Jupiter Hammon

11 October 1711—

Featured Hymns:

Salvation comes by Jesus Christ alone

Published Works:

“An Evening Thought, Salvation by Christ,” broadsheet (1760): NYHS

“Dear Hutchinson is Dead and Gone,” manuscript (1770): NYHS

“An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley,” broadsheet (1778): PDF
[Connecticut Museum of Culture and History / Readex]

An Essay on the Ten Virgins (1779) [missing/lost]

A Winter Piece: Being a Serious Exhortation, with “A Poem for Children” (1782): PDF

An Evening’s Improvement with “The Kind Master and Dutiful Servant” (1783): PDF

“An Essay on Slavery with Justification to Divine Providence” (1786) [MS]: Yale

An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York (1787): PDF

Related Resources:

Nathan Perkins, A Sermon Occasioned by the Unhappy Death of Mr. Lloyd: A Refuge from Long Island (1780): PDF

Oscar Wegelin, Jupiter Hammon: American Negro Poet (Beaufort Books, 1915).

Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America (NY: Columbia University, 1931): Archive.org

Charles A. Vertanes, “Jupiter Hammon, early Long Island poet,” Nassau County Historical Journal, vol. 18, no. 1 (Winter 1957), pp. 4–20: HathiTrust

“Notes on first black poet,” The Afro-American, no. 35 (18 Apr. 1970), p. 3.

Stanley Austin Ransom Jr., ed., America’s First Negro Poet: The Complete Works of Jupiter Hammon of Long Island (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970): https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/65/

Jonathan Cohen, “A black poet’s view on Christmas, 1760,” The New York Times (25 Dec. 1977), pp. 9, 14.

Erskine Peters, “Jupiter Hammon: His engagement with interpretation,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies, vol. 8, no. 4 (1981), pp. 1–12.

Jean B. Osann, Henry Lloyd’s Salt Box Manor House (Lloyd Harbor Historical Society, 1982).

Phillip M. Richards, “Nationalist themes in the preaching of Jupiter Hammon,” Literature, vol. 25, no. 2 (1990), pp. 123-138.

Lonnell E. Johnson, “Dilemma of the dutiful servant: The poetry of Jupiter Hammon,” Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Berlay (Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 105–117.

Sandra A. O’Neale, Jupiter Hammon and the Biblical Beginnings of African-American Literature (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993).

Margaret A. Brucia, “The African-American poet, Jupiter Hammon: A home-born slave and his classical name,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 7, no. 4 (Spring 2001), pp. 515–522: JSTOR

Arlen Nydam, “Numeralogical tradition in the works of Jupiter Hammon,” African American Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (2006), pp. 207–220.

Cedrick May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1765–1835 (University of Georgia, 2008): Amazon

Charla E. Bolton & Reginald H. Metcalf Jr. “The migration of Jupiter Hammon and his family: From slavery to freedom and its consequences,” Long Island History Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (2013): https://lihj.cc.stonybrook.edu/2013/articles/the-migration-of-jupiter-hammon-and-his-family-from-slavery-to-freedom-and-its-consequences/

Cedrick May & Julie McCown, “‘An essay on slavery’: An unpublished poem by Jupiter Hammon,” Early American Literature, vol. 48, no. 2 (2013), pp. 457–471: JSTOR

Duncan F. Faherty, “Jupiter Hammon,” African American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2013):
https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.34432

“Unpublished Jupiter Hammon Poem Discovered at New-York Historical,” The New York Historical (2015):
https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/jupiter-hammon-poem-discovered

Cedrick May, The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2017): Amazon

Viha Rosin, “Jupiter Hammon’s ‘An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries’: An Analysis,” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 23, no. 11, ver. 2 (November 2018), pp. 24–26: https://www.iosrjournals.org