In comparison with the rural villages of Freetown and Dighton, however, Newport was a city filled with irresistible temptations. With a population of only four thousand in 1730, Newport was not yet the bustling commercial center it would become a decade later, and Thames Street, its major thoroughfare, was still a rutted, mud-caked road where hogs sometimes wandered in front of coaches. But as the members of the rising merchant class made a fortune in shipping, they built imposing new houses (one that was rumored to have running water), stocked their sideboards with silver, bought large numbers of slaves, and flaunted the latest fashions from Britain. When George Berkeley, the British philosopher, arrived in Newport in 1729, he found “a rage for finery, the men in flaming scarlet coats and waistcoats, laced and fringed with brightest glaring yellow.”10 The houses, too, were colorful, painted in dazzling hues of red, yellow, green, and blue, and they were filled with imported goods brought by Newport’s ships. Taverns were so popular that a group of residents complained that “the great Increase of Taverns, Alehouses victualing houses & other houses of common entertainment” had led to “Evil practices and great abuses.” When Sarah was not tending shop for her father, she could watch a horserace on the outskirts of town, learn the latest songs and dances from one of the many local teachers, or parade up and down Thames Street arm in arm with her friends. Never before had she been able to make so many choices about how to spend her time. Rather than trying to become the obedient child her parents wanted her to be, she decided to become someone else—someone less sober and anxious. Forgetting her resolutions to become a Christian, she “got into company and was full of vanity.”11
A Plan of the Town of Newport, Rhode Island. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.
Although all Sarah’s stories hinted at her anger and unhappiness, nothing in her memoir prepared her readers for the shock of what came next. Immediately after admitting that she had “got into company,” she abruptly changed the subject. “One day,” she began to write, but before she could bring herself to finish her sentence, she burst out in an agony of grief, “Oh that I could mention it with weeping eyes and a bleeding heart, and after such a manner that glory may redound for the glorious God, while I with shame confess my monstrous, God-provoking, and hell-deserving sin.” Struggling to compose herself, she admitted that she had been so despondent that she had considered suicide:
One day . . . my mother being very angry with me, and as I thought for no reason at all, my passion was raised to a dreadful degree, but durst not vent it by saying anything to her. I reflected upon many such seasons and thought myself exceedingly wronged. Satan took the advantage of me at this time, and tempted me to believe that there was no one upon earth Lived so miserable a Life as I did. Neither was hell worse. I had therefore better take away my Life and so know the worst at first, for that hell would be my portion sooner or Later, for my sins was so great they could never be pardoned. At first I started at the temptation and thought it a dreadful thing to murder myself. But Satan hurried me on, till at Last, monster that I was, I yielded so far as to think how to accomplish so hellish a design. And being in a garret, there was seemingly a voice which said, “there’s a rope and there’s a place,” which was one of the crosspieces in the roof. “What hinders you now?”12
Filled with rage and despair, Sarah imagined how easy it would be to tie the rope around her neck, climb onto a chair, and lash herself to one of the rafters. By the time her parents found her body, she would be dead, damned to a hell that could not possibly be any more terrible than her nightmarish existence on earth. Like Judas, who had hanged himself after betraying Christ, she felt worthless and ashamed, utterly forsaken by both humanity and God.
