Faith & Spirit Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Hammons line lands like a sermon delivered with the calm certainty of someone who knows what it means to be owned and yet insists the soul is not property. The rhetoric is orthodox Calvinist thunder: humans are "by nature" sinners, enslaved not just by bad habits but by cosmic powers, and the only exit is conversion. But coming from Jupiter Hammon, an enslaved Black poet writing in colonial and early republican America, the word "slaves" can never be merely metaphor. It folds two regimes of bondage into one sentence: the theological and the literal, the invisible chain and the iron one.

That doubling does specific work. On the surface, Hammon is repeating the era's dominant Protestant grammar, a language white audiences respected and that could grant an enslaved speaker a rare kind of authority. Underneath, the framing quietly relocates the real hierarchy: if everyone is enslaved to sin, then moral superiority based on race or status collapses. The claim is leveling, even if it appears to submit.

The stakes are also strategic. "Miserable forever" weaponizes eternity, but it also offers a counter-horizon to a life structurally denied hope. Born-again Christianity becomes both a discipline and a refuge: a way to argue for dignity without asking permission from earthly masters. In Hammon's context, this isn't abstract piety. It's a coded assertion that the final court of appeal is not the plantation, but God.