Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  With the weather turning colder, Sarah especially worried about her daughter-in-law, but in a rare piece of good news the Town Council agreed to pay Abigail five pounds a week to support herself and the two children still living at home. By law, Rhode Island towns were required to pay yearly pensions to the dependents of soldiers and sailors killed in war.49 Although the sum was too paltry to lift Abigail and her children out of poverty, it still eased Sarah’s burden. Every shilling from the town treasury was one less that had to begged from friends and neighbors.

  If Sarah could have sold her slave Bobey, her most valuable possession, she might have been tempted to part with him in order to raise money. Sixteen years old and healthy, he was probably worth at least ninety-five dollars.50 But he was in the last year of his apprenticeship to her former brother-in-law, and if she wanted to sell him she would have to wait until the end of 1761. Even though she and Henry had raised him “as our own from the cradle,” and even though his mother, Phillis, was her “sister” in Christ, she does not seem to have had any scruples about selling him. After seeing him in November, she admitted in her diary, “I find as His time draws nearer being out with his Master, my dependence begins More and More to fix on Him, and Expectations from this withering Gourd are raised as if this would shadow me from the Heat.” (She was implicitly comparing herself to the prophet Jonah, who had been sheltered by a gourd until God sent a worm to destroy it.) “When shall I cease to catch at and build upon every Prospect of Prosperity?” she asked herself. “And when shall I cease to fear and droop at every fear of disappointment?”51 There was no guarantee that she would ever make a profit from Bobey (what if he got sick and died in the next year?), but he was her best hope for the future—the only thing of real value that she owned.

  For the time being, though, she was so desperate for money that she was forced to rely on charity. Abigail Chesebrough, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of David Chesebrough, one of the wealthiest merchants in Newport, gave her a gift of eight pounds—the equivalent of the tuition Sarah received from two boarders in a week. (Since David Chesebrough was a slave trader who ranked forty-second on Newport’s tax list in 1760, he and his family could afford to be generous.)52 The Chesebroughs had left Sarah’s church to join the Second Church of Christ, but they admired her piety and wanted to help.53 Sarah also received relief from Nathaniel Coggeshall, the deacon of her church, and his wife, a member of the women’s society, who had been the Osborns’ friends for many years. On a cold evening in November Nathaniel appeared at the door with coal, and in December, when Sarah “begged in Jest” for firewood, his wife supplied it. (Sarah denied that she had “the Least thought of receiving wood,” but the Coggeshalls realized that her joke was actually a thinly disguised plea for help.)54 Even though they were not as affluent as the Chesebroughs, Nathaniel’s distillery was quite profitable, and he and his family numbered among the wealthiest people in Sarah’s church. (In comparison to the ten pounds that Henry Osborn paid for his pew in 1753, Nathaniel Coggeshall and his sons were assessed twenty-two pounds.)55 Sarah may have also relied on help from friends like Sarah Anthony, Susanna’s sister, who had lent her money in the past despite her own poverty.56 If Sarah Osborn’s diaries are representative of other people’s experiences, those who had the least were often the most generous in giving it away. The poor often depended on one another for food, clothing, and money.

  An advertisement for a slave, Newport Mercury, March 11, 1760. Photograph courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.

  Although Sarah always insisted that her poverty was best for her, she would have loved to be a rich woman who could open her hand and heart to the poor. When she wrote about her cousin in England, a wealthy, pious woman who was supposedly worth as much as three or four hundred thousand pounds, she could barely suppress her envy—not of her material possessions but of her ability to be charitable. Besides supporting the work of ministers (regardless of denomination) who were “eminent for Piety,” her cousin and her husband often invited six people of “Lower rank” to enjoy the bounty of their table on Sunday evenings. She was the kind of woman whom Sarah longed to be—affluent, generous, and devoted to Christ. “They keep their own chariot &c &c but run into none of the foolishness of the Gentry,” Sarah boasted to Joseph Fish. “A Greater Honor this to them and me than all their riches.”57

  Since the first half of Sarah’s diary for 1761 has been lost, we know little about her life during the early months of the year, but it is clear that she and Henry still struggled to pay for their food and rent. (Later she remembered that in 1762 they were three hundred pounds in debt—a staggering sum that probably represented more than she could earn in a year.) “I can say safely, though not by way of Complaint, that we are really much poorer then some years ago,” she admitted to Fish in February 1761. As always, though, she claimed that her poverty was good for her, a discipline that brought her closer to God. Besides making her more grateful for what she had, her poverty helped her remember her complete dependence on God’s grace. “All is as well as if we Possessed thousands,” she assured Fish. “Tis sweet Living to see God Giving day by day our daily bread.”58

  Remarkably, Sarah somehow managed to pay down her debts during the year while also making significant contributions to help the poor and to support the ministry. According to church records, she gave nine pounds, nineteen shillings, to the church in 1761, almost double what she gave in 1760.59 Her scrimping and saving must have affected the quality of her life (it is hard to imagine that she and her family ever wasted a morsel of food or a stick of wood), but she was willing to make sacrifices in order to be charitable. Psychologically, she seems to have gained a sense of assurance from her constant, almost compulsive efforts to help others. Whenever she reminded herself that faith showed itself in good works, she felt more secure about God’s love for her.

