Both poets are talking about the slave trade and people being brought from Africa to America. Phyllis Wheatley came to America, supposedly as a companion, on a ship called the Susannah. In the states, she was taught to read and write. She says that it was a mercy for her to be brought to America and uses her own conversion to Christianity as evidence of all Africans' need for redemption. Philip Freneau, on the other hand, was an anti-slavery activist. He believed people can be better redeemed through education and that teachers of philosophy were better instructors of morality than the church.