Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  Yet not everyone shared in the wealth generated by mercantile capitalism. Despite the rising standard of living, the gap between the richest and the poorest widened in the eighteenth century, especially in cities. In Newport in 1760, the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers paid 56 percent of taxes and the bottom 20 percent paid only 3 percent. (Since taxes were not graduated, this statistic reveals that the top 10 percent owned more than half of the taxable wealth.) Stark as these percentages are, they fail to capture the vast distance separating the “haves” from the “have-nots.” Many residents of Newport were too destitute to pay taxes, but because they never asked for poor relief their numbers are impossible to count precisely. Based on town records, one historian estimates that 45 percent of Newport’s white population may have lived near the poverty line.12 When Sarah walked through the city on her way to teach school, she saw both prosperous merchants on the way to the counting house and ragged, hungry men looking for a day’s work.

  Frustrated by the growing number of vagrants in the cities, magistrates and ministers tried to distinguish between the “deserving” poor—the disabled, the widowed, and the elderly—and the “undeserving,” who were too lazy to earn their bread. The “idle poor,” according to Charles Chauncy, should not be assisted to eat. (Earlier, in 1695, Cotton Mather had argued, “We should Let them Starve,” and in 1697, John Locke recommended that “begging drones” should be “kept at hard labor” until they reformed.)13 Newport provided small sums of cash (known as out-relief) to the able-bodied poor or arranged for them to board with families, but the city also constructed an almshouse in 1723 to care for the aged or infirm. Sometime in the 1750s, city fathers became so concerned about the rising numbers of tramps that they built a workhouse where the “idle poor” were required to pick oakum. (This was a messy job that involved separating tar from fiber in order to make caulking for ships.) As in other New England towns, large numbers of the transient poor who were not legal residents were “warned out”: forced to return to their hometowns to receive charity.14 Land shortages, the loss of male breadwinners in the war, inflation—all exacerbated the problem of poverty, but at a time when the study of economics was still in its infancy, most people understood poverty as an individual rather than a structural problem. The solution was simple: “If we are industrious we shall never starve,” Benjamin Franklin insisted.15 The lazy had to be forced to labor, not coddled with food and a warm place to sleep.

  Public discussions about poverty usually focused on how to help (or to force) men to support their families, but hidden from view was a large group of penniless women. During the 1740s female poor-relief recipients in Newport outnumbered men by two to one.16 Early-American women made significant contributions to the family economy by spinning cloth, brewing beer, growing vegetables, and churning butter, but they were not educated to be anything other than wives and mothers, and if they lost their husbands or fathers they had limited options when it came to supporting themselves. A few became lawyers or printers, but most were forced into low-paying “women’s work” as seamstresses, cooks, or teachers. For every woman in Newport like Ann Franklin, a successful printer, there were dozens of others like Hannah Lamb, a member of Sarah’s prayer group who managed to stay out of the almshouse only because of her church’s charity. Even though there were many female-headed households in Newport (the consequence of the appalling numbers of sailors who died at sea), in 1760 only thirty-five women earned enough money to pay taxes. (They constituted 3.6 percent of all taxpayers.)17

  Sarah’s income was too small to earn her and Henry a spot on Newport’s tax list (she probably earned less than half the wages of male teachers),18 but she felt fortunate in comparison to the many women who were forced to rely on charity. When war was formally declared in 1756 after more than a year of skirmishes on the frontier, she seems to have believed that she and her family would be able to withstand any economic hardships that might come their way. Ever since their bankruptcy fourteen years earlier, she had always managed to pay the family’s debts by dint of her hard work, never too proud to bake, sew, or spin flax to supplement her teaching income. Even though she and Henry never managed to scrape up enough money to buy their own house, they were still better off than many of their friends and neighbors. When the First Church of Christ assessed pew rents in 1753, Henry Osborn was charged ten pounds a year, a figure that put him in the bottom half of the congregation but still above 21 percent of the membership. (In a typical example of early-American patriarchy, the church listed the pew in Henry’s name alone even though Sarah earned the money to pay for it.) While the richest member, Thomas Coggeshall, paid thirty-six pounds for a large pew on the first floor, the poorest members, Widow Hart and her son Norman, paid only five pounds to sit in the gallery near Sarah and Henry.19 Describing their social and economic standing to her friend Joseph Fish, Sarah explained that they did not belong to either the “politest sort” or “the vulgar,” but the lower middling sort who were hardworking and “pretty sober.” Grateful for enough food to eat, a warm house to live in (though rented), and a large school to teach, Sarah addressed God in her diary, “Thou in infinite Wisdom art giving me neither Poverty nor Riches and thou Hast Graciously freed me from anxious cares and Perplexing fears about futurities.”20

