We can only imagine how Phillis responded to the suggestion that Sarah could somehow “make up” for the loss of her son.
At the end of Sarah’s diary entry, she recalled a biblical text that had comforted her after the loss of her own son, Samuel. She implored God, “Be better to Her than ten Sons.”71 Her allusion to this verse suggests that she may have remembered her own terrible grief after Samuel’s death, and yet she refused to consider the possibility that this time the story could end differently. Even though she had the power to relieve a grieving mother’s anguish, she refused to yield. It is hard to understand how she could have been so callous, but she seemed to want Phillis to prove her faith by resigning herself quietly to God’s will. The problem was that Phillis insisted that the sale of her son was only Sarah’s will.
Day after day in her diary Sarah pleaded with God to help her do what was right. As she lamented, she could “think of nothing Else.” Her entries all sounded alike: “I can’t control the torrent of thoughts that whirl me down the stream from the fountainhead.” “I am so amused with this affair and at such a Loss to know what is duty that I can bend to nothing.” (By “amused,” she meant troubled or distracted.) “I am wearied out and Heartsick of thinking and weighing one thing with another.”72
Finally, however, Sarah made a decision. In a long entry written on a Sunday before church (where she would almost certainly have to look Phillis in the eye), she tried to imagine Bobey’s life if she sold him. Since her former brother-in-law was a “Steady Master” and a Christian, she had no reservations about entrusting Bobey to him. He would make sure that Bobey went to church regularly and avoided “bad courses.” Yet she had to admit that dangers might lie ahead. “Should his Master die and Leave Him,” she worried, “I can’t conclude How it might be as to religious Privileges or other comforts He now Enjoys.” If he were ever sold to a new master, he might be forbidden to practice the Christian faith. (Phillis and Gosper were probably concerned about the possibility of physical abuse as well, but Sarah focused solely on his religious vulnerability.) Bobey had not yet experienced conversion, but because he attended worship and knew how to read the Bible, Sarah hoped he would some day be born again. If she owned him, she could guarantee that he would be given every opportunity to become a Christian, but if she sold him she would have no say about his future. Could she take that chance?73
No, she finally realized. No, she could not. Even though she did not object to the buying and selling of slaves, nothing was more important than Bobey’s soul.
As stubborn as ever, though, Sarah refused to give Phillis any credit for being right. When she wrote about her decision in her diary, she never mentioned Phillis, suggesting instead that her change of heart had grown out of her commitment to trust in God. As she agonized over Bobey’s future, she asked herself, “Why can’t I still trust Him in the Hands of that gracious God that at first Gave Him to me, and believe that He will take care of both Him and me?” Not only was it “ungrateful” of her to consider parting with a gift from God, but it showed her lack of faith. Bobey “shant nor he can’t Go to Sea except God Pleases,” she reminded herself. “He can Control Him if we can’t, and his Life, his Health, his Living is in God’s Hands. The whole disposing is of the Lord, and I think I had rather commit Him to Him to keep for me then to Commit Him to the Care of any Man.”74 In the religious drama she constructed, the most important roles belonged to her, Bobey, and God, with Phillis and Gosper appearing as bit players.
Yet there is no doubt that Sarah cared deeply for Phillis. Her own word was love—a word she rarely used in reference to anyone except Susanna Anthony (and, of course, Jesus). Sarah saw Phillis as a genuine Christian, the beloved of God. “I Bless thee, my God, from my very soul for what thou Hast done for His Mother,” she wrote after deciding to keep Bobey. “She, I trust, is thine own. Thou Hast appeared for Her.” On December 25, two weeks after her decision, Sarah mentioned writing a letter to a “choice friend,” almost certainly Phillis, in order “to remove some disgust I think is taken at some of my conduct.” She prayed that God would “compose my friend and convince I designed no slight at all but to improve all means for my Establishment in the Path of duty.” She did not record the response, but when she met with the women’s society on January 2, Phillis was there.75
As long as Sarah was the master and Phillis and Bobey were slaves, however, their relationship would always be tainted by her sense of racial superiority and their feelings of vulnerability. When Sarah asked God to transform Bobey into a “new creature,” she prayed, “Though he cannot change His skin nor His Heart, thou can change His Heart in a moment.”76 Despite Sarah’s belief that slaves could be spiritually equal to their masters, she also assumed that racial differences would not be erased until death. When she looked at Bobey and Phillis, she saw not only members of the body of Christ but slaves with black skin who would never be her equals on earth. As for Bobey and Phillis, we can only imagine what they saw when they looked at Sarah, but their sight was probably clouded by fear.
