A bit of historical background in preparation for tomorrow’s three blog posts: one here, one at ClimateChangeCommunity.com, and one at cCcmty.com. They should be posted by 6:00 am.
In the summer of 1776, as the Continental Congress debated independence from Britain, a twenty-three-year-old Black soldier and lay preacher named Lemuel Haynes composed the most philosophically audacious document produced by the Revolution — one that would remain unpublished for more than two centuries. His essay “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping” opened with a direct quotation from the Declaration of Independence, then turned that text against its own authors by insisting that its universalist language left no room for the enslavement of African people. Haynes’s manuscript, discovered in a Harvard archive only in 1983, is now recognized as the inaugural document in what scholar Hannah Spahn calls the “Jeffersonian Enlightenment” tradition in African American thought — a lineage that stretches from Haynes through David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and that ultimately shaped the way Americans read the Declaration of Independence today.
Part I — The Man Behind the Manuscript
Lemuel Haynes was born on July 18, 1753, in West Hartford, Connecticut, the child of an African or African-American father and a white mother — their identities still contested by historians (Wikipedia: Lemuel Haynes). Within five months of his birth, he was surrendered by his mother to indentured servitude in the household of Deacon David Rose, a blind farmer in Granville, Massachusetts. The indenture legally bound Haynes to Rose until his twenty-first birthday, placing him in a condition that, while distinct from chattel slavery, still denied him liberty, mobility, and the full rights of selfhood. Haynes was neither free nor enslaved in the strictest legal sense — he occupied the liminal world of unfree labor that was common across colonial New England, sharing its humiliations with thousands of Black and poor white bondsmen alike.
Deacon Rose was required by the terms of the indenture to provide Haynes with a basic education, and here Haynes’s extraordinary intellectual life began. He attended local school, devoured books by candlelight after long days of farm labor, and absorbed Calvinist theology — particularly the “New Divinity” school descended from Jonathan Edwards — through weekly church attendance (Journal of the American Revolution). The works of George Whitefield and Philip Doddridge shaped his religious sensibility. He began preaching as a teenager, committing sermons to memory and practicing his oratory in the fields. By the time his indenture expired in 1774, Haynes had fashioned himself into one of the most theologically learned men in western Massachusetts — a remarkable self-education conducted entirely under conditions of bondage.
The Minuteman and the Continental Soldier
When the battles of Lexington and Concord erupted in April 1775, Haynes joined the local Massachusetts militia as a minuteman — one of the first armed responses to British aggression that would ignite the Revolution (TeachIt Connecticut History). He subsequently served in garrison duty at Fort Ticonderoga in 1776, the strategically vital post on Lake Champlain recently captured from the British by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys (Wikipedia: Lemuel Haynes). His service was brief — a bout of typhus cut short his military career — but its significance was immense. Haynes was a Black man who fought under the banner of liberty, wielding a musket for a republic that simultaneously held more than half a million of his kin in bondage.
This lived contradiction — fighting for freedom while freedom was systemically denied to people who looked like him — became the animating tension of everything Haynes would write. As historian John Saillant notes, Haynes “absorbed from the American Revolution a mix of republican ideology and New Divinity theology that inspired his antislavery and problack writings” (The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes). He was not a passive witness to the Revolutionary moment but an active participant — and that participation gave him a moral standing to hold the Founders accountable that few could match.
After his military service, Haynes studied theology under the tutelage of local Congregational ministers and was ordained in 1785 — becoming the first Black man in the United States to be ordained as a minister in any Christian denomination (National Constitution Center). He went on to pastor predominantly white Congregational churches in Connecticut, Vermont, and New York for more than fifty years, a career of astonishing cultural navigation. In 1804, Middlebury College awarded him an honorary Master of Arts — the first honorary degree ever bestowed upon an African American (Wikipedia: Lemuel Haynes). He was, in Saillant’s phrase, “better documented than any African American born before the luminaries of the mid-nineteenth century,” a figure whose faith and social views were recorded across decades of sermons, letters, and public controversy.