Yet at the last minute Sarah felt a sense of God’s nearness, an overwhelming feeling of his presence that made her realize that she was not alone. It was as though God had collapsed the distance between them, speaking to her across time and space. With her hands trembling and her eyes blurred by tears, she remembered how he had pulled her out of Satan’s grasp immediately after her decision to destroy herself. “And being thus drove by the violence of temptation and my own corruptions, I thought to do it,” she wrote in large, shaky handwriting. “But while in the utmost Hurry, anguish, and distress, these words come to me with great power, ‘resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you.’” Recalling these words from the Epistle of James, she felt as though she heard them for the first time, and as she fell to the ground in prayer, she begged God to save her from her despair. “Oh! how then did I fall down prostrate on the floor,” she remembered, “and adore the infinite goodness of a compassionate God.” Breaking down into “floods of tears,” she “returned thanks for so great a deliverance.” Even thirteen years later, she could not remember that awful day in the garret without weeping, smearing the ink on the page.13
Sarah’s account of her suicidal crisis. Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Despite the old adage that “time heals all wounds,” Sarah’s unsteady handwriting, her blotched ink, and even her choice of words suggest that the intervening years had not smoothed away the jagged edges of her pain. Without realizing it she slipped into the present tense as she wrote, erasing thirteen years with a single stroke of her pen. Instead of remembering the biblical words that “came” to her, she wrote, “These words come to me with great power.” That day had been so frightening, so confusing, and so heartbreaking that she seemed to relive her despair while gripping her pen in her hand.14
To anyone who has ever been tormented by thoughts of suicide, Sarah’s despair will seem painfully familiar. Like other people in the eighteenth century, she would have called it “melancholy,” but she described it in language that matches our modern understanding of depression, or, in more clinical terms, a “major depressive state.” Devastated by feelings of hopelessness, guilt, and loss, she felt as though she were being crushed beneath the weight of her sorrow. Her grief was so intense and immediate that it seemed to obliterate the future. To borrow William Styron’s image of his mental breakdown, darkness had become visible, and she could no longer imagine anything beyond the unbearable pain of her present life. Consumed by her suffering, she felt as though nothing else existed. She was empty, alone, “miserable.” Even hell could not be worse.15
Sarah Osborn lived more than a hundred years before Sigmund Freud, and she would never have used psychological language to describe her suffering: words like repression would have been incomprehensible to her. Yet there are striking parallels between her narrative of her suicidal crisis and modern psychological theory. Long before psychoanalysts suggested that depression should be understood as misdirected anger that has been turned inward against the self rather than outward against the world, Sarah’s narrative offered a textbook example of the theory. Alice Miller has argued that children who have been forbidden to express their anger often become self-destructive and suicidal, venting their repressed rage on themselves rather than their parents.16 Although Sarah’s account of her crisis is unfortunately quite short, she claimed that her ordeal began after she struggled to stifle her resentment of her mother, who had been “very angry” with her. “My passion was raised to a dreadful degree,” she remembered, “but [I] durst not vent it by saying anything to her.” Reared in a religious culture that taught children to be obedient, she choked back her anger instead of daring to challenge her mother’s authority. Retreating to the garret in a silent fury, she turned her explosive rage inward against herself rather than outward against her mother, desperately deciding to kill herself. Even after her crisis passed and she finally came downstairs, she seems to have disguised her true emotions. “When I had with floods of tears returned thanks for so great a deliverance, and committed myself to God’s keeping,” she wrote, “I came down rejoicing and perfectly calm in my temper.”17
Although Sarah continued to struggle with bouts of despair throughout her lif
e, she managed to overcome her suicidal feelings because of her growing faith in God’s love. If, as Miller argues, a “sympathetic listener” can save someone from self-destruction, then Sarah’s listener was God. She poured out her sorrows to him in prayer, and when she most needed him he sent her precious words of comfort: “Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you.” Even though she continued to see him as angry as well as “compassionate,” she had begun to outgrow her earlier conception of him as a larger version of her parents. As she talked to her friends, listened to sermons, and, most important, read the Bible for herself, she developed a richer, more complicated image of God: he was a “king,” a “conqueror,” a protector, a friend, the “dearest Lord.” Even though she had been ready to destroy herself, he had saved her. “Lord,” she wrote, “fill me with gratitude, flaming Love too, and praise of thee, my God and King, who Like a mighty Conqueror appeared for me in the mount of difficulty and put to flight the grand enemy of my soul’s salvation.” Just as he had done during her two other brushes with death, he had made her see that she was worthy of being loved.18
