The fact that Sarah was guided by a verse from Exodus, a book about escaping slavery, suggests the precariousness of her situation in the summer of 1742. She seems to have hoped that just as Moses had led the Israelites out of bondage, her marriage would lead her out of poverty. After her school had failed the year before, she had agreed to work as a housekeeper in exchange for room and board, but she had no steady source of income. (As always, she seems to have eked out a little extra money by sewing and baking.) She had been offered a position teaching school outside Newport, but her devotion to her church and the women’s society made her disinclined to move. When Henry asked her to marry him, she found it “very remarkable that God was this way providing for me.” Henry was not rich, but he made a decent living as a tailor. When they were married, on May 5, 1742, she believed that God had sent a good Christian man to give her and her son a better life. “During the whole time of the ceremony,” she wrote, “I did enjoy much of God’s gracious presence and was enabled to renew my engagements with the blessed Jesus and to give my whole self to him while giving my self to my husband. Oh surely Christ did sweetly manifest his Love to my soul. A happy marriage this was indeed.”84
Only four months later, though, she and Henry went bankrupt. In the booming economy of the early 1740s, he had hoped to make a fortune by investing in a ship, but for reasons that Sarah never explained he lost his hard-earned savings instead. Since Sarah blacked out almost her entire account of their financial struggles (two pages in all), few of her words can be deciphered, but it is clear that the family was plunged into poverty. “The debts was due,” she remembered, but “month in and month out we could raise no more cash.” Since married women could not own any property of their own, it is likely that creditors seized her meager savings. Henry sold all the goods in his shop as a last resort (he may have been afraid of debtors’ prison), but because they were forced to part with things “under price,” they still owed “a hundred pounds or more.”85
Although Sarah crossed out most of her account of their bankruptcy, probably out of shame, she left a few sentences untouched. She wanted people to know that if she and Henry were unable to repay their creditors, it had not been out of “carelessness” but from genuine poverty. Besides regretting the “wrong” they had done to others, she worried about dishonoring her “profession”—in other words, her Christian faith. “And what does the LORD require of you?” the prophet Micah had asked. “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Quoting this verse, Sarah insisted that she had always tried to treat people with “justice,” but in this case she and Henry were powerless. They simply had no money to repay their debts.86
As always, though, Sarah affirmed that God had afflicted them for their own good. She was ashamed of their inability to repay their creditors, but not of being poor, and although she was frank about her desire for a “comfortable” life with a well-stocked cupboard, she believed that God knew what was best for her. Confident that she understood his will, she decided that he had ordained her poverty in order to “suppress that pride of my nature which doubtless would have broke out greatly to his dishonor had I had health and prosperity.” Too proud to be trusted with the good things of life, she had been deprived of them in order to learn the meaning of humility. Poverty was a hard cross to bear, but in her dark moments she remembered a verse from Hebrews: “Let your conversation be without covetousness and be content with such things as you have: for he hath said, I will never Leave thee nor forsake thee.”87
When Sarah finished writing her memoir in December 1743 she and Henry were still deeply in debt, and despite her positive tone much about their life seemed bleak. Henry’s older sons, Edward and Henry, had probably already found jobs to support themselves, but John was only fourteen, and Samuel was ten. Both would need food and clothing, and there was no money to spare. Worse, Sarah left a few small hints in her memoir that her “happy marriage” was not quite what she had hoped for. Although she thanked God for answering “all my petitions throughout the course of my widowhood by giving me one who I trust is united to Christ,” she added, “and is in all respects almost tender.” At some point she decided to cross out that qualifying almost because of what she had unintentionally revealed about her feelings. She summed up her relationship to Henry thus: “My affections are so much placed on him as I desire they should be on anything here below.” Although she cared for him, there was no danger of her turning him into an “idol” she would be tempted to love more than God. Sarah also praised her new stepsons for their “tender affection, both in sickness and in health,” but then once again she censored herself, crossing out a description of them as “sober, well-inclined,” and “in no ways addicted to the vices of the times.” At some point she decided that they were not actually “sober” after all.88
And yet she was determined to be “content” with what she had. Poverty was hard, but not as hard as the years that she had spent searching for God. Now that she had found him, she could look forward with hope instead of backward with despair.
