No Shelter from the Storm: Slavery and Freedom in Early New York City

Abstract

On November 10, 1786, Jupiter Hammon completed a poem entitled “An Essay on Slavery.” The Queens author explored the roots of enslavement and the moral and religious imperatives that ought to produce emancipation in New York. Hammon emphasized that he was voicing the collective story of an African people. The poem begins with the declaration, “Our forefathers came from africa/tost over the raging main”; the operative pronouns throughout the poem are “we” and “us.” The journey from Africa to America should rightfully conclude in freedom, not in bondage. He ends stanza 6 with the word “Liberty”; stanzas 17 and 21 end, respectively, with the phrases “Tis Slavery no more” and “That Slavery is no more”; stanza 18 notes that God “can fill our hearts with things divine/And give us freedom two.” The spelling t-w-o draws attention to two kinds of freedom, earthly and heavenly. Hammon asserts that his fellow descendants of Africa will remain on this “Christian shore” and suggests that religious faithfulness will liberate them in this world and the next. In newly independent New York, masters and Euro-Americans bore responsibility for fixing the earthbound problem. However, having brought Africans to the “Christian shore,” whites, in Hammon’s telling, had no role to play in determining the eternal fate of their bondspeople.1 Jupiter Hammon has been known to scholars for many decades as the first enslaved person in the British mainland colonies to publish a poem (1760), but literary specialists Cedrick May and Julie McCown only recently unveiled the welcome archival discovery of “An Essay on Slavery.”2 Hammon’s poem sets forth key themes around which historians