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Cambridge, February 2d, 1776.

Miss Phillis:

Your favour of the 26th October did not reach my hands till the middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer ere this. Granted. But a variety of important occurrences continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming but not real neglect. 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 panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your 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. If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favoured by the muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations I am, with great respect, your obedient humble servant. 

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

During this time Phillis Wheatley's life appears to have been less happy than in the preceding years. Her patroness was married and had little time for her. Mrs. Wheatley had died, and when after the death of John Wheatley the family to which she owed all was dissolved, she gave her hand in wedlock to John Peters. That 

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this marriage was unhappy we feel. There is no poem in which she sings of Love and happiness.  Love, the greatest urger for poet, the most intensive creator of poetical expression was not her inspirer and this  tells us more about her marriage tha anything else.  The few letters which we know, have a different tone after her marriage.
Her husband, like herself, a Negro who "kept a shop, wore a wig, carried a cane, and felt himself superior to all kinds of labor." The most contradictory rumors circulate about this husband of Phillis Wheatley.  He is said to have been a grocery keeper, according to others a baker journeyman, a man of all jobs.  It is, however, a proven fact that he was at some time of his life a lawyer, and that he tried his hand at being a physician.  During the Revolution he lost all his property and the family became very poor.  Phillis' friend, Mary Latrop, had died and no helping hand was near.  Her husband did nothing to provide for the family, and when Nathaniel Wheatly died also and her husband had been imprisoned for debt, Phillis Wheatley, who had (probably through the death of her mistress) become a free Negro, was forced to earn her daily bread in a common Negro boarding house.  It appears that she was too proud to apply for help to any of her old friends, for 
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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-26 22:28:53 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-27 09:46:29 indents removed