Every night seems marvelous to her—a stunning testament to God’s grace. Crowds of people assemble at her door almost every evening waiting to pray, read the Bible, and sing hymns with her. To handle the throng, she arranges for different groups to meet on different nights of the week: white boys, young men, “neighbor’s daughters,” and “Ethiopians” join her family for worship on Sundays; Baptist men gather on Mondays; blacks on Tuesdays; the women’s society during their traditional time on Thursdays; and Baptist women on Fridays. Since she is reluctant to pray aloud in front of adult white men, she asks her husband, Henry, to pray with them instead.2
Both exhilarated and frightened by the revival at her house, Sarah writes to Joseph Fish for advice. Sometimes she worries that the sheer number of worshipers might become like “the river Jordan overflowing all the banks,” and with more than three hundred people crowding into her house each week, she fears losing control, especially of the slaves. Yet because of her hope that she is witnessing the beginning of a “glorious revival of religion,” she refuses “to shut up my mouth and doors and creep into obscurity.”3
A Glorious Revival
Sarah Osborn’s prayer meetings were controversial—women were not supposed to aspire to religious leadership—but her decision to invite blacks into her home was greeted with greater hostility than she had ever before encountered. Without intending it she had exposed the deep ambivalence about race that lurked underneath Newport’s urbane, polite culture. Christians in Newport paid lip service to the ideal of converting blacks, but they found it disturbing to imagine that slaves—especially their own slaves—might become their “brothers” and “sisters” in Christ. They preferred to assume that Africans were too ignorant, stubborn, or savage to understand the gospel.
Evangelicals set themselves apart from virtually all other Christians in the eighteenth century by making a determined effort to convert the enslaved. Just as the rise of evangelicalism in dialogue with the Enlightenment gave women new opportunities for religious leadership, it inspired a small but influential group of free blacks and slaves to affirm their spiritual equality. Influenced by the Enlightenment emphasis on the authority of individual experience, evangelicals insisted that blacks could become true Christians, and they encouraged the most literate to publish their narratives of sin and redemption.
Yet white evangelicals shared something else with Enlightenment thinkers: a tragic inability to accept racial difference as anything other than a sign of inferiority. Even the most fervent preachers to the enslaved found it virtually impossible to imagine a world where blacks and whites would be political, economic, or social equals. Neither evangelicals nor Enlightenment thinkers were able to forge a new vision of race on their own. Each had something the other lacked: evangelicals a fervent belief that sin must be immediately repented, Enlightenment thinkers an equally fervent belief that freedom was a universal right. In the eighteenth century only a few radical visionaries were courageous enough to combine the Enlightenment ideal of universal equality with the Christian imperative to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and at first, Sarah Osborn was not one of them.
It is not clear exactly when and how her meetings began. None of her diaries survive for the period between April 1762 and January 1767, and although Samuel Hopkins included brief extracts from the missing diaries in his Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn, he was not able to read several crucial volumes dating from the early years of the revival. Sometime before Sarah died, she realized that her diaries from January 4, 1765, to October 2, 1766, had disappeared, but she “could not tell where, or by what means they were gone.”4 As a result, there are many questions about the revival that we cannot answer.
