Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  For years Sarah had stifled her anger at her parents, but when they forbade her to marry the man she loved, she became enraged. Not only did she resolve to marry Samuel, but since they refused to give her a marriage portion she decided to steal it from them. Although they did not have much cash, she found it easy to pocket things from the shelves of their shop. “I had been very diligent to work,” she explained, “so was tempted by Satan and wicked companions to believe it was no sin to take anything I wanted, for it was my own by right—my parents having no other child here but me. And accordingly I did, in trifling things to the value of 30 pounds as I cast them up afterwards and was exceedingly perplexed when I found how much they amounted to.”33 Thirty pounds was a great deal of money at the time, more than she could have made by working as a seamstress or a teacher for several months.

  As Sarah tried to explain to both herself and her readers how she could have sunk to the level of a thief, she put much of the blame on her “wicked companions.” Although she had wanted to return the stolen items after realizing their value, her friends convinced her to remain silent:

  Those who had persuaded me to take them and had kept them for me pleaded with me not to do it, for I must discover them and it would be base ingratitude in me so to do when they had done it all for my good. And more than that it would make a breach between my parents and me that would never be made up, for they knew they would make me a public example. And still insisted upon it: it was no sin. So at last all these things prevailed over my resolutions and I kept them [the goods] with this thought: that if ever I was able I would make restitution. But it has cost me thousands of tears since.34

  Under her friends’ bad influence, she decided that the risks of confession were too great. Not only would her friends feel betrayed, but her parents might decide to make a “public example” of her: they might tell their neighbors or the congregation or, worse, file criminal charges against her. To even conceive of such a thing, Sarah must have already been deeply estranged from her parents, but she still seems to have wanted their love and approval. She was terrified to think that she might make a “breach” in their relationship that she would never be able to close. Most of all, she thought her friends were right to argue that her theft had not been a sin but her just due. It was not she who had been in the wrong, but her parents.

  Looking back, however, Sarah realized that she had been a “vile wretch”—not only a sinner but literally a criminal. If not for God’s grace she would have become as bad as the thieves and vagabonds who were publicly whipped on the street corners. “Oh Lord,” she testified, “how just hadst thou been if thou hadst Left me entirely to myself, and if thou hadst, nothing would have been too bad for such a vile wretch as I to have committed. But blessed be God that withheld me from such sins against strangers as would have brought me to open justice and exposed myself and family to disgrace and shame.” (Here she closely echoed John Bunyan, who claimed that if not for “a miracle of precious grace,” he would have “laid myself open, even to the stroke of those laws, which bring some to disgrace and open shame before the face of the world.”)35 Unlike those who celebrated human goodness, she thought there was only a fine line separating the “virtuous” from the outwardly criminal.

  When Samuel Hopkins read Sarah’s account of her theft many years later, he found it so troubling that he decided not to include it in his published version of her memoir. Since he shared her dark view of human nature, he probably was not bothered by the fact that she had stolen from her parents; indeed, he could have used her story to emphasize God’s free grace to even the worst of sinners. Had not Jesus saved the thief who was crucified next to him? Yet Hopkins seems to have feared that Sarah’s words of repentance were not completely genuine. While she admitted her wrongdoing, she also tried to justify herself by pointing to her parents’ unreasonableness and the evil influence of her “wicked companions.” The lesson she drew from her experiences was not what he would have chosen. Addressing herself to children, she wrote, “Oh Let children tremble at the thoughts of doing any such thing, and be entreated to shun all such company as will persuade them to it.” Rather than accepting full responsibility for her actions, she suggested that she had been cruelly misled by bad company.36 As Hopkins knew (and as we shall see), she also continued to remain silent about her crime even after she supposedly had been reborn in Christ. Her parents did not realize what she had done, and she could not bring herself to confess until eleven years later.

  Sarah Haggar married Samuel Wheaten on October 21, 1731, at the age of seventeen. Although she did not describe the ceremony (she recorded nothing except the date), they were probably married by a civil magistrate. Reformed Protestants, unlike Catholics, treated marriage as a civil contract rather than a sacrament, and couples were usually wed at home. Even though marriage was a covenant that symbolized Christ’s love of his “elect,” most Protestants did not think that clergy should preside over weddings, and until 1733 only Quaker and Anglican ministers had the legal authority to perform marriages in Rhode Island.37 If Sarah and Samuel were like other couples, they probably put on their best clothes (but not the elaborate finery that brides and grooms wear today) and then exchanged their vows in front of a justice of the peace and a small group of well-wishers.

