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[24], chapter one Jupiter Hammon and the Written Beginnings of Black Theology &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 whether Hammon advocated abolition; he was clearly comfortable and apparently content with his condition as a slave by the time he began publishing his writings in December 1760. Rather, this analysis reveals what is known about the religion and theological beliefs of one American slave who likely is representative of what some enslaved converts to Christianity believed about their place in the world as both slave and Christian. Hammon does not represent the thinking of all slave converts of the period, but his complex beliefs and representation of the nature of sin, belief and faith, and death and the afterlife reveal a wealth about one form of Calvinist Christianity. Many enslaved people of the time were exposed to and had the opportunity to accept or reject Hammon’s conception as a way of organizing their spiritual lives and explain social reality. In the 1990s, some scholars labeled Hammon a type of antislavery writer, arguing that his writing was emancipatory in nature, that it illustrated an enslaved human being trying to resist slavery through the language of religious literature.1 Hammon’s writings do not support this conclusion, however. Hammon was a complex individual living under unusual circumstances with certain ideological beliefs that interacted with the literary and political culture of early America, but resistance was not one of his concerns. While his occasions for writing may have held emancipatory and resistive potential, his temporal life was far from resistant, and his works ultimately validate the social and politi24 Hammon and Written Beginnings • 25 1 [25], cal status quo of slavery by supporting the lessons and arguments of proslavery , predestinarian Calvinist evangelists and missionaries of the period. But his writing also attempted to consolidate a community of blacks around principles of Christianity. His example would encourage and sharpen the way that black writers and thinkers debated slavery, but the message Hammon put forth was far from revolutionary. In fact, it exemplifies the traditional teachings the majority of slaves and free blacks sought to resist prior to the middle of the eighteenth century. Hammon’s writings offer today’s readers access to the way in which some Christianized slaves conceived of the individual’s relationship to the divine and by extension the slave’s relationship to free society. Hammon thus provides a written example of the theologies slaves either rejected or remolded to fit their life experiences and needs. Though neither an abolitionist nor a blacknationalist icon, Hammon remains an important part of the literary tradition, worthy of further study for insight into transitions in early Christian doctrines from colonizing tools to organizing principles for resistance to oppression. Hammon’s writings and sermons may well indirectly have contributed, over time in his region, to black resistance by spreading common organizational principles that disrupted the desocializing effects of slavery. These principles eventually became the basis for black collective action, intellectualism, and resistance. In the hands of African Americans who would use Christianity to organize and argue against slavery, scriptural lessons and biblical exegesis profoundly affected the lives of blacks. Whether or not Hammon agreed with Christianity’s effects on civil order, his participation in the spread of the religion inevitably led to future resistance movements based in large part on Christian principles. By spreading his vision of the proper Christian life, Hammon provided fuel for future black evangelical activists. But understanding his contributions to a culture of resistance requires understanding his writings within their temporal context, including the political and religious milieu and the functions of Hammon’s poetry and sermons as they circulated among both white and black readers. Hammon was not particularly interested in the end of slavery in a temporal, civil sense: such matters fell into the realm of secular politics, which did not interest Hammon except where they contradicted his sense of religiosity. In...

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