Thousands of Curiosities from the Harvard Libraries

The Harvard Libraries have created a set of webpages called “CURIOSity Digital Collections” which provide “Curated views that provide specialized search options and unique content.”

That content comes from the university’s own holdings, and since the Harvard system adds up to one of the largest libraries on the planet, there’s a lot of content to choose from.

Some of the topics covered by these pages are:

• the South Sea Bubble of 1720
• France in the Americas
• American Currency over the centuries (watch the quantity of bills explode during the Revolutionary War)
• The Artemas Ward House in Shrewsbury
• English Crime and Execution Broadsides of the 18th and 19th centuries
• Joseph Story, justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from Marblehead

The newest collection looks at Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom. Linking to more than a thousand items related to black history and culture, this collection is the result of a university-wide effort that digital collections program manager Dorothy Berry has led since 2020, as reported in the Harvard Gazette.

Some of the eighteenth-century items to explore in that section are:

• Nathaniel Appleton’s Considerations on Slavery; in a Letter to a Friend, printed by Edes and Gill in 1767.
• James Swan’s A Dissuasion to Great-Britain and the Colonies, from the Slave Trade to Africa, printed by Ezekiel Russell in 1772.
• A Forensic Dispute on the Legality of Enslaving the Africans; held at the Public Commencement in Cambridge, New-England, July 21st, 1773, credited to Theodore Parsons and Eliphalet Pearson and printed by John Boyle for bookseller Thomas Leverett.
• Jupiter Hammon’s An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York from 1787.
• Prince Hall’s A Charge Delivered to the Brethren of the African Lodge on the 25th of June, 1792, printed by the Thomas and John Fleet.

Plus, there are pamphlets from the same years printed in Philadelphia, London, and other important British cities.

This collection extends into the nineteenth century, so there are many items from the fight for (and against) abolition in the U.S. of A. and around the world. Plus, more to come.

Another Newly Discovered Poem by Jupiter Hammon

For the second time in four years, a researcher has identified a previously unstudied poem by the enslaved preacher Jupiter Hammon in an archive.

In this case, the poem had not already been properly catalogued, like the last time. It was filed under the name of Phebe Townsend in the Townsend Family Papers at the New-York Historical Society. But above her signature in big letters, Townsend had labeled the three-page manuscript:

Composed by Jupiter hammon
A Negro belonging to mr Joseph Lloyd
of Queens Village on Long island
August the 10th 1770

Claire Bellerjeau, who has researched the Townsend family’s own slaves in depth, came across the document and confirmed that the poem had not been published elsewhere. She has been speaking about the find this spring. The New Haven Register reports that Bellerjeau “hopes to publish her findings by the end of this year in the New York History Journal,” which is the periodical of the New York State Historical Association.

The Oyster Bay Enterprise-Pilot reported on Bellerjeau’s surprising conclusion about the untitled poem’s subject:

She said one of the things that struck her about this poem is that it is an homage to [Anne] Hutchinson, a woman who lived 127 years before Hammond’s time.

“It’s truly incredible,” she said. “He was educated enough, thoughtful enough and scholarly enough to pay tribute to her, a woman who also had a belief that she was equal in God’s eyes.” . . .

She explained that the poem by Hammond is in three parts, titled “Sickness,” “Death” and “Funeral” and alludes to aspects of Hutchinson’s life; and since Hutchinson never had a proper funeral, Bellerjeau interprets the poem as a way of “laying her soul to rest.”

I’d love to see the full text of the poem because Bellerjeau’s reading raises several questions for me:

• What “aspects of Hutchinson’s life” does it address, and how rare were those for early American women? 
• In the “Death” section, does it describe how Hutchinson was so notably killed by Native Americans? 
• Aside from the “Funeral,” what other aspects of life does the poem discuss which were not part of Anne Hutchinson’s life? 
• Can we rule out the possibility that Hammon wrote a memorial to a local woman who had recently died, of the sort the young Phillis Wheatley was cranking out in Boston?

I ask those questions because I’m surprised that Hammon, who advocated meek and conventional piety, would praise Anne Hutchinson, a disruptive dissenter who had lived a century earlier. Hutchinson wasn’t as widely admired in 1700s America as she later became.

That said, the eighteenth-century author who had the most to say about Anne Hutchinson was her descendant Thomas Hutchinson. He wrote about her at length in his History of the Province of Massachuset’s-Bay. That book was published a few years before the date on this poem, so perhaps it was Hammon’s source of information and inspiration.

Jupiter Hammon’s “Essay on Slavery”

In the Yale Alumni Magazine, Prof. Cedrick May of the University of Texas’s English Department reported on how his research team identified a previously unpublished poem by Jupiter Hammon (1711-before 1806) of New York. Hammon was enslaved to the Lloyd family of Long Island, who had a few relatives in Boston.

Here’s an image of the first page of the manuscript, and a transcript of the whole poem, which begins:

An essay on Slavery, with justification to Divine
providence, that God Rules over all things
Written by Jupiter Hammon

1
Our forefathers came from Africa
Tost over the raging main
To a Christian shore there for to stay
And not return again.

2
Dark and dismal was the Day
When slavery began
All humble thoughts were put away
Then slaves were made by Man.

3
When God doth please for to permit
That slavery should be
It is our duty to submit
Till Christ shall make us free

I can’t help hearing those lines sung as a hymn.

Prof. May explains the finding this way:

In the fall of 2011, I gave my graduate students the assignment of acquiring scanned images of Hammon’s writings from libraries and archives I knew to hold copies of his works. A librarian at the New York Public Library helpfully pointed one student toward a Yale Libraries finding aid for the Hillhouse Family Papers, which listed a poem by Jupiter Hammon. A Yale librarian e-mailed the title of the poem to us, and when I saw it was called “An Essay on Slavery,” I realized it might be a new discovery. I purchased a scanned image of the poem, and when it arrived I knew right away I was looking at a never-before-known poem by Jupiter Hammon.

Of course, this “never-before-known poem” was known to the New York librarian who guided Prof. May and his student, and before that to the archivist at Yale’s Manuscripts & Archives Department who had created the finding aid listing it. [Full disclosure: I worked in that department in 1984, in a much less important capacity.]

I’m not convinced by May’s analysis of this poem and how it fits into Hammon’s work:

We know from his writings that his masters raised and educated him under devout Calvinist principles that advocated the compatibility of slavery with Christianity. (His masters later became connected by marriage to the Hillhouse family of New Haven, which is how the poem ended up at Yale.) In his previous publications, Hammon suggests a predestinarian belief that since slavery existed, it had to be part of God’s will, and therefore slaves were bound to obey their masters. But “An Essay on Slavery,” written in 1786, declares unambiguously that slavery is a manmade sin, not the will of God, and then proceeds to celebrate the eventual end of the institution of human bondage. . . . Clearly, Hammon has changed his mind about the theological soundness of slavery’s compatibility with Christianity.

But Hammon’s third verse above precisely repeats the “predestinarian belief” that May describes. The verses describe an end of slavery in the next world, it seems to me, or after the Second Coming. Hammon was still echoing the argument that slaveowners used to convince their human property to obey them for life. Was adding a promise of future supernatural liberation really a change?