  Although it was customary in New England for women to be married at home, it is hard to imagine that Sarah and Samuel were welcome in her parents’ house. They may not have even told the Haggars of their plans. According to Rhode Island’s legal code, couples could not be married until they had published their intention in a public place for fourteen days, but Sarah and Samuel may have persuaded someone to perform the ceremony in secret. In theory, the penalties for illegal marriages were stiff—magistrates could be fined or suspended from office, and couples could be whipped, fined, or imprisoned—but the laws were rarely enforced. Indeed, later in her life Sarah recorded another woman’s secret marriage in her diary.38

  After their marriage Sarah and Samuel left Newport to visit some of his friends in the country. Perhaps they did not know where else to go. Since her parents had refused to give her a marriage portion, they did not have any of the pots, spoons, furniture, or linens they needed to “go to housekeeping,” and despite Sarah’s theft, they may not have had enough money to pay rent.39 Since Samuel would not go to sea again until the spring, they stayed with his friends for the first five months of their marriage.

  While Sarah never expressed regret about her marriage, her first months with Samuel were filled with guilt. Instead of describing her happiness, she remembered her deep shame at her disobedience of both her parents and God. “I thought I could have Laid down my very Life to have recompensed my parents for the wrong I had done them,” she wrote. “Then that sin was more clear to me than ever before. I could no longer flatter myself with hopes that it was no sin, but in bitter agonies of soul pleaded with God to forgive me for it and to give me a competency of this world so that I might make restitution.” Although she decided it was not her “duty” to confess her sin to her parents unless she could repay them, she begged God to have mercy on her. Sometimes she let herself appear “merry,” but inwardly she was disconsolate. “I had no real pleasure,” she wrote. She loved Samuel, but she thought nothing could ease her sadness except God’s grace.40

  Samuel and Sarah returned to Newport in the spring. He needed to leave on another voyage, and she, now pregnant, may have hoped that her parents would welcome her home as a prodigal. Whether or not she suffered from the exhaustion and nausea that often accompany the first trimester of pregnancy, she may have felt vulnerable as she prepared to see them again. Would they embrace and forgive her? Would they promise to put the past behind them?

  The answer, sadly, was no. According to Sarah, five months had not been long enough to heal the rift between them. “After I came home I met with much affliction in many respects,” she wrote. As she had done earlier in her memoir, she briefly slipped into the present tense, rememberin
g the past so intensely that she seemed to be experiencing it again. “My parents are more set against me than ever,” she lamented, “but it was not for anything that Justified it.” Since she later decided to scratch out the words “Justified it” as well as the next eight lines, which are now illegible, we do not know what she originally meant to say, but she was clearly resentful that her parents had decided to continue punishing her. Although she tried to sound less angry in the lines she allowed to remain on the page, she admitted that she had “let nature rise”: “It seemed to me that the whole world was in arms against me. I thought I was the most despised creature Living upon earth. I used to pray to God in secret to relieve me but did not, as I ought, see his hand in permitting it so to be as a just punishment for my vile sins. And therefore was not humbled under it as I ought but let nature rise, and acted very imprudently in many respects. I was then with child, and often Lamented that I was Like to bring a child into such a world of sorrow.”41 After Samuel left her in Newport, she felt alone and unloved, adrift in a world that seemed to “despise” her.

  In retrospect Sarah interpreted her troubles as God’s punishment for her vile sins. As she explained, she should have asked herself why God had brought her more sorrow, but infuriated by her parents, she never looked inward to examine her own conscience. As ministers often warned their congregations, God’s rod had a voice. “The Lord’s voice crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom shall see thy name,” the prophet Micah had declared. “Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it.” Since God never sent afflictions without reason, Christians had to search their hearts for every unknown sin. If a sinner dared to say, “It is my lot to lie under a dumb and silent rod, I do not understand its language, I cannot hear its voice, I cannot find the sin that is pointed at by it,” God might be provoked into an even greater display of wrath. “It very much aggravates the affliction to God’s people, when they know not the language of it,” a minister admonished.42 Suffering was rarely mysterious; it was the logical consequence of sin.

  In practice this meant that an afflicted person was supposed to “accuse, judge, and condemn himself, for being the cause and procurer of his own troubles.” In the words of John Flavel, a seventeenth-century British Dissenter whose works remained popular in eighteenth-century America, a suffering person should ask, “Lord, what special corruption is it that this Rod is sent to rebuke; what sinful neglect doth it come to humble me for?” Many other ministers repeated his words. “It concerns you to consider what you have been, and done, that has provoked the LORD thus to deal with you,” one clergyman wrote in 1737. Another urged people who had met with “heavy and grievous afflictions” to ask, “What special article of repentance does this affliction find in me, to be repented of? What miscarriage does this affliction find in me, to be repented of?” Softening their language, clergymen admitted that physical or psychological suffering was not always a sign of God’s anger, but they still argued that it was “safest” to beg his forgiveness. “God sometimes visits his people with affliction for the trial and exercise of their grace, and for their spiritual instruction, more than for the correction of their sin,” a minister explained. “But, sin being the original and foundation of all affliction, it is safest when it is our own case, and most acceptable to God to look on sin as the procuring cause.”43

  Although Sarah did not “condemn” herself at the age of eighteen, she saw her life differently at the age of twenty-nine. As she searched for the hidden meanings in her story, she concluded that God had punished her for disobeying her parents, stealing from them, and failing to keep her vows to “lead a new life.” “I blush and am ashamed when I remember my notorious ingratitude,” she wrote. “Oh break this heart of flint, dearest Lord, that it may melt into tears of contrition, and never suffer me to forgive myself because thou hast forgiven me.”44 If she had been a better Christian, she would have listened more carefully to the voice of God’s rod.

