Daughters of the Faith: Ordinary Girls Who Lived Extraordinary Lives. 1761--Phillis Wheatley was a little girl of seven or eight years old when she was captured in Africa and brought to America as a slave. But she didn't let her circumstances keep her down. She learned to read and write in English and Latin, and showed a natural gift for poetry. By the time she was twelve, her elegy at the death of the great pastor George Whitefield...