Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833
Lemuel Haynes was a Minute Man in 1774, fighting in the Northern Campaign from the seizure of Fort Ticonderoga with Ethan Allen through the unsuccessful campaign to capture Montreal and Quebec in 1776.
He is one of the better known men of African heritage who served in the American Revolution. He is also relatively well known as having been a Congregational minister. But now there is a detailed biography of his own full life, the story of a unique individual American.
Lemuel Haynes was born in 1753, the son of an unknown woman, classified by law and custom as "white," apparently from a prosperous and well known family, who gave birth to him in the home of a man who was not the father of her baby, nor her father or husband.
She gave him the name Haynes as a kind of curse on the man who sheltered her and helped her to hide her pregnancy. Others, perhaps the very man who gave her shelter to give birth secretly, may have given him the Biblical name of Lemuel from Proverbs 31. That may even have been a retort to the mother. As his mother was "white" and free, he too was free. His father may have been free, but has never been identified. As he had no family to shelter and raise him, he was indentured to Deacon David Rose and his wife. It was a common enough legal relationship in 18th century New England. It seems to have held a reasonably affectionate place in the family, where he returned after his Revolutionary War service, until he was ready to step out on his own.
"The Love and care of the Rose family were prominent in Haynes's recollections, but he also recalled the labor he performed as an indentured servant... His comments suggest a youth more complicated than a simple adoption into a loving family." He served as an agricultural laborer, and came to be trusted as the one to send if a horse had to be bought. His indenture included the provision that he be education in a district school. Childhood friends recalled that he memorized sermons and significant portions of the Bible.
At about age 20, a crisis of conversion confirmed his place in the Congregational church. He began preparing for the ministry in the mid-1770s, studying Latin, Greek, hermeneutics and Calvinist theology.
He adopted a New Divinity minister named Job Swift as a spiritual father. Haynes adhered strictly to the tradition that a clear adult conversion experience was essential to being admitted to full membership in the church.
Like many in New England, he felt by 1774 that God himself was commanding resistance to England.
Fully free of his indenture, he joined the Minutemen and began drilling regularly. After serving in the Northern Campaign in the war of independence, Haynes returned to live with the Rose family, composing an essay titled "Liberty Further Extended: Or free thoughts on the illegality of Slave-keeping."
Haynes's writings include attribution of the slave trade to the influence of Islam in West Africa -- although only some sources of the slave trade were controlled by Muslim kingdoms. Many of those arriving from the Senegamia region in the mid-18th century seem to have brought with them reports that Muslims were the main trade sources.
Haynes pastored churches in Torrington, Connecticut, in Rutland, Vermont, and toward the end of his life in South Granville, New York, where he died in 1833.
He adhered to the New Divinity school of theology, popular among New England church members at the time, and was a staunch federalist in his politics. While his complexion made his ministry in Torrington controversial, his call to Rutland seems to have ended because of his political allegiance.
