By October 1773, Phillis Wheatley was back in Boston, where she was now a free woman waiting ardently for copies of her books to arrive. “Since my return to America, my Master has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom,” she writes to Colonel David Wooster. In an odd coincidence, her books arrived in December 1773 on the Dartmouth, one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party.