Slavery was one of the greatest challenges faced by early American evangelicals. Influenced by a passage from the book of Acts—God “hath made of one blood all nations of men” (17:26)—they preached the gospel to slaves, baptized them, and invited them to the communion table, but their egalitarianism usually stopped at the church door. In 1761, Sarah was no exception, but her conflict with Phillis and Bobey seems to have forced her to reflect more deeply about what it meant to love her neighbor as herself. Her anguished debate over selling Bobey was the first step in a slow, halting journey toward a new vision of race, slavery, and the meaning of the gospel.
The Fatherless
Since Sarah rarely mentioned Bobey in later diary entries, it is not clear what happened to him. Perhaps she hired him out to his former master in Berkeley, or perhaps she arranged for him to work in various businesses in the city. We do not know what trade he learned during his apprenticeship, but skilled slaves in urban areas often worked outside their masters’ households. If Bobey had learned to be a tailor, for example, he might have been hired out as a tailor’s assistant for months or even a year. Yet unless Sarah and Henry allowed him to keep a portion of his wages, his earnings would have belonged entirely to them.77
Bobey’s wages may have been the reason that Sarah and Henry suddenly had fewer financial worries at the beginning of 1762. “Thou Hast Given me the utmost of my wishes,” Sarah thanked God in her diary. “Thou art comfortably feeding and clothing me and all committed to my immediate charge: my dear husband in His age and the dear orphans, too. We Have a comfortable House, wood Enough, and no one under our roof is Exposed to any temporal wants—thou art enabling me Honorably to Pay rent, wages, and all other dues.”78 Sarah never explained how God had made all these things possible, but her new sense of security may have been founded on slave labor.
Sarah and Henry’s fortunes improved even more in the spring when she heard the unexpected news that her uncle John Guyse had died and left her a bequest of 20 pounds sterling, the equivalent of 640 pounds in American currency.79 Sarah had not seen Guyse since her childhood in England, but she had always been proud to be related to such a distinguished minister, and she seems to have corresponded with him regularly. Surprised by his generosity, she was determined not to be “silly” about her new prosperity. Besides using the bequest to pay off some of her debts, she immediately set aside 125 pounds to give to charity. She planned to “support the Gospel, buy books to send or Give away to children, and to relieve the needy.” She also gave 22 pounds, 14 shillings, to two “poor widows,” one of them almost certainly Abigail.80 Like everything else in the world, money ultimately belonged to God, and he had given it to her in stewardship to use for the common good.
Yet Sarah was not immune to the acquisitiveness of her age, and her sudden wealth posed temptations that kept her awake at night. “Before I had tidings of my Legacy, all was well,” she confessed in her diary. “I had Enough. I decl
ared myself satisfied.” But now that she had money in her pocket, she could not stop dreaming about the expensive goods that were for sale on the wharves, especially “a Handsome suit of black silk and a Prussian cloak” that she could wear as mourning for Guyse. “Satan Has taken me in Hand,” she lamented. Although “Dear friends” encouraged her to buy proper mourning attire, she worried about being motivated by “Pride and a conformity to the world.” The suit would cost more than 300 pounds, a hefty sum for someone who had recently relied on charity to survive, and if she bought it, only 125 pounds of her bequest would remain. On one hand, she fretted that such an expensive, “handsome” outfit was too “grand” for a lowly schoolteacher, but on the other, she also worried that her decision not to buy it would be a sign of her “unbelief,” her failure to trust God to provide for her in the future. Although she knew that the “Worldly wise” would condemn her, she thought it would be better to “spend every farthing” than to hoard away her money in a spirit of doubt. (This profligacy would have surprised Max Weber, who associated the “Protestant ethic” with the steady, disciplined accumulation of capital. Although Sarah does not seem to have been representative, at least a few evangelicals tried to obey Christ’s injunction to “take no thought for the morrow.”)81
Since Sarah never wrote about the new suit and cloak again, we do not know for certain whether she decided to buy them, but probably not. In March, finally at “peace” with regard to her uncle’s bequest, she made a momentous decision about how God, the “father of the fatherless,” wanted her to spend the money, and it did not involve clothing. Distressed by the sight of Henry’s two youngest grandchildren, Nancy and Johnny, living in squalor with their mother, she promised God to give them a better life—a life away from Abigail.82 If Sarah could find a place for Nancy to live as an apprentice, then Johnny could join his two other siblings at her house, and Abigail could get a job to support herself.
