War & Peace Quote by Jupiter Hammon

Hammon slips a quiet blade into a sentence that, on its surface, reads like modest autobiography. He notes that his wartime publications were “well received,” then immediately qualifies the praise: the white readers who approved weren’t applauding a Black poet as a peer; they were endorsing him as a tool. The phrase “might do good among their servants” is the tell. His work is being valued less for its artistry than for its usefulness in managing an enslaved labor force.

That’s the subtext doing the heavy lifting. Hammon doesn’t need to accuse anyone directly; he lets the logic of paternalism indict itself. White audiences imagine Black writing as a kind of moral instrument to be deployed “among” people they own. The preposition matters: not with, not for, but among, as if the enslaved were a population to be administered. Hammon records this with restraint, a strategy that matches the peril of his position. As an enslaved man publishing in colonial America, open confrontation could close the narrow channel he’d carved out. So he documents the gatekeeping, in plain terms, and trusts the reader to hear the chill.

Context sharpens the point. Hartford during the Revolutionary era was full of rhetoric about liberty that rarely extended to Black life. Hammon’s sentence captures that contradiction in miniature: a Black author can be “well received” precisely when his words can be bent to reinforce order. It’s an early snapshot of a recurring American pattern: celebrating Black expression when it comforts power, policing it when it challenges power.