  Sarah would have been less sanguine if she had been able to see the hard years that lay ahead, but at the beginning of 1757, with the fighting still far from Newport, she and Henry felt secure enough to hire an assistant teacher for her school and to move to a more comfortable house. They also helped support Henry’s son John and his wife, Abigail, who were “Destitute of the Necessities of Life.” In a cryptic diary entry, Sarah complained that John and Abigail had been guilty of “Misconduct” in the past, but out of pity for their four children, the oldest not more than nine and the youngest a baby, she was determined to “cheerfully and thankfully relieve them.”21

  Sarah worked hard not just because she needed to support her family but because she saw teaching as her vocation. Echoing Martin Luther and John Calvin, who had rejected the monasticism of the Catholic Church, she believed that Christians must serve God in the world rather than withdraw from it. “Christians must have some Business of their own to mind,” Nathaniel Clap preached. “Their Bones, or their Brains, or both must be Employed in some Good Business, whereby their Neighbors may be Advantaged, in their Souls, or Bodies, or Estates, or some of their Desirable Interests; otherwise, they will not mind the Work of the Lord.” Hoping to glorify God and to serve her neighbors, Sarah prayed to be “diligent in business.” In many ways she embodied what Max Weber would later term the Protestant ethic: she worked hard, spent frugally, and treated time as a commodity that should not be wasted. Between teaching, caring for her family, meeting with the women’s society, and writing in her diary, she allowed herself virtually no time for leisure.22

  Yet even Sarah’s industriousness was not enough to shield her and her family from the economic distress caused by the war. By the spring of 1757 she was worried about rising prices. “Everything of the necessaries of life are so Excessively risen,” she complained in her diary. Because the British military needed to buy large quantities of food for their soldiers, the price of commodities rose sharply. Overall the war benefited America’s economy (the British army and navy spent more than six million pounds sterling in the colonies between 1756 and 1762), but the poor found it difficult to afford food or firewood. Prices were especially high in Newport because merchants suffered heavy financial losses during the war. Rhode Island had always been infamous for privateering, and in the 1740s many merchants had grown rich by capturing French bounty. During the Seven Years’ War (known in the colonies as the French and Indian War), however, they lost more than 150 of their ships to the enemy. Because the British enforced a trade embargo with the French West Indies, they also lost one of their most important sources of revenue. (Many resorted to smuggling, but they faced stiff penalties if caught.) When the Act of Insolvent Debto
rs was passed in Rhode Island in 1756 to help those facing bankruptcy, it was supposed to be temporary, but by the end of the 1760s more than a hundred men had filed for protection. Handley Chipman, for example, whose wife was a member of Sarah’s prayer group, lost his soap-boiling and rum-distilling business during the war, perhaps because he could no longer import molasses from the French West Indies.23

  Sarah, too, feared that she might go bankrupt, but she hesitated to raise the tuition for her school at a time when so many people were suffering. What made her decision especially difficult was that many of the parents who sent children to her were also members of her church, her “sisters” and “brothers” in Christ. Student Polly Hammond, for example, was probably related to Elnathan Hammond, a member of the committee that assigned pew rates.24 Parents could choose among schools in Newport, but many seem to have been attracted to Sarah’s desire to make her school “a Nursery for Piety,” and they not only expected her to teach Christian ethics but to embody them herself. Because Sarah took this responsibility seriously, she swore that she would rather “beg my bread from door to door or die upon a dunghill” than sully her name as a Christian. Indeed, when she had tried to raise her prices once before, she had changed her mind after hearing “cutting, bitter reflections” on whether she was a true Christian.25

