Lemuel Haynes, Young African American Patriot of the 1770s
by John Saillant
In 1776, Lemuel Haynes was a young veteran of the War of Independence who was envisioning his future. He had been an indentured servant from his birth in 1753 to his coming of age in 1774. After being released from indenture, he experienced some momentous events. He began training as a Minute Man in 1774. He marched in the militia from western Massachusetts to Roxbury after the Boston Massacre in 1775. He traveled to Fort Ticonderoga to secure the prize, taken months earlier by Ethan Allen, in 1776. His service finished, he returned to the family farm of his youth and began writing and planning his future. Two of his early manuscripts—“The Battle of Lexington” and “Liberty Further Extended”—deserve attention as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Neither was published in his lifetime. After producing these two works, he traded labor on farms for tutoring in theology, Latin, and Greek, and he successfully sought ordination in 1785. From 1792 to 1821, he was the most prolific African American author, crafting not only theological works but also social commentary touching on racism, slavery, and, of course, the legacy of the American Revolution. He died in 1833 and he remains our most thoughtful African American philosopher of the Revolution and its consequences.
Today Haynes is known for his essay “Liberty Further Extended,” yet his poem “The Battle of Lexington” deserves commentary. In its headnote, he described himself as “Lemuel a young Mollato who obtained what little knowledge he possesses, by his own Application to Letters.” In thirty-seven stanzas, modeled on those in hymnbooks, Haynes excoriated the British authorities for the tyranny and violence besetting Americans. He praised the republican spirit, as verses 14, 16, and 16 show. I transcribe them below with Haynes’s corrections as he made them in the manuscript. The strikeouts show words he tried, then replaced. These make an important point. But first the verses:
14. For Liberty, each Hero Freeman strives
As its a Gift of God
And for it willing yield their Lives
And Seal it with their Blood15. Thrice happy they Who who thus resign
Into the peacefull Grave
Much better there, in Death Confin’d
Than a Surviving Slave16. This Motto may decore adorn their Tombs,
(Let tyrants come and view)
“We rather seek these silent Rooms
“Than live as Slaves to You”[1]
The language of tyranny and slavery was central to republicanism and to the experience of the patriots of the Revolution. Haynes declared its relevance to race relations by describing himself as a “Mollato”; he would explore these connections for decades to come. Beyond the content of the poem, its form, that of a hymn or ballad, is important. Much like his contemporary, Phillis Wheatley, Haynes first learned about poetry from congregational singing. Surviving manuscripts suggest that each wrote first drafts that required little revision. In a well-known incident, Wheatley wrote a poem “on demand” for a skeptical viewer. In the lines quoted above, we observe Haynes revising as he wrote, composing in ballad meter and establishing rhymes easily. Haynes’s method of composition, like Wheatley’s, suggests the influence of hymns. Singing was the first step toward writing.
“Liberty Further Extended,”[2] for which Haynes is justly renowned today, is a profound argument for the termination of the slave trade and of the enslavement of human beings. It deserves careful reading. First we should attend to its form and its manuscript, just as we did with “The Battle of Lexington.” It was written as a petition even if today we call it an essay. Haynes’s approach is extremely significant. The right to petition—still today guaranteed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution—revered among Anglo-Americans, had been recognized and exercised for centuries and was available to anyone in society as a means to seek redress of grievances. One of George III’s offenses, lambasted by Thomas Paine, was his refusal to hear petitions from the American colonies. On several occasions in the 1770s and 1780s, African Americans and Afro-Britons wrote landmark petitions that expressed their own sense of wrongs done to them and the remedies they envisioned. Several presented in New England in the 1770s were signed by a number of men, including well-known individuals like Prince Hall. In 1783, a petition was presented to the legislature of Massachusetts by a woman named Belinda seeking reparations from the estate of her former master, a Loyalist. A petition presented by the Black Loyalists of Nova Scotia to the colony’s governor almost certainly saved their lives as he responded with food at a time when they were starved of resources after having supported the British in the war. And Olaudah Equiano’s famous 1789 Narrative began and ended with petitions, to Parliament and to Queen Charlotte, asking each to act upon slave traders. Haynes chose well in choosing the petition.