Not surprisingly, Abigail resisted the idea of being separated from her two younger children. Although she may have been grateful to Sarah and Henry for saving her family from the poorhouse, she also seems to have resented their interference and criticisms. Once again, we only have one side of the conversation, but if Sarah ever spoke to Abigail in the tone with which she wrote about her, their relationship must have been tense. Sarah almost never described poverty as a divine punishment for sin, but in an angry moment she wondered whether God might punish Abigail’s “sloth” by refusing to show mercy to her children. “If it is thy Pleasure that they through her obstinacy as a Just Punishment for sloth and other sins shall remain miserable,” she asked God, “who am I that I should oppose it?” Although she prayed for Abigail’s salvation, she had little hope that she would ever be born again. “O Let Her not be Miserable through time and to Eternity through Laziness,” she prayed. “But I Leave her in thy wise, Just, and faithful Hands.”83
Sarah always described herself in her diaries as “weak” and powerless, but in fact she was a formidable opponent who knew how to get her way. After two weeks of arguing, Abigail relented under the pressure. Still dependent on Sarah and Henry’s charity, she had little choice. Besides agreeing to send Johnny to live with them, she allowed “Little Nancy” to live with a Mrs. Wanscoat, probably as a household servant. (Mrs. Wanscoat did not belong to the First Church of Christ, but she was probably a member of one of the other Christian churches in Newport. Sarah would have hesitated to send Nancy to anyone who was not a devout Christian.) Perhaps Sarah worried about her ability to support all four of Abigail’s children, but she may have also hoped that Mrs. Wanscoat would teach Nancy a skill that would help her in the future—for example, baking or sewing.84
Without knowing more about Abigail, it is hard to say whether Sarah treated her fairly. Sarah could be condescending at times, and because of her certainty that Abigail was a bad mother, she ignored her pain at being separated from her children. Given Sarah’s suffering when she had lost her own son, she might have been more empathetic, but just as she claimed to know what was best for Phillis and Bobey, she also insisted that she knew what was best for Abigail and her children.
But perhaps in this case she made the best choice under difficult circumstances. If she was not exaggerating when she described her grandchildren as “hungry” and “naked,” then they needed her help. Many people in Newport were poor, but Sarah claimed that “no greater Objects [of compassion] are to be found in this Place than these [children].” Abigail’s “sloth” seems to have included outright neglect. As a widow with no money and no employment, she may have been too depressed to care for her family. When Sarah embraced Abigail’s children as her own, she was trying to imitate God’s compassion to the fatherless. They were “Dear Lambs,” a gift from God.85
Sarah’s generosity was especially remarkable in light of her faltering health. Although she felt relatively well between flare-ups of her illness, her condition deteriorated with every attack. By the spring of 1762 walking had become so difficult that her friends usually took her to church in a chaise. She could no longer visit the sick or the needy unless someone drove her, and to spare herself the exertion she seems to have moved her school into her house. In November she suffered a flare-up that was so severe she spent twelve days in bed. Thinking she might die, her friends gathered around her bedside to keep vigil. In a rare expression of pride, Sarah remembered later, “perhaps not less than fifty offered to watch.”86 She eventually recovered, but the number of people who rushed to her side was a fitting tribute to a woman who had always tried to help others in need. Many of them had probably experienced Sarah’s generosity in the past.
