Sarah Osborn’s World
Title page of Samuel Hopkins, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn (Worcester, Mass.: Leonard Worcester, 1799). Photograph courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.
Sarah Osborn’s World
The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America
CATHERINE A. BREKUS
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON
NEW DIRECTIONS IN NARRATIVE HISTORY
John Demos and Aaron Sachs, Series Editors
The New Directions in Narrative History series includes original works of creative nonfiction across the many fields of history and related disciplines. Based on new research, the books in this series offer significant scholarly contributions while also embracing stylistic innovation as well as the classic techniques of storytelling. The works of the New Directions in Narrative History series, intended for the broadest general readership, speak to deeply human concerns about the past, present, and future of our world and its people.
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College, and from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.
Copyright © 2013 by Catherine A. Brekus.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brekus, Catherine A.
Sarah Osborn’s world : the rise of evangelical Christianity in early America / Catherine A. Brekus.
p. cm. — (New directions in narrative history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-18290-3 (alk. paper)
1. Osborn, Sarah, 1714–1796. 2. Christian biography—United States. I. Title.
BR1725.O7B74 2013
277.3′07092—dc23
[B]
2012019515
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
publication of this book is enabled by a grant from
Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford
For my mother, Trudy Brennan Brekus
And in memory of my father, Gordon L. Brekus (1930–2011)
Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel
Write this for a memorial in a book.
—Exodus 17:14
Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART I: A MEMOIR, 1743
ONE. Never Despair
TWO. The Name of Christ
THREE. An Afflicted Low Condition
FOUR. Amazing Grace
PART II: DIARIES AND LETTERS, 1744–1796
FIVE. The Lord Gave, and the Lord Hath Taken Away, 1744
SIX. No Imaginary Thing, 1753–1755
SEVEN. Pinching Poverty, 1756–1758
EIGHT. Love Thy Neighbor, 1759–1763
NINE. Jordan Overflowing, 1765–1774
TEN. The Latter Days, 1775–1787
ELEVEN. The Open Vision, 1796
Epilogue: A Protestant Saint
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
This book tells the story of an eighteenth-century evangelical woman, Sarah Osborn, who recorded her experiences in thousands of pages of letters, diaries, and a memoir. These manuscripts offer a rare opportunity to hear an early American woman reflecting on the meaning of her life, and they also offer a fascinating glimpse of the world of eighteenth-century America. Although Sarah’s story was uniquely her own, she was deeply shaped by her culture, and when we read her writings we can hear both her own individual voice and the voice of her community speaking through her. Like all of us, she could not transcend the historical moment in which she lived, and although no other person in the eighteenth century shared all her feelings or experiences, her life bears the indelible imprint of the ideas, practices, and material forces of her time.
Each chapter of this book combines a narrative of Sarah Osborn’s life with an examination of the larger historical forces that shaped her understanding of both herself and God. Rather than trying to write a traditional biography from the cradle to the grave, I have organized this book around the fragments of her writings. By listening to her reflect on her experiences, we can come to a deeper understanding of how early Americans made sense of the religious, economic, and political transformations that were reshaping their world. Whether writing about the revivals of the Great Awakening, the consumer revolution, slavery, or the American Revolution, Sarah wrestled with the most critical issues of her age.
In order to recapture the vibrancy of Sarah Osborn’s world, I have built this book around a wide variety of sources: manuscript church records, ministers’ sermons, newspapers, religious periodicals, census data, philosophical writings, theological treatises, childrearing books, devotional manuals, and other men’s and women’s conversion narratives and diaries. My most important sources, of course, are Sarah’s own religious writings, including her memoir, ten volumes of diaries, more than a hundred letters, and a short tract, The Nature, Certainty, and Evidence of True Christianity, which she published anonymously in 1755. I have also relied on two collections of her writings that were published after her death: Samuel Hopkins’s Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn and Elizabeth West Hopkins’s Familiar Letters, Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn and Miss Susanna Anthony. Since Samuel Hopkins occasionally edited Osborn’s language in order to make her conform to his vision of an ideal Christian (and his wife, Elizabeth Hopkins, may have done the same), these books must be used cautiously, but they are the only clue to what may have been in Sarah’s missing manuscripts.
Unfortunately most of her diaries have been lost. Six volumes disappeared during the last years of Sarah’s life, perhaps given to friends who never returned them, and others may have been destroyed after her death by a fire at Hopkins’s house. (Many of his own manuscripts were consumed in the blaze.) Perhaps others were forgotten in attics or discarded as worthless.
