Those of you who can read I must beg you to read the Bible, and whenever you can get time, study the Bible, and if you can get no other time, spare some of your time from sleep, and learn what the mind and will of God is.

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.