Part II — “Liberty Further Extended”: The Essay and Its Arguments
The essay that would define Haynes’s historical legacy was composed in Massachusetts in 1776, almost certainly in the months immediately following the public proclamation of the Declaration of Independence. Its full title — Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping; Wherein Those Arguments That Are Used in Its Vindication Are Plainly Confuted. Together with an Humble Address to Such as Are Concerned in the Practice — announces both its polemical purpose and its systematic ambition (DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska).
The essay’s most startling move comes on its opening page, where Haynes employs a formal genre inversion. Eighteenth-century Calvinist sermons conventionally opened with a Bible verse that the preacher would then expound. Haynes replaced the scripture with a passage from the Declaration of Independence, quoting it as his epigraph: “We hold these truths to be Self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” By treating Jefferson’s political text as a sacred-text equivalent — a revealed truth demanding explication and application — Haynes accomplished something philosophically decisive: he elevated the Declaration’s preamble from a political statement into a moral axiom, and then proceeded to demonstrate that the axiom was being violated on a massive, systematic scale (OUP Academic).
Haynes’s argument rests on several interlocking propositions, each drawn from both Enlightenment natural rights theory and Calvinist theology:
1. Liberty is an innate, divine endowment. “Liberty, & freedom, is an innate principle, which is unmovably placed in the human species,” Haynes wrote. “Liberty is a jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of Heaven, and is coeval with his existence.” This formulation grounds liberty not in positive law or political convention but in the nature of the human being as created by God. The source of liberty is prior to and superior to any earthly authority (Libertarianism.org).
2. Liberty proceeds from God alone, and no earthly power can revoke it. “As it proceeds from the Supreme Legislature of the universe, so it is He which hath a sole right to take away; therefore, he that would take away a man’s Liberty assumes a prerogative that belongs to another, and acts out of his own domain.” Slaveholders, in this framework, are not merely unjust — they are committing a kind of cosmic usurpation, stealing a right that belongs exclusively to the divine sovereign (DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska).
3. Natural rights are universal across the human species. Haynes invokes Acts 17:26 — “It hath pleased God to make of one Blood all nations of men, for to dwell upon the face of the Earth” — to establish a single, undivided human nature. From that common nature, he draws a universal law: “As all are of one Species, so there are the same Laws, and aspiring principles placed in all nations.” What follows is his central syllogism: “Therefore we may reasonably conclude, that Liberty is equally as precious to a Black man, as it is to a white one, and Bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other: Seeing it effects the laws of nature equally as much in the one as it does in the other” (Hamilton/Gilder Lehrman Education Program).
4. Color is not and cannot be a criterion of natural right. “Shall a man’s color be the decisive criterion whereby to judge of his natural right?” Haynes demands. “God has been pleased to distinguish some men from others, as to natural abilities, but not as to natural right, as they came out of his hands.” The distinction between natural ability and natural right is philosophically precise: Haynes acknowledges that people differ in talents, intelligence, and capacity — but insists that these differences are irrelevant to the question of fundamental rights, which are distributed equally by virtue of species membership alone (EBSCO Research Starters).
5. Slave-keeping is categorically illegal. “The main proposition which I intend for some brief illustration is this, namely, that an African, or, in other terms, that a Negro may justly challenge, and has an undeniable right to his Liberty: Consequently, the practice of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land is illicit.” He adds that “whatever acts are passed in any Earthly Court, which are Derogatory to those Edicts that are passed in the Court of Heaven, the act is void.” American law permitting slavery is, on this analysis, null and void before the higher law of God (National Constitution Center).
6. The hypocrisy of Revolutionary slaveholders is self-condemning. “We live in a day wherein Liberty & freedom is the subject of many millions’ concern,” Haynes observes, “and the important Struggle hath already caused great Effusion of Blood; men seem to manifest the most sanguine resolution not to Let their natural rights go without their Lives go with them — yet while we are so zealous to maintain and foster our own invaded rights, it cannot be thought impertinent for us candidly to reflect on our own conduct.” The colonists’ very passion for their own liberty — the passion fueling the Revolution — becomes, in Haynes’s hands, the measure of their guilt in denying it to others (EBSCO Research Starters).
