SOURCE: "A New Home in a New Land," in They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 1787-1930, Townsend Press, 1970, pp. 3-49.

In the following excerpt, Williams compares Hammon's poetry to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American religious verse.

[Hammon's] first publication was a poem of eighty-eight lines entitled An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ, With Penetential Cries. The title page carries his name and asserts that he is a slave "belonging to Mr. Lloyd, of Queen's Village, on Long Island," and the poem is dated December 25, 1760. As the title pages of his publications indicate, Hammon belonged to three different members of the Lloyd family of Long Island….

Apparently the Lloyds were considerate masters who allowed Hammon a great deal of freedom of movement, for he wrote in An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York in 1787: "I have good reason to be thankful that...