Sarah almost always portrayed God in masculine terms as a father, but she occasionally used feminine imagery when writing about Scripture, imagining God’s word as a mother that nourished and comforted her. In a letter to a friend, for example, she thanked God for sending her a reassuring biblical text at a time when she felt frightened and vulnerable. Remembering his words “be not afraid,” she felt as though she were lying “becalmed in his bosom sucking by faith the breast of the promises given me by a faithful God.” On another occasion she remembered that she had “sucked Large draughts of consolation” from the promise in Psalm 84:11, “the Lord God is a sun and shield.”19
Yet Sarah’s belief in a compassionate God did not offer a simple cure for her distress. Because evangelicals believed that true saints had an overwhelming sense of their own “vileness,” she repeatedly reminded herself that she was a “wretch” who did not deserve God’s mercy. “Oh, for Jesus’s sake, suffer me not to do anything that will tend to puff up self,” she prayed. “Oh, remove all spiritual pride and keep me Low at the foot of Jesus.” Her faith both wounded and healed her, alternately aggravating and relieving her feelings of despair.20
Since many evangelicals claimed to have been besieged by the temptation to commit suicide, Sarah may have decided to share her story because it seemed to fit common expectations about the agony of religious doubt. Even though the actual suicide rate seems to have been fairly low, many converts claimed to have contemplated self-destruction. According to Susanna Anthony, Sarah’s closest friend in Newport, Satan had tempted her to believe that she was “an outcast, rejected of God,” and she decided it would be better to kill herself than “to live to treasure up wrath against the day of wrath.”21 In the eyes of eighteenth-century evangelicals, considering suicide was not necessarily a sign of a disordered mind (although in some cases they saw it as extreme) but proof of religious fervor. As Christians struggled to understand God’s will, they were forced to ask themselves excruciating questions about whether they had been destined for heaven or for hell. As ministers admitted, “some very godly men” had considered killing themselves, even “the Best of Saints upon earth.” Because Satan was enraged by their goodness, he saved his worst “snares” for them. “When the Devil has no hope of prevailing, yet he will Tempt unto Crime,” the Reverend Increase Mather explained. “He will do it, only to vex and molest the faithful servants of GOD!”22
Yet even though evangelicals assumed that many sinners would be tempted to commit suicide, they also condemned the “horrid crime of self-murder” as the ultimate act of rebellion against God. Suicide was the most shocking sin a person could commit—in Sarah’s words, a “monstrous, God-provoking, and hell-deserving sin.” Christians were supposed to accept their sufferings as God’s will, but by the act of suicide they tried to wrest their fate out of his hands.23
Sarah tried to make sense of her anguish in the garret by blaming both Satan and herself for her suicidal feelings. On one hand, she portrayed herself as a helpless pawn in a cosmic battle between God and Satan—a battle over who would possess her soul. Using passive language, she described Satan as the cause of her despair: “Satan took the advantage of me,” she swore. “Satan hurried me on.” It even seemed as though Satan spoke to her, telling her where to find a rope and reminding her of the crosspiece in the roof. Yet on the other hand, she insisted that Satan would have been helpless to hurt her if not for her inherent corruption. She had been so sinful that she had provoked God into allowing her to be tempted.24
Searching for a rational explanation for her suicidal crisis, Sarah concluded that God had punished her for disobeying her parents. In case any children ever read her memoir, she warned them to “submit to and obey their own parents or other superiors in all things right and not suffer passion to rise in their breasts.” If she had been a more dutiful daughter, she would never have been afflicted.25
Yet Sarah could not completely suppress her anger against her parents. Without intending it, she gave her story two contradictory plots. On the surface, she claimed to have been such a sinful, disobedient child that God had allowed Satan to tempt her. She alone had been at fault. Yet underneath her pious confession of guilt lay a less orthodox explanation for her psychological anguish. Undermining the purely religious moral of her story, she blamed her mother, not Satan or her own depravity, for “provoking” her to suicide. At the beginning of her account, she made it clear that her crisis started when her mother had been “very angry” with her “for no reason at all,” and at the end, she warned parents not to enrage their children by being too harsh. Echoing Paul’s words to the Ephesians, she chided, “Oh, Let parents be entreated to be very careful that they don’t provoke their children to wrath by being too severe to them since a subtle adversary will take the advantage of such seasons.” Although she tried to soften the impact of these resentful words by emphasizing her own “corruptions,” she could not bring herself to justify her mother’s treatment of her.26 Even fifteen years after her despair in the garret, her memory of that afternoon still angered her.