Refutation of Pro-Slavery Arguments
Haynes did not merely assert his position — he systematically dismantled the defenses offered by the slave trade’s apologists. He rejected the “curse of Canaan” argument (the claim that the biblical curse on Ham’s son Canaan authorized African enslavement), noting that “whether the Negroes are of Canaan’s posterity or not, perhaps is not known by any mortal under Heaven,” and that even if they were, the coming of Christ had removed all such Old Testament distinctions. He rejected the argument that enslaved Africans were prisoners of war who would otherwise have been killed — observing that purchasing a stolen human being transfers no legitimate title. He rejected the argument that slave owners had paid for their enslaved people — pointing out that no price can establish a property right in a human being. And he rejected the claim that slavery benefited Africans by exposing them to Christianity — his vivid description of the Middle Passage, with hundreds shackled below decks, a third dying on the voyage, and survivors driven to suicide, leaves no rhetorical room for the “civilizing mission” defense (DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska).
Part III — Haynes and Jefferson: A Comparative Analysis
Jefferson’s Philosophical Framework in the Declaration
Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration’s famous preamble drawing on a well-established tradition of Enlightenment natural rights philosophy — particularly John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which grounded political authority in the natural rights of individuals and justified revolution when government violated those rights. Jefferson replaced Locke’s triad of “life, liberty, and estate [property]” with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a formulation influenced by the Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Burlamaqui and the broader Scottish Enlightenment moral sense tradition (Libertarianism.org: Declaration of Independence).
Jefferson’s claim that “all men are created equal” was, in the context of its drafting, primarily a claim about the political equality of peoples and nations — specifically, the equal standing of the American people relative to the British Crown — rather than a statement of individual human equality (PBS NewsHour). Leading Revolutionary War scholars, including Jack Rakove, have argued that the Declaration’s famous phrase “referred less to individual equality than to the rights of a people as a whole to self-government.” Jefferson’s philosophical approach has been characterized as an “Enlightenment of Feeling” — one that made the new American nation “subjectively plausible to equal republican citizens” but whose truth-claims remained, in Hannah Spahn’s formulation, “epistemologically vague” (University of Virginia Press).
Jefferson himself, of course, enslaved more than six hundred people over the course of his lifetime. The Continental Congress, significantly, deleted from his draft a clause blaming King George for the slave trade — a deletion that revealed the Founders’ unwillingness to apply their liberty language consistently. The Declaration as ratified thus contained a philosophical universalism that its framers simultaneously refused to implement.
Side-by-Side: Key Textual Parallels and Divergences
| Dimension | Jefferson’s Declaration (1776) | Haynes’s Liberty Further Extended(1776) |
| Opening claim | “All men are created equal” | “An African has equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen” |
| Source of rights | “Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” | “Liberty is a jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of Heaven” |
| Scope of “men” | Ambiguous; contextually the American colonial population | Explicit and universal: “as all are of one Species, so there are the same Laws…placed in all nations” |
| Race as a qualifier | Unaddressed; implicitly limited to white men | Directly rejected: “Shall a man’s color be the decisive criterion whereby to judge of his natural right?” |
| Higher law argument | Implicit (rights “endowed by Creator”) | Explicit: earthly laws contrary to divine law “are void” |
| Application to slavery | Silent (anti-slavery clause deleted from draft) | Central thesis: “the practice of Slave-keeping…is illicit” |
| Philosophical grounding | Lockean natural rights, Enlightenment empiricism | Calvinist theology plus natural rights; Acts 17:26 as universal human unity |
| Logical consequence | Independence from Britain | Immediate emancipation of all enslaved persons |
The Universalist Reading vs. the Founders’ Context
The key interpretive move Haynes made was one of radical literalism. He took Jefferson’s words at face value — “all men are created equal” — and refused to permit any qualification based on race, nation, or condition. As Hannah Spahn observes, Haynes “isolated the passage containing the famous phrase from the rest of the Declaration and made it express ‘timeless, universally binding norms.'” In doing so, “he deliberately downplayed Jefferson’s original emphasis on problems of collective assent and consent” (PBS NewsHour).
