Wealth & Money Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A single sentence, and Hammon compresses an entire social order into a courtroom where it finally can’t hide. “He will bring us all” sounds soothing on first pass, the pastoral promise of shared destiny. Then the blade turns: “rich and poor, white and black” aren’t poetic contrasts so much as the actual fault lines of colonial America, named plainly and then hauled, without appeal, to “his judgment seat.” In Hammon’s hands, Christianity isn’t a private comfort; it’s a moral subpoena.

Context matters. Hammon was an enslaved Black poet writing within the only widely legible public language available to him: Protestant devotion. That constraint becomes his instrument. He doesn’t need to denounce slavery directly to make the indictment land. By insisting that God’s jurisdiction ignores the categories that govern plantations and pulpits, he exposes those categories as temporary, man-made, and therefore indictable. The phrase “judgment seat” borrows the formal tone of legal authority, flipping the era’s obsession with property and hierarchy into a different ledger where the powerful can’t purchase innocence.

The subtext is strategically inclusive. Hammon doesn’t separate himself from “white” or from the “rich”; he puts everyone in the same dock. That rhetorical choice does two things at once: it makes his warning harder to dismiss as grievance, and it forces the listener to imagine a world where the enslaver’s confidence is replaced by spiritual peril. Equality arrives, not as a political platform, but as an unavoidable reckoning.