By July 4, 1776, when the Declaration was adopted, many colonists had chosen sides in the war based on their understandings of how a win by the patriots or the British would affect their futures. A majority of African Americans who served in the war, by some estimates around 20,000, fought on the side of Britain, deciding that alliance was the better choice. Many joined the British Army after Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation the prior year, offering freedom to those enslaved there by patriots in return for their service. Enslaved people in other colonies were also inspired to join the British cause.

Other enslaved people thought it best to join the American patriots on the same promise of freedom. Either way, it was a gamble for the future. The free Black people who joined the patriots did not have as much to gain as the enslaved, who could escape the crushing status of being legal property. But they evidently had some sense that the end result of the rebellion against the British would be improved circumstances for all people of color in America. Perhaps the patriots really meant all their insistent talk about “liberty” and strident criticism of tyranny. Maybe the words of the Declaration of Independence could apply to everyone: “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.”

When Jefferson wrote those words, the Declaration’s most inspiring passage, racially based chattel slavery existed in all 13 American colonies, including at his Virginia home, Monticello. Beautiful as it was, Jefferson’s language opened up a gap between the idealism of the country’s founding document and reality as it existed in what would become the new republic.

Lemuel Haynes, who enthusiastically joined the patriots, was one of many people who early on noticed that chasm. Haynes had the kind of life and public career that seems almost unimaginable for a person of African descent in North America during the 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the first Black American to be ordained as a minister in a Protestant church and the first Black person to receive an honorary degree in the United States (from Middlebury College in 1804). He was a public figure during his time, prominent enough to have a biography written about him in 1837, four years after his death.

“Liberty Further Extended,” Haynes’s elaboration of the contradictions and potential of the document that has come to be called America’s creed, was apparently never finished and was not formally published during his lifetime. But there is evidence that it was shared among those sympathetic to abolition. Haynes’s presentation went beyond abstract moral principles, though he engaged those with great precision. He argued mainly from a religious perspective, but he wrote in a manner designed to make readers feel the pain of the Middle Passage and the institution of slavery itself. He urged his readers to see the humanity of African people and understand why the slave trade and the institution of slavery should not be tolerated.

Haynes was born on July 18, 1753, in West Hartford, Conn. His father was an African American whose name is not known. There is some controversy about the identity of his mother. She was either a young white servant or the daughter of a prominent family who had to hide the fact that she had given birth to a mixed-race child out of wedlock and arranged to have another woman claim the infant as her own. “Haynes” was the name of the man in whose house his mother lived when she gave birth.

Haynes was abandoned at around 5 months old and taken to live in the home of David and Elizabeth Rose in Granville, Mass. He had been born free, but was indentured to the Roses as a servant until he turned 21. Haynes said of Elizabeth Rose that “she treated me as though I was her own child” and noted that observers claimed that she seemed to love him more than her own children. As his indenture required, Haynes was educated. He was enrolled in the local school, but his work schedule allowed him to attend only part of the year.

Haynes’s religious instruction appears to have come largely from the Rose family. David Rose, a deacon in the Congregationalist church, was a deeply religious man, who made his home a place “where the Sabbath was sanctified, daily prayer offered.” Even as a teenager, Haynes impressed members of his community with his talent for preaching. He went to study Latin, one of “the learned languages,” with a clergyman in Canaan, Conn. Later he added Greek to his repertoire so he could read the earliest translations of the New Testament.

Haynes’s life story confounds expectations in so many ways. A mixed-race child born out of wedlock, abandoned by his parents and indentured as a servant was not only accepted by members of his New England community; he was nurtured and encouraged to succeed. Perhaps the response to him was generally positive precisely because he was one of a small minority of people of color in New England, and one of an even smaller number in Granville. Would his life have been different if there had been enough people of color in his community to make white people feel threatened by their presence, especially if some of them started to succeed?

