An Ante-Bellum Sermon

Dunbar begins “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” with the speaker, a Black preacher and a slave, addressing his congregation of Christian “brothahs” (Line 1), who are all slaves like himself. In this first stanza, the preacher promises to speak “some words of comfo’t” (Line 3) to those in “distress” (Line 4), uniting the downtrodden slaves for his sermon. He announces his “subjic’” (Line 5), directly quoting the first meeting between God and Moses from the Book of Exodus. The preacher next introduces Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt and the “wuss man evah bo’n” (Line 10), who was responsible for the suffering of the Hebrew slaves. The speaker notes how the slaves were forced to labor in Pharaoh’s fields of corn (Line 12), a deliberate parallel to the current situation of his enslaved audience.

Beginning in the second stanza, the preacher deliberately belittles and trivializes the cruelty of slavery under Pharaoh. Perhaps this lack of seriousness is because his audience was already intimately familiar with such cruelty and needed no further elaboration, but this trivializing is more likely the speaker’s attempt to show his contempt for slave owners and their practices.