There’s a brand new poem to add to Juneteenthcelebrations this year. It’s a previously unknown work by the country’s first published black writer, Jupiter Hammon. UT Arlington grad student Julie McCown, uncovered the handwritten poem while looking for a specific piece of Hammon’s work. The piece, called “An Essay on Slavery," was buried in documents at the Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library in Connecticut.
Jupiter Hammon was born a slave in 1711 and worked his entire life for the Lloyd family of Queens on Long Island, New York. Hammon, who was allowed to attend school and a devout Christian, had his first poem published on Christmas of 1760: “An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries.” He would go on to write a handful of poems and essays, his most well-known "Address to the Negroes of the State of New York", had this famous line: "If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves."
The newly uncovered work by Hammon, “An Essay on Slavery." is a “game-changer” according to Professor Cedric May, an expert on African-American literature and associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington. In an interview with NPR’s Michelle Martin, May said in this poem Hammon defines slavery as a sin for the first time.
“And that's a real big issue at this point, because theologically speaking, there had been a lot of talk about the compatibility of slavery with Christianity in the colonies, and now he's defying that idea.”
The poem, May says, is also the only only handwritten draft of Hammon's work.
"We can see mark-outs and corrections, and fortunately we can actually see many of the original words he used while he was composing this poem," May says.
The full poem “An Essay on Slavery," will be published this month in the journalEarly American Literature.
You can listen to Professor May read the entire poem here:
