The Friends meetinghouse in Newport, mid-nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.
Sarah was less critical of Quakers (perhaps because one of her closest friends, Susanna Anthony, had grown up in a Quaker family), but most evangelicals judged them to be as dangerous as Anglicans. Besides denying the doctrine of original sin, Quakers claimed that the Bible was not the final revelation of God: all believers had a spark of divinity in them, an “inner light” that made it possible to receive ongoing communications from God. If this were not proof enough of their “enthusiasm,” they also allowed women to lead religious meetings, a clear violation of Paul’s command that women should “keep silence in the churches.” Although most Quakers lived in Pennsylvania, they could be found in all of the colonies by the mid-eighteenth century, and they built a large meetinghouse in Newport.24
Evangelicals were also troubled by the spread of new, “enlightened” ideas about God and human nature. Since Sarah was poor and female, she did not have access to what college students were reading, but she often heard ministers criticizing the “new learning” in their sermons, and she was convinced that Christianity was under attack. Because she lived in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in America, she had a keen sense of the changing intellectual climate of the eighteenth century. Newport’s shops were stocked with books imported from England, and the Philosophical Society, a group that had been founded by George Berkeley, the bishop of Cloyne and one of the eighteenth century’s most famous philosophers, met regularly in Newport’s taverns to discuss the latest theological and scientific works. (Berkeley had lived in Newport from 1729 until 1731.)25 Based on booksellers’ catalogues and the records of both private and circulating libraries, few educated Americans read the works of radicals like Baruch Spinoza (the virtual father of the “radical Enlightenment”), but they were attracted to moderate thinkers like John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, John Tillotson, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury.26 None of these men ever condemned Christianity as “priestcraft” or completely discarded the authority of biblical revelation, but they undermined older Calvinist assumptions about the self and God in quieter, more subtle ways. Shaftesbury, for example, argued that all humans have an innate moral sense that inclines them to ethical behavior, an idea that threatened the doctrine of original sin, and Hutcheson insisted that humans are naturally compassionate. John Tillotson, the archbishop of Canterbury, was especially controversial—and especially popular among the “better sort” in the colonies—because of his rejection of orthodox doctrines like predestination and eternal punishment and his emphasis on good works over doctrinal disputes.27 Tillotson’s sermons, according to one historian, “were probably the most widely read works of religious literature in America between 1690 and 1750,” and his positive view of reason, his focus on morality, and his tolerance left an indelible impression on colonial American religion. After George Whitefield visited Harvard in 1741, he complained that more students were reading Tillotson than Thomas Shepard, the famous Puritan divine: a charge that Harvard’s students and faculty heatedly denied.28
Whitefield was being deliberately polemical, but he had a point. After thousands of books were donated to Harvard and Yale in the early eighteenth century, ministry students were exposed to the ideas of “enlightened” British theologians who questioned traditional Christian doctrines. Although Sarah Osborn probably did not read any of these books herself, she was almost certainly familiar with them. Her uncle, the Reverend John Guyse, devoted much of his illustrious career to defending Calvinism against rationalism, and the authors that he found most objectionable were the same ones who caused controversy in New England. Thomas Chubb’s books, for example, could be found at Harvard despite his denial of original sin and his radical claim that “reason either is, or ought to be, a sufficient guide in matters of religion.” “I truly wish some of our modern & new Books had never arrived or been read there,” complained Benjamin Colman, “& particularly such as Mr. Chubb.”29 Students could also read books by authors like William Whiston, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity; Daniel Whitby, who referred to the doctrine of predestination as “Bull”; and Samuel Clarke, whose elevation of human reason seemed so threatening that Thomas Clap, the president of Yale, eventually removed all his books from the library. (Clarke also portrayed God as a benevolent father, not as a stern judge, and suggested that the doctrine of the Trinity was unscriptural.)30 Although Clap’s censorship may have been an overreaction, at least one Congregationalist minister traced his flirtation with “the dangerous error of Arminius” to “reading Arminian Books, and some of the Writings of such as are called Freethinkers.” Writing in 1738, Edward Wigglesworth, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, commented that his students were “loath to give up” the traditional doctrine of original sin, but “they seem hardly able to bear up against the Current of our English Writers of the present, and latter part of the last Century, who are almost all against it.”31
As Sarah Osborn knew, a small but influential group of Congregationalist clergy had responded to these enlightened ideas by moving in more liberal religious directions. In the 1720s, ministers like Benjamin Wadsworth and William Brattle began preaching a more optimistic form of Calvinism that emphasized religious tolerance, the rational order of the universe, and the benevolence of God, and although they remained orthodox, a small number of others stretched Calvinist theology to the breaking point. Four Congregationalist ministers faced well-publicized disciplinary hearings during the 1730s because of suspicions about their beliefs, and all but one were forced out of their pulpits. Samuel Osborn’s crime was claiming that people could be saved by doing good deeds: “Men’s Obedience is a Cause of their Justification,” he declared. (Despite the common surname, he was not related to Sarah.) Benjamin Kent was even bolder, denying the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. According to his accusers, “he denied an absolute Election, and asserted a conditional one on the foresight of good works.” Other ministers managed to keep their pulpits, but not without a fight. After William Balch was accused of preaching that “Man by Nature is more inclined to Virtue than Vice,” a statement that flatly contradicted Calvinist theology, he was harassed by a conservative faction within his congregation.32
