Lemuel Haynes - Ministry

Ministry

By the 1780s, Haynes became a leading Calvinist minister in Vermont. His contemporary white republican and abolitionist thinkers saw slavery as a liability to the new country, but most argued for eventual slave expatriation to Africa. The American Colonization Society (founded in 1817) was one such group. Included among its supporters were people such as James Madison, James Monroe, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. In contrast, 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.

As the first black person in America to serve as pastor of a white congregation, Haynes ministered to Rutland's West Parish for thirty years starting in 1783. Middlebury College granted Haynes an honorary master of arts in 1804, the first advanced degree ever bestowed upon an African American.

Historian John Saillant (2003, p. 3) writes that Haynes's "faith and social views are better documented than those of any African American born before the luminaries of the mid-nineteenth century."

Lemuel Haynes House, his home for the last 11 years of his life in South Granville, New York, when he was pastor of South Granville Congregational Church was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975. Originally sitting on a parcel of the PAR Farm, it was purchased from Charles Halderman in 2009 by Bo Young and William Foote, formerly of Brooklyn.