore, Wheatley’s emphasis on freedom as a divine mandate does the work toward winning another longer fought battle that would rage for generations in America—the fight against slavery. General Washington was reported to have owned approximately 300 slaves at his plantation in Virginia at the time that Wheatley composed, “To His Excellency General Washington.” Although she won her own freedom from the Wheatleys by 1753, Phillis Wheatley would not see the end of slavery in America before her death in 1784.