The cover of Sarah Osborn’s diary no. 21. Sarah often reread her diaries in order to find evidence of God’s grace in her former experiences. After reading this diary again in 1764, she wrote on the cover, “February 2nd 1764, blessed be God for the Experience of His Mercy truth and faithfulness recorded in this Book and for the refreshments He has Granted me in reviewing and renewing the acts of faith I now commit it to the same.” Photograph courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Evangelicals were ambivalent about the individualism that was enshrined by the Enlightenment, but in response to the challenges of their time they crafted a new form of Protestantism that was based more on the converted individual than the covenanted community.45 Since the Puritans had also encouraged people to look inward for signs of God’s grace, evangelicals often sounded like them, but it was as if they were speaking the same language with a different accent. Fearful that God would break his covenant with them if they did not behave righteously, the Puritans had emphasized the morality of the entire commonwealth. When the number of converts dwindled in the early eighteenth century, they demanded communal renewal and repentance as well as individual conversion. They imagined New England in collective terms as the people of God, the “new Israel.” In contrast, even though evangelicals agreed that both personal and communal transformation were important, they put their pronunciation more on the individual, arguing that one could not be a Christian without a personal experience of grace. As a minister explained, “True religion is an inward thing, a thing of the heart.”46
The spiritual individualism embedded within the evangelical movement seems to have enhanced women’s sense of personal dignity and worth. Instead of trying to suppress the gendered dimensions of their identities, they filled their conversion narratives with details about their distinctive lives as women, including marriage, childbirth, motherhood, and female friendships. In most aspects of their lives they were expected to subordinate themselves to their fathers and husbands, but in the realm of religion they turned their gaze inward to focus on their own stories. “O why me, why me,” exclaimed Hannah Heaton. “Oh Why me! Why me, when Thousands perish! How is it that I should be a Vessel of Mercy, that have deserved to have been a Vessel of Wrath forever!” Like other evangelical women’s writings, Sarah Osborn’s Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity overflowed with the words I and me. “I’ll tell you truly what GOD has done for my Soul,” she declared at the beginning of her letter. “GOD the FATHER manifested himself to me.” “God made with me an everlasting Covenant.”47
Yet as we have seen, there were limits to the kind of “individual” an evangelical could be, and women’s writings were rarely published if they challenged gender norms. Perhaps readers were able to find more egalitarian meanings in these texts, but they nonetheless portrayed women as naturally humble and self-effacing. Osborn’s title page included a scriptural citation, “1 Cor. 1: 26–31,” in the center of the page, an allusion to Paul’s words, “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” Since Osborn never explicitly referred to this biblical text in her letter, it is likely that either the Reverend Prince or Samuel Kneeland (the printer) decided to include it—but they may have been inspired by her description of herself as a “poor nothing creature.” At a time when few women dared publish their words, these men wanted readers to know that even the weak and the foolish—or in Osborn’s case, the female—could offer insight into “the nature, certainty, and evidence of true Christianity.”48
The publication of Osborn’s letter raises crucial questions about the effects of both the early evangelical movement and the Enlightenment on women. Many historians have been sharply critical of the Enlightenment, arguing that it created “a single truth and a single rationality” that legitimated women’s political, economic, and religious subordination.49 As Enlightenment thinkers tried to establish a new “Age of Reason,” they constructed their ideal of the rational self against the image of feminine religious “enthusiasm,” a strategy that led to a decline in women’s spiritual authority. According to Susan Juster, one of the results of the Enlightenment commitment to rationality and middle-class respectability was the “domestication” of women’s religious voices. When radical female prophets like Jemima Wilkinson and Joanna Southcott published books in the late eighteenth century, they were ridiculed for their “enthusiasm,” a reaction that demonstrated “the intractable hostility of Anglo-American men of letters toward women in public.”50 Few women participated in the “public sphere,” the vibrant world of coffeehouses, freemasonry societies, and newspapers that laid the foundation for democratic government. Although white, property-owning men were encouraged to engage in rational political discourse, women were excluded from the public on the grounds of their supposed irrationality.51
On one hand, Sarah Osborn’s story seems to confirm these bleak interpretations of the effect of the Enlightenment on women. Even though she published a book, she did not exert the “democratic political agency” that historians have associated with the public sphere; nor was she part of an explicitly feminist “counterpublic” that demanded a voice in public affairs. Controversial feminist writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Judith Sargent Murray would not publish their works until the late eighteenth century.52 It is clear that Osborn accepted (and reinforced) negative stereotypes of women’s frailty and passivity, and even though she probably knew more about Reformed Protestant theology than most of the men in her church, she never defended her religious authority on the grounds of her intelligence, only her experience.