The number of liberal-leaning pastors remained small, but the mere fact of their existence was cause for scandal. Fearful that the faith of the Puritans was being abandoned, the Reverend John White lamented that “some of Our Young Men, and such as are devoted to and educated for, the Ministry of the Gospel, are under Prejudices against, and fall from important Articles of the Faith of these Churches, and cast a favorable Eye upon, embrace, and as far as they dare, argue for, propagate, and preach the Arminian Scheme.”33
Underlying these new ideas were changes occurring in everyday life that contributed to a greater confidence in human agency. As the historian C. C. Goen has argued, the revivalists of the awakening seem to have been less afraid of an actual “Arminian” faction than a changing climate of opinion, “a mood of rising confidence in man’s ability to gain some purchase on the divine favor by human endeavor.”34 During the 1740s traditional ideas about hierarchy and deference had begun to break down under the pressures of political, economic, and scientific change. Politically, these years witnessed the emergence of a more representative form of government that vested authority in the people as well as the monarchy. Because all the colonies elected their lower assemblies, men with the minimal property required to vote felt as though they were important political actors in their own right, not just subjects of the king.35 Scientifically, new discoveries, especially Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, revolutionized the way that people imagined the universe. As the historian Roy Porter has commented, nature now seemed to be “a machine made up of material particles governed by universal laws, whose motions could be given mathematical expression”—a machine that did not seem to work exactly as it had been described in the Bible.36 (If the Bible
were literally true, then why did it portray the sun revolving around the earth instead of the earth revolving around the sun?) And economically, a consumer revolution made it possible for people throughout the colonies to buy a greater variety of British goods than ever before, enabling them to make more extensive choices about their everyday lives: what to eat and drink, what to wear, what books to read, and how to decorate their houses. Shopkeepers in cities and villages and peddlers in the countryside offered so many tempting wares for sale that in 1740 a Boston physician punned that the colonies were suffering from a bad case of “Galloping Consumption.”37 (The word consumption had two meanings in the eighteenth century: it referred both to the purchase of goods and the disease of tuberculosis.) In the seventeenth century only the wealthiest colonists had been able to afford luxuries like “Fine Flanders Laces” and “the Finest Dutch Linens,” but in the early 1740s, as trade with England rapidly expanded, the middling sort found that they, too, could participate in a thriving marketplace.38
The Potter Family of Matunuck, Rhode Island, circa 1740. The family in this portrait demonstrates its social status by displaying some of its most valuable goods: expensive clothing, a tea set, and a young slave. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.
Among the most desired commodities in the eighteenth century were slaves, and there is no doubt that white colonists gained an inflated sense of their own personal agency because of their control over the enslaved. Slaveholders had the power to determine virtually every aspect of slaves’ lives, including whether their children or other loved ones would be sold, and many exercised this power ruthlessly. Psychologically, masters seem to have regarded slaves as symbols of their status and importance, and instead of recoiling at the power they had been given, they prided themselves on it. According to an Anglican priest in Maryland, masters should regard themselves as “God’s overseers,” and slaves should “do all Service for THEM, as if . . . for GOD himself.”39
If slavery had been limited to the South, its effects might have been mostly regional, but in the eighteenth century, slavery could be found in every colony. Although most slaves lived in the South (where they made up 38 percent of the population by 1750), they also toiled as household servants or farm laborers in the North, especially in cities. In Newport in 1748, blacks made up almost 17 percent of the population.40 Although evangelical ministers do not seem to have realized it (and in fact, many of them owned slaves themselves), ministers undermined their message of human sinfulness and helplessness by insisting that white masters had a God-given right to own and control their slaves.
Proud of their ability to influence political decisions, to improve the material quality of their lives, to make consumer choices, and to own slaves, growing numbers of Anglo-Americans found it hard to believe the things the Calvinist tradition taught them. They did not feel helpless, but capable. Not weak, but strong. Not sinful, but worthy of the material goods that filled their parlors and the slaves who toiled in their fields. Although Perry Miller may have been exaggerating when he declared that by 1730, “the greatness of man’s dependency had unaccountably become a euphemism for the greatness of man,” his words contain a grain of truth.41 Even though Americans knew that many things were still tragically out of their control, including the devastatingly high rate of infant mortality, they had new confidence in their ability to shape their lives.
For Sarah Osborn, and for thousands of evangelicals like her, this was nothing less than hubris. Only God could determine an individual’s destiny.