Sarah ended her memoir on a triumphant note. After days (or perhaps weeks) of delving into the past, she had arrived back in 1743 with a new sense of assurance about her relationship to God. Despite all she had suffered, she had found the proof—the “evidence”—of God’s love for her on every page of her memoir. His grace had triumphed over her sinfulness.
But Sarah’s struggle to “trust in God and never despair of his mercy” had not yet ended. Far from it. Her feelings of worthlessness were not so easily conquered, and in the years ahead there would still be dark nights of the soul when she was plagued with doubts. Yet by writing a memoir she had given her life a new religious meaning, and whenever she longed for tangible evidence of her salvation she would sit down to reread her story. Her tone of assurance always comforted her. As she wrote on the cover of the memoir twenty years later, “this Book I Have reread again and again.”
By combining the Christian language of human sinfulness and divine glory with a new Enlightenment vocabulary of benevolence, happiness, rationality, and empiricism, Sarah Osborn crafted a narrative that was both uniquely her own and distinctly evangelical. Lost but now found, doubtful but now sure, dead but now reborn—this was not only Sarah’s story; it was the story of all those who belonged to the first generation of evangelicals in America.
Part Two
DIARIES AND LETTERS, 1744–1796
Chapter 5
The Lord Gave, and the Lord Hath Taken Away, 1744
On Thursday afternoon, the sixth day of this month, I had the sorrowful news that my only son was sick unto death. God in his providence provided presently for me—My dear Susa Anthony to keep my house—A horse for myself and my husband to ride, and all other things comfortable. And on my way God gave me such a sense of his goodness to me in a thousand instances, that instead of sinking under my sorrow, my mind was employed in attention to, and blessing God for my mercies. . . .
On Friday morning we got to Rehoboth where I found my son much swelled with a dropsy, and pined to a mere skeleton with the jaundice, scurvy, and consumption, all combining. He rattled in his throat like a dying person, laboring for every breath. He was given over by the doctor and all his friends, who lamented him, and did the best for him in their power, as to the body. But alas! My great concern was for that precious jewel, his immortal soul. I endeavored to improve every opportunity to discourse with him, and read to him such portions of scripture as I thought suitable, with passages out of Mr. Allen’s Alarm, &c. And I was enabled to pray all the day, by ejaculatory breathings, and sometimes to plead and wrestle with God on his behalf: Though alas! God was pleased to hide his dealings with him altogether. For I could discern no evidence of a work of grace wrought on his soul, for which I did pray from day to day. I did not so much as once, in all his sickness, pray for his life; but for some evidence that his soul might live. And for want of this, I sometimes seemed to be crushed down, having a sense of his dole
ful case, if not reconciled to God.1
Sarah Osborn wrote these painful words on September 22, 1744, eight days after the death of her son, Samuel. He had died just a month before his twelfth birthday.
As always, Sarah turned to writing in order to make sense of what seemed incomprehensible. Although it was several days before she could bear to put her thoughts on paper, she seemed to hope that the orderly act of arranging her experiences on a page would help her see God’s hand in her life. When she sat down to write, a quill in her hand and an inkbottle at her side, she was stunned by how much her world had changed in such a short span of time. Just two weeks earlier, she had been spending an ordinary afternoon in her school teaching her students how to stitch a sampler or do sums, when suddenly someone had arrived at the door to report that her son was dying. Rushing to be with him, she found him struggling to breathe, and by the end of the following week he was gone.
