Wealth & Money Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Equality arrives, in Hammon's telling, only when it can no longer be negotiated. The line opens with a bracing leveling move: death abolishes the hierarchies that organize colonial America - race and class included. For an enslaved Black poet writing in an era that treated Black life as property, that assertion is both spiritual and quietly political. It seizes the one arena enslavers can't fully control: the afterlife, the soul, the final accounting.

But Hammon doesn't let the sentiment drift into comfort. He pivots from social parity to moral gatekeeping: the only passport is being "born again" and loving God. That phrase isn't decorative; it places him squarely in the revivalist Protestant world of the Great Awakening, where conversion was experiential, urgent, and publicly legible. The subtext is strategic. By adopting the dominant religious language of his time, Hammon claims authority inside the culture that denies him civic authority. He speaks in a register white Christians recognize, then uses it to collapse their moral alibis: if Heaven is for the regenerated, then the Christian slaveholder's status is suddenly precarious.

The promise of being "happy for ever" functions as consolation, but also as critique. It's a future tense that exposes the poverty of the present. Hammon offers no earthly revolution here; his intent is pastoral and disciplinary - to steady the oppressed, to warn the complacent, and to relocate the real hierarchy from plantation economics to divine judgment. In a society obsessed with sorting bodies, he insists God sorts souls.