Connections Between Black Poet Phyllis Wheatley and the Church of Irish Strangers in Boston

Courtesy of The Met

Phyllis Wheatley, the enslaved woman from Africa who arrived in Boston in 1761 and who is considered America’s first Black female poet, had an interesting connection to the first Irish church in Boston during the 18th century, a Presbyterian congregation known as the Church of Irish Strangers, or alternately, the Church of Presbyterian Strangers. 

In 1773, the year her popular book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published, Wheatley penned a moving poem to Miss Mary Moorhead, the daughter of Reverend John Moorhead, the popular head the Church of Irish Strangers, who had died in December.

Wheatley’s poem is titled “Elegy to Miss Mary Moorhead, on the Death of her Father, The Rev. Mr. John Moorhead,” and reads in part: 

 Involved in clouds of woe, Maria mourns, 

And various anguish wracks her Soul by turns; 

 See thy loved parent languishing in Death, 

His Exit watch, and catch his flying breath… 

Thine, and the Church’s Sorrows I deplore; 

Moorhead is dead, and Friendship is no more.  

Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society 

There are several connections between the Wheatley and Moorhead families, and between Blacks and Irish immigrants in the American colonies. Reverend Moorhead was one of 18 judges who formally attested that Phyllis Wheatley was the true author of her poetry, prior to it being published.  Others on the panel included John Wheatley, James Bowdoin and John Hancock, according to the Phyllis Wheatley Historical Society. 

The cover piece of Wheatley’s poetry book was illustrated by the Moorhead family’s slave, Scipio Moorhead, whose talent as an artist was brought to the fore by the Reverend’s wife, Sarah.   Phyllis Wheatley published a poetic tribute to Scipio in her book, writing, "To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works," according to the Massachusetts Historical Society. 

Wheatley's poem was printed from the original manuscript, and sold by William M'Alpine, at his shop in Marlborough Street,

Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society 

Born around 1753 in West Africa, Phillis Wheatley arrived in Boston in 1761 and was purchased as a slave by John Wheatley to be a servant in his household.  She herself became a baptized communicant of the Old South Meeting House in 1771, according to Revolutionary Spaces. She died December 5, 1784. Some believe she was buried at the Old Granary Burying Grounds with the Wheatley family, though she could also have been buried in an unmarked grave in Copp's Hill Burying Ground. 

History of the Church of Presbyterian Strangers

Founded in 1729, The Church of Presbyterian Strangers began in a converted barn on Long Lane (later Federal Street) in 1730, where they conducted services until eventually they built a church in 1744. It was known locally as the Irish Meeting House. 

The congregation was led by Reverend John Moorhead, a young minister who was born in Newtonards, near Belfast, County Down, "of pious and respectable parents," according to Moorhead's Memoirs published in 1807. "His father, who was a farmer, gave him the best advantages within his power, for improvement in learning. He finished his education at one of the universities in Scotland."

John Moorhead, portrait by Peter Pelham in 1751

Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

Moorhead's congregation consisted of Presbyterian families who had emigrated from the province of Ulster in Ireland to New England, hoping to find religious liberty and economic prosperity, which had been denied to them by the British Crown. When these congregations of Presbyterians began arriving in Boston starting in 1718, they discovered that the Puritans did not want them around, and they were shipped to the outskirts of the colony, settling in Worcester, New Hampshire and Maine. After a decade of trying, they were finally granted permission for their own church in the Towne of Boston.

Church on Long Lane, 1744

In 1786-87, the congregation converted from Presbyterianism to Congregational in polity, according to a book, The Early History of Arlington Street Church by Harriott E. Johnson.  

The church has an interesting footnote in Boston's revolutionary history. In 1788, political leaders and colonial rebels convened the Massachusetts Convention in this church, and in honor of this event they changed the street name to Federal Street and the church was henceforth referred to as the Federal Street Church.  

In 1862, the congregation moved to a new building on Arlington Street in the Back Bay part of Boston, and henceforth became known as the Arlington Street Church. After Moorhead died in 1773, he was replace by a succession of leaders including Robert Annan (1783-1786); Jeremy Belknap (1787-1798); John Snelling Popkin (1799-1802); William Ellery Channing (1803-1842); and Ezra Stiles Gannett (1824-1871), according to records at the Harvard Divinity School.  Jeremy Belknap was the founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Records of the Arlington Street Church are housed at the Harvard Divinity School Library, Special Collections, in Cambridge. 

Who Were the Ulster Scots?

The parishioners of the Church of Irish Strangers were known as Ulster Scots for historical reasons.  Originally from the Scottish Lowlands, they were given captured land in the Ulster province starting in the early 17th century, as part of the British conquest of Ireland.  The land transfers continued through Oliver Cromwell's invasion of Ireland in the 1650s.  Having displaced the native Catholic land holders, these Ulster Scots were also known as planters. 

But in the 18th century, they suffered both economic hardship and religious discrimination, and for those reasons began coming to America, initially to New England, and eventually to Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Appalachian states. 

In America, the term Ulster Scots evolved to the self-named Scotch-Irish or Scots-Irish in the 19th century, to differentiate themselves from the generations of Irish Catholic famine refugees who came to Boston and the United States starting in the 1840s.  Read more about the Ulster Scots. 

For more about Boston's Irish history visit IrishHeritageTrail.com 

Text + Research,  Michael Quinlin