VI In Memory of Rev. James Lemen, Sr.
By A Well-Wisher
(The Standard, Chicago, November 16, 1907)
When James Lemen’s early anti-slavery Baptist churches went over to the cause of slavery, it looked as if all were lost and his anti-slavery mission in Illinois had failed. At that crisis Mr. Lemen could have formed another sect, but in his splendid loyalty to the Baptist cause he simply formed another Baptist church on the broader, higher grounds for both God and humanity, and on this high plane he unfurled the banner of freedom. In God’s good time the churches and state and nation came up to that grand level of right, light, and progress.
Of James Lemen’s sons, under his training, Robert was an eminent Baptist layman, and Joseph, James, Moses, and Josiah were able Baptist preachers. [William, the “wayward” son, also became a useful minister in his later years.] Altogether they were as faithful a band of men as ever stood for any cause. This is the rating which history places upon them. The country owes James Lemen another debt of gratitude for his services to history. He and his sons were the only family that ever kept a written and authentic set of notes of early Illinois; and the early historians, Ford, Reynolds, and Peck, drew many of their facts from that source. These notes embraced the only correct histories of both the early Methodist and the early Baptist churches in Illinois and much other early matter.35
Note.—This communication was probably from Dr. W. F. Boyakin.