But though the New England colonies never saw the development of large-scale plantations or widespread slave ownership, slavery was the cornerstone of the region’s pre-Revolution economy, both directly and indirectly. The New England Triangular Trade brought kidnapped and enslaved Africans to the British colonies in the Caribbean in order to work the cane plantations that supplied the sugar that was converted from molasses by New England workers into the thousands of barrels of rum that fueled this never-ending cycle.

Among the many New Englanders who amassed vast fortunes during this time, Timothy Fitch (1725–90) stands out. The owner of several ocean-going vessels, Fitch’s voluminous correspondence with his captains, now preserved at the Medford Historical Society, offers a chilling glimpse into the intimate relationship between New England and the transatlantic slave trade. Although conventional wisdom cautions us to never impose the moral judgements of today onto the people of the past, it is disturbing to encounter the clinical prose Fitch uses to instruct one of his captains to “take prime Slaves for pay if Reasonable or Cash, but they must Not Cull your Cargo Unless thay give you a Good price, / if you Could Sell the whole of your Cargo thare to a Good Proffett & take Slaves & Cash & Cum Directly Home that would Shorten the Voyage Much, but this is not Very Likely to be the Case” in a January 1760 letter to Captain Peter Gwinn of the Phillis. (As an aside: Timothy Fitch died penniless in 1790 after a particularly pernicious bout of diarrhea. So while I’ve been taught not to impose judgment on the past, one certainly might say that he got what he deserved.)

Aboard the Phillis on its return to Boston was a young girl from West Africa who would come to be known as Phillis Wheatley. She had been purchased by the wealthy merchant and tailor John Wheatley as a servant for his wife Susanna and received the same name as the ship that brought her in chains to the shores of America. Tutored in reading and writing by the Wheatley children and steeped in popular 18th-century neoclassical poetry, Wheatley went on to embark upon her own career as a poet. With the 1773 publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in London, Wheatley became the first published African American female poet, earning the praise and admiration of thousands throughout England and the American colonies. Lauded by such colonial luminaries as George Washington and Thomas Paine, Wheatley nevertheless was forced to repeatedly defend her own authorship against claims lodged by those who found the very notion of a literate female slave poet utterly inconceivable. Her accomplishments were further demeaned by those who saw the danger her literacy and creative output posed to an economic system legitimized by racial theories that dehumanized the slave. In his 2004 article “Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley,” Professor Eric Slauter examines contemporary responses to Wheatley’s publication and the manifold ways in which her work was diminished in order to maintain the status quo of slavery.

We know of Phillis Wheatley’s image not through a stately three-quarter-length portrait in an extravagant frame but through a simple one done by a fellow slave named Scipio Moorhead that was adapted by a London engraver and used as the frontispiece to Wheatley’s pioneering volume. The Phillips Library at PEM is fortunate enough to possess two signed first-edition copies of Wheatley’s collection, including an annotated edition owned by the famous Salem bookseller John Dabney. Despite her considerable fame and eventual emancipation, Wheatley spent her adult life working in the homes of the Boston elite as a scullery maid and died penniless at the age of 31, a victim of the sexism and racism of her era.

The portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Fitch have been in the PEM collection since 1878, yet it is only now, some 257 years after their creation, that the complex web that linked these two figures to the transatlantic slave trade and one of the most influential writers of the colonial era has been explored. PEM is committed to examining overlooked histories embodied in the objects that comprise our vast collections, and as we prepare to install our American collections anew, we are doing our best to disrupt conventional narratives in order to present objects and their stories in ways that expand our consciousness of the past and help to inform our present.

This article first appeared on Hyperallgeric on August 18, 2017.