By writing down her experience, Sarah hoped to discover why God had taken Samuel away from her and, more painfully, whether her son had been saved. Turning her gaze inward, she also hoped to discover whether she had endured her loss like a true Christian. She believed that Samuel’s death, like all the other events in her life, had been designed to teach her something, but when she began writing about it she was not sure what she was supposed to have learned. Was the story of Samuel’s death supposed to reveal something about God’s mercy or, more frightening, his wrath to sinners? Was she supposed to have gained greater insight into her own relationship to God?
The original manuscript of this narrative does not survive, only Samuel Hopkins’s published transcription, so it is not clear why Sarah wrote it—or for whom. But she may have intended it as a memorial to her son that would be shared with friends and family. Besides hoping to come to a deeper understanding of her loss, she seems to have wanted to teach others something about God’s grace in the midst of affliction.
In contrast to Enlightenment thinkers who celebrated the pleasures of everyday life, evangelicals denied that the meaning of human existence could be found here on earth. Christians were called to love their families and friends, but they always had to beware of turning them into “idols” that they worshipped more than the sovereign God. It was sinful to mourn too much for the broken things of this world.2
Hide Not Thy Face
If Sarah had thought that writing a memoir would satisfy her desire to make sense of her relationship to God, she soon changed her mind. By 1744 she had begun keeping a regular diary, and she also wrote hundreds of letters to friends and acquaintances. Despite her desire for certainty, there were still many days when she had “Hard struggles with unbelief,” and often she echoed the cry of absence in the Psalms: “How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? forever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?”3 Still searching for evidence of God’s love, she picked up her pen in order to see how he was guiding her life.
Sarah experienced Samuel’s death as one of the greatest tests of her faith, a moment when God seemed to have “hidden his face” from her. Struggling with grief, she tried to bring God into her presence through the sheer power of her words, making him visible on the page. Writing about God was like lighting a candle in the dark. Suddenly, she could see him. “Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble,” she read in the Psalms. “Incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily.”4 She had never been more in need of the comfort of writing. Prayer was not enough; she wanted to see God in front of her, his name inscribed in ink.
Samuel was one of the most important people in Sarah’s world, but he is also one of the most shadowy. Samuel Hopkins, who never met him, described him only as a “promising youth,” and Sarah’s other friends never mentioned him. Since Samuel left no letters or diaries of his own, we do not know how he would have chosen to describe his life, but it must have been a hard one: he had no memory of his father, who had died when he was only a year old; he had grown up watching his mother struggle to make ends meet; and unlike better-off children he knew what it meant to worry about the cost of food or firewood. In the worst times he may have gone hungry. (When he died, he was suffering from malnourishment, among other maladies.) But when Sarah bent over his bed in the evenings to pray with him, giving thanks for God’s grace, he also must have known what it meant to be loved. While other mothers had many children, ten on average, Sarah had only Samuel, and she seems to have adored him. She never referred to him simply as her son, but always as her only son. He was her “only son,” she wrote passionately in her memoir, “who had been cast upon God from the womb.”5
By the time Samuel was eleven, he had been apprenticed out to learn a trade. Perhaps, like his stepfather, Henry, he planned to become a tailor. Or perhaps Sarah had higher aspirations for him. Tailors tended to be lower on the economic ladder than carpenters or blacksmiths, who were paid more because of the difficulty of their crafts.6
Apprenticeship was a common way of teaching boys how to make a living in early America. While some relied on their fathers to teach them how to farm or practice a craft, others were indentured out to master craftsmen who promised to teach them the “art and mystery” of their trade. In a typical contract, apprentices agreed to work for seven years or until the age of twenty-one, whichever came first, and to be obedient. In return masters agreed to provide food, clothing, and in some cases education. They also agreed to provide apprentices with a new suit of clothes at the end of their term. Since boys were not usually apprenticed out until the age of twelve to fourteen, Samuel was young to learn a trade, but he probably spent most of his time doing menial chores: sweeping floors, fetching water from the well, tending the fire, or running errands for his master.7
Sarah may have hesitated to send her only child away from home, but her decision might have seemed like the best one for him. If she had ever hoped to send him to college (one can imagine her dreaming that he would become a respected minister like her uncle John Guyse), she had to face a more sobering reality when she and Henry went bankrupt. By indenturing Samuel to a master craftsman, she hoped to give him the skills to escape their poverty. Although it is not clear why she chose to send Samuel all the way to Rehoboth, a place that Hopkins described as a “country” town, she may have hoped to shield him from the temptations of urban life.8 She would have shuddered at the thought of her son growing up to imitate her adolescent rebelliousness and her taste for “bad company.” It is also possible that she may have had friends there. When she and her husband had been first married, they had spent several months visiting his friends in the “country.”