The manuscript of “Liberty Further Extended” calls into question a claim often made about Haynes, that he was the first to comment on the Declaration of Independence. A crucial sentence from the Declaration appeared as the epigraph of the petition: “We hold these truths to be self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Ceartain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happyness.” (This spelling of “happyness” inspired the title of a memoir by Quincy Troupe and the cinema version starring Will Smith.) The arrangement on the manuscript page suggests, however, that Haynes wrote the petition, then, after the fact, once it was finished, added the quotation by cramming it into a blank space at the top of his first page. The Declaration itself is never mentioned otherwise in “Liberty Further Extended.” Haynes himself would probably have denied being “first.” He clearly assumed, as I discuss below, that he was working in political, religious, and antislavery traditions. Instead of being first to connect the Declaration to abolitionism, he was intent on pointing out that republicanism and Calvinism could be understood in antislavery and pro-Black ways instead of as apologies for slavery and racism. Much as Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Declaration was less his own creation than it was an expression of the common sense of the American people, Haynes was writing for and from traditions that had not included Black people but that, he asseverated, could be extended to them. Yet when freedom came, it developed not from republicanism and Calvinism but rather from liberal individualism and democratic, multi-denominational Christianity. This appalled Haynes, and it put American race relations on a course that he neither imagined nor endorsed.
“Liberty Further Extended” made a powerful argument against the Atlantic slave system and for social equality in America. “Liberty, & freedom,” Haynes wrote, “is an innate principle, which is unmovebly placed in the human Species.” Using language that would become important in the Black Lives Matter movement 250 years later, Haynes wrote that slaves feel that they cannot breathe: to enslave a person is “to stop a man’s Breath,” inciting a “convulsion in nature.” Instead of thinking of Haynes as the first to quote the Declaration, we should think of him as the first to say, in the face of racial oppression, “I can’t breathe.” He argued that enslaved people had as much right to resist their masters as the colonists had to challenge Great Britain. An “affrican,” he asserted, “has Equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen.” He blended such republican principles with other elements. One was empathy for the enslaved. Drawing from contemporary abolitionists as well as English, French, and Dutch accounts of the Atlantic slave trade, he focused on the horrors its victims experienced. He lamented the “myserys of a Slave” in the Americas, where families were ruined and individuals were “Drove to market, like Sheep and oxen.” A second was conviction that a proper reading (Calvinist and typological) of the Bible was abolitionist. Although the Old Testament indicated that God allowed the chosen people to hold slaves in some circumstances, the New Testament inaugurated a new dispensation that revealed that “antiquated Ceremonies” such as enslaving people belonged in “oblivion.” Christ came to set the record straight about slavery and other sins, Haynes believed. “O Christianity,” he thundered, “how are thou Disgraced” by enslavers. A third was a common-sense epistemology that led him to argue that his audience already knew that slavery was unjust. The problem was that they had not yet applied their knowledge broadly. We all can see, he asserted, if we “turn one Eye into our own Breast” whether the “monster” of “Tyrony” is “Lurking in our own Bosom.” An “Ocular demonstration” proves that enslaving others is sinful. The right to liberty is seen so clearly, he insisted, that “to spend time illustrating this, would be But Superfluous tautology.”
In his early works, Haynes insisted that once the slave system was destroyed Americans could reconstitute their society in ways reflecting the communal sense of the patriots fighting the British as well as that of church bodies of the Congregational churches of his youth and, after he became a minister, his adulthood. He imagined an inclusive society modeled on ideals such as the covenant and the social contract. Yet these had never been as welcoming or as universal as Haynes thought they had the power to be. They had always presupposed exclusion of outsiders, regardless of race. Like other Black people of his generation, Haynes lived to see immense changes in race relations in the early nineteenth century. He had always insisted that the path forward was the creation of interracial equality and amity throughout society. As a soldier, he served in mixed-race companies. As a student, he was tutored in the post-war years by White teachers. As a minister, he preached to mostly White congregations. As a husband, he married a White woman. As a writer, he co-authored on a few occasions with White men and he gave his manuscripts to White men for preservation. In later years, he denounced American society, not for racism but for abandonment of the ways that he thought an interracial republic could be created. He perceived American society fragmenting around him. Today we call this society modern, liberal, or individualistic. Haynes lacked that vocabulary, but he recognized the birth of modernity and he critiqued it as undermining the post-slavery society he imagined he saw on the horizon in 1776.
John Saillant is a professor of English at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes (Oxford University Press, 2003) and an editor of the eight-volume African American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008).
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[1] Lemuel Haynes, “The Battle of Lexington,” 1775, printed in Ruth Bogin, “‘The Battle of Lexington’: A Patriotic Ballad by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 42.4 (October 1985), pp. 501–504.
[2] Lemuel Haynes, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping,” 1776, printed in Ruth Bogin, “‘Liberty Further Extended’: A 1776 Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 40.1 (January 1983), pp. 93–105.