Reviewed by James Sidbury | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2

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Reviewed by James Sidbury | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833. By John Saillant. Religion in America Series. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 232. $39.95.) Reviewed by James Sidbury , University of Texas at Austin
In recent years, we have witnessed a flood of commercially successful biographies of founding fathers, from Jefferson to Adams to Washington to Franklin and others. Watching yet another of these volumes climb the best-seller charts can produce an odd sense of disconnection for many historians of early America, for these books appear as the discipline continues to become less convinced of the role of "great men" and their personalities as shapers of national destiny. John Saillant's fine book on Lemuel Haynes joins several other recent biographies of black figures—Peter P. Hinks on David Walker, James Walvin on Olaudah Equiano, and Julie Winch on James Forten—that offer an important counterweight on the growing bookshelf of founding-era biography.¹ As Saillant's book shows, biographies of Revolutionary-era blacks do more than offer a politically correct balance for a self-styled multicultural age, for they raise questions that are too rarely asked about biographies of political leaders. Readers seldom need to be persuaded of the importance of the founding fathers, and the goal of blockbuster biographies of these men is generally to "bring them to life" for the reader. The case for learning about a now-obscure black sail maker or a black preacher to white congregations is less clear. Black Puritan, Black Republican can be read as a book-length brief that makes just such a case in a way that underscores the complexities inherent in drawing connections between one life and broader social processes.	1
Lemuel Haynes's life raises the question of historical significance in particularly obvious ways precisely because he was neither a major player in political or economic terms nor someone whose life appears to have been representative of any larger group. Born in Connecticut to a white woman and a black man, he was indentured to a Massachusetts farming family when still a baby and continued to serve into his twenties with a brief interruption for a stint in the militia during the American Revolution. The pious family in which he grew up permitted him to pursue learning on his own, and as a young man he discovered and became a disciple of the strictly Calvinist New Divinity movement. By the time he reached his early twenties, he had authored and privately circulated an antislavery essay, and he had begun to preach. In 1788, he was appointed to pastor an otherwise all-white western Vermont congregation, and he remained a Congregational minister, first in Rutland and then in Manchester, Vermont, until he was dismissed in 1822. In addition to serving his congregations, he was an active controversialist, publishing sermons in support of the Hopkinsian version of Calvinist orthodoxy and against creeping Arminianism. After losing his pulpit, he took to the road as an itinerant and died in 1833.	2
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that this summary includes most of what we know of Lemuel Haynes's life. He married and had children, but we have neither letters nor descriptions that shed light on his family life. He was an ardent Federalist opponent of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, but we lack evidence of his politicking. He lived in the same community for close to thirty years, but we know little of his relationships with neighbors or the pastoral care he provided his congregants. Whatever John Saillant might have wanted to do, the sources do not exist for a biography that would convey a clear sense of Haynes as a man. What has survived are sermons and speeches, and from them Saillant tells the rich story of what Lemuel Haynes thought.	. . .

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