Hopkins claims that Sarah did not begin holding meetings until 1766 and 1767, when “there was an uncommon attention to religion, which turned the thoughts of many to Mrs. Osborn. They repaired to her as a known pious, benevolent Christian, to whom they could have easy access, that they might enjoy her counsel and prayers.” Yet by piecing together evidence from her extensive correspondence, her 1767 diary, and Hopkins’s own account of her life, we can determine that Sarah began holding religious meetings for blacks and children (probably white children) as early as June 1764. “Lord, overrule for thy own glory, both as to servants and children,” she prayed. Perhaps Hopkins minimized her evangelistic role in order to shield her from criticism, but the evidence suggests that her meetings were not the consequence of the “uncommon attention to religion” but its cause. As she explained to Joseph Fish in September 1764, she was eagerly praying for a revival, and by the following April “several Ethiopians” were coming to her house every Sunday evening. In an attempt to hide her own agency, Sarah explained that they had “asked Liberty to repair to our House for the benefit of family prayer, reading, &c.” But she also admitted, “I have thought it a duty to Encourage them.” Although she never mentioned reading Cotton Mather’s The Negro Christianized, which was published in 1706, she may have been influenced by his call to evangelize slaves. One of Mather’s suggestions was that families should invite blacks to join them on Sunday nights for worship.5
If the Reverend Vinal had been available, Sarah might have sent the Africans to his house instead of her own, but he was increasingly incapacitated by his drinking. Reluctant to name the problem, Sarah wrote only that he was “Laid by frequently and we scattered as sheep without a shepherd.”6 Although Deacon Nathaniel Coggeshall strove to keep the church running, it was Sarah who took up the mantle of spiritual leadership. Despite her illness, she had a gift that others lacked.
Sarah’s evangelism was fueled by her belief that the millennium might be near. Like many Americans she had interpreted France’s defeat during the Seven Years’ War as a blow to the Catholic Antichrist, and she searched for signs that Christ would soon return. “I know not what is before us,” she wrote in 1764, “no, not for an Hour, but would fain Hope the Glory of the Latter days is beginning to dawn.” Encouraged by the news of revivals in other places, she hoped that “vile Rhode Island” might be next.7
Sarah’s meetings began only a few months after her mother’s death, a painful loss that may have also felt like a release. There is no doubt that Sarah loved her “dear mother,” and ever since her confession many years earlier, she had tried to be a good daughter. Yet their visits over the years had sometimes been difficult, and it may not have been a coincidence that Sarah decided to do something radical so soon after her mother’s death. If Susanna had been alive to hear the news of Sarah’s prayer meetings for slaves, she probably would have reprimanded her daughter for being too zealous: they had never completely agreed about what it meant to be a Christian. But now that her mother was gone, Sarah could make her own choices without fear of recrimination.8 As she wept over her loss, she may have realized that there was no longer any reason to mute her convictions. She would follow God wherever he led.
Sarah’s meetings with Africans—both enslaved and free—seem to have begun with a slave named Quaum (also known as Quamenee Church and later John Quamine), who sent her a letter describing his conversion in 1764. Quaum was the slave of Captain Benjamin Church, a merchant who had belonged to the First Church of Christ for seventeen years, but he decided to approach Osborn and Deacon Nathaniel Coggeshall instead of his own master for religious guidance, perhaps hoping that they would be less reluctant to accept him as a spiritual “brother.” Most masters had little interest in welcoming their slaves to the communion table. Since Africans in Newport formed a tight-knit community, Quaum probably knew about Sarah’s close relationship to Phillis, and it is even possible that he asked Phillis for help in writing his conversion narrative. He dictated his account to a literate female slave because of his poor English and his inability to write.9
Quaum’s narrative has been lost, but Sarah sent it to Joseph Fish, and his response includes a summary of the contents. Quaum was born in Anamaboe on the Gold Coast of Africa (in modern-day Ghana) and was sold into slavery in