When thinking about the trajectory of Haynes’s life — why he decided to attach himself so fervently to the patriot cause; why he, who had never been enslaved, decided to attack slavery so passionately — it seems clear that his early experiences helped raise his expectations about his place in the world.

The historian Richard Newman, who edited a compilation of Haynes’s writings, noted that in the epigraph to his poem “The Battle of Lexington,” Haynes identifies himself as “a young Mollato.” This may indicate that the relatively rosy picture he painted of his early life in a nearly all-white setting was a bit more complicated than his virtually conflict-free narrative would suggest. It is very likely that he had the experience of being treated as different — or saw other Black people being treated as different — by the majority community. And not in a good way.

In his early 20s, Haynes became terrified at the thought he would go “before the bar of God, knowing that [he] was a sinner.” While “under an apple-tree” he experienced a religious conversion that led him to become an adherent of Calvinism, specifically a movement within the theology referred to as the New Divinity. The ministers associated with the New Divinity, as the historian John Salliant has noted, “were ardently committed to the patriot cause and War of Independence, since republican political principles struck [them] as God’s moral law articulated in a polity.”

As the colonial crisis unfolded, they saw that cause as a just and moral struggle against British tyranny. Haynes saw it this way, too. He trained as a Minuteman in Granville, Mass., in 1774, and enlisted in the Continental Army the following year, after the Boston Massacre. By the end of 1776, he had a new focus. Not only did he support independence from Britain, but he also believed that the cause of liberty for which he fought must apply to the enslaved as well.

While people have debated what Jefferson meant when he wrote that “all men are created equal” — most often asking, “Did it include Black people?” — there is no doubt about the lesson Haynes took from the document. In “Liberty Further Extended,” he used his discussion of the Declaration to specifically make the case that the God-given right to liberty and freedom belonged to “Africans” as well as the “Englishman.” It was the only conclusion to draw, considering that God had created all mankind.

“It hath pleased god to make of one Blood all nations of men, for to dwell upon the face of the Earth,” Haynes wrote, referencing a Bible passage and laying out his own thinking. “Consequently we may suppose that, what is precious to one man, is precious to another and what is irksom intolerable to one man is so to another, consider’d in a law of nature. 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 intollarable to the one as it is to the other. … ”

Other early uses of the Declaration’s language to attack slavery — for example, petitions to local legislatures — either do not engage the subject of race, or do so only obliquely. Haynes’s essay addresses the race question and its relationship to slavery head-on and at length. The religious basis of his argument might not land well for modern secular readers, but this type of presentation would resonate strongly in a society suffused with religion like Haynes’s New England.

Of course, Haynes was not alone in this approach. The views he expressed in his essay had much in common with the religious attack on slavery in the American colonies that Quakers had been making since the end of the previous century. The argument would be taken up even more fervently by the larger abolitionist movement that appeared in the 1820s and helped stoke the tension that led to the Civil War.

But Haynes was among the first to connect this line of thinking to the nation’s founding charter, and thus produced one of the earliest articulations of what should be possible for people of color under the new American government. “Liberty Further Extended” demonstrates how much Haynes’s deep religious faith informed his understanding of the Declaration of Independence. The two were melded in his mind in a way they were not for the document’s author.

Jefferson drew from his faith in an Enlightenment-based ethical sense to say that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Using the word “Creator” was in keeping with his deist philosophy that posited that some form of entity created the universe and then stepped aside, leaving humanity to its own devices. Haynes was much more emphatic about his vision of the connection between liberty and a supreme being: “Liberty [was] a Jewel which was handed Down to man from the cabinet of heaven, and is Coaeval with his Existence,” he wrote. “And as it proceed from the Supreme Legislature of the universe, so it is he which hath the sole right to take it away.”

Liberty and freedom were “innate” principles that were “unmovably placed in the human Species.” People who infringed upon these principles were acting against the “very Laws of nature.” In Haynes’s worldview, the infringers were not merely violating rights, which could be perceived as a wholly secular act; they were committing an actual sin. When he came under the influence of the New Divinity theology, he accepted its followers’ view that sin was providential. Human beings were to learn from their sins and do better. That could be applied to slavery in America. The Revolution and the new republic provided an opportunity to redeem society.

