Final answer:
The most strongly supported inference about the speaker from Phillis Wheatley's first stanza is that she believes America is protected by divine providence. Option C is the correct answer.
Step-by-step explanation:
Phillis Wheatley's poetry, deeply interwoven with her personal experiences as an enslaved African woman in America, offers profound insight into her perspectives on slavery and Christianity.
Within her poems, she frequently capitalizes and emphasizes certain words, such as Freedom, Tyranny, and God, to convey her complex views on these fundamental concepts. Her employment of diacritical marks and textual alterations highlights the conflicting nature of an enslaved poet championing liberty while living under oppression.
An inference about the speaker Wheatley's first stanza that is most strongly supported is C. Wheatley believes that America is protected by divine providence. This inference is drawn from her strong Christian beliefs and capitalized references to God which indicate a reliance on divine will and protection. Her repeated emphasis on religious motifs throughout her poems aligns with the idea that she saw America's future and her own existence within it as under God's guidance, despite the moral contradictions of slavery and freedom she so intricately addresses.