Newport in 1754 or 1755. There he had quickly mastered the tenets of evangelical Christianity. His language, though reportedly “broken,” sounded much like Sarah’s. “Truly I must join you in Favorable Sentiments of what has passed within him,” Fish wrote to her. “The discoveries he had of Himself,—his Sinful Life,—Total Corruption and Depravity of Nature,—utter Inability to help himself,—Unworthiness of any Favor,—Just Desert of Eternal Punishment,—Lost undone state,—Excellency and Loveliness of Christ,—Freeness of his Grace,—Perfection of his Righteousness,—Fullness and all-sufficiency &c &c are all of a Gospel Stamp; & constrain me to think that there is, in the Subject, like Precious Faith with Saints.” On July 28, 1765, Quaum was baptized and accepted into full communion at the First Church, the fourth black member to be accepted. Perhaps because of his devotion to the Gospel of John, which he named as a favorite book of the Bible, he renamed himself John Quamine.10
Although the meetings at Sarah’s house began with blacks, the news of Quamine’s conversion soon brought others to her door as well, including a group of white boys. Perhaps they were simply curious at first, but there was something magnetic about Sarah—a warmth and an earnestness—that drew them in. Week after week they returned, pressing into her kitchen to pray and sing with her. By the summer of 1766 she felt as though she were witnessing the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. As she explained to Fish, when she had first allowed “poor servants and white Lads” to join family worship on Sunday nights, she had “Little thought of their Multiplying as at this day even till the House will not contain them.”11
But the crowds kept growing. Soon both blacks and whites of all ages were clamoring for the opportunity to pray at her house. Though not all were Congregationalists, Sarah welcomed them anyway. Since we do not have any accounts from the people who attended her meetings, we cannot know why they were so drawn to her, but even if asked they might have found it difficult to articulate the force of her charisma. Gifted in prayer, Sarah seems to have intuitively known how to touch people’s hearts. When a group of more than thirty girls assembled at her house one night, including a girl whose father had recently died, Sarah’s emotional prayer for the “fatherless” reduced them to tears.12 Although she could be stern when speaking to those who did not share her faith, she could also be tender when consoling the ill or distressed. Her sensitivity to other people’s crosses must have made her an especially appealing figure to the enslaved, who knew that she, too, had lost loved ones. Although there must have been times when her empathy failed (as it had with Phillis), she tried her best to offer comfort and hope. Her message was always the same: a loving, compassionate Jesus had offered up his own life to save them.
People seem to have been especially drawn to Sarah because of her steadfast faith in the midst of suffering. Even though she was losing her ability to walk and to see, she testified that God was her only portion—her strength and her life. Her faith seemed remarkable, a mystery that they wanted to understand.
As the Osborn house grew increasingly crowded on Sunday evenings, the meetings spilled into other homes as well. Deacon Coggeshall invited worshipers to join his family on Sunday evenings, and a “free Ethiopian” opened his doors to “young men” (probably of both races) on Sunday nights and to blacks on Thursday nights. Sarah also invited young children to visit her twice a week to recite the catechism, sing hymns, pray, and talk about God. Sometimes she read passages from A Token for Children, a Puritan book featuring the stories of pious children who had died young.13
Not everyone was welcome at Osborn’s house, however, and not everyone found her a charismatic figure. Most Quakers seem to have avoided her, probably troubled by her defense of original sin, and some members of the Second Church of Christ (her mother’s former church) found her overly strict. Even parents who sent their children to her for catechism classes sometimes chafed at her rigor. In a humorous aside to Fish, Sarah admitted that an Anglican couple “complained I Had Spoilt their child for she did nothing but get alone and read and pray and cry and they would not divert her all they could do.”14 Although Sarah cherished the child’s visible signs of a changed heart, others in Newport rejected the notion that true religion should involve tears.