Haynes’s early invocation of the Declaration for the purpose of destroying slavery was prescient. In the 250 years since, many marginalized people and groups in America have used Jefferson’s words to establish a right to equal treatment in the United States. By arguing for a wider application of these words, and by actually living their meaning through venturing into and succeeding in places normally reserved for white people, Haynes provided an example of how that democratizing force could be put in motion. In truth, the standard has gone global. Historians have shown how influential this part of the Declaration has been to people fighting oppression and seeking self-determination all across the world.

Lemuel Haynes exists somewhere between the famous and the obscure. He left far more records than most African Americans of his day, but not enough to convey a rich picture of the details of his life. His sermons and addresses were shared during his time but gradually fell out of circulation. “Liberty Further Extended” was rediscovered at a library at Harvard University in 1983.

What we know of Haynes is extremely impressive. He was obviously a brilliant and resourceful man. To start life the way he did, with the racial situation as it was, and to rise to become learned, the Black leader of several white churches, to receive an honorary degree from Middlebury College in 1804, to give a sermon at Yale College in 1814, were important achievements. The ending was not as happy as it could have been. After changes in the political situation in his area led to his dismissal from the Rutland pulpit in 1818, he never again held so prominent a position. Instead, he lived a more precarious existence pastoring to a rural church in upstate New York until his death in 1833.

It is at least worth considering whether Haynes would be better known if the political situation in the early American Republic had been different. Conservative by nature, Haynes rejected Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party, which he saw as godless, too supportive of the French Revolution for his tastes and headed by slaveholders, who may have made antislavery noises but were nowhere near doing anything to end the institution. In his view, they had betrayed the promise of the Revolution. Instead, Haynes joined the Federalist Party, which was closely aligned with his hero George Washington, a lifelong enslaver who arranged for the emancipation of those he enslaved in his will, an act that increased Haynes’s admiration for the first president. To his professional detriment, Haynes championed the Federalist cause even as the party gradually disappeared under the Jeffersonian wave.

Then there is the question of how Haynes lived his life. He existed almost entirely in a white world — “almost,” because there were some Black people in the New England towns in which he lived, and he surely came into contact with them. But for the most part he was disconnected from anything that could be called a Black community. The title of the 1990 compilation of his writings says it all: “Black Preacher to White America.” If he really was that — a Black preacher to white people — one can understand how he could be less well-known than he should be. In later years, Haynes addressed the subject of slavery and race, but never so passionately as he did in “Liberty Further Extended.” For the most part, he concerned himself with the same theological questions as would any white minister.

There would be little reason for the Black community to know Haynes or lift him up when they had their own leaders to champion, even if they felt a degree of group pride in the positions he attained. During Haynes’s lifetime, there were other Black people who were actively involved in the advancement of the Black community, among them Prince Hall of Boston, James Forten of Philadelphia, Bishop Richard Allen of Philadelphia. David Walker appeared on and disappeared from the scene like a comet in 1829, but his “Appeal,” which condemned slavery on the same basis as Haynes — with far more fire and defiance — ignited such attention and fury that his name has lived in history in a way that Haynes’s has not. Then there is the towering figure of Frederick Douglass, who overshadows nearly all but Lincoln in the 19th century.

Haynes remains important for having articulated in 1776 the connection between the rhetoric of the Revolution, particularly the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and the status of African Americans in the newly created nation. In later years, he criticized those who squandered the promise of the Revolution that he thought should have been the death knell for slavery. He would not live to see the destruction of the Union over the matters discussed in “Liberty Further Extended.” Of course, he would not live to see the 20th century civil rights movement, what has come to be called the Second American Revolution, which tried to revive notions of the equality of all mankind — the very notion that Haynes thought already lived within America’s creed, enunciated in the country’s first Revolution.