SOURCE: "Jupiter Hammon," in The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770-1800, New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973, pp. 171-80.

In the following excerpt, Kaplan briefly comments on the prominence of religion in Hammon's verse.

It is altogether possible that Jupiter Hammon was a preacher to the slaves in the communities of Long Island and Connecticut where he labored for the Lloyds. An Evening Thought, an antiphonal poem echoing the word "Salvation" in twenty-three of its eighty-eight lines, has all the ringing ecstatic hope for heavenly freedom with "tender love" that charges the earliest spirituals of the enslaved. The preacher calls and the flock responds—thus the "Penetential Cries."

Jupiter Hammon wrote this hymn on Christmas Day of 1760, and for the next forty years, whenever he cried out in print to his black brothers and sisters, his theme, more or less, was always salvation. Yet there...