The dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley a free black poet who resisted the pressures of arranged marriage truly embodying the ideals of the American RevolutionampnbspThere is an uncomfortable paradox at the heart of the American Revolution many of the men leading the war for independence were slave owners contradicting the ideal of freedom that they claimed to represent. Meanwhile abolitionist sentiments of the time contained contradictions as well. Abolitionists encouraged freed Christianized slaves to return to Africa. In this way they hoped to send more missionaries to Africa in order to Christianize the continent and at the same time to send free blacks away from America. ampnbspampnbspThis tension is revealed through the dramatic story of Phillis Wheatley an AfricanAmerican poet who refused to marry a man she had never met and return with him to Africa as a missionary. She was enslaved in Africa as a child and transported to Boston where she was sold to an evangelical family. Agreeing to the proposed marriage amp8211 arranged by Congregationalist minister Samuel Hopkins amp8211 would have echoed the social mores of the time particularly those for enslaved black women. However due to her prodigious talents as a poet Wheatley won her freedom a year prior to Hopkinsamp8217 arrangement allowing her to take her future into her own hands. ampnbspampnbspG.J. BarkerBenfield considers Wheatleyamp8217s story and Hopkinsamp8217s plan in the broader context of the American Revolution. The ideals of the revolution motivated Hopkins and some of his contemporaries to propose freeing African slaves and thus address the amp8220monstrous inconsistencyamp8221 fundamental to the white slave owners leading the revolution. In so doing they presented themselves as freedom fighters who resisted the threat of slavery at the hands of British tyranny. Wheatley challenged this inconsistency and taking the revolutionariesamp8217 rhetoric seriously called for liberty for all human hearts wom