Nevertheless, a remarkable number of her writings still survive, preserved by people who found her voice too compelling to ignore. Although it is not clear how her letters and diaries eventually ended up in several different archives on the East Coast (including libraries in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire), they seem to have been passed around as devotional reading after her death. Several people, for example, wrote their names on the inside cover of her 1757 diary, including “Cabel J. Tenney” of Newport, Rhode Island, and “Miss Clara Allen” of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Reading Sarah’s writings can be difficult because of her frequent misspellings, her lack of punctuation, and her odd capitalizations, but nothing can substitute for the experience of encountering her breathless, urgent words in their original form. In order to give readers a glimpse of her “stream of consciousness�
�� style, I have started several chapters with excerpts from her manuscripts as they were originally written. (In other cases the quotations come from her published writings, which were edited for clarity in the eighteenth century.) In the rest of the book I have chosen to modernize the spelling and punctuation of her manuscripts in order to make them more intelligible.
Historians who write about women have to make difficult decisions about what to call their female characters. Books about famous men usually identify them by their last names: Jefferson, for example, or Lincoln. But Sarah did not become “Osborn” until her second marriage at the age of twenty-nine, and it seems anachronistic to use the name “Osborn” when writing about her childhood or her marriage to her first husband, Samuel Wheaten, when she was known as “Mrs. Wheaten.” Because women were defined in relationship to their fathers and husbands, they could have several different names in a lifetime. In most of the book I have chosen to call Sarah by her first name because it seems most true to her identity—the only name she kept from birth to death, the name she used when standing before God. All her surviving manuscripts are written in the first person, and many of her diary entries are addressed directly to God. But I have also chosen to use her last name when discussing her authorship and her participation in the religious debates of her time. My hope is that Sarah Osborn will appear in future books about the evangelical movement next to male leaders like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley.
Reading Sarah’s reflections on her life reminds us of how far away the past is—but also how close. Sarah lived at a time when modern ideas about the reality of human freedom and the goodness of everyday life were still emerging, and we may find it hard to understand her unflinching belief in human depravity, her embrace of suffering as a positive good, and her fears about loving her family and friends too much. “The past is a foreign country,” the novelist L. P. Hartley once wrote. “They do things differently there.” But Sarah’s questions about the meaning of human life were ultimately universal ones, and her story can help us to reflect on our own understanding of the human condition. We, too, debate over how to define happiness, and we, too, wonder if there is any such thing as absolute truth. Sarah was profoundly influenced by the Enlightenment world in which she lived, a world that stood on the brink of our own, and although we may try to distance ourselves from the past by describing our culture as postmodern, we continue to wrestle with the legacy of the Enlightenment in its many forms—whether its defense of capitalism, its commitment to humanitarianism, or its optimistic faith in human nature.
After spending many years with Sarah Osborn, my feelings about her are a mixture of admiration and ambivalence: admiration for her intelligence, her kindness, and her commitment to the common good, ambivalence about her vision of a God who deprives us of genuine freedom and rejoices in violence and damnation. Her quest for absolute religious certainty—rational proof of God’s existence—strikes me as one of the most problematic legacies of both the evangelical movement and the Enlightenment, burdening Christianity with the task of empirically demonstrating its truth. Yet I have tried to understand Sarah on her own terms, and I have been inspired by her determination to see God’s goodness in every part of her life. Like the poet A. R. Ammons, she went in search of the “lowly,” certain that her place was with the smallest and least significant things in the universe, but wherever she looked she found signs of grace. “Though I have looked everywhere,” Ammons wrote in “Still,” “I can find nothing/to give myself to:/everything is/magnificent with existence, is in/surfeit of glory: nothing is diminished,/nothing has been diminished for me.” Despite wrestling with many dark nights of the soul when she felt as though God had “hidden his face,” Sarah refused to give up hope.
If not for her remarkable memoir, diaries, and letters, we would know almost nothing about her. After more than 250 years, few traces of her life remain. If we pored over genealogical records, we would find that she had lived a long life that took her across the Atlantic Ocean: she was born in 1714 in London and died in 1796 in Newport, Rhode Island. If we searched for her name in the Newport Mercury, the city’s weekly newspaper, we would discover that she had been a teacher who had considered opening a boarding school in her home. “SARAH OSBORN, Schoolmistress in Newport, proposes to keep a Boarding School,” declared an advertisement in 1758. “Any person desirous of sending Children, may be accommodated, and have them instructed in Reading, Writing, Plain Work, Embroidering, Tent Stitch, Samplers, &c on reasonable Terms.” And if we sat down to read Newport’s many volumes of church records, we would find that she and her second husband, Henry, had been members of the First Church of Christ (later known as the First Congregational Church). Most intriguing, we would learn that in 1826, thirty years after her death, her church had organized a charity known as the Osborn Society.