  Sarah’s dilemma arose from the fact that ministers offered advice about economic life that seemed to point in contradictory directions. On one hand, they argued that the poor must do everything possible to improve their lives: although it was good to trust in God, it was sinful to be passive in the face of adversity. “Reliance on God is vain and provoking without a diligent use of Means,” Cotton Mather insisted. “If a drone pretend to trust in Providence he does but tempt God.” Echoing this language, Sarah wrote in her diary, “O, my God, suffer me never to live in the neglect of proper means, but use all diligence, casting my care on thee.” She thought that raising her tuition was what a responsible follower of Christ should do. On the other hand, ministers also insisted that converts must subordinate their own economic interests to the common good, and Sarah feared she might be guilty of violating Christ’s injunction to love her neighbor as herself. Imagining the Christian community as the body of Christ, she believed that she was linked to other believers by bonds of love that were more important than the desire for individual gain. She wrote, “Let me consider myself only as a member of the Glorious body of which my Precious Precious Christ is Head and seek the Prosperity of the whole.”26

  Sarah believed that if she were motivated by genuine economic need, she could raise her tuition with a clear conscience, but if she were driven by “covetous desires” she would have to make the best of her destitution. It was better to be a poor woman on the way to heaven than a rich one on the way to hell. Everything hinged on her motivation, but because she had such a strong sense of her sinfulness she was afraid to trust herself. Praying to God, she asked him to help her see into her own heart. “Let the Golden Rule be mine,” she wrote. “Preserve me from covetousness, from extortion, from Grinding the face of the Poor.”27

  Sarah’s economic scruples might suggest that she saw money or material goods as inherently corrupt, but in fact she spent most of her life praying for more: more money, more firewood, more flour, vegetables, and pork. Reflecting the historic influence of Calvin and Luther, Protestants insisted that poverty was not a sign of holiness but an evil that must be combated. (In contrast, the Catholic Church argued that the poor were especially blessed in the eyes of God, and many nuns and priests took vows of poverty.) Sarah assumed that money was one of the good things of the world, a sign of God’s overflowing love for his creation. When Jonathan Edwards searched for an image that would capture the joy of being part of a revival, he compared it to a “market day,” a day of “Great opportunity and advantage.”28 As long as people did not worship money, they could savor the contentment of a comfortably furnished house, shelves filled with books, and a well-stocked pantry. The challenge was to approach money in a spirit of stewardship, not ownership. Like everything else in the world, money ultimately belonged to God, and those who had been blessed with prosperity were supposed to use it for the common good.

  Hoping to improve her fortunes, Sarah often bought tickets in the city lotteries. Lotteries were a common way to raise money for civic improvements (like paving roads) in the eighteenth century, and although some people disapproved of them as a form of gambling, Sarah believed that like everything else they were controlled by God. “I come to thee for success,” she wrote to God in her diary, “for I know the whole disposal is of the Lord. Not a mite shall go to one or the other without thee.” She promised that if she won, she would use the money not only for her own “comfort” but for the support of the ministry and the relief of the poor.29

  As she soon discovered, however, winning the lottery was not part of God’s plan for her life. If she wanted to raise more cash, she would have to increase her tuition. The decision was so difficult that she spent months agonizing over it. Borrowing an image from Psalm 131 (“Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child”), she prayed to be “weaned” from the world, to place her affections on God instead of the fleeting pleasures that someday she would have to leave behind. But it was not easy. Surrounded by people who spent more on fashionable carriages and imported lace than she could earn in a year, it was hard not to be envious, hard not to wish that she were one of the well-heeled matrons who had never felt the pinch of poverty. Recent historians have celebrated the “strikingly egalitarian” nature of the consumer market because “anyone with money could purchase what he or she desired,” but the truth was that many people did not have excess money to spend, and even those who occasionally bought a penknife or a piece of ribbon knew that their purchases did not put them on equal footing with the rich. The language of consumption may have brought people together, but it also caused resentment. This was why Sarah’s church wrote a new covenant in 1755 forbidding “Manifest Discontentment with our own Estate and Circumstances, together with all manifest inordinate Motions and Affections toward anything that is our Neighbors.’”30 And it was also why Sarah spent so much time wringing her hands over raising her tuition. Envy, avarice, selfishness—these, not money, were what she feared.

