It was 1775, and an invasion was afoot. The misty dark hung over Vermont’s Lake Champlain as a group of small boats cut their way across the surface of the water. On those boats huddled a contingent of American Minutemen, hardly daring to breathe as they neared the other side of the lake. In the dim starlight, the force of fewer than 200 ragtag rebels could just make out the towering stone walls of their target: Fort Ticonderoga, a garrison laid out in the shape of a five-pointed star that secured not only the strategic pathway to Canada and the north, but also harbored a significant cache of weapons, including heavy artillery. If the Minutemen succeeded, the fort’s capture would be a desperately needed boon for the Continental Army, and a flicker of hope for a desperate nation ramping up its fight for independence.
How America’s first black minister helped redefine liberty and defeat slavery, one gospel message at a time.
Aboard the unwieldy craft, militia leader Ethan Allen knew he had to act quickly. The light would soon come, and then his force, dubbed the Green Mountain Boys, would have to fend off the 50 British soldiers stationed within Ticonderoga’s walls. With officer Benedict Arnold at his side, the two commanders decided to attack. Silently, the Green Mountain Boys jumped ashore and overcame the single sentry on duty, pushing their way into the officer’s quarters. A stunned and surprised British officer, facing a crowd of muskets, demanded of Allen to know under whose authority Ticonderoga was being raided. As tradition would have, the dogged Vermont frontiersman shot back: “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” Whether by God or gunpowder, Fort Ticonderoga now belonged to America’s fledgling army—and the capture proceeded without a single death on either side.
As the Green Mountain Boys unfurled their flag to declare victory and celebrated with the alcohol found within the fort’s stores, however, a lone soldier within the occupying company had more on his mind than liquor and revelry. The battle might be won, but his personal war for independence involved far more than captured forts and hard-won territory. His fight had been raging since birth, and would rage for decades longer, becoming directly intertwined with the fate of the nation he’d taken up his musket to defend. He was Lemuel Haynes of Connecticut, and his life and work would stand as an affront to both the political power of the British Empire and the spiritual power of the devil—and earn him a spot among America’s greatest black patriots.
Haynes, like almost all black Americans at the time, hailed from the humblest of beginnings. The child of a white (Scottish) mother and black (enslaved) father in West Hartford, Connecticut, he was abandoned soon after his birth in 1753, a fate that should have been a death knell in a world where one child out of every 10 died before reaching the age of five. Yet the infant Haynes avoided this fate; instead, he was assigned as an indentured servant to the Rose family, white Puritans in New Granville, Massachusetts. Deacon David Rose would have an immeasurable impact on the young Haynes’ life, instilling in him a profound love of theology that would, intentionally or otherwise, mold him into an incisive, if unexpected, voice for American liberty.
Haynes’ first love was preaching, crediting his start down the pastoral road with the positive response he received while extemporaneously expounding the Scriptures to the Rose family one night. Yet his love of preaching would soon be put on hold: his indenture to the Roses expired in 1774, and there were forces at work far greater than Haynes’ happy and pious existence in New Granville. The newly formed Continental Army was on the move, and struggling to face the forces of the British Empire in the field. Haynes, buoyed by both religious and political conviction, volunteered as a Minuteman shortly after his indenture expired, officially joining the ranks of the Army in 1776, shortly after the nation suffered crushing defeats at Valcour Bay and White Plains, sending shockwaves of uncertainty through the troops—and increasing the weight upon the shoulders of young Virginian general George Washington. Haynes marched as an American soldier, including at the garrison of Fort Ticonderoga, until leaving the army later that year after contracting typhus. With his short stint in the military over, Haynes’ true life battle would begin.
Haynes had carried his love of preaching to war with him, writing sermons while deployed in Boston and the surrounding area. With his military career ended, Haynes was once again free to pursue his first love. He held services within his local parish, preaching to any who would listen while looking for opportunities to further his still mostly self-gained education. And opportunities would come, at a level Haynes could not have expected—he rejected an open offer to pursue studies at Dartmouth College in favor of studying Latin and Greek closer to home. Throughout the course of his life, he would go on to receive an honorary master’s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont, the first black man ever to receive the honor. In 1780, the 27-year-old Haynes would finally be licensed to preach by the Congregational Association and would become America’s first black ordained minister and the latest member of the growing New Divinity movement, an offshoot of revivalist Jonathan Edwards’ theology, which emphasized both the sovereignty of God and the need for rational social critique. The movement, although spearheaded by white theologians like Samuel Hopkins (a disciple of Edwards), specifically targeted the institution of slavery as damnable.
In an era when many critics of slavery were finding receptive ears among Americans newly focused on questions of natural rights and law, Haynes and his fellow New Divines concentrated their arguments as expressly theological, biblical critiques of humans as property. For thinkers like Haynes, the argument against slavery was the same as the argument for American liberty: if natural rights meant anything, they meant freedom for all Americans against all forms of servitude. It was more than abstract Calvinist philosophy—it was a deeply humanizing argument for black Americans like Haynes, who felt God’s hand of liberation upon them just as firmly as did their fellow white patriots. As biographer John Saillant notes: “From Calvinism, this generation of black authors drew a vision of God at work providentially in the lives of black people, directing their sufferings yet promising the faithful among them a restoration to his favor and his presence.”
Haynes’ task as a preacher was more than parsing theological truths. It was representing such truths as a black man in an era when his mixed race was perceived as a hindrance. Haynes completed his ordination in 1785, in a northwestern Connecticut town called Torrington, and not all his listeners were easily swayed by the spiritual guidance of a black pastor. Some persistently mocked and dismissed Haynes, wearing hats in church to protest his sermons (at the time, a cardinal breach of protocol). Yet, as historian Samuel Orcutt put it, “curiosity conquered prejudice,” and soon even congregants who once protested his ministry now flocked to Torrington to hear the black evangelist, further encouraged by Haynes’ fellow Reformed clergy, who never viewed his race as disqualifying.
Throughout his early years in the pulpit, Haynes refused to allow controversy to affect his love of preaching. He pressed on, and the preaching circuit would soon lead him into the neighboring republic of Vermont. Be it New England’s comparative racial tolerance or simply an unyielding need for preachers in the still-developing American colonies, Haynes soon found himself at the head of West Parish Church, an all-white church in Rutland. It proved a pastoral relationship that lasted three decades.
Haynes was said to possess a lightning-fast wit. According to some accounts, after one of Haynes’ fellow clergymen had lost all his scholarly work to a fire, the black preacher remarked that they had produced more illumination as fire starters than they ever had as sermons. While his demeanor in the pulpit was more austere, he spoke with a giftedness and natural passion that served to draw listeners to him. Over the decades in Rutland, Haynes’ church grew tremendously, from fewer than 50 to a congregation of more than 300 at its peak. Haynes spoke boldly, proclaiming a heavily Calvinist message that kept the gospel as central and vociferously critiqued the notion of universal salvation. In the words of one observer, “When he ascended the pulpit, it was with a gravity which seemed to indicate that he felt the amazing weight of his charge as an ambassador of God to dying men.” Haynes’ work communicated a keen focus on the obligations of the Christian life for preacher and listener alike, and applied the gospel to his listeners in a manner that consistently hearkened to the inability of anyone, black or white, to truly prevail against divine judgment save by the grace of Christ.
This emphasis on obligation drove Haynes, like many of his contemporaries in the New Divinity movement, to critiquing the institution of slavery. Haynes, perhaps surprisingly, spoke less on the issue of slavery than some at the time, and certainly less than figures like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington would later on. Yet, when Haynes did speak on the subject, he did so in the pastoral spirit of unsparing moral and theological criticism. The ideological framework of the American Revolution offered Haynes fodder from which to draw his audience into the case against slavery.
Perhaps his most famous work, 1776’s Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping, is a direct response to the Declaration of Independence. His work is awash with references not only to America’s ongoing revolutionary struggle but also to his clear conviction that the arguments made against British tyranny applied just as much, if not more, to the plight of enslaved Americans. Liberty begins by quoting from the Declaration and attempting to persuade Haynes’ largely white audience of his familiarity with and sympathy for the American cause of liberty. “I query whether Liberty is so contracted a principle as to be confined to any nation under Heaven,” Haynes argues. “I think it not hyperbolical to affirm that even an African has equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen.”
Like Frederick Douglass, Haynes managed to turn key rhetorical advantages often employed by slaveholders into devastating points against the institution of slavery. If Douglass used his personal education and charisma to disprove slaveholders’ portrayals of Africans as subhuman, it was a tactic Haynes had begun decades earlier. His theological knowledge allowed him an incisive view into the hollowness of much of the pro-slavery argumentation that Christians at the time found convincing. One such example was the “curse of Ham,” then termed “Canaan’s curse.” An argument among professedly Christian slaveholders held that, since Africans were the biological descendants of Noah’s son Ham, cursed for his sins in Genesis chapter 9, the slave trade was the natural development of this curse, lending chattel slavery a veneer of scriptural legitimacy. And so Haynes offered an expressly biblical and theological argument in response: if all people could be redeemed from the far greater curse of sin through Christ’s atonement, that had to include Africans. To reject such an argument would be to reject the all-sufficiency of the gospel itself. It was an internally consistent argument—and one Christian slave owners couldn’t dismiss easily.
Another argument used by those on the pro-slavery side was that slaves taken to the New World encountered Christianity through exposure to their captors, making the slave trade a twisted form of evangelism. Haynes once again dissented, perhaps buoyed by his own countervailing lived experience of having encountered Christianity in the home of Deacon Rose as a younger man. Slaveholders rarely offered slaves education of any kind, particularly religious instruction; in Haynes’ view, the blind faith on offer was no evangelism at all but merely the weaponizing of context-free Scripture to both assuage the conscience of the slaveholder and ensure passivity from the slave. To Haynes, the growing American view of the human person, as one deserving to be free from the unaccountable tyranny of a king half a world away, didn’t go nearly far enough. A truly moral and upright outlook required a biblical view of every human person as of equal moral value and standing, deserving to be free from all oppression, no matter what color or nationality one might be.
