Who is lemuel haynes

Lemuel Haynes viewed this as his personal calling. He took the first 10 verses of Proverbs 31, as his own personal call and exhortation to live a life belonging to God. For Haynes, politics did come to the pulpit often. He refused to support Thomas Jefferson as president, because Jefferson was a slave owner.

It was a God issue. He truly was a cultural futurist, and light years ahead of all his contemporaries. He stood against colonization—sending free African-Americans and Blacks back to Africa to colonize remote settlements—for all the same reasons we now see it was a disaster. He opposed every kind of religious sectarianism that supported slavery. He centered his theology around God, and his abolitionist views flowed freely from his witty and deep political and religious commentary. Haynes was the first black abolitionist to reject slavery on purely theological grounds, rather than hiding behind social, economic, or civic arguments for the abolition of slavery.

He left behind a literary tapestry of essays and works that influenced minds, spoke out on important issues, and helped direct local government. Local leaders sat under his sermons, and God used his voice like a megaphone. His writing was prolific, and we have a flowing stream of sermons, social commentary, political dissertations , and musings surrounding the direction of the new country of America.

Politically, he supported only Federalist candidates Washington and Adams. Adams owned no slaves, and was against it. While Washington on the other hand had risked his life, his health, and his entire estate, in order to secure the freedom of the country, and upon his death, had emancipated any slave that had been on his farm. After pastoring an all-white Connecticut church for several years, with rousing, standing-room-only audiences, a few troublemakers in the church drove him away for his outspoken belief that slavery was a sin.

But God was only getting started. A young white woman, good friend and schoolteacher, Elizabeth Babbitt, moved from her home in order to be near Haynes. Just 21 years old, she proposed to Haynes, breaking several barriers and cultural norms in the process. She waited to propose until they had reached Connecticut because of the several miscegenetic laws that Massachusetts had.

He joyfully accepted and they had 10 children together. She proved to further legitimize his ministry in the eyes of many—sadly due in part to the fact that she was white—since she was a school teacher, which allowed Lemuel to write and publish works at home.

After leaving the church in Connecticut, they set out for the frontier state of Vermont. Lemuel spent the next 30 years pastoring a church in Vermont. During his tenure there, he preached and worshipped with many congregational churches of blacks and whites that worshipped together, a historical phenomenon most people are unaware took place at the time.

His reputation steadily grew. Haynes left the Rutland ministry to enter the final phase of his vocation. He was in high demand as a pastor and speaker all over Vermont. He pastored another church in South Granville, New York. His church grew and so did his ministry of spiritual counseling, funerals, and weddings. A Pastor named Reid S. Yet this proximity also made the discrimination he faced all the more difficult as indicated by churches that would let him preach the gospel to them but would not let allow him to be in authority over them as their pastor.

He truly believed, as the founders did, that life without liberty is no life at all. He was trying to impart that to anyone who would listen around him. Give me liberty or give me death. Yet the nation around him had only deaf ears.

Search the Collection. Search the rest of site. Maker Unknown. Culture American. Year ca. As an adolescent, he frequently conducted services at the town parish, sometimes reading sermons of his own.

When his indenture ended in , Haynes enlisted as a "Minuteman" in the local militia. While serving in the militia, he wrote a lengthy ballad-sermon about the April, Battle of Lexington. In the title of the poem, he refers to himself as "Lemuel a young Mollato who obtained what little knowledge he possesses, by his own Application to Letters. After the war, Haynes turned down the opportunity to study at Dartmouth College, instead choosing to study Latin and Greek with clergymen in Connecticut.

In he was licensed to preach. He accepted a position with a white congregation in Middle Granville and later married a young white schoolteacher, Elizabeth Babbitt.

In , Haynes was officially ordained as a Congregational minister. Haynes held three pastorships after his ordination.