  In June, after three months of praying about it, she finally decided that she was “in the path of duty respecting raising my price for schooling.” The word duty was crucial: she believed that she had a religious obligation to make sure that she could pay her bills. Although she did not want to “grind the face of the poor” by raising her tuition, she also did not want to defraud her creditors, and because of the war her situation had suddenly become desperate. The British government, angered by smuggling, had ordered all American ports closed, and from March until the end of June no ships could sail without explicit government clearance. The results were devastating. A severe drought in New England had decreased agricultural yields, and as Newport’s ships sat at anchor in the harbor, forbidden to sail, Sarah feared that dwindling food supplies might lead to “famine.” Shortly before deciding to raise her tuition, she admitted that “this week we knew not what to do for food.” She and Henry would have gone hungry if God had not sent them “dainties from day to day: squab, pigeon, sparrowgrass [asparagus], pudding, gingerbread, tarts, Gammon &c.” (It was typical for her to explain people’s charity toward her as God’s will.) It did not seem as though things could get any worse, but in response to her tuition increase eight of her students left for cheaper schools. “My whole school totters,” she wrote fearfully.31

  As always, Sarah relied on her diary to strengthen her faith. She often recorded her prayers in order to keep track of when (and if) they were answered. For example, at some point after asking God to help her and Henry pay their debts, she added in the margins, “blessed be God, good success.” Sometimes her prayers were answered almost immediately, like the day whe
n she wrote an anxious entry about the scarcity of firewood in Newport, and someone arrived at her door fifteen minutes later to tell her where to buy it. But even if she had to wait months before a prayer was answered, she would return to her original entry in order to make a notation. In case she was ever tempted to forget it, her diaries “proved” that God heard her prayers.32

  As she reflected on her life, Sarah found abundant evidence of God’s mercy in the midst of her troubles. Henry had not had a paying job since their bankruptcy, but because of widespread fears that French forces might attack by sea he was hired to be one of the wardens who stood watch over the harbor. “I have been able to stand alone some years without his Earning anything and then there was no way that He could earn a shilling to Help,” she wrote in her diary, but now God had brought something good out of the evil of the war. Even though Henry’s job was only part time, his income helped pay their rent.33

  An even greater mercy awaited in May when Phillis, Bobey’s mother, told Sarah that she had been born again in Christ. Because she was a slave, few records mention her, but based on fragmentary evidence we can piece together some facts about her life. The mother of two children, Bobey and another whose name has been lost to history, Phillis belonged to Timothy Allen, a silversmith who was a member of Ezra Stiles’s church, and she was married to Gosper, a slave like herself. On June 26, 1757, she was admitted into full membership at Sarah’s church, the First Church of Christ, and afterward she became the only black member of Sarah’s prayer group.34 Based on a single sentence in Sarah’s diary, we can surmise that Phillis had either been owned by the Osborns at an earlier date or been hired out to them as a household servant. “This was my servant,” Sarah wrote in her diary, “but is she now thine?”35 Without more evidence, the exact nature of their relationship is murky, but they had probably known each other for at least thirteen years, ever since Phillis’s infant son had become Sarah’s slave. We can only imagine the pain that Phillis must have felt at being separated from her son or the anger and resentment that may have bubbled under the surface whenever she saw Sarah scold or punish him. Yet there were far worse masters in Newport, and over the years Phillis and Sarah managed to forge a close relationship—so close that they eventually had serious conversations about suffering, sin, and God. After Phillis experienced conversion, she asked Sarah to come with her as she recounted her religious experiences to the Reverend Vinal. (Phillis wanted to join Sarah’s church, not her master and mistress’s, perhaps because she wanted the freedom to worship without their supervision or perhaps because of her more conservative theology.) Although many slaves attended Vinal’s meeting each Sunday with their masters, only two had ever been accepted into membership before. The first was Cudjo Nichols, who was baptized in 1749, perhaps on his deathbed, and the second was Primos Leandrow, a free black who had transferred his membership from Bristol in 1757. With so few black faces in the congregation, Phillis may have been apprehensive about whether Vinal would accept her as his spiritual equal, but he judged her religious experiences to be real. Only one obstacle still remained: she had to get her owner’s approval before she could be baptized or partake of the Lord’s Supper. It is not clear what would have happened if her master had said no, but when Sarah anxiously visited him the next day he assured her he had “no objection at all.”36 In June, when Sarah saw Phillis sitting at the Lord’s Supper for the first time, she was so moved by God’s grace that she could almost forget the war, suffering, and hunger that lurked outside the church doors. “O adored be thy Name for what thou Hast done for my poor Phillis,” she thanked God. “She is made free indeed.”37