Haynes never stopped poking at the sore spot of hypocrisy when it came to the cause of liberty: it was too important and soul-rending of a double standard to allow his fellow Americans and Christians to brush it aside. “It is pleasing to behold that patriotic zeal which fires your breast,” he concluded in Liberty Further Extended. “But it is strange that you should [lack] further expressions of so noble a spirit. Some … have determined to contend in a consistent manner. They have let the oppressed go free.”
So was Lemuel Haynes preaching a proto social gospel? Viewed through a certain lens, it might seem so. There was no question that his passion for the gospel led him to involve himself in contemporary issues that were roiling society, even a society that struggled to fully accept and integrate him. The burden of integration lay on Haynes’ shoulders his whole life. His own interracial marriage, to a white schoolteacher named Elizabeth Babbit, with whom he had 10 children, was one he undertook only after serious consideration and counsel from fellow clergy—due to social custom, she even had to ask him to marry her. Haynes was a man deeply aware of the rot and prejudicial traditions within the society that surrounded him, and no doubt this awareness encouraged him in his own vocation as a minister.
But it would be a mistake, or at the least simplistic, to claim that Haynes merely preached a “social gospel.” Haynes by all accounts disdained politics in the pulpit proper, maintaining a lifelong belief that God, and God alone, was the driver of the heart change necessary for any political and social renewal: “None but He who, by one word’s speaking, spake all nature into existence, can triumph over the opposition of the heart.” Perhaps few during America’s infancy understood the interplay between a free and virtuous society better than the black preacher from Connecticut—and perhaps few were more galled by Americans who decried tyranny abroad while practicing slavery at home.
While his condemnation of American slave owners could be intense, Haynes never supported expatriation (also termed colonization) of slaves back to Africa. The idea drew favor in certain circles, with some believing that America’s racial divide was too great for white and black Americans ever to coexist. Haynes rejected this, putting himself squarely at odds with figures like Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. Having grown up in a white household, and having served alongside white brothers-at-arms in the Revolutionary War, he believed that the two races were capable of living together—if both were truly free. A staunch Calvinist, Haynes seemed to see America as predestined for racial coexistence, even if it took years for the young nation to get there, a vision that would come to fruition in the civil rights movement almost 150 years after his death.
As Saillant notes in “Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776–1901”:
Scholars who have encountered Haynes have universally considered him an anomaly—a black Puritan uninterested in Afro-American affairs. But a more penetrating encounter with Haynes reveals his links to the ideology and events of his nation’s formative years as well as to a crucial dimension of Afro-American history—a black theology prizing both liberty and community.
Liberty and community truly formed the foundation of Haynes’ life and work: as a young man, he found liberty from his tragic life’s beginnings through education, and found community through military service, investing his own life in the service of the nation he believed in every bit as much as he criticized it. As a public figure, he defended liberty by speaking what he believed to be the biblical truth regarding American slavery and defended community through his unceasing work as a small-town pastor on the frontier of civilization. It would be a mistake to view Lemuel Haynes as merely a black pastor or black thinker. He certainly never seemed to view himself that way. His days likely contained more anti-black prejudice than what many commentators who make their living opining on social prejudice and racial bigotry experience today. Yet Haynes’ job, as he saw it, was to preach Christ and Him crucified to a nation and congregation that desperately needed to hear it. His political work was a complement and a furtherance of his pastoral vocation—neither a substitute, as in the social gospel, nor an impediment, as in a purely “spirituality of the church” approach.
Haynes, buoyed by both religious and political conviction, volunteered as a Minuteman shortly after his indenture expired.
Haynes’ humility is perhaps best epitomized by his gravestone, a simple slab erected after the preacher’s death in 1833 at the age of 80. The limestone marker reads: “Here lies the dust of a poor hell-deserving sinner, who ventured into eternity trusting wholly on the merits of Christ for salvation. In the full belief of the great doctrines he preached here on earth, he invites his children and all who read this, to trust their eternal interest on the same foundation.”
Haynes’ story reveals an inspiring portrait of a man who viewed his obligations as far more animating and compelling than his obstacles. He had the wisdom to understand that his life story alone couldn’t carry the full weight of the arguments about freedom and virtue he was making. Perhaps more significantly, he possessed the increasingly uncommon humility to reach outside himself to craft arguments and narratives that everyone from black slaves to white slave owners could find morally irrefutable.
Lemuel Haynes was an anomaly—a pious, old-fashioned man, born into truly extraordinary times, who played a largely forgotten role in the story of the American Revolution while fulfilling his vocation in preaching the kingdom of heaven. Yet without people like Haynes, people of strident character, unsparing moral insight, and uncommon humility, the American experiment that followed him would not, could not, have succeeded.
