25 Facts About Lemuel Haynes

Lemuel Haynes was a native of West Hartford, Connecticut, and was the son of an African American man and a white woman.

Lemuel Haynes spent much of his childhood as an indentured servant in the house of a Granville, Massachusetts farmer.

Lemuel Haynes served in the militia during the American Revolution, including garrison duty at the recently captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1776.

In 1788, Lemuel Haynes accepted a call to pastor the West Parish Church of Rutland, Vermont, where he remained for the next 30 years.

Lemuel Haynes then moved to a temporary pastorate at Manchester, Vermont, and finally to South Granville, New York, where he was pastor of South Granville Congregational Church.

Lemuel Haynes died in South Granville in 1833 and was buried at Lee-Oatman Cemetery.

The identity of Lemuel Haynes's mother has long been the subject of debate among historians and theologians.

Lemuel Haynes named her son Haynes, either to give him respectability or to take revenge against the Hayneses for firing her.

At the age of five months, Lemuel Haynes was given over to indentured servitude to Deacon David Rose, a blind farmer of Granville, Massachusetts.

In 1774, as one of his first acts as a free man, Lemuel Haynes joined the minutemen of Granville.

Lemuel Haynes remained on garrison duty until contracting Typhus, which caused him to return home.

Lemuel Haynes returned to the Rose homestead, even though his indenture had by this point expired.

Lemuel Haynes continued these activities after the war, and began to prepare sermons, family prayers and other theological works.

The Scripture, abolitionism, and republicanism affected his published writings, in which Lemuel Haynes argued that slavery denied black people their natural rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

Lemuel Haynes was ordained in 1785 and settled at Hemlock Congregational Church in Torrington, Connecticut.

Lemuel Haynes was the first African American ordained in the United States.

Lemuel Haynes remained an ardent defender of Calvinistic orthodoxy, opposing the emerging ideologies of Arminianism and universalism.

In contrast Lemuel Haynes continued to passionately argue along Calvinist lines that God's providential plan would defeat slavery and lead to the harmonious integration of the races as equals.

Some cite political differences, on the basis that Lemuel Haynes was a lifelong Federalist whose politics conflicted with those of the council.

Lemuel Haynes died in South Granville, New York, in September 1833, at the age of eighty.

Lemuel Haynes was buried at Lee-Oatman Cemetery in South Granville.

Lemuel Haynes had composed his own epitaph, which was included on his gravestone as he had requested.

Babbit was ten years younger than Lemuel Haynes and had recently come to teach at the village school.

Lemuel Haynes was the first black abolitionist to reject slavery on purely theological grounds.

Lemuel Haynes was one of the first African American individuals to be published.