Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  And in Newport, Rhode Island, Sarah Osborn sits quietly at her desk, a pen in her hand, wondering how to tell the story of her life—how to find words for the sorrows and joys, the moments of despair and trust, that have led her to Christ. She has already written three volumes of diaries, but she wants something more than a daily record of her thoughts and feelings. Inspired by the revivals, she wishes to understand how God has been directing her life since her childhood. She is young (only twenty-nine), female, and poor, but like many other ordinary people caught up in the fervor of the awakening, she believes that her story is immensely valuable as a testimony to God’s grace.

  With much to say, she does not know how to begin. Which stories should she share? How can she make sense of all that has happened to her on the way to being “born again”? Dipping her pen in a pot of ink, she writes a breathless sentence that stretches all the way down the page. (Her words tumble out with such urgency that she forgets to include a subject and a verb.) Gathering up the fragments of her memories, she frames her life story around her “vile” sinfulness, God’s grandeur, and the unmerited, priceless gift of “free grace” that has saved her from “despair.”

  Sarah fills more than 140 pages with her bittersweet memories of God’s “dealings” with her. She writes about her childhood fears, her angry battles with her parents, and her desire to accept her sufferings as God’s will. She writes about her marriage at the young age of seventeen, the birth of her son, and the crushing poverty that makes it difficult to buy food and fire-wood. She writes about her anguish over her “vile” sins and her resolutions to “lead a new life” in the midst of the awakening. And in what will become a recurring refrain, she writes about her long struggle to overcome her feelings of doubt and hopelessness, what later generations of Americans will call depression. Writing is her way not only of communicating with God but of staving off the darkness that sometimes seems about to engulf her. The lesson she has learned along her religious pilgrimage can be summarized in just a few words. “Trust in the Lord,” she advises, “and never despair of his mercy.”4

  Sarah Osborn’s memoir is both a meditation on her past and a declaration of a new religious identity. After years of doubt, she longs to leave her burdens behind in order to embark on a new life devoted to Christ. By casting her future with those who demand an “evangelical faith” or “evangelical repentance” (and who will someday be known simply as evangelicals), she rejects not only her former life but the tempting world of enlightened self-interest and consumer choice emerging around her.

  A New Life

  With the exception of a single letter, Sarah’s memoir, finished in 1743, is the earliest piece of her writing that still survives. Although she had thought about writing a memoir for “some years,” she had always hesitated, daunted by the challenge of narrating the story of her entire life. Unlike a diary, which could be fragmentary and episodic, a memoir was supposed to have a coherent plot, and although she knew that she wanted her story to be an archetypal tale of sin and salvation, the prodigal coming home to her father, she may have worried about how she would fit her complicated life into a single, linear framework. Instead of simply recording what had happened to her each day, she would have to construct a single, coherent “I” out of her multiple, contradictory experiences.5

  Since Sarah was one of relatively few American or British women in the eighteenth century to write a memoir (most chose to write diaries instead), it is worth asking why she decided to subject herself to such a difficult discipline. Why, in 1743, after years of hesitation, did she finally sit down to write the story of her life?

  People often decide to write about their lives during times of turmoil and disruption. By putting their stories into writing, they try to impose coherence on events that stretch the limits of their understanding: for example, the loss of a loved one, the birth of a child, or the outbreak of war. As one critic has explained, writing can be a response to “a sense of discontinuity of self—I was that, now I am this; I was there, now I am here. Keeping a life record can be an attempt to preserve continuity seemingly broken or lost.”6 In Sarah’s case, she seems to have begun writing in order to make sense of two dramatic upheavals that had recently shaken her life: her spiritual awakening during the revivals and the loss of almost all her money because of bankruptcy in September 1742.

  First had come the exultation of her renewed commitment to Christ. During the early 1740s, she had been an eyewitness to one of the most thrilling spectacles that had ever taken place in New England—a religious “awakening” that brought thousands of new converts into churches. Like others who have been touched by major historical events (one thinks of the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the attacks of September 11, 2001), she wanted to articulate the dizzying sensation of watching the wheels of history turn—in her case, of watching hundreds of people crying out for mercy and rejoicing at their salvation. When she realized that she, too, had been saved, she was so overwhelmed with joy that she could barely find words to describe it. It was not enough to say that she had been “born again”; she had been virtually resurrected, “restored as it were from the grave.”7

  But then, in a turn of events that was almost too bewildering to comprehend, she had plunged from the elation of feeling God’s “astonishing grace” into the despair of losing the little money she had managed to save. Her husband, Henry, a tailor, had hoped to strike it rich by investing in a Newport ship, but instead he went bankrupt.8 When she finished her memoir in 1743, she was still not sure how they would find the money to repay their creditors.

