Life & Wisdom Quote by Jupiter Hammon

A rebuke that sounds like simple workplace morality turns sharper once you remember who’s speaking: Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved Black poet writing inside a world where “masters” were not a metaphor but a legal fact. The line leans on the familiar vocabulary of Christian exhortation - wickedness, care, theft - because that language was one of the few public registers available to an enslaved writer who wanted to be heard by white audiences without being silenced.

On the surface, Hammon warns against negligence and petty theft, the kind of sermonizing that reassures owners and ministers alike. The phrase “whenever you think you shall not be found out” is the tell: he’s not just policing behavior, he’s spotlighting the psychology of surveillance that slavery depends on. It’s a moral argument shaped like a security system. Even your private calculations, the quote implies, are already exposed to a higher authority.

The subtext is double-edged. Hammon can’t directly challenge the theft at slavery’s core - the stolen labor, the stolen life - but he can insist on an internal standard that doesn’t require the master’s recognition. By framing wrongdoing as a spiritual and communal hazard rather than merely a punishable act, he’s addressing enslaved readers as ethical agents, not property. That’s a quiet act of cultural resistance: taking the master’s language and redirecting it toward self-governance, dignity, and survival in a regime designed to deny all three.