Turned Fool and Distracted
Given the growing faith in human goodness, free will, and the sufficiency of reason, it is not surprising that evangelicals were often mocked for being too extreme in their piety—too strict and self-abasing. “Some would tell me I was turned fool and distracted when I said that I had been a vile sinner,” Sarah confessed in her memoir, “for everybody knew I had been a sober woman all my days.” When she insisted that true Christians had to give up “amusements” like singing, dancing, gossiping, and playing cards, many of her friends wondered why she was making such a fuss about trivial self-indulgences. “Some said they should hate such religion as caused people to forsake their friends,” she remembered. “Others said in a way of derision they supposed I thought they were monsters now.”42
Hostile jokes like these stung, but far more upsetting were the critiques of Protestants who might have been expected to sympathize with the emerging evangelical movement. Not all Protestants in New England believed that the awakening was a genuine “work of God,” and as the revivals became increasingly emotional in 1742 and 1743, ministers (and their congregations) began to split into competing parties. Charles Chauncy, one of the leading opponents of the awakening, agreed with evangelicals that the “Spirituality of Christians” rested in their “Lowliness, and Humility,” but he angrily accused the “awakened” of lacking both. In a tract published in 1743, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England, he complained that while converts loudly chastised themselves for their sinfulness, they were clearly proud of their piety. Ministers like George Whitefield were not true Christians but “pompous” zealots who went from town to town “boasting of their own superior Goodness.”43
Converts during the revivals were criticized for being self-righteous, overly emotional, and “enthusiastic.” As people cried out for mercy, wept over their sins, fell into “fits,” or, in the most radical cases, claimed to have seen visions of angels or heard heavenly voices, ministers worried that the revivals had spun out of control. Chauncy argued that “strange Effects upon the Body” were “produced . . . by the wild and extravagant Conduct of some over-heated Preachers,” not by the Holy Spirit. Pointing to the example of James Davenport, who was infamous for stamping his feet, shrieking, and threatening his listeners with graphic descriptions of damnation, Chauncy claimed that ministers had deliberately inflamed their listeners’ passions. Ezra Stiles, the future president of Yale, remembered later that it seemed as if “multitudes were seriously, soberly, and solemnly out of their wits.”44
When Sarah began writing her memoir, the bitter controversies over the revivals (and the complaints about her own newfound piety) were never far from her thoughts, and besides hoping to strengthen her commitment to Christ, she also seems to have wanted to defend the rising evangelical movement from criticism. At first she seems to have intended to keep her memoir private until her death, hoping that it would be read by future generations of Christians who might “providentially light” on it after she was gone. (There was a thriving custom of manuscript exchange in early America, and Sarah may have hoped that someday her memoir would be passed around within evangelical circles, as indeed it was.)45 But at some point she decided that her memoir was too valuable to put away in a drawer during her lifetime. In 1744, only a year after the ink on her pages had dried, she sent it to one of her closest friends, the Reverend Joseph Fish of Stonington, Connecticut, who responded that he had read it “with close attention and great Delight, not observing anything in it that needed Correction.” With this implicit nod of approval, she began sharing it with friends, especially members of her female prayer group.46 She seems to have envisioned her memoir as an extension of the transatlantic revivals, a way of preaching the gospel.
Sarah fashioned her memoir into a powerful justification of the revivals and, more broadly, evangelical theology. She portrayed the story of her life as the gospel in miniature, a story of sin and redemption that spoke to universal truths about the human condition.47 In order to defend evangelicalism against the challenge posed by the Enlightenment, she argued that humans were weak and flawed, the reverse image of the newly emerging “modern” self. She was not autonomous or independent, but helpless; she could not earn salvation through good works, but only through grace; she could not understand God through unaided reason, but only through revelation; and she was not essentially good by nature but vile. And in response to critics of the revivals, she argued that the
awakening was not the result of overheated passions, but an instance of divine grace. Sprinkling her narrative with tidbits of theological wisdom, she left no room for doubt about how she wanted her story to be read. At the end of her memoir she explained, “My intent has been all along to show how God’s glorious grace has triumphed over my sins and temptations, infirmities, and everything that has risen in opposition to it.”48
Underneath everything else, Sarah’s memoir was about the transforming power of divine love. The God she imagined in the pages of her memoir was often angry and punishing, but he was also a “father” and “friend” who loved her despite her sinfulness. Because she had such a strong sense of God’s power, she expressed both astonishment and gratitude for his “free grace and redeeming love.”49 His love for her—a poor, insignificant woman—seemed too remarkable to be true.
Although many evangelicals expressed amazement at their salvation, Sarah’s sense of wonder seems to have been more than simply a nod to convention. She had often doubted God’s love during her periods of “backsliding,” and in her worst moments she feared that he had abandoned her. By writing about her tangible experiences of his love, she hoped to reassure herself that even when she felt most alone and vulnerable, he had not deserted her. “He hath said I will never Leave thee nor forsake thee,” she reminded herself, quoting from Hebrews.50 Her memoir is the story of her slow, halting steps away from feelings of worthlessness toward the breathtaking realization that God loved her.
Sarah wrote about her religious experiences for many reasons, but this was the most deeply felt: she wanted to express her love to God in return for his goodness. Although she hoped that future Christians would read her manuscripts, she sometimes turned away from her imagined audience to speak directly to God. “Let me Love thee much whom I never can love too much,” she prayed.51
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