Hammon, Jupiter

By: David N. Gellman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Hammon, Jupiter

(b. 17 October 1711; d. c. 1790–1806),
poet and writer.

In 1760 Jupiter Hammon became the first published African American poet. Over the next three decades Hammon's small assortment of published prose and poetry made him a literary pioneer. The native of Long Island, New York, explored themes and styles that would define African American literature from the American Revolution to the Civil War. His reputation has long been obscured by that of his more famous contemporary, Phillis Wheatley. Nonetheless, Hammon's work addresses crucial themes concerning religion, slavery, and African American literary self-expression.

Hammon spent his entire life as a slave. He was the property of the Lloyds, a wealthy merchant family that maintained an estate on the northern coast of Long Island. Slaves were among the cargo the Lloyds carried between the West Indies and the Atlantic coast. One scholar suggests that Hammon was the son of two Lloyd family slaves, Rose, whom the Lloyds had acquired from Barbados, and Opium, whom the Lloyd's had owned for seventy years. Hammon most likely acquired his literacy skills at a school the Lloyds had established on their estate. He also probably had access to his masters' manor house library. Hammon's duties as a slave are unknown, but the fact that he accompanied Joseph Lloyd to Hartford, Connecticut, when his master fled Loyalist-occupied Long Island during the Revolutionary War suggests that he may have been a house servant. Hammon also may have served his fellow African Americans as a preacher.

Poetry

Hammon's first poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (1760), captures his intense religiosity. The broadside sheet identifies Hammon as “a Negro belonging to Mr Lloyd, of Queen's Village,” but the poem itself makes no explicit references to his condition. The word “salvation” appears more than twenty times, and Hammon invokes Christ repeatedly. The evangelical spirit of the Great Awakening animates Hammon's poem, as he seeks to spiritually transform diverse new communities of people. As Hammon proclaims, “Dear Jesus give … / Thy Grace to Every Nation.” Moreover, the emphasis on salvation and redemption speaks to the idea of liberating slaves from bondage, albeit spiritual bondage.

Hammon's next publication appeared in 1778, during his wartime residence in Connecticut. His poem “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley” made him a participant in a literary conversation that, because of Wheatley's fame on both sides of the Atlantic, had broad political and philosophical dimensions. Hammon uses his poetic platform to emphasize the spiritual significance of Wheatley's life. Hammon keys his stanzas to a variety of biblical passages. The poem traces Wheatley's movement from Africa to her ultimate heavenly destination, with the African-born Wheatley's passage across the ocean functioning as a metaphor for traveling to God. The poem's emphasis on the ephemeral nature of earthly existence undermines the potential for reading the poem as an acceptance of slavery as a civilizing process, even if the slave trade functioned as a vehicle for Christian conversion. Moreover, Hammon's suggestion that Phillis “drink Samaria's flood” implies an identity with ancient Israel's excluded outsiders.

Of Hammon's two other Hartford verses, “A Poem for Children with Thoughts of Death” and “A Dialogue Entitled the Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant,” the latter connected Hammon's religious and secular themes more fully. The “Dialogue” was particularly poignant because Joseph Lloyd, with whom Hammon fled to Connecticut, killed himself in 1780; the Patriot was distraught over news indicating severe military reversals in South Carolina. Master and servant alternate speaking in the first twenty-three stanzas of the poem. At first, the master takes the lead:

Come my servant, follow me,
According to thy place;
And surely God will be with thee,
And send thee heav'nly grace.

The servant assents to the suggested devotion to God, a devotion that over the course of the poem supersedes the servant's attachment to his master. It is “our King,” not his master, who commands the servant. At the halfway point, the servant redirects the dialogue toward war-torn America, looking ahead to the day when “foes” should “act like friends, / And leave their wickedness.” The final seven stanzas of the dialogue belong to the servant, who favors a godly peace to a man-made war. In the poem's concluding stanzas, Hammon not only takes command of the discussion but also inserts himself directly as the didactic author:

Believe me now my Christian friends,
Believe your friend call'd Hammon:
You cannot to your God attend,
And serve the God of Mammon.

