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Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833 JOHN SAILLANT. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 232 pp.
In Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833, John Saillant explores the religious and political beliefs of black religious figure and abolitionist Lemuel Haynes. This study apparently leaves no stone unturned in its examination of the Calvinist republicans life, from his "'obscure' and 'unfavorable'" (10) birth to his death and "rebirth" as "as an exemplary black man" who was posthumously and ironically celebrated as representative of everything against which he religiously and politically stood: "colonizationism and antebellum abolitionism" (185). Through the lens of Haynes's life, Black Puritan, Black Republican examines compelling eighteenth-century black texts-epistle, sermon, jeremiad, antislavery and religious poetry and discourse, Puritan captivity narrative, religious and political debate, biblical exegeses-from Haynes's "Liberty Further Extended" (1776), through his contributions to some of the most politically relevant religious debates of the post-Revolutionary era, to Mystery Developed (1820). Saillant's contribution to Early American literary, religious, and cultural studies illuminates complex notions of abolitionism and antiracism. Saillant offers Haynes as a prescient figure who remained true to a New Divinity Calvinism and republican ideology that enabled him to offer the extirpation of slavery, oppression, and racism as a counter to the expatriation and colonization of formerly enslaved Africans.
Given the breadth and depth of Haynes's work, it is difficult to isolate the most significant contribution this study offers. However, central to its achievement is its illumination of Haynes's excision of both Calvinism and republicanism from their problematic and potentially racist origins in order to advance a progressive view of post-Revolutionary America as a free society where blacks and whites lived together. Key to such an antiJeffersonian, anti-colonizationist perspective on the post-Revolutionary American landscape is Haynes's extension of Christian "benevolence" to blacks by whites based on New Testament dispensations and a refiguring of Old Testament and Quranic law. Haynes "model of human relations" (74) demanded both a religious and political confrontation of postRevolutionary racism and the "chasm" that "colonization sought to widen" (49) between America's black and white citizens.
Distinguishing "Haynes s black republicanism," which "promot[ed] the abolition of the slave trade and slavery as well as freedom and equality," from "the Jeffersonian...