  Torn by conflicting feelings of thankfulness and loss, Sarah seems to have hoped that recording her life story would help her to come to a deeper acceptance of God’s plan for her. Writing would help her to remember what was really important: not her possessions, but her relationship to God. Although she wrote only obliquely about her struggles to accept God’s will, she hinted at her difficulties when she confessed her desire to “stir up gratitude in the most ungrateful of all hearts, even mine.” By looking back over the whole story of her life, she hoped to reassure herself that even in her darkest moments, when she had felt most alone and vulnerable, God had been invisibly guiding her and arranging everything for her own good. At the beginning of her memoir, when she explained that she hoped to inspire others to “trust in the Lord and never despair of his mercy,” she may also have been speaking to herself.9 She, too, had to remember to place her trust in God instead of succumbing to despair.

  Although Sarah could have written another volume of diaries in 1743 to help her cope with her “unbelieving fears” (she would write more than forty volumes of diaries in the years ahead), she had “resolved to lead a new life,” and she thought that writing a memoir was the best way to strengthen her commitment to become a new self in Christ. Beginning with her birth and moving forward, she wanted to give her past a new meaning, imagining all her former trials as nothing more than the prologue to her “astonishing” experience of “the sovereign riches of free grace.” She sought both to bring her old self into line with the new person she had become and to determine the self she would be in the future. Because she had not always been an evangelical, she seems to have been afraid that she might backslide again, forgetting who she “really” was. Writing would allow her to fix her identity on a page, anchoring her to the new self she had become. If she were ever tempted to doubt the reality of her conversion or to question God’s goodness and mercy, she would be able to reread her narrative. “Do not trust your slippery memories with such a multitude of remarkable passages of Providence as you have, and shall meet with in your way to heaven,” advised the English Puritan John Flavel. “Certainly it were not so great a loss to lose your silver, your goods and chattels, as it is to lose your experiences which God has this way given you in the world.”10 Flawed by original sin, humans were too imperfect to remember all of their religious experiences, but if they committed them to paper they could preserve them against f
orgetfulness. Unlike prayer or other religious practices, writing led to the creation of material, permanent objects that could serve as commemorations of God’s grace. Sarah’s memoir would be a lasting testimony to the ultimate meaning of her life.

  Sarah never would have used such modern language, but she seems to have approached her memoir as a project in self-fashioning, a “technology of the self.”11 Autobiography, as one critic has noted, is not only the narration of the self but the construction of the self. Although Sarah began her memoir by insisting that she was “impartial in this work, declaring the truth and nothing but the truth,” she inevitably made choices about which details to include and which to leave out. Instead of recording her whole life as it was actually lived, her memoir reveals the “self” that she chose to share—and on a deeper level, the self that she wanted to be.12

  Yet unlike the more liberal thinkers of her age who believed that individuals had the power to remake themselves (one thinks of Benjamin Franklin’s faith in self-improvement), Sarah insisted that selfhood was bestowed, not chosen. Evangelicals absorbed parts of the Enlightenment’s individualistic language as their own, but they still claimed that their identities ultimately came from Christ, not their own efforts at self-construction. Denying her own agency, Sarah believed that she was helpless to change herself, but she nonetheless hoped that writing, like listening to sermons or reading the Bible, could be a “means of grace.”13 She prayed that her memoir would be a channel of divine transformation, the means through which God would pour greater humility and obedience into her heart.

  Although writing was Sarah’s most cherished religious practice, it was not her only “means of grace.” Besides writing a spiritual memoir (and then thousands of pages of diaries), she prayed, listened to sermons, joined church members around the table of the Lord’s Supper, read the Bible and devotional literature, and visited the sick and needy. Even her modest dress and speech reflected her attempt to conform her entire identity to God’s will. At a time when colonial women copied the latest dress styles from England, she wore plain clothing, and despite the popularity of salons among the better sort, she thought that the most important topic of conversation should be Christianity. Religion was not simply a way of thinking for her; it was a way of acting. By disciplining both her body and her mind, she hoped to empty herself in order to make room for God’s grace. “Lord, nothing Else can, Nothing else shall satisfy my craving soul but thee,” she wrote in a later diary entry. “O fill me with thyself.”14

  Becoming a new self was a painful process that involved renunciation as well as affirmation. At the same time as Sarah celebrated the birth of her new identity in Christ, she also expressed deep hostility to her former self—a “stubborn and rebellious” sinner who had disobeyed both her parents and God. Condemning herself in harsh language as a “hell deserving sinner,” “an heir of hell,” a “fool,” and “a poor sinful worm” who was “unworthy of the Least mercy,” she expressed amazement that God had chosen her for salvation. She was “astonished,” she wrote, “at God’s patience in sparing me alive and out of hell.” If she had not emphasized her sinfulness, an emerging evangelical community would not have recognized her as one of their own. But the cost was high. Becoming an evangelical empowered her to construct a new self, but it also required her to destroy the person she had once been.15

  Yet even though Sarah knew what kind of story she was supposed to write, she could not always make her life fit into the conventional evangelical framework of sin and redemption. Reading her memoir is like watching the collision between her real, personal experiences and the expectations of a new evangelical community, a community that was linked together not only by shared beliefs but by a shared narrative voice.

