Diagram of the lower deck of a slave ship. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
At first glance it may seem hard to understand why slaves were attracted to Sarah’s theology, especially the doctrine of original sin. When John Quamine lamented his “Total Corruption and Depravity of Nature,” he inadvertently reinforced negative stereotypes of slaves as inherently sinful and unruly. “I have a Great weight of Sins upon me that none but the blood of Christ can take away,” a slave woman confessed to Sarah.70 Yet even though Sarah urged slaves to denigrate themselves, she also gave them a powerful vocabulary to criticize their masters and to make sense of their suffering. The doctrine of original sin is egalitarian at its core, emphasizing that all humans—even the wealthiest and most powerful—are flawed. When Sarah described the world as a fallen, broken place in which humans selfishly pursued their own interests, slaves knew exactly what she meant. Forced labor, beatings, starvation, sexual abuse—they understood the reality of sin.
It may also be difficult to understand why slaves accepted Sarah’s explanation of affliction, but many seem to have been willing to blame themselves for their suffering in exchange for the promise that it was not meaningless. Whether Sarah ever urged them to “kiss the rod” (an image that she sometimes used in her letters and diaries), she almost certainly promised that their afflictions were a sign of God’s love, a “furnace” that would burn away their “dross” in preparation for salvation. At a time when all the colonies sanctioned slavery and freedom seemed like an impossible dream, many slaves seem to have been comforted by the thought that their trials might be ultimately redemptive. According to Newport Gardner (also known as Occramar Marycoo), who had been born in Africa, God had punished Africans for their idolatry in “worshipping trees, and streams, and fountains of water, and reptiles,” but his chastisements were meant for their own good. When Gardner and several other black evangelicals founded the Free African Union Society, they confessed the “righteousness of GOD in bring[ing] all these evils on us and on our children & brethren.”71 Similarly, Phillis Wheatley wrote a poem in 1773 describing her enslavement as a blessing rather than a curse:
’Twas mercy brought me from my heathen land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Perhaps other slaves were troubled by her determination to view slavery as a “mercy,” but like Sarah Osborn, Wheatley was drawn to the image of a sovereign, all-powerful God who arranged everything for her benefit.72 Her suffering was not pointless but a rational part of God’s plan.
Besides being urged to see themselves as sinful and deserving of punishment, the slaves who attended Sarah’s meetings heard a more radical message about the equality of all souls before God. When the Reverend Hezekiah Smith, a Baptist, preached at Osborn’s house on the text “And yet there is room,” a slave was “greatly awakened” by the realization that there would be room for him, too, at Christ’s banquet. Jesus made no distinctions among persons, welcoming even “the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind” to his table.73 Even though the rich and powerful seemed to enjoy God’s favor on earth, only the born again would spend eternity in heaven. The first could be last and the last could be first—a dizzying thought for those who felt despised.
Above all, slaves may have responded to Sarah’s faith that the millennium was near. She interpreted their religious yearnings as a portent of “Ethiopia’s” mass conversion to Christianity and then Christ’s return, a vision that promised the end of their captivity. There would be no slavery in Christ’s glorious kingdom.
By the end of 1767 the revival at Sarah’s house had begun to wane, and as she admitted to Fish, many children and young men now treated her meetings as a “task” or a “burden” rather than a “delight.” She had managed to keep their interest for three years—a remarkable achievement for a woman with no formal religious authority—but many eventually drifted away. Male and female slaves and young white women, however, continued to come each week in large numbers. “There is seldom Less than 60 or 70 odd blacks on Lord’s day evening,” Sarah reported in the spring of 1768, and between thirty and fifty girls typically attended on Monday nights. Perhaps more than anyone in Newport, slaves and young white women knew that their future depended on the decisions of white men, and they seem to have been strengthened by Sarah’s assurance that only God—not masters, fathers, or husbands—could determine the ultimate direction of their lives.74
Most of the sixty or seventy Africans who attended Sarah’s meetings were never baptized or admitted into full communion. The First Church of Christ accepted eight blacks into full membership between 1765 and 1774; the Seventh-day Baptist Church baptized two blacks in 1771; and Ezra Stiles’s Second Church of Christ counted seven black members in 1772.75 (Because the records for Gardiner Thurston’s Baptist Church no longer survive, we do not know whether it had any black members, but Sarah mentioned that his church reaped the benefits of the revival.) According to Ezra Stiles, there were “perhaps 26, and not above 30 professors out of Twelve hundred Negroes in Town.” Although it is not clear why so few slaves were baptized, some may have been reluctant to renounce their African religious beliefs in order to become Christian, and others may have faced opposition from hostile masters who viewed baptism as a step toward freedom. Despite clerical assurances that born-again slaves did not have to be emancipated, many masters seem to have been worried about the morality of holding a fellow Christian in bondage.76 By the nineteenth century these qualms would disappear, but only after ministers repeatedly insisted (as Sarah Osborn had done) that Christianity would make slaves more obedient.