Almost everything that we know about Sarah’s declining health comes from her letters to Joseph Fish rather than her diaries. Although she prayed for help as her illness progressed, she chose her words carefully because she did not want to sound discontented or resentful. Adopting a posture of submission, she wrote in her diary, “I ask not Health nor any temporal mercy, be it what it will, if it will stand in competition with that or be anyway improved to the dishonor of God.” If not for her candid descriptions in her letters to Fish we would have no idea of the true extent of her debility. In a brief aside she mentioned that she usually spent at least one day a week in bed, and as she admitted in June 1763, she had been to church only twice in the previous ten months.87 Since the Reverend Vinal was still struggling with alcoholism the church may have been closed on many Sundays, but even when it was open, she did not have the strength to get there. Her disease often left her exhausted, and it was slowly robbing her of the ability to walk. She still taught her school, but she was forced to spend more and more time at home, her world shrinking to the four walls of her house.
At the age of forty-nine Sarah could no longer venture out into the streets to find those who needed her charity and prayers. But driven by her desire to be useful and to glorify God, she opened her doors to anyone who wanted to learn more about the gospel. Her advancing illness should have marked the end of her evangelism, but instead it was the beginning of the most remarkable chapter of her life.
Chapter 9
Jordan Overflowing, 1765–1774
I Hope and trust out of Love to poor Perishing immortal souls and a degree of Love and Zeal for the Glory of God I at first concented to Let poor servants and white Lads come here on Sabbath evenings to Join with us in family worship but Little thot of their Multiplying as at this day even till the House will not contain them and now I know not what to do I Have set my hand to the plow and dare not look back I dare not dismiss and say they shall not come since they behave with all decency and seem to esteem it a great priviledge I [can] chierfuly read to them talk with them and sing a psalm with them but when it comes to the duty of prayer I [refrain] Lest I bring a wound and reproach upon religion I dare not Encourage black ones to pray thus openly Lest they be Lift’d up with Pride and proceed from praying to Exhorting &c Every Brother and friend declines affording me assistance in this Point . . . shall I
write my dear Pastor just to come up and pray one Lords Day Evening Mr Styles another Mr Thurston another and Mr Maxen another as there is a considerable Number of each Ministers Peculiar charge as well as there own servants or shall they be sent away without Prayer . . . Who would ever have thot that God by such a Mean despicable worm would have Gatherd such a Number as now statedly resorts to this House every Week . . . in all three hundred and twelve souls beside all the trancient persons that come to converse on a religious account is this not the Lords doing is it not marvelous in our Eyes what but his secret drawing could incline so Many to Lend a Listening Ear to serious things why aut [else] the young and the bond as usual not prophaining the Lords Day Evenings by Plays and Passtimes if God has not given them a serious turn and in a degree stopt them in their Mad Carreer is there not room to Hope God is preparing his way for a Glorious revival of religion I have sometimes cheiring Hopes but as to my self none but God alone knows my conflicts and fiery trials and temptations the Lord soport guide and direct me that I may not turn out of the Path of duty to the right hand or Left. . . . O pray for me dr sir pray for me o that my God will Grant me Grace to know and do his will the weight and concern that Lies upon my spirits at this time Lest I should take any wrong steps or Encourage others to do so causes my sleep to depart from me whole Nights together and o my dear Pastor so far as in you Lies protect me and direct me what course to take would you advise me to shut up my mouth and doors and creep into obscurity will this be most for Gods Glory and the Good of souls sometimes I am tempted thus to do but Hithertoo I dare not.1
1765. It is a cold Sunday night in the middle of winter. Candles and firelight illuminate Sarah Osborn’s house, casting a glow onto the street. More than seventy slaves and free blacks sit quietly in her kitchen as she reads the Bible to them. With few chairs in the house, most of them sit shoulder to shoulder on the floor while she perches above them on a stool, pausing occasionally to emphasize that the Bible was written for each and every one of them. Though she has difficulty walking and standing because of her advancing illness, she has never felt more alive.
Sarah Osborn's World Page 32
