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.