  Besides giving away money, Sarah also became involved in a different kind of “charity” in 1761—a moral crusade against the theater. (Any activity that led to the salvation of souls constituted charity in her eyes.) When a company of British actors arrived in Newport in the fall, she was stunned by the huge crowds who gathered to see farces like Charles Coffee’s The Devil to Pay and sentimental comedies like Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers. (Some people traveled from as far away as Boston, a two-day trip in each direction.) Ever since the sixteenth century, Puritans had railed against the theater for glamorizing evil, promoting effeminacy (the women’s parts were played by men in female clothing), encouraging hypocrisy and lying, and, in general, luring people into vice, and Sarah thought that going to see a play was a form of devil worship—even when it included, as it did in Newport, occasional performances of Shakespeare.60 Condemning the theater as a “temple of wickedness,” she resolved to “oppose vice and immorality as far as in me Lies.” She even promised God to break off a friendship with a woman who did not see anything wrong with “playing at cards—reading romances, seeing Plays.” (Despite her desire to “Live Peaceably with all,” Sarah refused to “contract or maintain intimate friendship with those that will not appear on the Lord’s side.”) Although she knew that she might be mocked as a scold, she was afraid that staying silent would be sinful. “Can I altogether Hold my Peace and be guiltless?” she asked. For two months, until the actors finally packed up their costumes and props to travel to their next engagement, she and other evangelicals were a constant thorn in their side, denouncing the theater as the “devil’s entertainments.” Their activism eventually paid off in 1767 when the colony passed an act prohibiting theatrical performances—a victory that Sarah surely savored.61

  My Dear Servant’s Soul

  It is a reminder of the distance between the eighteenth century and our modern world that Sarah Osborn, who wanted to love her neighbor as herself, could spend hours writing about the theater as an abomination while turning a blind eye to a real evil in Newport. Every time she walked along the docks she saw slave ships anchored in the harbor, and eve
rywhere she went—to neighbors’ houses, to shops, to her church—she saw the faces of Africans (and their descendants) who had been violently seized from their homes and sold as chattel. The auction block stood only a few blocks away from her church. And of course she herself owned a slave, Bobey, whom she and Henry had raised from birth.

  Although Sarah believed that she had a duty to treat slaves with compassion and to share the gospel with them, she did not see either the slave trade or slaveholding as sinful. Since the great patriarchs of the Bible—Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph—had all owned slaves, most Christians assumed that slavery had been ordained by God. Shaped by the racial prejudices of the time, they also assumed that Africans were an inferior race. As African slavery became economically profitable, Christians interpreted Noah’s curse on his son Ham’s descendants, “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,” as a reference to all people of African descent—this despite the fact that Ham is not described as either black or African. The Hebrew Bible never sanctions the enslavement of Africans in particular (slaves are described as war captives who can belong to any race), but by the time of Sarah Osborn’s birth most Christians associated slavery with blackness.62 Although Sarah hoped to glorify God by teaching slaves about Christianity, she did not think that her faith required her to protest against slavery in the same way that she protested against gambling, cardplaying, drinking, or theatergoing. The merchants of Newport who stumbled home drunk on Saturday nights were sinners; the merchants who attended church, lived soberly, and amassed huge fortunes in the slave trade were not.

  This was why in December 1761, when Bobey’s apprenticeship ended and his master, “brother French,” offered to buy him, Sarah did not question the morality of selling another human being. The only sign we have that she might have felt uneasy is her odd silence about the money involved. When she had first considered selling Bobey a year earlier, she had been frank about her desire for “prosperity,” but by the end of 1761 she treated the question of money as irrelevant. It is hard not to wonder whether she felt a twinge of conscience about being covetous, or whether she remembered the nights after Samuel’s death when she had rocked Bobey’s cradle and hoped for another chance to raise a Christian child. For many years he had been virtually a member of her family—playing on their floor, attending church with them, and knitting his stockings by their fireside.63

  Whatever her deeper feelings, Sarah told herself (and God) that she wanted to sell Bobey because it was in his best interests, not her own. Because he was strong-willed, he would be better off living in the country than in Newport, where she and Henry might not be able to shield him from bad influences. As she confided to her diary, “I fear if we keep him He will rather be an Encumbrance than a comfort as Neither His Master or I can manage him.” Even though he was “Honest and averse to drink and . . . more and more faithful,” she worried that if he lived in the city they might not be able to prevent him from “Proving bad, taking to bad courses, or Going to Sea.” She seemed especially concerned about the possibility that he might become a sailor—a common occupation for slaves and freed people in the urban North that was frequently associated with drunkenness and profanity.64 Selling him, she was convinced, would be for his own good—a demonstration of her commitment to loving her neighbor.