The numbers who crossed Sarah Osborn’s threshold each week were astonishing. During the summer of 1766 more than 500 people crowded into her house every week, including almost 140 on Sunday nights alone. Sometimes strangers stopped by to see what was happening. Always self-effacing, she asked Fish, “Who would ever have thought that God by such a Mean despicable worm would have Gathered such a Number as now steadily resorts to this House every Week?”15
Sarah’s interracial meetings were so large that they were impossible to ignore, and many in Newport were troubled by her violation of the codes of racial etiquette that kept blacks and whites apart. Because Sarah allowed dozens of slaves and free blacks to mix with young white men and women on Sunday evenings, some critics seem to have feared miscegenation. As she admitted to Fish, one of Newport’s matrons had cut off “all intercourse with her” because “the reproachful sound of keeping a Negro House is too intolerable to be born.” Fearing that her decision to allow “Neighbor’s daughters” to worship with blacks on Sunday nights might “Give some occasion of offence,” Sarah asked the young women to come on Monday nights instead. But she refused to stop welcoming blacks into her house. “I dare not dismiss and say they shall not come,” she explained to Fish. “They behave with all decency and seem to esteem it a great privilege.”16
Slave masters in Newport prided themselves on their benevolence, but the truth is that they were more than a little afraid of the slaves and free blacks in their midst, and they seem to have worried that Sarah Osborn’s meetings would incite rebellion. The Newport Mercury often printed accounts of violent slaves who had revolted on shipboard or murdered their masters. In the spring of 1763, for example, the newspaper printed stories about a Newport captain who had died after his throat was cut during a slave mutiny; a twenty-one-year-old woman who had perished after a slave struck her with a flatiron and dragged her to the cellar; and a slave uprising in Berbice, a Dutch colony in Guyana, that had led to the massacre of “all the inhabitants.” Masters insisted that their slaves were content, but they knew that a desire for freedom always bubbled under the surface. Between 1758 and 1775 the Newport Mercury printed more than sixty-five advertisements for runaway slaves, each ad accompanied by a crude drawing of a black figure in flight, a staff in hand. John Bannister, for example, a member of Sarah Osborn’s church, placed an ad offering a reward for his runaway slave Caesar. Although these images were designed to serve as a quick reference point for slave catchers, the result was that the dominant visual representation of slavery involved escape.17
Sarah could not have chosen a worse time to encourage mass gatherings of slaves and free blacks. Although whites in Newport had always been nervous about the possibility of slave revolts, they grew especially anxious during the 1760s because of mob violence against British policies. When the British Parliament passed the Sugar Act in 1764 and the Stamp Act in 1765 in order to pay for the French and Indian War, colonists responded by burning effigies of stamp collectors, destroying houses, and tarring and feathering Loyalists. In June 1765 a mob of five hundred “Sailors, Boys, and Negroes” seized a boat from the British vessel The Maidstone and burned it on the Newport Common to protest against the impressment of men into the British navy. (Impressment was virtually a form of kidnapping.) Even for those who were sympathetic to the plight of impressed sailors, the “rabble” was alarming, especially because it involved “Negroes” brazenly attacking British property. Two months later a Stamp Act demonstration organized by three of Newport’s leading merchants spiraled out of control when Patriots attacked the houses of two prominent Loyalists.18 With tensions running high, any large gathering raised the specter of anarchy and violence.
An advertisement for a runaway slave, Newport Mercury, November 11, 1765. Photograph courte
sy of the Newport Historical Society.
A large gathering led by a woman conjured up images of a different kind of disorder. In a letter to Joseph Fish, Sarah asked whether she had ventured “too far beyond my Line.” Although hoping that he would say no, her question was not rhetorical. Certain that “Ministers should stand in their Places and Private Christians . . . in theirs,” she did not want anyone to think that she aspired to “Ministerial Office.” Nor did she want worshipers at her meetings to imagine that women had the same religious authority as men. Though she was willing to pray aloud in front of women, children, and slaves, she refused to place herself in a position of leadership over adolescent boys or white men; she relied on Henry or visiting ministers to pray with them instead. She knew her “proper place.” Comparing herself to the biblical woman of Samaria, she portrayed herself as nothing more than a messenger. If people believed in Christ, it was because “of his own word and not for the saying of the woman only.”19
Sarah’s meetings were controversial for another reason as well. Not only were they interracial, they were interdenominational. By 1761 she had allowed at least one Baptist woman, a former Congregationalist, to be part of the women’s society, but she had always worried about compromising her religious purity. During the revivals, however, she put aside her scruples to invite both Baptists and Seventh-day Baptists to her meetings, and even a few Anglicans attended. “Church folks,” she called them. Because Vinal was increasingly withdrawn and even hostile, she invited the Reverend Gardiner Thurston, the pastor of the Second Baptist Church, to attend instead. He was a cooper (a cask and barrel maker) who had never been to college, but he was rumored to have “the power of attracting great congregations.” Like George Whitefield, Osborn believed that religious experience was more important than doctrinal disagreements, a nondenominational approach that would become a hallmark of the evangelical movement in the future. “All sorts and sects almost promiscuously come to our House,” she reported. “They Have all a welcome there.”20
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