Period Phillis Wheatley And Lucy Terry Prince example essay topic

What is a hero? The dictionary definition for the word hero is "one that is much admired or shows great courage". To me a hero is one that thinks of others before themselves and is willing to help someone in need without hesitance. Either way we look at it, if someone is titled a hero by someone else one can always assume the best of that person. My biggest hero is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, because he made the biggest sacrifice for others, which was to die for us. None can compare in my mind.

Several male and female African American "heroes" come to us from the colonial and antebellum periods of American history, however two in particular inspires me the most. The colonial period "signifies the age of revolution in American history" and from this period Phillis Wheatley and Lucy Terry Prince are the ones that rouse up my inner thoughts and touches my heart with their heroic acts and fights for equality. Phillis Wheatley was captured as a slave and transported to the American colonies as a child. John and Susanna Wheatley of Boston then purchased her in 1761. Phillis learned to read and write with the help of the Wheatley women. In her writings she focuses on the contrast between slavery and freedom as a black woman in colonial America.

Phillis was freed around 1778 after John Wheatley's death and became the wife of John Peters, a freeman. She and John Peters had three children, but none of them lived to adulthood. Phillis Wheatley died in 1784 while working in a Boston boarding house. Like Wheatley, Lucy Terry Prince was African by birth. She was brought to America and sold as a slave. After arriving in the colonies, she was purchased by Ebenezer Wells, a resident of Deerfield, Massachusetts.

She eventually learned to read and write. Terry wed Abi jah Prince around 1756. He purchased his wife from her owners. They relocated to Guilford, Vermont around 1760. Lucy died in 1821. Phillis Wheatley is a woman who not only spoke out against injustice and oppression, but also dramatized the possibilities and limitations of the age of the Revolutionary War.

She wrote books during a time when few men and women could even read, gaining the respect of thousands. Lucy Terry Prince like Wheatley also led a remarkable life as an advocate. She first demonstrated a willingness to defend her rights in a public debate while living in Guilford. In 1785, white neighbors threatened her and her family's lives and destroyed some of their property. Lucy appealed in person to Governor Thomas Chittenden and his Council seeking protection from these assaults. On June 7, 1785, the council ordered the law enforcement authority in the town to defend her family.

Although both Lucy and Phillis were activists for equal rights they also differed in some ways. Prince addresses other subjects in her writings like in "Bars Fight", she writes about an Indian attack against white colonists. The poem reveals the tension between whites and Indians in colonial America and indicates the poet's sensitivity to the social and political climate of the period. Both Wheatley and Prince were slaves at one point and both were emancipated.

Although these remarkable women differed in some ways they both had the same desire and passion for equality and freedom. These women could have ended their fight at the time of their own emancipation, but their desire and belief kept them in the fight for the equality of all. I believe these women played a pivotal role in securing the freedom of every person in the United States.