This was philosophically innovative, not merely rhetorical. Jefferson’s Declaration was, in its context, a document about the self-determination of a particular political community — the American colonies — against a particular tyranny — the British Crown. Haynes transformed it into a universal moral law, binding on all people in all circumstances. He accomplished this transformation by linking the Declaration’s claims to the deeper authority of divine and natural law: rights are not conferred by Congress but by God, and what God has conferred no Congressman may revoke.
The contrast with the Founders’ evident intent is sharp. The same men who signed the Declaration — many of them slaveholders — understood “all men” to refer, at a minimum, to propertied white males, and in the context of the Declaration’s argument, to the free male citizens of the American colonies. Jefferson himself held deeply racist views about African intellectual capacity, as expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), where he speculated that Black people might be biologically inferior in reasoning ability. His Declaration’s universalist language and his personal practice were, by any honest accounting, in radical contradiction — a contradiction that Haynes and the entire subsequent Black abolitionist tradition exploited with devastating effect.
What Haynes grasped, with extraordinary clarity for a twenty-three-year-old writing in wartime, was that the logic of natural rights, once stated, cannot be bounded by the prejudices of its authors. If liberty is an innate principle “unmovably placed in the human species,” then it is placed there without racial exception. Jefferson had opened a door that, by his own philosophy, he could not close — and Haynes walked through it.
Part IV — The “Jeffersonian Enlightenment” and the Black Abolitionist Tradition
Why Haynes Was the Cornerstone
Lemuel Haynes was the first person to use the Declaration of Independence as a weapon against slavery — and he did so within weeks of the Declaration’s promulgation. His essay, as the OUP Academic notes, is “among the first to use ideas from the Declaration of Independence to advocate for the abolition of slavery, explicitly arguing that the natural rights asserted in the Declaration apply not just to White but also to Black people.” The manuscript was never published during his lifetime — the chaos of the Revolutionary War prevented it — but it circulated in manuscript among the New Divinity clergy who mentored Haynes, establishing a pattern of argument that others would take up and amplify (Gilderlehrman Hamilton Education Program).
The structural innovation Haynes introduced — using the Declaration’s own language to condemn American slavery as a contradiction of founding principles — became the template for the entire Black abolitionist tradition. It was philosophically more powerful than any purely religious argument, because it held the nation to standards it had publicly proclaimed for itself. It was also more legally sophisticated than most antislavery writing of the period, because it grounded abolitionism not in sentiment or pity but in the logic of natural rights that the Revolution claimed to vindicate.
The Chain of Influence: From Haynes to Douglass
According to Hannah Spahn’s landmark study Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition (University of Virginia Press, 2024), the tradition Haynes inaugurated included writers such as William Hamilton, David Walker, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and ultimately W. E. B. Du Bois — “a long tradition of writers” who “were on the forefront of crafting today’s view of Jefferson as the contradictory personification of both America’s greatest sin and America’s greatest promise” (Liberty Fund).
Each figure in this tradition advanced the Haynesian method:
- David Walker (1829): In his incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, Walker “blended Christianity, natural rights, and America’s Founding creed,” arguing that “blacks are part of the language of Jefferson’s first principles,” including the right of revolution. He specifically attacked Jefferson’s racist arguments in Notes on the State of Virginia while appropriating his Declaration’s language (National Constitution Center).
- Frederick Douglass (1852): In his famous “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech, Douglass employed the Declaration’s principles to indict American slavery as a national betrayal. Like Haynes, he applied a “secular, cosmopolitan sense of what common decency requires” to argue that natural law made slavery impossible to justify — making antislavery arguments “not in religious ways…but in secular ways that derive from the Enlightenment tradition, as Thomas Jefferson did” (OUP Academic, Literary Imagination).
- W. E. B. Du Bois (early 20th century): Extended the tradition into the modern era, continuing to hold American democracy accountable to the universalist principles of the Declaration while analyzing the structural racism that prevented their realization.
