Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  Evangelicals were also troubled by the attempt to promote charity on the grounds that it was pleasurable and gratifying to the giver. Influenced by Shaftesbury’s theory of an innate moral sense, many philosophers, poets, and sentimental novelists claimed that the highest human virtue was “sensibility,” a sympathetic identification with the sufferings of others. As one historian has explained, “The most exquisite raptures known to mankind were supposed to flow from the ability to feel for the sufferings of others, and to relieve it by acts of unselfish courage and generosity.”23 If evangelicals could have been sure that this kind of charity was indeed “unselfish,” they would have welcomed it, but they recoiled at anything that looked like self-indulgence. Sarah could sound like the heroine of a sentimental novel when she prayed to “be filled with sympathy, when I see others in distress” and to “weep with those who weep,” but she never waxed rhapsodic about the delights of benevolence. She thought her kindness to others should be motivated by her desire to serve God rather than the quest for individual gratification.24

  The crucial issue for evangelicals, as always, was self-interest. As the gap between the rich and the poor grew during the early eighteenth century, many Protestant ministers tried to convince the wealthy that giving charity would not only increase their status in the eyes of the world (an appealing thought for nouveau riche merchants who felt insecure about their social standing) but it might even make them richer. As one minister promised his congregation, “the Great Benefactor” would “highly recompense” the benevolent for their charity.25 The more they gave, the more God would shower them with blessings. In a frank defense of “private interest,” the Reverend Samuel Cooper assured a group of wealthy men (all donors to the Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor) that they did not need to pretend that their largesse sprung solely from their commitment to the public good. “If Charity seeketh not her own, yet she always finds it,” he promised, “and Self-Love may be improved as a Motive, to the Practice of this Virtue. It gains us the Confidence of Men, and enlarges our Credit in the World. It derives the Blessing of Heaven upon our secular Affairs, and entitles us to the peculiar Care of Providence.” Invoking one of the most important words of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, he insisted that being charitable would make people happy. “And as Happiness is the only Thing worth possessing for its own Sake; we ought to remember, that Charity is the very Temper of Happiness.”26

  Evangelicals disagreed. They insisted that giving charity was not a mark of “true holiness” unless it emanated from a spirit of genuine self-sacrifice. “A man may give all his goods to the poor, and devote his whole life to the most severe discipline,” Samuel Hopkins warned, but if he were motivated by self-interest then his actions were no better than if he “indulged his sensual appetites in riot and wantonness.” Hopkins’s language, as usual, was extreme, but Sarah Osborn shared his antipathy to “the Hateful Principle of self-Love.” She thought Christians should be charitable because of their love of God, not because they wanted to boast about their munificence or be rewarded with greater prosperity. In her own case she prayed not to “sound a trumpet before me” while helping her daughter-in-law.27

  The greatest difference between evangelicals and humanitarians lay in their definition of charity. Though influenced by the charitable spirit of the age, Sarah did not believe that it was enough to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, or care for the sick. All these things were important, but there was no point in making people’s lives more comfortable if they would someday end up in hell. It was no good to fill a hungry man’s belly if he was destined to starve for all eternity. True charity, in Sarah’s eyes, must be aimed not only at the body but at the soul. “Our Enemies say we deny all moral Actions,” George Whitefield complained, “but, blessed be God, they speak against us without Cause: Now, my dear Brethren, we highly value them; but we say, that Faith in Christ, Love of God, being born again, are of infinite more worth.” Besides tending to people’s physical needs in times of poverty or illness, Sarah urged them to repent and seek salvation. Part of the reason she regretted turning the beggar away from her door was that if she had fed him, she might have persuaded him to “Listen to something serious.” Like Whitefield, she thought the kindest thing that she could do for others was to proclaim the gospel.28

  As Sarah went about her daily business in Newport, drawing water from the well or stopping to buy a barrel of flour, she evangelized anyone who seemed willing to listen. (And when it came to close friends or family members like Abigail, even those who seemed determined not to listen.) Despite her recognition that some people found her holier than thou, she felt compelled to speak. Remaining silent would be cruel, like watching a man burn to death without trying to quench the flames.