But without her writings, we would have no way to make sense of these fragmentary glimpses of Sarah’s life, the scattered remains of a world far removed from our own. Although we would know that she had been a teacher and a Christian, possibly an influential one, we would have no sense of her as a living, breathing person who had once walked down Newport’s cobbled streets. None of these records captures the pious, intelligent, and sometimes anguished voice that we hear in the pages of her writings. None of them tells us about the everyday joys and sorrows that influenced her image of God. And none reveals her struggle to believe that a loving God had designed everything in her life—even her moments of doubt and despair—for her own good.
When Sarah Osborn died in 1796 at the age of eighty-two, frail and nearly blind, she left behind few possessions of value: a gold locket, a silver spoon inscribed with her second husband’s initials, a maple desk. But more precious, in her opinion, were the thousands of diary pages she had sewn together into neat booklets, each marked with a number and date. Even after more than two centuries, her tight stitches have never come unraveled. On the cover of one of her diaries, she bequeathed her words to “the disposal of providence.” Her most cherished hope was that someday her manuscripts would be read by people who shared her hunger to communicate with a personal, majestic, sovereign God. More than two centuries later, her writings can help transport us back to the world of eighteenth-century America, a world that has much to say to our own.
Introduction
If a word in these lines ever prove useful to one soul after my decease it will be ten thousand times more than I deserve from the hands of a bountiful God to him alone be all the glory.1
What can the story of an eighteenth-century woman’s life tell us about the rise of evangelical Christianity in America?
This is a book about Sarah Osborn, a woman born three centuries ago, and the strange yet familiar world in which she lived. Strange, because she rejected many of the axioms about human goodness, freedom, and self-determination that Americans today take for granted. Familiar, because she belonged to the first generation of evangelicals in America, and she helped create a dynamic new religious movement that has flourished in our modern world. Her passionate language of sin, repentance, and conversion still reverberates on the American landscape, a tribute to the enduring power of born-again Christianity.
Few people today have ever heard of Sarah Osborn, but at a time when virtually all women were forbidden to vote, attend college, seek ordination, or own property if they were married, she became a well-known religious leader. Her life story, as dramatic as a novel, was filled with tragedy. Born in 1714 and raised by parents whom she later described as “severe,” she struggled with suicidal feelings in her youth; eloped at the age of seventeen with a sailor, Samuel Wheaten, who died two years later, leaving her with a one-year-old son to support; married a tailor, Henry Osborn, a widower with three children, who suffered a physical or mental breakdown that left him unable to work; and toiled long hours as a schoolteacher in order to pay her family’s bills. Despite her constant battle to achieve economic security, she remained so indigent throughout her life
that her name never appeared on Newport’s tax lists. Her beloved son, her only child, died at the age of eleven. Through it all, she endured chronic bouts of illness. Although it is impossible to diagnose her disease across the span of almost three centuries, her symptoms suggest that she may have suffered from either rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis.
Two pages from Sarah Osborn’s diary, March 15, 1758. Osborn cut pieces of folio paper into squares and sewed them together to make individual books. (Her stitching is visible along the side of the page.) Each diary page measured approximately 4 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.
Yet despite these tribulations, Sarah was so charismatic that many people sought her spiritual counsel. Like the followers of medieval women saints, they seemed to interpret Sarah’s afflictions as a mark of her sanctity, a symbol of her closeness to a suffering Christ. Reputed to be gifted in prayer, she became more popular than any of the ordained ministers in her town. During the mid-1760s she emerged as the leader of a remarkable religious revival that brought as many as five hundred people—including large numbers of slaves—to her house each week. Although she remained poor, strangers from as far away as Canada and the West Indies sent money to help defray her expenses, eager to help the woman who had become virtually a Protestant saint.2
Sarah spent many hours teaching her school, reading the Bible, attending church, doing chores, and sharing the gospel, but she saw her life first and foremost as a writing life: she wrote early in the morning, sometimes before daybreak, putting down her quill only when it was time to feed her family and teach her students; she wrote at noontime between sessions of her school; and if she could force herself to stay awake she wrote late in the evenings by the light of her fireplace, squinting to see the pages in front of her. If she wore a pocket tied around her waist (a common piece of clothing for colonial women), she may have carried a pen and paper with her as she did her chores. Because she hoped to make a “hidden God” visible, she picked up her pen day after day, hoping to see his refracted image on the page. “O blessed be God that I have been taught to write,” she rejoiced in her diary, “since that is the means that God has made the most Effectual of all other to fix my thoughts on Eternal things.” When she explained that “’tis in this way of musing that the fire burns,” she echoed a verse from Jeremiah: “His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” Writing was almost a compulsion for her, an obsession. A fire in her bones that she could not put out. Besides composing a memoir at the age of twenty-nine, she wrote hundreds of letters and kept a diary for at least two decades, filling as many as fifty volumes and fifteen thousand pages with her heartfelt prayers to God.3 More than two thousand pages of her manuscripts still survive.
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