A Woman’s Influence
If Sarah was disappointed by the small numbers of slaves and free blacks who joined her church, she never admitted it in her diaries and letters. But she was obviously hurt by the Reverend Vinal’s disapproval of her meetings and, worse, by his refusal to defend her from criticism. He had “refused to protect me,” she lamented.77 Praying for a spirit of forgiveness, she struggled to overcome her feelings of bitterness.
As Vinal’s drinking problem became increasingly obvious to church members, Sarah debated over what to do. Drunkenness was a religious issue for her: a “temptation” rather than a disease. A “DRUNKARD,” according to a writer in the Newport Mercury, “is indisposed to Virtue: Is a licentious Person: Makes his Belly his God: Is worse than a Brute.” Although Sarah “longed to act the part of a faithful friend” by talking to Vinal about his drinking, she did not dare speak to him openly, and out of deference to his authority as her minister she did not even confess her fears to her husband. From reading her correspondence one would never know that there was a problem in her congregation. If anything she became more effusive in her praise in an attempt to hide her concerns. Writing to her friend Susanna Bannister, she claimed that “our dear Mr. Vinal” was “more than ever Enlivened.”78
Only a year later, however, in September 1768, the First Church of Christ Committee (the governing body of the church) convened to discuss Vinal’s “Excessive Use of spirituous Liquors.” After weighing his excuse that he had been tempted by a “Bad habit of body” and a “weakness” in his “stomach,” the committee unanimously voted to dismiss him as pastor.79 He had led the First Church for twenty-two years, but the members were fed up with his drunkenness, his combativeness, and his frequent absences from church on Sunday.
Infuriated by his dismissal, Vinal wrote to Sarah asking for help. Even though she could not vote on church business, she was one of the most influential members of the church, and despite the tensions between them, they had once been close friends. She may have also remained close to his children, especially the two daughters who had lived at her school after their mother’s tragic death. We do not have a copy of the letter that Vinal sent to her, but based on her response he seems to have mixed self-pity with recrimination. Though
he thanked her for her kindness over the years, he denied ever being drunk (contradicting his earlier confession to the church), and he angrily accused the church of being (in Sarah’s words) “odious, malicious, cruel, unmerciful.” Portraying himself as an innocent victim, he blamed church members for treating him unfairly and plotting against him, and he urged her to take his side when a church council convened to hear his complaints.80 (It was common for Congregational churches to invite local ministers to hold councils in order to make judgments about internal disputes. The council could not force a church to take its advice, but served in an advisory capacity.)
Sarah’s long, emotional response to Vinal suggests the depth of her distress about his accusations. At the beginning of her letter she assured him that “you and yours were and are dear to me,” and she admitted that the thought of doing anything to upset him caused her “sensible pain.” “I should rather delight in comforting you,” she lamented. Yet as she continued writing, she finally allowed herself to express the sadness, frustration and anger she had kept bottled up for years. Insisting that she herself had seen him in “the effects of spirituous Liquor,” she remembered how many sleepless nights she had spent “sighing and weeping” on his account. “My only relief was in God alone,” she wrote passionately. “To him I carried you with my own soul and cried for strength.” Rejecting his language of victimization, she claimed that she had been wronged, not he: his dismissal had upset her so deeply that she had longed to die, and his lies about his drunkenness had been almost unbearable. “This cuts me to the heart,” she cried. “It even tears me all to pieces, it stumbles, it grieves me almost to death, it gives my cruel foe [the devil] such an advantage against me that I don’t know if Ever I shall get over it to my last breath.” If he had admitted his sin she could still treat him as a friend, but lying about it was intolerable, “a thousand times worse to me than the thing itself.” At the end of her letter she promised to pray for him, but she also made it clear that she had no interest in helping him restore his battered reputation. If a church council ever convened, she would “declare to every serious enquirer after truth that I do believe in my heart that the church’s proceedings with you were conscientious and not malicious.”81
Sarah might have responded less emotionally to Vinal’s letter if she had been in better health, but by the fall of 1769 her illness had worsened again, and this time her flare-up was not followed by a period of remission. If she resented Vinal for his lies, she also resented him for consuming the little energy she still had left. She was only fifty-five, but she found walking extremely difficult, and even reading and writing were exhausting. “I am entirely cut off,” she admitted to Joseph Fish, “and if I presume . . . to strain my sight a Little the pain is so Great in my Eyes, and my Head so amazed and confused that I am utterly unfitted for all duties secret and social perhaps for a week or two.”82 Since Henry also felt “poorly” (he was now eighty-four), she could not depend on him for help. She continued to meet with slaves on Sunday evenings as well as with groups of children, men, and women, but she no longer had the strength to cope with Vinal’s anger and paranoia. If she ever wrote him another letter, no copy of it survives.