Hammon establishes his own equality, indeed, moral superiority, weathering the storm of wartime exile far better than his master.

Prose

The “Dialogue” was appended to “An Evening's Improvement,” one of Hammon's three prose pieces published during his Hartford sojourn. Of these poems, “An Essay on the Ten Virgins,” has not survived. Hammon, in “A Winter Piece” and “An Evening's Improvement,” staked out a moderate political position, integrating remarks on slavery with a broader insistence on the necessity of conversion. According to Hammon, slaves, members of “a poor despised nation,” found themselves in America with God's acquiescence, while he disavowed any personal desire to be free. At age seventy, he saw no advantage in such a prospect. But in “An Evening's Improvement” he “pray[ed] that God” would enable African American freedom. Hammon's position did not absolve either whites or blacks of what he regarded as a far greater mission. He asked pointedly why so few ostensibly Christian masters had done anything to raise their slaves as Christians, while demanding that his black “brethren” seize the opportunity to seek salvation. In sum, he placed priority on matters of faith and preparation for the afterlife, domains in which he emphatically believed equality between black and white existed.

Hammon's final publication, An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York (1787), was probably the most widely disseminated of his works. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society sponsored the publication of one edition of the address, originally dedicated to New York City's African Society, one of the nation's earliest black organizations. The pamphlet offered clear reminders that whites and blacks were ultimately equal in God's eternal judgments, including an epigraph that quoted the phrase “God is no respecter of persons” from the New Testament book of Acts. Yet Hammon also stated that it was God's will that “while we are slaves, it is our duty to obey our masters” and to do so “cheerfully, and freely.”

The aging author was glad that emancipation enjoyed increased support in the wake of the war. But the spiritual state of blacks concerned him more; he urged African Americans to learn to the read the Bible and to regard their lowly social position as an advantageous one from which to seek salvation free of worldly distraction. The ultimate result, he assured his audience, would be positive: “If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.” As in his other writing, Hammon did not counsel passiveness so much as the direction of energy toward spiritual development. By implication, his advice and his ability to voice it constituted a rejection of white supremacy.

Critical opinion regarding Hammon's work breaks down into three broad camps. In the first half of the twentieth century, commentators tended to treat the slave-poet as a curiosity, offering condescending appraisals and viewing him as an unsophisticated folk poet. Hammon's religious themes were seen as shallow expressions of emotional devotion to Christianity. Hammon's emphasis on religious salvation and temporal obedience has been viewed as diverting his readers' attention away from the cause of black liberation. Since the late 1980s readers have emphasized the sophistication of Hammon's work and the density of his biblical allusions. Such observers regard his rhetoric as a firm, if subtle, assertion of African American equality. Reading between the lines, these commentators do not find Hammon's emphasis on black conversion to Christianity and moral uplift as coming at the expense of an antislavery message, but rather as underscoring that message.

Hammon's work, like that of any literary artist, can be read through a variety of lenses. The sources of his religious argument have been variously identified with Puritan, Methodist, and Quaker traditions. He has been regarded as having compromised too much to white interests and, alternatively, as being a black nationalist. Hammon is perhaps best understood as a writer of sincere religious convictions. He used his considerable knowledge and intense beliefs to pique the consciences of whites while encouraging his vision for the spiritual elevation of blacks. Hammon participated in a conversation about slavery and racial inequality, conducting his part of the discussion on the contested ground of Christian morality. His work indicated that African Americans not only were the spiritual equals of whites but also were fully capable of creating a literature written in their own voices. Writing during an era when Americans, particularly in the North, had begun to question the moral and political efficacy of slavery, Hammon challenged conventional wisdom in a fashion and in a voice that subsequent generations of black writers would adapt effectively to their own purposes.

See also American Revolution; Great Awakening; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Literature; and Wheatley, Phillis.

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