Yet on the other hand, Sarah Osborn’s story suggests that the Protestant encounter with the Enlightenment made it possible for women to make their voices heard in one of the other publics that jostled for attention in eighteenth-century America—an “evangelical public of letters” that was crucial to the emergence of the movement. Evangelicals defined themselves not only around well-known leaders like George Whitefield but around common texts like Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, Thomas Prince’s periodical Christian History, and Puritan stalwarts like Elizabeth White’s Experiences of God’s Gracious Dealing with Mrs. Elizabeth White. Although Sarah Osborn’s letter never achieved the status of an evangelical classic, it was still published in five editions before her death, in Boston, Newport, Providence, Danbury, and even London, and her words helped define what it meant to be an evangelical.53 We do not know who bought her book, but it is clear that in the early years of the evangelical movement men as well as women were eager to read about women’s religious experiences. Jonathan Edwards read the works of Elizabeth Rowe and Hannah Housman, and one of the surviving copies of Osborn’s letter is marked with the signature “John Perrey, his Book.” We can only imagine what it meant for an eighteenth-century man to search for religious truth in a woman’s book, but it seems likely that women’s growing presence in the evangelical public of letters paved the way for their later activism in missionary societies, Sunday Schools, and charities. As evangelicals grew accustomed to encountering women’s voices in print, they became more comfortable with women’s participation in public life—provided, that is, that women never forgot Paul’s words: “the man is the head of the woman.”54
Historians have sometimes debated whether evangelicalism was liberating or oppressive for women, but this dichotomy is too simplistic. Evangelicals were not feminists before their time, but they still encouraged women to publish books, to hold religious meetings in their homes, and, in the most radical cases, to speak publicly about their beliefs. By arguing that women were silenced by the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality, historians have underestimated the equally powerful language of experience and individualism. They have also underestimated women’s ability to devise new strategies to overcome the limitations placed upon them. Despite being excluded from the republi
c of letters on the basis of their supposed irrationality, women found ways to enter through the door of religious experience. Sarah Osborn never claimed to be equal to men, but by testifying that she had been reborn in Christ, she portrayed herself as uniquely qualified to write about the “nature, certainty, and evidence of true Christianity.” She might be female, poor, and “worthless” in the eyes of the world, but she was sure that her heartfelt religious experience, like God himself, was “no imaginary thing.”
Chapter 7
Pinching Poverty, 1756–1758
I now record on purpose yt I may Give God the Glory of Providing for us in His Providence yt at this time my ways are as mr Elot expresses it Hedg’d up with thorns and grow darker and darker Daily for our Expense is unavoidably Greater then our income notwithstanding I take every Prudential step I can think of to Lessen it the Necessaries of Life being so vastly risen A considerable sum is tis Probable Lost in bad Hands beside 50 or 60 more yt can be Had in nothing of Eatables or cask yt there is no Prospect at Present of our being able to provide wood or any one Particular for winter—but the God yt Has fed me all my Life Long does know what I need and will supply all my Needs too Let Satan or unbelief say what they will He never yet made me asham’d of my Hope nor He never will He has said He will never Leave me nor forsake me.1
“Our Expense is unavoidably Greater than our income.” “This week we knew not what to do for food.” “Let us not ungratefully . . . complain of Poverty but cheerfully rely on the stores of the Providence without coveting stores of our own.” “Lord, pity me.”2 Sentences like these punctuate almost everything Sarah Osborn wrote between 1756 and 1758, the opening years of the Seven Years’ War.
The war pitted two of the world’s great powers, France and England, against each other in a battle over who would control America’s vast economic resources. Most of the fighting took place in Canada, the Ohio valley, and upstate New York, but because the stakes were so high, the hostilities spread to Europe and the West Indies as well. The war sparked an international crisis that influenced the balance of power in western Europe.
For Sarah, though, the war was less a conflict over money and territory than a cosmic battle between true religion and false. French Catholics and their “heathen” allies, the Indians, were “Bloodthirsty enemies” who were plotting to “deprive us of all our Privileges sacred and civil, to cut off the very Name of Protestantism.” Like other Protestants at the time, she identified the French as the “Antichrist,” and she was certain that they were part of a vast Catholic conspiracy to make the world bow down to the authority of the pope. Remembering the fate of the Protestant martyrs who had been burned at the stake during the reign of England’s Mary I, Sarah swore that she would suffer anything—“Prisons, dungeons, racks and tortures, fire and faggots”—rather than forsake her faith.3
Little though Sarah realized it, the greatest test of her faith during the war would come not from the French Antichrist but from the grinding poverty caused by rising prices and scarce provisions. As the war dragged on, her prayers for a Protestant victory were eventually overshadowed by petitions for food, money, wood, and, most important, the courage to trust in God. Her flour barrel was often empty, her fireplace cold. Even when she worked herself to the point of exhaustion she could not pay all her debts. Although she and Henry had endured bankruptcy once before, she could not bear the thought of losing all their possessions again. She yearned to believe that God had a plan for her life, but it was hard to believe in a God who sometimes seemed to be absent. “May I trust Him?” she asked herself in her diaries. Her answer was always yes, but given how many times she repeated the question during the war, it is obvious that she found it hard not to doubt. In the darkest days of her poverty, when she and her family were forced to rely on charity, she admitted experiencing “the sharpest conflict with temptations to atheism I have endured some years.” (In the eighteenth century, an atheist was not necessarily someone who doubted the existence of God, but rather one who doubted God’s providential intervention in the world.)4
Sarah’s diaries during the first years of the Seven Years’ War reveal her struggles to understand the meaning of poverty in a world of consumer abundance. During the 1740s and 1750s, British manufacturers flooded the colonies with small consumer items that transformed the character of every day life. China, clothing, ribbons, jewelry, books—all were for sale in cities like Newport, and even in rural areas people could buy merchandise from itinerant peddlers. Between 1750 and 1773 the American market for consumer items rose by an astonishing 120 percent.5 In Newport alone, people could visit more than ninety shops along the waterfront, most marked with hanging signs, that offered goods as mundane as linen and as exotic as red wine from Lisbon.6 Not just the rich but the middling sort could now choose among a vast array of goods that promised status, pleasure, and refinement.