As Sarah eventually seems to have realized, she had not been able to offer a coherent explanation of her suicidal crisis. Sometime after she finished writing, she scrawled in the margins of her memoir, “Is it duty to let this criminal affair stand recorded.” Perhaps she was ashamed to admit that she had thought about the terrible crime of self-murder, but since many other evangelicals openly discussed suicide, it seems more likely that she was troubled by something in the substance of her account. Others almost never mentioned a nonreligious reason for their despair, and, most important, they usually described their suicidal feelings in the context of conversion. Nathan Cole, for example, claimed that Satan made a last-ditch effort to snatch his soul after he was “born again.”27 In contrast, Sarah did not experience conversion until several years later. Without intending it, she implied that her crisis had been triggered not by her deepening relationship to God but by her uncontrollable anger at her mother.
When Samuel Hopkins published extracts from Sarah Osborn’s memoir after her death, he decided to omit her account of her suicidal feelings. Besides sympathizing with her heartbreaking wish to forget the whole “criminal affair,” he may have worried that other Christians might be confused or misled by the conflicting meanings embedded in her story. He must have been particularly troubled by her underlying tone of self-justification. Despite her attempt to turn the story of her suicidal crisis into a lesson about human sinfulness and God’s punishments, she had also used it to voice her pent-up rage against her parents, especially her mother. At the age of fifteen or sixteen she had “durst not vent it.”28 But when she wrote her memoir at the age of twenty-nine, it spilled out on the page despite her best efforts to contain it.
Hear Ye the Rod
In the weeks and months after her suicidal crisis, Sarah slowly recovered from her despair. Taking refug
e in her faith, she promised God to become a more faithful Christian. Yet as she confessed in her memoir, her “goodness” lasted only a short season. Once again she fell into sin, and once again a sovereign God chastised her with his “rod.”29
Despite Sarah’s resolutions to lead a more devout life, she could not help being drawn into the whirl of Newport social life. There was always something entertaining to see in the streets: fashionable matrons showed off their finery as they rode by in horse-drawn carriages; drunks brawled outside taverns; fiddlers strolled up and down playing for the crowds; and gamblers—many of them gentlemen—placed bets on horseraces and cockfights. While Christians went to prayer meetings with Bibles tucked under their arms, Sarah, now seventeen, amused herself by visiting friends and learning the latest card games. “After all this, oh that with deep humility of soul, with sorrow and shame I could speak of it,” she wrote, “I relapsed again and was full of nothing but vanity. I used to sing songs, dance, play at cards with company as oft I could get opportunities.” Defying her parents yet again, she also began “keeping company” “with a young man something against my parents’ will.”30
The young man was Samuel Wheaten. Although Sarah wrote very little about him in her memoir (we would not even know his name if not for Samuel Hopkins’s account of her life), we know that he was a sailor whom she had met somewhere in the city, perhaps at a card game or dance. We also know that within a few weeks or months of their first meeting, they had fallen in love, and when he asked her to marry him she said yes.
As Sarah must have expected, her parents did not think their daughter was ready for marriage. Since most New England women did not marry until they were twenty-two or twenty-three, the Haggars probably thought she was too young.31 They also may have worried about what sort of future she would have as a sailor’s wife. Samuel spent many months of the year sailing to wherever merchants wanted to trade their goods, and he made very little money. Unless he managed to work himself up to the more lucrative position of captain, he would never be financially secure. Most important, Sarah’s parents seemed to suspect that he was not completely trustworthy. “At first they Liked him,” Sarah claimed, but they changed their minds because of “false reports raised of him.” Perhaps they feared he would turn out to be one of the irresponsible sailors who drank away their money in the local taverns. Hoping to dampen their daughter’s ardor, the Haggars swore they would never give her a marriage portion if she dared marry him. (It was customary for New England parents to give their daughters clothing, kitchen utensils, and other housekeeping goods as a marriage gift.) As Sarah remembered, “While they was angry with me they often threatened to give me nothing, which I thought was very hard.”32
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