Life & Wisdom Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Hammon’s sentence is a moral warning that doubles as a political strategy, aimed not at slaveholders but at fellow Black people living under bondage and surveillance. The opening, “Besides all this,” signals he’s stacking arguments like a preacher building momentum: he’s already laid out reasons to live upright, and now he adds the hard consequence. “If you are idle, and take to bad courses” isn’t just personal advice. It’s a rebuttal to a familiar colonial slander: that enslaved people are unfit for freedom because they’re irresponsible, disorderly, or morally suspect. Hammon knows the standards of judgment are collective. One person’s “bad courses” will be used as evidence against everyone.

The key move is his pivot from individual sin to communal harm: “you will hurt those of your brethren who are slaves.” That word “brethren” is doing heavy lifting, forging solidarity across differences in status, behavior, even perhaps between enslaved and free Black people. Then comes the most pointed clause: “and do all in your power to prevent their being free.” Hammon is naming respectability as a weapon that can boomerang. The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: enslavers and institutions don’t need much excuse to tighten the chains; they’ll recruit any perceived failure as proof that emancipation is dangerous.

As an enslaved poet writing within religious discourse, Hammon crafts a message that can pass as piety while smuggling in political urgency. He’s not romanticizing virtue; he’s describing how freedom debates get won and lost in public perception, and how the cost of being judged is paid by “your brethren” first.