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'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

So wrote the first major black poet in American history and one of the nation's first major female poets, Phillis Wheatley.

She was born in Gambia, West Africa, stolen from her parents at age 7, enslaved, and brought to America. Boston tailor John Wheatley purchased her as a personal servant for his wife, Susannah. Phillis displayed a ready intelligence, learned English quickly, and soon began reading and writing poetry.

The Wheatleys were members of the famed Old South Meeting House in Boston, where Phillis attended church and was baptized at age 18. She achieved some renown with the publication, in England, of her Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (1773). Though she had been examined by "18 of the most respectable characters in Boston" (to prove that she, a black women, really wrote the poems), no American publisher would publish her. Only with the help of evangelical philanthropist Selina, Countess of Huntington, did her poems come to the public's attention. As a result of her obvious gifts, her owners eventually gave her freedom.

Her poetry reflects the neoclassical style of the day but also reveals the circumstances of her life, especially her race and her faith. Perhaps her most famous poem was "On Being Brought from Africa to America," quoted above. Later she won the notice of General George Washington with a poem she dedicated to him.

She also memorialized the work of evangelist George Whitefield, a pioneer in preaching to blacks. Wheatley, in her poem "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield," imagined the evangelist offering salvation through Christ to his hearers:

Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you,
Impartial Savior is his title due:
Wash'd in the fountain of redeeming blood,
You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God.

Phillis married John Peters in 1778. For years she suffered from poor health and financial woes. Though she was the first African American to publish a book and is today considered the founder of the African American literary tradition, she died virtually penniless, living in obscurity on the outskirts of Boston. Many of her poems did not see publication until years after her death.

To the late twentieth century, when Christians vigorously debate the question of racial reconciliation and how to achieve it, Lemuel Haynes represents a significant symbolic "first"—the first black pastor of a white congregation.

The illegitimate son of a black father and a white mother, Haynes grew up as an indentured servant to the Rose family in Massachusetts. The Roses included young Lemuel in their church attendance and family devotions, resulting in Haynes's increasingly "fearful apprehensions," especially upon seeing the Northern Lights, which to him was a "presage of the day of judgment." Then "one evening, being under an apple tree mourning my wretched condition … ," he wrote, "I found the Savior."

The Roses also gave him an education and treated him, Haynes said later, like one of their own children. At the end of his period of indenture, he served in the Continental Army during the Revolution, and then, with the support and encouragement of the Roses and others, he was ordained to the ministry.

Haynes spent the largest part of his pastoral career at Rutland, Vermont (1788-1818), where he led the town's Congregational church through the Second Great Awakening. In 1803, for example, spiritual excitement spread through the congregation. So many young people attended an "inquiry meeting" at a private home, the floor collapsed and everyone fell into the cellar (no one was hurt). He recorded 103 conversions that year, and another 109 a few years later.

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