available records, he remained the property of sev-
eral generations of Lloyds. According to Vincent
Carretta, Hammon served his master as clerk and
bookkeeper and was taken to Hartford, Connecti-
cut, by one of Lloyd’s son when the British cap-
tured Long Island in 1776. However, over the years,
most scholars have labeled Hammon “an obedient,
conservative minded servant, caught up in the fer-
vor of Methodist preached piety and Christianity.”
Hammon “may well have been a minister of sorts,
as there were black and Indian churches on Long
Island” (Robinson, 5).
In his well-known published works, Hammon
did not comment directly on slavery. For example,
in his poem dedicated to his neighbor to the north,
“Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly [sic], Ethiopian
Poetess, in Boston, who came from Africa at eight
years of age, and soon became acquainted with
the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Hammon seems more
interested in the shackles of sin and the poetess’s
salvation than in critiquing the hypocrisy of her
Christian enslavers (as she seems to do in “On
Being Brought from Africa to America”) or in
abhorring their physical bondage as slaves and
legally owned property. Instead, filling his poem
with Methodist discourse, tropes, and pronounce-
ments on the fall, redemption, and salvation of
mankind, Hammon reminds Wheatley only that
“God’s tender mercy [had] set thee free.” In fact,
Hammon seems to celebrate what he might have
viewed as the beneficence of slavery, as it served
as the venue through which Wheatley, taken from
her “dark abode” to learn about the Christian God,
was able to seek and receive salvation and redemp-
tion from her fallen state. Hammon admonishes
Wheatley to “adore / The wisdom of thy God,” who
had brought her “from distant shore, / To learn His
holy word” (Robinson, 9). Had God not done this,
Hammon reminds Wheatley, “Thou mightst been
left behind, / Amidst a dark abode; / God’s tender
mercy still combines, / Thou has the holy word”
(Robinson, 9).
Hammon’s sermonic, pioneering poem “An
Evening Thought,” which is clearly influenced by
Wesleyan hymns with its stanzaic pattern, meter,
rime, diction, and imagery, identifies the definitive
source of humanity’s salvation as “Christ Alone, /
The only Son of God.” Hammon’s speaker pleads;
“Lord, hear our penitential Cry: / Salvation from
above; / It is the Lord that doth supply, / With his
Redeeming Love” (Robinson, 7). Hammon, in his
“An Address to the Negroes in the State of New
York” (1789), encourages his fellow bondsmen and
bondswomen to bear patiently their condition of
servitude. This led editors RICHARD BARKSDALE and
Keneth Kinnamon to level a harsh critical note
against him in the anthology BLACK WRITERS OF
AMERICA: “In the final analysis, Jupiter Hammon’s
religion was an opiate, that dulled him to the
world’s evil ways. Instead of giving him a revolu-
tionary social vision, it filled him with penitential
cries. And his poetry is aesthetically anemic and
almost stifling in its repetitive religiosity” (46).
However, other critics argue that in Hammon’s
“A Dialogue Entitled the Kind Master and the
Dutiful Slave,” one finds “element of resistance,
and, even more, elements of human equality” be-
cause it is “the servant who asserts the ultimate
sovereignty of Christ” (Bruce, 51–52). Similarly,
Hammon’s emphasis on a more inclusive Christi-
anity in “An Evening Thought”—one that does not
limit redemption and salvation to the elect chosen
few—can be seen as a radical rhetorical strategy,
an indirect rebellion against the slave economy,
which had reduced blacks to mere chattel, making
their salvation null and void. Hammon’s speaker
supplicates Jesus: “Dear Jesus, give thy Spirit now,
/ Thy grace to every Nation” (7), “Dear Jesus, by
thy precious B1ood, / The World Redemption
have,” and “Dear Jesus, let the Nations cry, / And
all the People say, / Salvation comes from Christ
on high, / Haste on Tribunal Day” (7). Hammon’s
use of “every nation,” “World,” and “all people”
clearly reveals his conviction of free and univer-
sal grace, allowing him to claim and ensure a place
for blacks in God’s heavenly kingdom. In the end,
however, Hammon’s reflection on the condition
of man—his “evening thought”—might merely
reflect the fundamental teachings of John Wesley,
who willingly proselytized among the poor and
downtrodden, unlike the Calvinist Puritan settlers
of Massachusetts Bay, who claimed to have entered
into covenant with God to establish God’s “city
upon a hill,” a heavenly city on earth that excludedHammon, Jupiter 225