In 1778, five years after the slave Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, another writer, also a slave, sat down during a moment’s respite to begin penning a response to the younger and more well-known poet’s work. Now nearly sixty-seven, Jupiter Hammon, who had published a handful of poems in locally distributed broadsides, included his ideas on religion specifically as well as ideas that implied a certain political position. Wheatley, who was about nineteen in 1773, when she published her book, had accomplished the remarkable feat of producing a book that not only appealed to her...

Jupiter Hammon made important contributions to African American writing that present contemporary readers with many problems of interpretation, particularly in the area of slave resistance. Generally neglected by literary and historical scholarship, Hammon’s poetry and essays nevertheless can shed light on how black people, both enslaved and free, entered discussions concerning their destinies as human subjects in British America. In fact, Hammon’s work reveals much to readers about the theological teachings slaves received about their relationships to their masters in the early to mid–eighteenth century and about how Hammon reinterpreted and spread those teachings. This chapter does not investigate...

In May 1773, a young woman named Phillis Wheatley boarded a merchant ship named the London Packet that was sailing from Boston to London. Several Boston newspapers announced her journey, noting that she was being escorted by the wealthy owner of the ship and celebrating the young woman as an “extraordinary” poet of “ingenious” capacity.¹ Such announcements of the comings and goings of ships and their prominent passengers were common practice, information of interest to the publications’ general readers. But the notices regarding Wheatley were remarkable because the woman who would soon be hailed internationally as a poet was also...

On a cold winter morning, January 27, 1788, John Marrant departed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the final time, boarding a ship headed for Boston. For almost three years, he had preached to a dedicated and growing congregation of loyalist blacks who had immigrated there to escape British-American slavery. His goal, as assigned by the Huntingdon Connection of Calvinist Methodists, was to bring a more rigorous predestination doctrine to a region to which the more moderate Wesleyan Methodists, who also vied for control in the area, had previously ministered. He also brought a new covenant, proclaiming himself, through his works...

Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant were black religious writers who worked contemporaneously to change the way black people viewed themselves in relation to religion. Hammon and Wheatley worked primarily as individuals, producing literary expressions of their piety and intellectual engagement with Atlantic culture, whereas Marrant eventually connected himself to larger bodies of black people to express his religious concerns through black institutions—first the interethnic churches of mostly black loyalists living in Nova Scotia, then the African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston. Such coalitions became more common as the free black population grew and coalesced into small communities....

Richard Allen was the founder of and the first bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (ame) Church, the first independent black denomination in North America. Scholars generally believe that the African church movement began in 1792 or 1793, when the black members of St. George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia walked out as a group as a consequence of intolerable discrimination within the predominantly white church. Church officials had ordered the black members to sit in a recently added gallery at the back of the church, but when they kneeled to pray, officials directed them to move to the back of...

As this book demonstrates, beginning with the chapter on Jupiter Hammon, late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century blacks adopted a range of intellectual positions concerning the proper theological schools of thought related to slavery and human rights. And while Phillis Wheatley, Hammon’s contemporary, was in many ways his complete intellectual and theological opposite, her concerns were broad enough to address rights on the level of a universal humanity. In fact, most of the writers examined thus far, to one degree or another, couch their ideals in universalizing language. The tendency can be misleading, as most “universal” claims tend to leave out some subjects....