Lemuel Haynes
BIRTH
Jul 18, 1753
West Hartford, Connecticut Colony, British America
DEATH
September 28, 1833
South Granville, New York, U.S.
FAMILY
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Haynes, Lemuel
(1753-1833)
Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) was a Revolutionary War veteran, Congregational minister, and antislavery writer. Born to a white mother and a Black father, he became one of the first African Americans ordained by a Protestant denomination in the United States.
Lemuel Haynes was born on or about Jul 18, 1753 in West Hartford, Connecticut Colony, British America. The names of the parents are not yet securely established in this database. These family and geographic circumstances formed the earliest setting for a life later associated with ["MINISTER","WRITER","SOLDIER"]. The surviving evidence represented in this record does not always preserve the details of childhood schooling, household routine, religious instruction, apprenticeship, or youthful travel. Where such particulars remain uncertain, they are not reconstructed as fact. Even so, the known birthplace and family connections place this individual within the local, colonial, imperial, Indigenous, or Atlantic communities that shaped opportunity and identity in the eighteenth century. Those early relationships could determine education, inheritance, occupation, marriage prospects, military obligations, religious affiliation, and access to political or commercial networks. Social position also influenced which experiences were documented. Elite households often left correspondence, property records, school accounts, or legal papers, while the childhoods of women, laborers, enslaved people, Indigenous people, and less prominent relatives were more likely to survive only indirectly. Absence of detail should therefore be understood as a limitation of the record, not as evidence that the early years were uneventful or unimportant. Place mattered as well: settlement patterns, nearby ports and roads, denominational institutions, warfare, migration, and kinship networks all affected the choices available to a young person. This early-life summary therefore emphasizes the documented setting and immediate family rather than unsupported anecdotes. It establishes a careful biographical foundation while leaving room for future discoveries from family papers, parish registers, probate files, military documents, and local histories. Together, these facts provide the background necessary for understanding how Lemuel Haynes entered the adult world described in the Career field and became connected to the people, events, and historic places indexed by HistoryGPS.
Haynes served with Massachusetts militia forces during the Revolution, including service connected with the siege of Boston and the northern campaigns. After studying theology, he was licensed and ordained as a Congregational minister. His sermons and essays joined evangelical theology with arguments against slavery.