Like other evangelicals, Sarah was not immune to the desire for material goods, and she welcomed the “consumer revolution” as a reflection of God’s beneficence toward his creation. As long as people did not become greedy or turn their possessions into idols, they could savor the pleasures of buying a new book, choosing a new outfit, or investing in a matched set of Wedgwood plates. At the same time, however, Sarah was uneasy about the commercial world emerging around her in Newport, and although she could not clearly articulate her fears, she seems to have sensed that there was something deeper at stake than money and possessions. Searching for the right word to describe her disquiet, she often complained about “pride,” but in fact the crux of the issue was choice. What troubled her was not the expansion of commerce but the implicit sanction of individual agency and self-interest that lay underneath it. If there was anything that Sarah knew for certain, it was that the self and God were reverse images of each other, with the sinful, helpless self standing in awe of the perfect, sovereign Creator; yet when people participated in the consumer economy, they were encouraged to imagine themselves as free agents who could fashion their identities however they pleased, gratifying their desires instead of repressing them. This kind of “choice,” though alluring, was always sinful.
Sarah’s insistence that her poverty was God’s will must be read with this context in mind. In spite of the expansive choices offered in the consumer marketplace, she denied that she or anyone else had the power to make real choices about their economic lives. Distinguishing herself from the self-satisfied merchants in Newport who acted as though they were the masters of their own fate, she insisted that only God had the power to determine whether a person would be rich or poor.
And for reasons she only partially understood, God wanted her to be poor.
The Haves and the Have-Nots
One would not know it from reading Sarah’s diaries, but the standard of living seems to have improved for most Americans in the eighteenth century because of the expansion of the market and the greater availability of material goods. As British merchants increased their exports to the colonies, the middle and lower-middle ranks could buy objects that had once seemed out of reach. Based on evidence drawn from estate inventories and archaeological digs, historians have argued that eighteenth-century Americans were eager to purchase items that would increase not only their comfort (for example, spermaceti candles) but also their social standing in the eyes of others. Hoping to imitate the British gentry, they spent their money on objects that signaled their good taste and refinement. When a team of archaeologists excavated the site of an eighteenth-century house in Newport that had once belonged to William Tate, a blacksmith, and his wife, Mary, a seamstress, they discovered remnants of creamware, fans, jewelry, and a tin-glazed punchbowl that had been imported from England. The Tates were not well off, but they seem to have aspired to gentility, and they lived in a style that earlier generations of Americans would have found luxurious.7 Nothing could quench “Wild-Fire Fashion,” a Boston writer complained in 1750: “It is now fashionable to live great, to indulge the Appetite, to dress rich and gay.�
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Historians tend to be uneasy about using the word capitalism to describe the economic system of the eighteenth century because industrial capitalism as Karl Marx defined it did not appear in America until the 1800s. Before the economic energies unleashed by the American Revolution, many farmers continued to value cooperation over competition, and although they wanted to make enough money to ensure the security of their families, they remained suspicious of self-interest and economic rivalry.9 Yet still it is clear that the economy of the Anglo-American world was shifting in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and increasing numbers of farmers and merchants embraced the opportunities offered by intercolonial and international trade. Fueling the acceleration of the consumer economy was mercantile capitalism—a form of capitalism characterized by strong government control of trade, the accumulation of wealth, and profit-oriented production instead of subsistence.
Although all the colonies were affected in some way by the emergence of mercantile capitalism and consumerism, cities like Newport represented the cutting edge of economic change. Merchants not only amassed vast fortunes by trading wood, molasses, furniture, and slaves throughout the Atlantic world, they showed off their financial prowess by spending staggering amounts of money—especially by earlier standards—on their houses, furniture, and clothing. (Conspicuous consumption, as Thorstein Veblen would later christen it, was not an invention of the nineteenth century.) Much of Newport’s wealth came from the slave trade, a business that was violent, brutal, dangerous—and lucrative. With molasses imported from the West Indies, merchants manufactured rum that they sent to Africa to trade for slaves (paying around two hundred gallons for each male slave), and then, to complete the triangle, they sailed back to the West Indies to trade the slaves for more molasses.10 In 1741 Godfrey Malbone used his earnings in the slave trade to build Malbone Hall, a pink sandstone mansion with a mahogany interior, six chimneys, and canals in the gardens that a traveler described as “the largest and most magnificent dwelling-house I have seen in America.” It cost a hundred thousand dollars, an almost unheard-of sum at the time.11
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