Like other parents, Sarah may have also decided to apprentice out Samuel because of her fears of spoiling him. To explain why so many New England parents sent their children away from home, even parents who were financially well-off, Edmund S. Morgan has speculated that “Puritan parents did not trust themselves with their own children . . . they were afraid of spoiling them by too great affection.”9 Because Samuel was her only child and a living reminder of her first husband, Sarah may have worried that she would not be strict enough when he needed “correction.” A firm master would help him mature into a responsible adult.
The danger was that masters might be too firm. As Sarah surely knew, apprentices were sometimes mistreated or abused. When Henry had been an apprentice, his master, a tailor, had tried to get out of paying for his food, lodging, or clothing, and the case had ended up in court. (His master was forced to pay more than thirty-three pounds in damages.) Years later, in 1740, Henry was called as a witness in a case involving an apprentice girl who often had been seen with whip marks on her back. Partly on the basis of his testimony, the court found the girl’s mistress and master guilty of “abuse and hard usage” and released her from service.10 If Sarah knew and trusted Samuel’s master, she may have assured herself that he would be well treated, but she still may have found it frightening to place her only child in someone else’s care.
Sarah’s worst fears were rea
lized on a September afternoon when she heard the “sorrowful news” that Samuel was “sick unto death.” Desperate to see him while he was still alive, she rushed to tell Susanna Anthony, who quickly agreed to take care of her house and school, and then she found someone to lend her and Henry a horse for the journey. Rehoboth was twenty miles away, probably only a few hours from Newport by horseback, but as she thought of Samuel fighting for his life without her, the distance must have seemed immense.
What sustained her, as she remembered later, was her unexpected sense of God’s presence. It would have been natural for her to have been overcome by anxiety or despair, but she claimed to have felt a sense of God’s “goodness” instead. “On my way,” she testified, “God gave me such a sense of his goodness to me in a thousand instances, that instead of sinking under my sorrow, my mind was employed in attention to, and blessing God for my mercies. Sometimes, that he [Samuel] was not snatched from me in a moment, by some awful accident—That he was not at so great a distance, but I might be allowed to go to him, with hopes of finding him yet alive.”11 Riding behind Henry for mile after mile, she thanked God for giving her the chance to see her son one last time.
It is impossible to know the degree to which Sarah’s narrative reflects her true emotions during the days leading up to Samuel’s death or her attempt to make sense of her grief in the days afterward. What is clear, however, is that when she finally found the strength to write about Samuel’s death, she was determined to frame it as a story about God’s mercy. Hoping to convince herself that Samuel had been saved, she filled her narrative with subtle allusions to biblical characters who had been healed by God. In the first sentence, “On Thursday afternoon, the sixth day of this month, I had the sorrowful news that my only son was sick unto death,” she implicitly compared Samuel to Epaphroditus, an associate of the apostle Paul’s who had been “sick nigh unto death: but God had mercy on him,” and to Hezekiah, who had beseeched God for mercy when he had been “sick unto death.” “I have heard thy prayer,” God had responded; “I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee.”12 Without explicitly claiming that God had shown Samuel the same compassion, she nonetheless began her story on a hopeful note. Perhaps God had answered Samuel’s prayers for mercy—or her own.
Sarah Osborn's World Page 18