  Sarah’s understanding of charity encompassed prayer as well as evangelism. As she knew, many of the “enlightened” men in Newport rejected her faith in the power of prayer to change the course of events, but she saw prayer as a form of action, a way of persuading God to intervene in history. God was a “Glorious Hearer and Answerer of prayer,” she rejoiced in her diary.29 She prayed not only for her family and her friends but also for all those who had not yet been reborn in Christ: criminals, “heathens” in other lands, children in her school, slaves, and those who had mistreated her. (This was an especially difficult discipline, but crucial to an ethic of turning the other cheek.) Even the ability to pray, though, depended on God’s grace. “Lord,” she testified in her diary, “thou knowest I can no more Pray in prayer myself then I can make a world.”30

  Evangelicals did not want to be associated with a movement that placed human welfare at the center of the universe, but they were strongly influenced by the humanitarian sympathies of their time. Indeed, they saw themselves as far more compassionate than reformers who focused solely on people’s physical needs. When humanitarian thinkers insisted that people must do everything possible to alleviate suffering, evangelicals nodded in agreement—but what they had in mind was not only the transient suffering of illness or poverty but the eternal suffering of the damned. After John’s death, Sarah collected charity for Abigail, but she also prayed for her—prayer after prayer for the salvation of the “poor widow” and her fatherless children.

  Making Everyone’s Burden My Own

  Sarah spent the winter of 1759–60 knocking on doors to ask for charity for Abigail, teaching school, looking after her boarding students, caring for her two grandchildren and Vinal’s two children, and worrying about her debts. She also met with her female prayer group on Wednesday evenings. (The women’s society had stopped meeting for several years, probably because of lack of interest, but Sarah revived it in January 1759.) Worried that she was trying to do too much, she asked God to help her accept her limitations. “Lord, show me that thou art not Looking for Perfection in me nor Marking iniquity against me,” she begged in her diary. “O Let me not Look on thee as an angry, austere Judge Looking for Perfection where thou knowest it is not to be found.” Yet she could not seem to stop “poring on the distressed circumstances of others, making every one’s burden my own, and thinking I am bound in duty to exert myself to do something for the relief of everyone that I know to be distressed.”31 Even though she knew, on one level, that God loved her despite her failures, she could not always live as if she believed it. Her expectations for herself were like a weight she could never shake off. In her own eyes, she could never be good enough.

  Given all the pressures on her during the winter of 1760, it is no wonder that her illness flared up again. “Hard Rheumatic Pains,” “strong Pains,” and “stupefying” headaches left her exhausted.32 Her usual morning schedule was to awake at five o’clock and pray for two hours, but her illness sapped her energy. “I am all sloth,” she complained. “Can’t awake in the Morning till near seven o’clock and then the duties of the family calls for me. The two Precious hours I used to redeem for secret converse with God are now wasted in sleep and I o
nly catch a few confused Moments. And how does my Precious soul Grow lean from day to day.” Yet except for a few days when she felt too ill to get out of bed, she kept working. Her family’s survival depended on it. In the spring she managed to pay her rent and three other debts she had owed for months, but she was still “deeply in debt.”33 Praying to God for help, she wrote, “Thou knowest all my need. Thou knowest the debts we owe and How the meal in the barrel and oil in the cruse is almost Expended. Thou knowest also the wants of the widow and fatherless whom I am determined to Help if thou permit.” She was “sinking under the weight of business,” and “yet the Necessities of my family oblige me to covet it.”34

  Usually she would have shared her troubles with her pastor, the Reverend Vinal, but since his wife’s death he had become distracted and morose. Pleading illness, he often kept the doors to his meetinghouse closed on Sundays or asked a neighboring minister to preach in his stead. Sarah explained to Joseph Fish, “His disorder is, the doctor says, a Nervous fever. He keeps about house and is better but can’t bear the air.” Hesitant to admit the full extent of his problems, she added only, “There is greater difficulties attends Him and us then I dare Mention.” Even in her diaries, she wrote about Vinal’s “indisposition” in vague terms, but most of her church suspected that his problems stemmed from alcohol abuse.35 He had always been a heavy drinker—between 1750 and 1752, the church bought him 111 gallons of rum—but as he grieved for his dead wife, he drank so much that he could no longer hide his addiction. As the church descended into controversy and “cruel backbiting,” Sarah tried to defend him from “slanderous tongues,” but he acted like a shepherd who had abandoned his flock. Even though she was caring for his two daughters, he rarely visited.36

