A paper presented to the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities on the occasion of Jupiter Hammon’s 300th birthday celebration, at the Joseph Lloyd House on October 15 2011, by George Wallace, Writer in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, offering a new appraisal of Hammon’s life and work.Jupiter Hammon, an African American slave of the Lloyd Family of Lloyd Neck, principally resided here at the Lloyd House during the Colonial and post-Revolutionary era. We know Hammon’s name, many of us, because his writings were rediscovered and brought to the public’s attention about 50 years ago. We’ve come to see a growing understanding of Hammon as the first published black poet in America, decades before the more widely known Phillis Wheatley. Beyond this, however, consideration of his religious verses and other writings, and what they signify, has been slight.
Hammon’s writings—which principally preach the salvation of his African brothers and sisters through acceptance of Calvinist Christian teachings—have been variously treated. First came a mixture of local pride and patronizing delight in having ‘discovered’ an African slave who was capable of cogent reading and writing. Then came attempts to find some measure of sophistication in his work. Some critics looked for signs of abstruse numerological architecture to demonstrate the author’s sophistication. Others made what proved to be a futile attempt to cast Hammon as a closet or ‘code’ proponent of emancipation. What was rarely discussed was the possibility that perhaps Jupiter Hammon was an anachronism, an apologist for an outdated world view, a man behind the curve during changing social and political times.
It is this fear, in addition to the earlier appraisals, that I hope to supplant, in this paper. It’s my hope to demonstrate that Hammon was neither an apologist nor an anachronism—but an advocate for social justice, liberation and human dignity consistent with his times—the Calvinist society which preceded the Humanist thinking of Revolutionary America. By working to include Africans in the public discourse, he was laying the groundwork to move social perceptions of Africans from chattel to human beings with souls that might be saved. Hammon’s verses were strategically important in advancing the cause of African slaves during the reign of Calvinist political and religious thinking in North America. His accomplishment should be weighed not by the standards of Romantic Humanism, on the cusp of which he lived and under which we still substantially live, but in the context of his time.
A Man of His Time
We tend, wrongly, to assess the world by our own standards. Living as we do in the age of Romantic Humanism, our impulse is to perceive Hammon as a man dominated by a philosophical system we reject because of the shackles we believe it put on the human spirit. We tend not to think on the liberation and solace that dogma offered to people.
Today we possess as our birthright a legacy of the ‘inherent rights’ of individuals—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We call these rights, privileges and dignities ‘universal,’ ’inalienable’ and ‘self-evident.’ These are notions of Romantic Humanism.
We tend to see Calvinist philosophy as medieval. The fact is, the philosophical system Romantic Humanism supplanted was, in its own way, an attempt to come to terms with the world and maximize the possibility of hope and human dignity.
The first two words of Hammon’s seminal verse, “An Evening Thought,” published in 1760, are “Salvation comes...” What we present-day readers reject are the words that follow—an enunciation of standard Calvinist doctrine of sin, penitence and submission. What we forget is that by establishing the notion that African slaves were eligible for salvation, Hammon was introducing a straightforward assertion that Africans were not just property, but full human beings.Read his words 29 years later, in his “Address to the Negroes of the State of New York”:
“Most of us are cut off from comfort and happiness here in the world, and can expect nothing from it... if we shall ever get to heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black or for being slaves.”Hammon’s assertion that the religious doctrine of his day offered comfort and solace to a people who had no hope of comfort on earth may not have been the ‘new thinking’ in 1789, but it was assuagement enough for his own time. Like any revolutionary faced with a situation of ‘assymetrical power,’ he used the weapons of the oppressors against them. He raided the spiritual armory of Colonial America, appropriated its doctrines, and used them to fight for the dignity of his people.
Planting the Seed
“An Evening Thought” was published in 1760, by which time Hammon, approaching 50, had spent the bulk of his productive years laboring to improve the lot of African people. By the time of the Revolution, Hammon was in his 70s. A revolution was in full swing in American society, but his day was nearly over.
There were proponents on all sides. There were Loyalists. There were Revolutionaries. There were Evolutionists. There were those who wanted to keep the power and status they possessed under the existing system. There were those who wanted to upset the system of power and influence in order to liberate themselves and others—or just to enhance their own power and status. And there were those who simply wanted to make a buck during uncertain times, to do a good business and hedge their bets by sending out family members to support both sides.