The Philosophical Contribution: Reason Over Feeling
Spahn’s analysis reveals why Haynes and his successors constituted not merely a political movement but a distinct philosophical tradition. Jefferson’s Declaration embodied what Spahn calls an “Enlightenment of Feeling” — a set of truths that were self-evident to a particular community of white republican men, grounded in shared sentiment rather than universal reason. The Black intellectual tradition, beginning with Haynes, represented an “Enlightenment of Principle” — one that demanded that liberty claims be grounded in reason and applied universally, without regard to the feelings of those who held power (University of Virginia Press).
Haynes achieved this by doing something Jefferson had not done: he provided a rigorous philosophical demonstration that natural rights applied to Black people. Where Jefferson asserted self-evidence, Haynes argued — marshaling scripture, logic, and the internal contradictions of the slaveholders’ own position. He asked: if liberty is a divine gift to the human species, what argument could justify denying it to any member of that species? He provided no satisfactory answer for his opponents, because none existed. Jefferson’s “epistemologically vague” truths, in Spahn’s phrase, “turned out to be precisely their flexible combination of subjective opinion and universal inclusiveness that could be transformed into the normative basis of a fundamental human equality” — and it was Black intellectuals, starting with Haynes, who made that transformation (University of Virginia Press, Author’s Corner).
Reshaping How America Reads Its Founding Document
The ultimate measure of Haynes’s influence is that it shaped the way all Americans — not just Black Americans — now read the Declaration of Independence. As the National Constitution Center observes: “It was Black Americans, free and enslaved, who were the first to interpret the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ as a statement of individual equality and have employed it most often and most eloquently over the past 250 years to advance liberty and equality for all Americans.”
The modern reading of the Declaration — as a universal statement of individual human equality, binding in principle on all governments and all peoples — is not, in fact, Jefferson’s original reading. It is the reading that Haynes proposed in 1776, that the Black abolitionist tradition developed over the following century, and that eventually entered the mainstream of American constitutional interpretation. When Abraham Lincoln invoked the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” as the philosophical foundation of the antislavery cause, he was drawing on a hermeneutic tradition that Haynes had founded. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the Declaration as a “promissory note” for which America had yet to deliver full payment, he was employing a framework of moral accountability that traces directly to Liberty Further Extended.
The Journal of the American Revolution has noted that Haynes’s 1776 tract contains “the theological roots of a concern for racial justice found in later writings, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail.'” That genealogy — from a twenty-three-year-old Black minuteman writing by candlelight in Revolutionary Massachusetts to the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 — is one of the longest and most consequential intellectual continuities in American history.
Lemuel Haynes was, by any measure, an improbable founder. Born of an interracial union in a society that denied full personhood to people of African descent, bonded into servitude before he was a year old, educated through sheer determination, and mustered into a revolution that would not recognize his citizenship — he nonetheless found, in the tumult of 1776, a moment to write one of the most philosophically precise and morally urgent documents the Revolutionary era produced. Liberty Further Extended did what Jefferson’s Declaration could not: it followed the logic of natural rights to its only consistent conclusion.
Haynes grasped what the Founders could not, or would not, admit — that a claim to universal human liberty is either universal or it is incoherent. He demonstrated that the same principles invoked to justify independence from Britain required the immediate abolition of chattel slavery. He did this not as an outsider attacking the Revolution but as a veteran who had bled for it, speaking from inside the tradition of republican liberty and Calvinist theology that the Revolution claimed to represent.
The essay’s belated discovery in 1983 did not diminish its historical significance — it magnified it, by revealing how early and how clearly one Black thinker had seen what so many white ones refused to see. The tradition Haynes founded did not merely protest America’s betrayal of its principles; it preserved and transmitted those principles in their most coherent form. When we interpret the Declaration’s universalism today, we do so, as Hannah Spahn argues, “necessarily through the lens of a prominent tradition of Black writing” — a tradition that Lemuel Haynes, with one unpublished manuscript, brought into being.
Deeply researched with the assistance of ChatGPT, with historical records carefully reviewed and reconfirmed to the best of my ability.
I offer this post from the perspective of a Buddhist, with sincere respect for the faiths, traditions, ethical commitments, and lived experiences of others. My intention is not to diminish, challenge, or disrespect anyone’s beliefs, but to encourage thoughtful reflection, honest dialogue, and a deeper understanding of history through a spirit of compassion, humility, and mutual respect.
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