  Exhausted, ill, and anxious about Vinal and the church, Sarah was sometimes impatient with the children in her school. She was still teaching seventy students, and despite the help of an assistant teacher, they were hard to keep under control. She begged God to subdue her “wildfire Passions,” but when the children were “Giddy, Idle and unruly,” she found it hard not to lose her temper. “Calm my Passions, dear Lord,” she prayed, “that I do nothing rashly or speak unadvisedly with my Lips.”37

  Psychologists have often noted that as children grow into adults, they repeat behavior they learned from their parents, and Sarah was no exception. Even though she had once resented her parents’ harsh style of discipline, she did not believe that the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” precluded the corporal punishment of children. When her students misbehaved and she was frustrated by “the darkness of their Minds, the blindness of their understandings, the stubbornness of their wills,” she used the rod to “subdue” them. As she admitted in her diary during the summer of 1760, “I was Last Evening obliged to correct a child from a sense of duty with some degree of severity in Hope of Preventing Her running to utter destruction. The Lord Sanctify the rod for Christ’s sake and secure thine own Honor.” When someone accused her of cruelty, she claimed to have been motivated by a sense of religious duty, not “Passion,” and she also insisted that “the rod was small and tender and in no respect an unreasonable weapon.” “Correct thy son while there is hope,” she quoted from Proverbs, “and Let not thy soul spare for His crying.”38 Yet despite her tone of justification, she seems to have feared that she had let her anger get the best of her. She was reputed to be a kind, dedicated teacher, but when so much else was troubling her—mounting debts, Abigail’s “sloth,” the French Antichrist, and Vinal’s alcoholism—she took out her frustration on her students. Not until several years later would she finally stop beating her students to make them behave. After reading Cotton Mather’s complaint that “raving at children and beating them” was “a dreadful Judgment of God upon the World and a very abominable Practice,” she was both shocked at herself and ashamed. After three decades of “correcting” children on the grounds that it was for their own good, she finally put away the rod.39

  With all the burdens on Sarah’s shoulders during the summer of 1760, it is hard to understand why she decided to take on anything more, but her pattern was to push herself to her limits whenever she felt most troubled by her imperfections. Perhaps because of her difficulty “governing” her students, she looked for another way to glorify God. In July, when she heard that two criminals in Newport would be executed for their crimes, she saw an opportunity to spread the gospel. She sent the criminals a letter urging them to repent, and soon she was spending hours in prayer for their salvation. (Once again, she seems to have modeled herself on the “righteous” in the Gospel of Matthew who visited the imprisoned.) For a month they were rarely out of her thoughts. One of them seems to have ignored her letter (perhaps exasperated by her zeal), but the other prisoner wrote back, and although it is not clear whether she was allowed to visit him in jail regularly, she was with him on the morning of his execution. “I think myself Dead in sin,” he reportedly said to her, “but alive through the alone Merits of Jesus Christ.”40 At a time when so much of her life seemed bleak, Sarah was elated by her role in his conversion. Nothing was more important than bringing a sinner to Christ.

  Many Enlightenment thinkers protested against the deplorable treatment of criminals, but if Sarah was troubled by Newport’s overcrowded, foul-smelling prison or by a justice system that sentenced people to death for offenses like robbery, counterfeiting, and sodomy, she kept silent. In contrast to the baron de Montesquieu, who argued that a punishment should not exceed the crime, and Voltaire, who decried the use of torture, Sarah felt that the most important concern was saving criminals from damnation, not reforming prisons or making the legal codes more humane. Like most evangelicals at the time (and like Christians generally), she not only accepted violence as an integral part of the social order; she sanctified it as God’s will. Because people were too sinful to resist the lure of violence, they had to be discouraged by the threat of violence in return. As proven by the existence of hell, God wanted sinners to be chastised. Public whippings on street corners, prisoners shackled in the stocks, public executions—all were a part of everyday life in Newport, and all, in Sarah’s eyes, glorified God.41

