Life & Wisdom Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Liberty lands here less as a trumpet blast than as a careful, almost devastating piece of moral bookkeeping. Hammon starts where no one can argue: "our own feelings". In a world that treated enslaved people as property, he asserts an interior life as evidence, making sentiment itself a form of testimony. You do not need a philosophy lecture to know liberty is "a great thing" if you have been denied it; the body already keeps the record.

Then comes the turn that sharpens the blade: "we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war". Hammon is writing in the afterglow of the American Revolution, when colonists framed their rebellion as a righteous fight against tyranny. He doesn not need to accuse; he can simply point. White Americans proved liberty's value by risking everything for it, dramatizing the exact principle they refused to extend to Black people. The phrase "conduct of the white-people" has the cool distance of someone observing a species in the wild: look at what they do when their freedom is threatened, and you have your argument for why enslaved people deserve the same.

The subtext is both indictment and strategy. Hammon, a Christian poet navigating lethal power imbalances, chooses measured language over open rage. Yet the irony is unmistakable: the revolution becomes Exhibit A against the new republic. Liberty, he implies, is not a racial inheritance; it's a human appetite the patriots accidentally confessed to the world.