Cedrick May: The Collected Work of Jupiter Hammon: Poems and Essays (The University of Tennessee Pres, 2017 - paperback 2024)

“Now whether it is right, and lawful, in the sight of God, for them to make slave of us or not, I am certain that while we are slaves, it is our duty to obey our masters, in all their lawful commands, and mind them unless we are bid to do that which we know to be sin, or forbidden in God’s word.” – Jupiter Hammon 

It is perhaps easy enough to become famous if you are the first, like the first black poet in America. But it is not easy to be the first. Whose shoulders are you to stand on? Who are your literary ancestors? Where are your forerunners, describing your time and circumstance in poetry and prose?

Jupiter Hammon (1711-c.1800) was born into slavery as the property of Henry Lloyd, a wealthy New England merchant and plantation owner on the isolated island community of Long Island, and all of his poems and essays are followed by a statement that reads something like this: “Composed by Jupiter Hammon, A Negro (Man) belonging to Mr. Lloyd of Queen’s Village, on Long Island.”

Lloyd and his wife Rebecca had ten children, and Jupiter Hammon’s story is unique in that he grew up alongside Henry Lloyd’s own children and learned to read and write, Cedrick May writes. Several of them were almost the same age. John was just three months old, Henry II was two years old when Jupiter was born, and a third, Joseph – who would ‘inherit’ Jupiter from his father and become his second master – was five years old. Those early years were formative for all involved.

Lloyd seems to have trusted and depended on Hammon far more than his other slaves. But various letters in the Lloyd family papers reveal that Henry Lloyd Sr. was in no way sentimental in his relationships with slaves, selling and buying enslaved Africans and African Americans for himself and others in his community, and impatient with free people of color who lived on Long Island.

New scholarship. Cedrick May’s book is only the third to collect and comment upon the works of Jupiter Hammon. In 1915 bookseller and bibliophile Oscar Wegelin (1876-1970) published Jupiter Hammon: American Negro Poet, a slim book with just four poems by the long forgotten enslaved poet, scarce on commentary but with an annotated bibliography useful to later Hammon scholars.

Cedrick May credits Stanley A. Ransom (b. 1928) and his book, America’s First Negro Poet: The Complete Works of Jupiter Hammon of Long Island (1970), though, with keeping “Hammon’s work in the public eye … through the second half of the twentieth century.” Ransom prints four poems and three essays by Hammon; there is a biographical sketch by Oscar Wegelin and a reprint of his Hammon bibliography; and a critical analysis by literary scholar Vernon Loggins (1893-1968).

But archival finds and new scholarship on the historical, political, social, and religious contexts that shaped Jupiter Hammon, the poet and his work – such as Sondra A. O’Neale’s critical monograph Jupiter Hammon and the Biblical Beginnings of American-American Literature (1993), one of the first contemporary analysis to evaluate Hammon’s work within the context of American slavery, and Cedrick May’s own essay (Re)writing the Life of Jupiter Hammon in the Archives – force us to revisit the image of Jupiter Hammon as the ‘contended slave’ painted by Loggins and others.

Finding Hammon in the archives. Even as children and childhood are significant themes in his work, Jupiter Hammon’s writings offer little information about his own childhood and youth. In 1970 archival research established that he was born on October 17, 1711, on the Lloyd plantation to slave parents, but we still don’t know when he died (May writes c. 1800, other sources say 1806).

If there are just three essays and four poems extant by a writer, the discovery of an additional two poems is big news. Dear Hutchinson is Dead and Gone (1770) is a recently discovered elegy on “the pious youth” of Boston. More important is An Essay on Slavery that May believes was meant to be published with the essay An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York, both dated 1786-87, a poem that “will necessarily overturn previous readings of Hammon’s most (in)famous essay and force us to reevaluate over two-hundred years of its interpretation,” May writes.

Liberty and the Revolutionary War. Jupiter Hammon published poetry and prose both before and after the American Revolution and the US Declaration of Independence of July 4^th, 1776. He was 49 when he published his first known poem, An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, in 1760. Often anthologized, not because it is a very good poem, but because it is the first by a black poet.

A second anthology favorite is An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley, Ethiopian Poetess, from 1778. Wheatley (1753-1784), a much more accomplished poet than Hammon, in 1773 had published a whole book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral – another first.

Modern readers may find the essays A Winter Piece (1782) and An Evening’s Improvement (1783), long, pious sermons on the wages of sin, heavy with quotes from the Bible, somewhat tedious to read. So let us look again at Hammon’s “most (in)famous essay” and its companion poem.

Cedrick May takes these lines from An Essay on Slavery as the answer to the question posed in the epigraph above: the institution of slavery is a sin in the eyes of God: “Dark and dismal was the Day/ When slavery began/ All humble thoughts were put away/ Then slaves were made by Man//.

This does indeed change the way we read An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York. But there are still those passages that coursed Vernon Loggins and others to dismiss Jupiter Hammon for his conciliatory attitude toward slavery: “That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.”

“Though for my own part I do not wish to be free, yet I should be glad, if others, especially the young negroes were to be free, for many of us, who have grown up slaves, and have always had masters to take care of us, should hardly know how to take care of ourselves; and it may be more for our own comfort to remain as we are.” Jupiter Hammon was 75-76 years old when he wrote this.

Cedrick May (b. 1969), professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, aside from a Preface and the Introduction, has written pages of notes, causing Wheatley scholar John C. Shields to write in his Foreword: “Ordinarily one expects to find notes to edited texts to be “dry as dust.” Such is hardly the case here. Indeed, I find May’s 251 notes to be fascinating, learned, and a joy to read.”