  The Great Noise

  The self that Sarah Osborn presented in the pages of her memoir stood in stark contrast to the enlightened, optimistic understanding of selfhood that had begun to gain ascendancy in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Like the evangelical ministers whom she most admired, Sarah seems to have feared that Protestants had begun to drift away from the faith of their fathers, abandoning the Puritans’ stark vision of human helplessness and depravity in favor of a more positive understanding of human goodness and free will. In the late seventeenth century, ministers in both England and America complained about a “visible decay of Godliness,” and by the 1730s, according to Jonathan Edwards, there was a “great noise about Arminianism.”16 (The term Arminianism refers to the beliefs of Jacobus Arminius, a sixteenth-century Dutch theologian who argued that humans could put themselves in position to earn God’s favor by their good works. Nothing was more offensive to Calvinist sympathies than the idea that humans could do anything to save themselves from hell.) When Sarah listened to sermons or read accounts of the revivals in The Christian History, a popular periodical founded in 1743, the echoes of that great noise were impossible to ignore. According to ministers, the contagion of Arminianism was everywhere, and some even confessed to having once been infected with it themselves. Besides complaining that the people in his congregation “had made themselves easy for some time with the Arminian way of conversion,” the Reverend Jonathan Parsons admitted that he himself “had been greatly in Love with Arminian Principles, and especially I abhorred the Doctrine of GOD’S ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY.” Joseph Park, a missionary, testified that before the revivals, “he had secretly believed there was something [good] in men to begin with, and that Gospel grace came to make [it] perfect.”17

  Since historians have been hard-pressed to find many genuine Arminians among New England’s clergy, they have wondered whether revivalists overstated this religious “declension” in order to make more converts. Perhaps Arminianism was a myth or a bogey man that ministers invoked whenever they wanted to remind people not to stray from orthodoxy. After surveying New England’s Congregational clergy in 1726, Cotton Mather wrote, “I cannot learn, That among all the Pastors of Two Hundred Churches, there is one Arminian.”18 Yet whether or not there were “real” Arminians in New England, people at the time clearly believed that there were, and perception can be as important as reality in shaping historical events. When ministers expressed alarm about the spreading heresy of Arminianism, they may have been exaggerating, but they were also trying to make sense of confusing religious changes that did not have a simple name.

  Why were Sarah Osborn and other evangelicals in the 1740s so grimly certain that they were standing in the midst of a religious crisis? For those in New England, the first and most visible sign of religious decline was the growing popularity of Anglican worship. Of course, the evangelical movement grew inside Anglican circles in England, and George Whitefield and John Wesley, two of the most influential evangelical leaders of the eighteenth century, were ordained Anglican ministers. But ever since the early 1600s, when Puritans had fled to Massachusetts Bay to escape Anglican persecution, New England ministers had reviled Anglicans and prohibited them from worshipping freely. (Contrary to popular myth, the Puritans did not found New England as a haven of religious freedom, and in order to maintain the purity of their holy commonwealth they severely punished dissenters. Sarah’s home of Rhode Island, founded by the visionary Roger Williams, was exceptional in extending tolerance to all religions.) The situation changed in 1689 when Parliament passed the Toleration Act, which extended religious freedom to all Protestants in the British Empire. Almost immediately afterward, King’s Chapel, the first Anglican church in New England, was founded in Boston, and many of its members ranked among the leading gentry in the colony. Even more shocking to Puritan sensibilities was the decision of several Congregationalist ministers, including Timothy Cutler, the rector of Yale College, to conform to the Church of England in 1722, and the decision of two more ministers to follow their example in 1734.19 By 1776, Massachusetts counted twenty-two Anglican churches and Connecticut thirty-seven. (According to the historians Edwin S. Gaustad and Philip L. Barlow, “A report of 1774 reckoned one out of every 13 citizens of
Connecticut to be an Anglican.”)20 Although some Anglican ministers in the colonies became part of the nascent evangelical movement—for example, Devereux Jarratt in Virginia—many others found evangelical piety too extreme. Rejecting the Calvinist belief in human depravity and predestination as “not only most absurd, but likewise blasphemous against God,” they insisted that humans were saved by their good works as well as by their faith.21

  Since Sarah had briefly attended Newport’s Trinity Church, the largest and wealthiest church in the city, she was particularly aware of the threat that the liberal wing of the Anglican movement posed to Calvinist theology. While she spent Sunday mornings in the First Church of Christ listening to stern sermons about the futility of good works, she knew that only a few blocks away the members of Trinity were listening to a more comforting message. As the Reverend James Honeyman assured his congregation, “Our whole Duty may be brought into a very narrow Compass,” namely, “The Love of God and our Neighbors.”22 In later years, Sarah would condemn this kind of preaching for “rocking . . . People more and more to sleep in the cradle of security instead of Exciting them to fly from the wrath to come.”23