  When she broached the topic with Bobey’s mother at a meeting of the women’s society, however, she was shocked by Phillis’s angry response:

  I asked the opinion of Phillis about our selling of Bobey, which contrary to my Expectation vexed her. I really Expected as we Have not business for Him and He must be Let out from Place to Place and run to risk of being made unsteady or quite spoiled or of going to sea, she would Have rather Chosen to Have Him Settled under a Steady Master whom He Loves, where He Has Lived more than Seven years, the whole family fond of him and He of them, where He has and will Enjoy the Privileges of God’s House, the worship of God in the family, instructions for His soul and all the Comforts of this Life Necessary for Him. But it was quite Otherwise. Her reason Seems at Present to be Laid aside and a fondness to take Place, or rather anger.65

  Sarah and Phillis were probably as close as a white woman and an enslaved black woman could be in the eighteenth century, but their conflict about Bobey exposed the deep racial divide separating them. As Bobey’s owner, Sarah was certain that God wanted her to sell him, but as Bobey’s mother, Phillis was equally certain that God wanted him to return to Newport. She and her husband, Gosper, had been separated from their son for seven years during his apprenticeship, and although they were probably proud that he had learned a trade, they wanted him home again. Bobey was their child, not an object to be bought and sold.

  Slaves were supposed to be deferential toward whites, but Phillis was too “vexed” to hide her anger. How could Sarah be certain that selling Bobey was the right decision? And how could she guarantee that Bobey would not be sold again, this time to a cruel master?

  Sarah spent ten days debating whether to sell Bobey. Although the issue of money always lurked behind her words, she seems to have convinced herself that her motives were pure: she was thinking about Bobey’s happiness, not her own. From her perspective, the only person who was acting selfishly was Phillis, whose “fondness” for her son prevented her from seeing what was best for him. She was stunned that Phillis, of all people, would question her judgment: Phillis, whom she had led into her church, welcomed into her women’s society, and treated as a spiritual equal despite her racial inferiority. Hurt and offended, she wrote, “Oh, How Hard it Has been to me to be thus Mistrusted by Phillis to whom I think I Have never been unfaithful, by Her who I always thought Had a better opinion of me! O Let this teach me to my dying day How ungrateful, How ungenerous and cruel it is for me to disbelieve my Gracious, faithful God who never deceived me.” Blinded by anger, she imagined herself, not Phillis or Bobey, as a victim, and in an astonishing moment of hubris she implicitly compared herself to God: just as she found it difficult to trust God despite his goodness to her, so Phillis had “mistrusted” her without reason. Like the Reverend Thomas Bacon, an Anglican minister who described slave masters as “God’s overseers,” Sarah seems to have imagined slaves standing in the same relationship to their masters as their masters did to God. Unless slaves were asked to do something that violated biblical law, they were expected to submit quietly to their masters’ will. In a diary entry, Sarah reminded herself that God had “given” Bobey to her “in a covenant way.”66 She had been divinely commissioned to oversee his life.

  We have only one side of the conversation—Sarah’s—but it is clear that she and Phillis argued fiercely about Bobey. In an entry written three days after their first clash, Sarah considered keeping him, but, as she acknowledged to God, only because her feelings of “resentment” had triumphed over “tenderness.” “I Have from resentment been ready to Give Him up to His father’s and Mother’s will since they can’t believe that Either His Master or I Have Honesty Enough to Speak the truth, or at all to aim at His Good.”67 Sarah rarely sounded so bitter in her diary entries, but whatever Phillis had said, it had stung. Sarah almost seems to have hoped that if she kept Bobey, he would ruin his life and prove that she had spoken the truth about the advantages of selling him. “O Let me not be Willing to Give the child up to be Exposed to Hardships and ruin to Gratify them [Phillis and Gosper],” she wrote angrily. “Nor yet to Encumber myself with cares, distresses, and Perplexities at Home and abroad.”68

  Sarah’s fury seems to have grown out of a sense of personal betrayal. If she viewed herself as a particularly kind, Christian master (it is unlikely that many other white women invited a slave to join their prayer group), she may have resented Phillis’s insinuation that she was no better than the heartless slave owners in Newport who separated children from their parents. Or if she relied on her relationship with Phillis to bolster her fragile sense of self-worth, she may have been hurt—and then enraged—to discover that even Phillis could be critical of her.
Proud of her role in bringing Phillis into her church, she seems to have expected a certain level of admiration and deference in return. It was a shock to realize that Phillis did not have a “better opinion” of her.69 Although we cannot sort out all of Sarah’s tangled thoughts and emotions, she clearly felt that Phillis had been disloyal, and her anger brought out the worst features of her character, especially her self-righteousness. She was certain that she was right.

  Gradually, however, Sarah calmed down enough to realize that her “temptations to anger” might destroy one of the most important relationships in her life. After praying and worshiping with Phillis for more than three years, it pained her to think of anything coming between them. Blaming the devil, not herself, for their conflict, she wrote, “I will not Humor Satan who Has a design against us both, but will Love Her still for Jesus’ sake.” Although she remained adamant about selling Bobey, she vowed to do everything in her power to ease Phillis’s distress. The solution, she thought, was to “Pity and make much of the poor creature and Endeavor if we do sell Him to make up to her the disappointment as far as in me Lies.”70