Lemuel Haynes

Lemuel Haynes was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, on the eighteenth of July 1753, the son of an African father he never knew and a white mother who abandoned him at five months. He was bound as an indentured servant to David Rose of Granville, Massachusetts, until his twenty-first birthday in 1774.

He served as a Minuteman in the Massachusetts militia from April 1775 and as a Continental Army soldier in the Northern Department under George Washington's command from 1776. He marched on the Ticonderoga expedition of 1776 and contracted typhus.

He returned to Granville after the war, studied Latin and Greek with two local clergymen, and was licensed to preach by the Association of Ministers of Litchfield County, Connecticut, in November 1780. He was ordained by the Congregational Church on the twenty-eighth of November 1785 — the first African American ordained as a Protestant minister in the United States.

He served as pastor of the West Parish Church in Rutland, Vermont, from 1788 to 1818 — thirty years pastoring an entirely white congregation. The Rutland pastorate is among the longest sustained interracial pastoral relationships of the early American republic. He was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree by Middlebury College in 1804 — the first honorary degree awarded to an African American by any American institution.

His sermon Universal Salvation, A Very Ancient Doctrine (1805) was reprinted at least seventy times in the United States, Britain, and Canada through the nineteenth century — one of the most-circulated American sermons of any author of the period.

He died in Granville, New York, on the twenty-eighth of September 1833, age eighty.

He is honored here as the first African American Protestant minister and the longest-pastoring interracial pastor of the early republic.