We cannot certainly, have any excuse either for taking any thing that belongs to our masters without their leave, or for being unfaithful in their business.

In the Upper South so many slaveholders manumitted slaves that the proportion of free blacks among African Americans increased from less than one percent in 1790 to more than 10 percent by 1810. He publiJupiter Hammond three other poems and three sermon essays. He was living in 1790 at the age of 79 and died by 1806.

Born into slavery Hammon was never emancipated. Jupiter Hammon (October 17 1711 – before 1806) was a black poet who in 1761 became the first African-American writer to be publiJupiter Hammond in the present-day United States. Additional poems and sermons were also publiJupiter Hammond.