Joseph Lloyd (and Jupiter) went to Connecticut, where the family conducted a brisk trade with the revolutionary war machine. Henry Lloyd threw his lot in with the Loyalists. So did the colorful Elizabeth Loring, consort to General Howe. Like many prominent families, particularly those with mercantile interests, the Lloyds played both sides of the war, which is why the during the early days, as Elizabeth gallivanted with her British General, the forests of Lloyd Neck were protected from the British ‘foraging’ which took place around Long Island. It was not until Howe was replaced that the Neck was stripped of its woodlands for war supplies—at least the portions of the Neck belonging to the “Rebel” Lloyds were. (Years after the conflict, Henry sent barrels of English oak acorns to the Neck, and the forests were restored. In that context, the oak trees we see around us today, the ones we walk beneath here at the Joseph Lloyd House, are testimony to the restoration of the land by a people who were divided by loyalties of various kinds, but united in their desire to be stewards to their adopted nation and people, in what best way they knew.
We may see this as a parallel to the work of Jupiter Hammon. He sowed the seeds of human dignity the best way he knew how—with the seeds he had it in his possession to sow.
A Stepping Stone to a New Day
By whose standards, then, are we to evaluate the life work of Jupiter Hammon? The man lived in a time and place, and with a people, for whom the best hope for human dignity and reconciliation lay in the prevailing doctrine of his day—namely, Calvinism. Hammon’s battle, in its day, was a stepping stone in human progress for the next generation to follow up on.
Some might contend that the aging Hammon was behind the times, but I would argue that his resolution was not a matter of stubbornness—rather, it was an unwavering commitment to a set of ideas that had achieved important results. In his “Address to the Negroes of the State of New York,” Hammon’s words to the next generation of African-Americans—possessors of a more progressive post-Revolutionary humanist way of thinking and restive about his position on slavery—are revealing:
“Liberty is a great thing, and worth seeking for... we know this from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white people in the late war. I have hoped that God would open (white men’s) eyes... to think of the state of the poor blacks.... He has done it in some measure... what may be done further God only knows... if God designs to set us free, he will do it in his own time and way; but think of your bondage to sin and Satan, and do not rest until you are delivered from it.”These words are deferential to the next generation, but insistent on the ideas which served as the foundation for his own work. I believe they reveal Jupiter Hammon as a man who held resolutely to the advocacies of his day, even as his day was passing. He stuck to his guns. He consolidated his gains. He did what any good advocate, in old age, would do. He refused to yield his point, but was willing to pass the torch on to the next generation, to do with it what they might.
The Spiraling Course of Human Progress
It’s been said that the American Revolution is an ongoing phenomenon, an experiment in the proposition that one can create a world where a government is put in place that maximizes individual liberty while protecting society against the abuses which might come from that liberty. That notion is enshrined in the phrase ‘Liberty AND Justice for All.’
There’s a push-pull inherent in that phrase, of course, which is why human progress isn’t straight. Human history spins in a circle, while spiralling forward through time. Revolution and counter revolution. Action and reaction. Progress and retrenchment.
Who would have predicted that following the American Revolution there would be a US constitution—founded on the idea that all men are created equal—calling slaves 3/5 of a man? That it would take 80 years, and a war between the states, to resolve that bit of political finesse and eliminate slavery? That a half century later, Jim Crow laws would be established that would hold sway in much of America for half a century? Or that it would take another half century and the blood, sweat and tears of the civil rights era to overturn those laws? One generation’s Jupiter Hammon is the next generation’s Frederick Douglass. One generation’s John Brown is the next generation’s Marcus Garvey. Rosa Parks. Fred Shuttlesworth. Martin Luther King Jr. When the wheel swings around again, who will the next leader be? And how will future societies judge the accomplishments and limitations of previous generations?
The other day I visited a local university to give a poetry reading. Afterwards one of the students came up to me and said he was sorry he was late, he had come from ‘Occupy Wall Street.’ I told him I work downtown at the Pace campus and had seen the protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge. He smiled and asked if I had gone down to join them. I’d been in the streets in the 60s, I said. I’d fought for what I thought was right then. I congratulated him on his commitment to justice and said now it was his turn. The young man’s smile turned into a smirk, and he walked away. Was I, in this young man’s eyes, as Jupiter Hammon was to the young African-Americans in 1789? An old and hopelessly out of touch greybeard?
Jupiter Hammon teaches us this: the wheel keeps turning and society keeps driving forward. In every age, people committed to social justice have fought their battle in their own way. If we wish to have a just hearing of our own efforts to improve the human condition, we need to offer it to those who came before us.
Let us then consider the accomplishments of men and women in the context of their own time. Let us encourage generations to follow their own paths in working for social justice. Let us plant the seeds we have to hand, as others have in their own day, in trust that through our stewardship, great forests will once again grow. It is in this context that I invite you to join me today in recognizing Jupiter Hammon, as we celebrate his 300th birthday, as an advocate, as a model of resolute conviction, and as a compassionate warrior for the betterment of his fellow man.
