Lemuel Haynes
On this date, Lemuel Haynes was born in 1753. He was a Black minister.
Abandoned as a child, Haynes was raised as an indentured servant in West Hartford, Connecticut, by a sympathetic white Evangelical family. Haynes was a soldier in the Continental Army who believed that the American Revolution should have expanded to free slaves. He detailed this in 1776 with an essay, "Liberty Further Extended." This pioneering essay was unknown and unpublished until 1983. Haynes was the pastor of several white churches, principally in Rutland, Vermont.
He was socially conservative, politically aligned with the Federalists, and a severe “Separatist” within Congregationalism. He published "Universal Salvation" in 1805, a sharp Calvinist assault on Universalism. In 1820, he published "Mystery Developed," a narrative of the famous Boorn murder case.
Haynes was among the first Black ordained by a mainstream white denomination in 1785 and one of the first to receive a college degree, an honorary M.A. from Middlebury College in 1804. Lemuel Haynes died in 1833.
An Encyclopedia of African American Christian Heritage
by Marvin Andrew McMickle
Judson Press, Copyright 2002
ISBN 0-817014-02-0