  War, too, could glorify God if it were fought against his enemies, and Sarah had no doubt that the bloodthirsty French and their heathen allies deserved to die. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire pointed out the absurdity of a religious man solemnly invoking the Lord “before he goes out to exterminate his neighbors,” but even among Enlightenment thinkers his voice was radical. In New England, Protestants of all theological stripes described the French and Indian War as a holy crusade. Sarah asked God to “Have compassion on the souls of our Enemies if it be thy Holy will, and turn them to thyself as well as to us,” but she was convinced that they were in league with Satan.42 Because the people of New England had turned away from God, falling into covetousness, profanity, and drunkenness, God had allowed the French and their Indian allies to raze towns and commit “cruel murders,” but he would save his chosen people from destruction if they reformed. “Lord, I own the Justice in all that Has befallen us,” Sarah mourned in her diary. “We Have deserved this and a thousand times More at thine Hand, but Lord, have Compassion on us. Make the antichrist and the Heathen know that Zion’s God has not forsaken her though He hast scourged Her.”43 Although she believed in loving her neighbor as herself, not everyone deserved the title of “neighbor,” and not all her prayers for others were benign. She prayed for the conversion of the “heathen,” but failing that, for their annihilation.

  When Sarah heard in September that British forces had followed a surprising victory in Quebec with the capture of Montreal, she rejoiced that her prayers had been answered. After years of humiliating defeat, the army had finally driven the “Antichrist” out of Canada. (The battle had taken place in August, but it took several weeks for the news to arrive.) At the end of a day of “public rejoicing,” Sarah and the women’s society gathered to offer thanks for “the Mercies He Has b
estowed on our Nation and Land.” Although the fighting continued in Europe (the Treaty of Paris was not signed until 1763), the colonies were no longer under siege, and Sarah was confident that God would vindicate his chosen people against their Catholic enemies. “Good news from a far country,” she exulted in November. “Zion’s God Has again appeared for the King of Prussia and Given Him another Victory . . . what a wonder of Mercy is it.”44

  Reminding herself of God’s compassion helped Sarah get through the dark days after the war. On a personal level, she and her family had little to celebrate in the fall of 1760: John and Edward were dead, Abigail was destitute, two of her grandchildren were still living in squalor, and the whole family seems to have been poorer than at any time since their bankruptcy eighteen years earlier. Sarah was in charge of managing the family’s finances (the result of Henry’s infirmity), and when she sat down with her account book she was alarmed. “I Have been deceived,” she wrote in her diary, “for I thought we was upon full as Good Ground now as at this time twelve month. But upon Examination see we are at Least an Hundred and twenty odd pounds poorer then we was then.” By November their debts had climbed to more than 170 pounds.45

  Sarah wanted to buy ten cords of wood for the winter, but by the middle of November she had scraped up only enough money to buy four—and only two had been delivered. (A writer in the Newport Mercury suggested that most people needed fifteen cords to survive the winter, and the Reverend Vinal received twenty as part of his salary, so the house must have often been cold. Sarah seems to have scrimped on wood to save money.) With fifteen children to feed, she also needed to buy apples, pork, potatoes, cornmeal, and flour, but she did not know how she would afford them. (She charged extra tuition for her boarding students, but she suggested in a letter to Joseph Fish that she had set her price too low to cover the rising costs of room and board.)46 She had borrowed small sums from friends in the past—her former employer Captain Moore had once loaned her twenty shillings—but she was already so buried in debt that she did not know how she would ever dig herself out. When two of her students withdrew from the school, she fretted that it was “breaking all to Pieces.”47 “Business is now failing every day,” she wrote to God in her diary. “Grant me a Habakkuk’s faith, that although all should be cut off, that I may trust and rejoice in thee.” Small economic exchanges suddenly seemed so critical that she noted them in her diary. After someone repaid a long-standing debt by giving them a rancid barrel of flour, she worried that they might have to settle the dispute in court.48