Jupiter Hammon 1711-1806?

With the important exception of Lucy Terry whose "Bars Fight" (included in the anthology) seems to have been well-known, Jupiter Hammon was probably the fist known published black American versifier. His Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, With Penitential Cries, a series of twenty-two quatrains, appeared as a broadside in 1760.

Hammon was born a slave on Manor House estate of Henry Lloyd at Lloyd's Neck (or Queen's Village) on Long Island, New York, where he and other slave children offered a rudimentary education at a school built on premises, Biographical facts about him are mot scarce, but it seems clear enough that, at an early age, Hammon became religious oriented, and, as has been suspected, may well have done some Christian exhorting to whatever black and whit audience he could gather. When he was 22 years old, he purchased a Bible from his master for seven shillings and sixpence. All of his known writings in prose and verse are exclusively pietist.

When Henry Lloyd died in 1763, Hammon became the property of Joseph Lloyd, a patriot who was obliged to flee encircling British troops and race with his family and slaves to Stamford and later Hartford, Connecticut. There Hammon published three more verses, two of them appended to prose sermonizing, At Hartford; too, he published "An Essay on Ten Virgins," advertised in The Connecticut Courant for December 14,1779; as no text has yet been found, it is not known if this piece is prose or verse. Composed originally at "Queen's Village, 24^th Sept. 1786," while he was a slave to John Lloyd, Junior, Hammon's prose Address to the Negro: in the State of New York was printed in 1787 in New York and reprint the same year in Philadelphia and again in 1806 in New York. He is also thought to have written a set of verses that celebrated the 1782 visit of 'Prince William Henry (King William IV of England, 1830-1837) to the Lloyd Manor o Long Island. These verses are not known to exist today in manuscript.

Hammon's sermons, written in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary eras, retain an acute consciousness of the gathering political significance of blacks in the period. He mentions the deaths of blacks in the War for Independence, draws upon the jeremiad in order to call for a virtuous black nation within the American nation, and speaks of petitions for freedom on the part of black slaves. Despite the seemingly acquiescent tone of much of his writing his sermons mount a firm appeal for black moral and social autonomy

On every single one of Hammon's nine published pieces of prose and verses acknowledgement-hardly incidental-is made of his being a servant to three generations of Lloyd family. Indeed, on several of his pieces it is noted that his verse of his prose was printed "with the assistance of his friends," presumably, while friends. Thus receiving the approbation of whites and repeatedly urging a resigned black reconciliation of slavery with unthreatening Christianity, it is not at all surprising that Hammon was permitted to publish as much as he did.

Our sense that Hammon's sermons, directed primarily towards blacks, are overheard and even managed by white patrons indicates an important problem in early African-American writing. Most writing by blacks in the Revolutionary period was published under head notes that indicated white sanction. Within this context, the reader must decide carefully how the weigh the frequent appeals for liberty and freedom which appear even in such a writer as Hammon. The complex weighing of meanings that such terms assume in the revolutionary rhetoric of white political writers becomes even more complicated the discourse of blacks.

William H. Robinson; Rhode

Island College

Phillip M. Richards; Colgate

University

PRIMARY WORK

Stanley Ransom, Jr., America's First Negro Poet. The Complete Works of

Jupiter Hammon, 1970

SECONDARY WORKS

Oscar Wegelin, Jupiter Hammon, American Negro Poet. 1915; Jacqueline Overton, Long Island's Story, 2nd ed., 1961; Gary Nash, Race and Revolution, 1990; Phillip M. Richards, "Nationalist Themes in the Preaching of Jupiter Hammon," Early American Literature 25,1990

Lucy Terry 1730-1821

Lucy Terry, taken from Africa as a slave, eventually settled in Vermont with her husband, Abijah Prince, a free black from Vermont who bought her freedom. Her only known extant poem, "Bars Fight," was handed down orally for nearly 100 years before being printed in Josiah Holland's History of Western Massachusetts in 1855.