From Columbia to Colombia: A Cultural Appropriation of Freedom in the Age of Revolution, 1775–1807

Late in 1784, Francisco de Miranda’s joined in transatlantic astonishment at the publication success of “Phillis Wheatley, a Negro slave woman.” Phillis Wheatley Peters died on December 5, 1784, only months after Miranda’s supposed meeting with her. Miranda did not mention in his memoirs how Wheatley’s poem honoring General George Washington, penned in 1775 and published in 1776, was among the first to popularize an allegorical female “Columbia.” The paper builds on Wheatley scholarship to demonstrate how Wheatley’s poetry called for the inclusion of people of color among Washington’s armies. It then turns to how Miranda’s appropriation of Columbia came to gain geopolitical weight on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in Miranda’s attempt to “liberate” Colombia, or Spanish America, from the Spanish Monarchy with covert aid from the British, the United States, and Haiti by 1806.

Delving into late 18^th and early 19th-century poetry, correspondence, newspapers, broadsides, books, and printed maps, this paper demonstrates how Miranda’s choice to refer to Spanish possessions in the New World “Colombia” allowed him to tap into trans-Atlantic imaginaries that fueled several (if failed) attempts to wrest key territories from Spanish control. The article explores the implications of Miranda’s appropriation of Phillis Wheatley’s Columbian armies through the production of printed messages hailing Colombia’s army's entrance into South America via printing presses aboard his ship, the Leander, while stationed in the port of Jacmel, Haiti in 1806, just after the island had gained independence from France and abolished slavery.