Life & Wisdom Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Deference is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and that is the point. Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved Black poet writing in an 18th-century world that dressed bondage up as “order,” frames cruelty as something almost accidental: not a system, but a lapse of individual character that good behavior can usually prevent. The sentence is engineered to sound like calm, practical advice, but it’s also a survival manual smuggled into moral language.

Hammon’s intent is double-edged. On the surface, he offers a model of dutiful service: strive, study, take pains, please. Those verbs stack into a theology of effort that would have landed as respectable to white Christian ears, the audience with power. The subtext, though, is grimly revealing: the enslaved person’s safety is conditional, always. The promise is deliberately limited - “but few masters” - leaving room for the unspoken truth that some will be cruel regardless. That small hedge is where reality leaks in.

Context sharpens the irony. Hammon is writing as someone who knows that “cruelty” is not an exception but a tool of the institution. By pretending it’s rare and preventable, he can rebuke masters without directly accusing them, and he can counsel the enslaved without sounding insubordinate. It’s a strategy of constrained speech: moral appeal shaped to fit inside the bars. The line works because it flatters authority while quietly indicting it, forcing the reader to confront a terrifying premise - that humanity must be earned from people who should never have had the right to withhold it.