Lemuel Haynes Lemuel Haynes ( 1753 – 1833 ) was an influential African - American religious leader who argued against slavery . Early life and education . Little is known of his early life . He was born in West Hartford , Connecticut , to a reportedly Caucasian mother of some status and a man named Haynes , who was said to be " of some form of African extraction " . According to the African American National Biography , his birth date is 18 July 1753 and he died the 28 September 1833 . At the age of five months , Lemuel Haynes was given over to indentured servitude in Granville , Massachusetts . Although serving as an agricultural worker , part of the agreement required educating him . Through accompanying his masters to church , he became exposed to Calvinistic thought . At about twenty years of age , he saw the " Aurora Borealis " , and , fearing the approach of the Day of Judgment as a result , he soon accepted Christianity . Military service . Freed in 1774 when his indenture expired , Haynes joined the minutemen of Granville . In 1775 , he marched with his militia company to Roxbury , Massachusetts , following the news of the Battles of Lexington and Concord . In 1776 , he accompanied them in the garrisoning of the recently captured Fort Ticonderoga . He returned to his previous labors in Granville after the northern campaign of the American War of Independence . Writings . After the American Revolution , Haynes began to write extensively , criticizing the slave trade and slavery . He also began to prepare sermon s for family prayer s and write theologically about life . The Scripture , abolitionism , and republicanism impacted his published writings . Haynes argued that slavery denied black people their natural rights to " Life , Liberty and the pursuit of happiness " . Paralleling the recent American experience with oppression to the slave experience , Haynes wrote : " Liberty is equally as precious to a black man , as it is to a white one , and bondage as equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other " . 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 Master of Arts 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 .