  The Heavy News

  On October 27, 1732, while Samuel was still at sea, Sarah gave birth to a son. Summing up her pregnancy, her hopes for her unborn child, and her labor in a few short words, she later wrote that she “sometimes found a disposition to dedicate my babe to God while in the womb and did so at all seasons of secret prayer. And after it was born, my husband being at sea, I could not rest till I had solemnly given it up to God in baptism. I met with many trials in my Lying in, it being an extreme cold season.”45 She was only eighteen years old.

  Hidden behind these terse words lay a vast store of memories that Sarah decided not to share. Based on evidence from other women’s diaries and letters, however, we can piece together a fragmentary account of what she may have experienced. If Sarah followed the pattern of other women, she spent the last weeks of her pregnancy preparing not only for the arrival of a new child (there were gowns, hats, and blankets to sew) but, more soberly, for the possibility of death. As the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has found, maternal mortality was high compared to modern rates. Whereas only one out of ten thousand women dies in childbirth today in the United States, the midwife Martha Ballard recorded “one maternal death for every 198 living births” in late-eighteenth-century Maine. (Since Ballard’s records suggest that she was a particularly skilled midwife, the average rate in the colonies was probably higher. In mid-eighteenth-century London and Dublin, there were between 30 and 200 maternal deaths per thousand births.)46 One Massachusetts woman kept a small diary in which she gratefully recorded every exhausting labor that both she and her newest infant had survived. “The Lord appeared for me and made me the living mother of another living Child,” she rejoiced. “This is the third time the Lord has appeared for me in the perilous hour of Childbearing.” Women referred to childbirth as travail. As the consequence of Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, it was usually hard and painful, and it was often accompanied by fears of death.47

  Since childbirth was almost entirely controlled by women (male doctors had only recently begun to contest midwives’ authority), Sarah probably summoned her midwife and a group of female friends when her labor pains began. Besides bringing her the customary “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes” to sustain her during labor, they may have also brought special herbs to relieve the pain. Their job was to help her walk in order to hasten labor, to hold her and comfort her if she began shaking or vomiting, and to encourage her through the worst contractions. During the last intense stage of pushing, they may have supported her as she reclined in their laps or sat on a special birthing stool with an open seat. When her son was born, they would have cut his umbilical cord and washed him, and then the midwife would have made sure that she was not beginning to show signs of fever or other complications. Although Sarah remembered enduring many “trials” during her lying in (the time of rest following childbirth, a period that probably lasted only a few days), her problems did not involve her health but the surprisingly frigid weather. Since it was only October, she might not have bought her stock of firewood for the winter, or perhaps she was too poor to afford any. She spent her first days huddled with her son to stay warm.48

  What Sarah remembered best about the days before and after her son’s birth was her desire to bring him into covenant with God. Imitating the example of Hannah, in the first book of Samuel, who had promised to give her child to God, she dedicated her child to God while he was still in the womb. (Unable to conceive, Hannah had prayed, “O Lord of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thy handmaid a man child, then I will give him unto the Lord all the days of his life.”) Also like Hannah, Sarah chose to name her son Samuel. Perhaps she wanted to name him after his father, but since she seems to have closely identified with Hannah (and continued to allude to her in later diaries), her choice seems to have been at least partially motivated by religious considerations. Since as many as three in ten infants born in New England did not survive to their first birthday, many parents seem t
o have hoped that giving their children biblical names would offer them special protection. In one New England church, for example, more than 80 percent of new members enrolled between 1716 and 1758 were named after biblical heroes and heroines.49

  Besides choosing a biblical name for her son, Sarah brought him to be baptized soon after his birth. Although Congregationalists did not believe that baptism could convey salvation, they did consider it a “seal of the covenant”: a tangible sign of God’s promise to redeem his chosen people. Even though God had not promised that all the children of the “elect” would be saved, he usually chose to “cast the Lines of election . . . through the loins of godly Parents.”50 Repeating what her own parents had done, Sarah wanted to bring her child under the protection of the covenant. “O how much comfort do those parents Lose who never gave their children up to God in baptism in their infancy,” she wrote. “And how sad for children themselves to be deprived of the privilege of pleading with God for covenant blessings. My being dedicated to God in my infancy always put an argument into my mouth to beg of God that I might not cut myself off since I was a child of the covenant [and] from a child given to him in baptism.” Although she knew that baptism did not guarantee her child’s salvation, she “could not rest” until a minister had blessed Samuel and welcomed him into the church. Her sense of urgency was not unique: most parents in New En gland brought their infants to be baptized as soon as possible, often within two weeks of their birth, even if it meant breaking the ice on the baptismal font.51