Without a pastor, the First Church turned the Osborn house into the spiritual center of their congregation. In many ways this had been true even before Vinal’s dismissal (which is part of the reason for his hostility toward Sarah), but as the church searched for a new minister, candidates often ended up preaching at her house. The Reverend Punderson Austin delivered a sermon there on a Wednesday evening, and both he and Ephraim Judson, another candidate, vied for her favor by meeting with her “societies” of children and of blacks—Judson eleven times and Austin eighteen.83
At first Sarah denied having a strong opinion about who should be the new minister, but after the First Church of Christ Committee decided to add Samuel Hopkins’s name to their list of candidates, she and Susanna Anthony threw their support behind him. Forty-eight years old and the pastor of a church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Hopkins had gained renown for his theology of “disinterested benevolence”—a view that portrayed selfless devotion to Christ as the essence of true faith. Hopkins was not reputed to be a charismatic speaker, and in fact he was later remembered for his “drawling” voice and his “bad” pronunciation, “decidedly so”: he mangled the word stone into “stun” and Deuteronomy into “Deuteronowmy.” He was also described as “ungainly in gait and dress.”84
Yet Osborn and Anthony cared less about his awkward style than his theology, and they were thrilled by his unblinking defense of the doctrine of human depravity and his intense self-abasement. Here, at last, was a minister who prized selflessness as much as they did. Hopkins, in turn, made no secret of his admiration for the two of them. An earnest, morally serious man who had often been tormented by doubts about his salvation, he wanted to learn how to be more like them: humble, self-denying, and yet supremely confident about his relationship to God. They seemed like the embodiment of his theology, living each day as if the only thing that mattered were God’s will.
Portrait of Samuel Hopkins. Drawn and Engraved by Abner Reed, May 1803. Frontispiece for Stephen West, ed., Sketches of the Life of the Late Rev. Samuel Hopkins (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1805). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
But not everyone in the church liked Hopkins. Although he had been one of Jonathan Edwards’s students, he and several other ministers—including Joseph Bellamy, Levi Hart, and Jonathan Edwards, Jr.—were accused of preaching a “New Divinity” because of their modifications to Reformed theology. Like other evangelicals, Hopkins tried to reconcile central Calvinist insights about divine sovereignty and human sinfulness with the Enlightenment faith in reason, divine benevolence, and freedom, but his commitment to logical consistency sometimes led him to conclusions that other Protestants found absurd or even offensive. On one hand, he made crucial concessions to Enlightenment thought by arguing that God was benevolent and that Jesus had died for all, not just the elect. On the other, he exaggerated the most controversial features of Calvinist theology in order to emphasize God’s sovereignty: he startled many liberal-leaning Protestants, for example, by asserting that sin was actually a rational good with positive consequences. Though not denying that sin was wrong, he argued that God chose to demonstrate his glory by bringing good out of evil. He also insisted that since people who longed for conversion were usually motivated by a selfish desire to go to heaven instead of genuine love for God, they were even more corrupt than the “heathen” who ignored the gospel. Most shocking of all, he claimed that true Christians should be willing to be damned for the glory of God. Although some members of the First Church were impressed by his radical demand for selflessness, others found him extreme, and many seem to have read the Reverend William Hart’s scathing attack on his theology, Brief Remarks on a Number of False Propositions, and Dangerous Errors, Which Are Spreading in This Country. (The book was advertised in the Newport Mercury.) Hart accused Hopkins of making such impossible demands on sinners that his theology was “a ready way to throw them directly into the devil’s arms.”85
Sarah Osborn worried that Hart’s “bitter” and provocative attack would alienate the congregation, especially since many were already concerned about Hopkins’s strict regulations regarding infant baptism and church membership. Besides requiring church members to make a public profession of faith (a custom that Vinal had abandoned), he refused to baptize the infants of those who were not full members. As Sarah recognized, he was a controversial figure, and without the power to vote she would have to rely on all her influence to gain his election. Unlike Susanna Anthony, who filled her letters to Hopkins with typically feminine self-deprecation, Sarah tried to give him advice without appearing presumptuous, and perhaps because she was seven years older she sometimes addressed him in the manner of an affectionate older sister. Reporting that a church member had expressed admiration for one of his sermons about human sinfulness
(a change from his earlier scorn for Hopkins’s preaching), she wrote gently, “You will take no notice of any Hint from me Sir, but if you Please visit him as soon as you can I believe his Ear is now open to receive instruction from you.”86 Wisely, Hopkins did indeed take Sarah’s “hints,” and he frequently visited her at home.
When the men of the church narrowly voted against Hopkins’s selection in March 1770 (the count was thirty-six to thirty-two), Sarah stubbornly refused to give up. According to Ezra Stiles, who was frank about his distaste for Hopkins’s theology, she and the “Sorority” (the women’s society) were “violently engaged and had great Influence.” With more than sixty members, the society was a force to be reckoned with—and they knew it. On the Sunday that Hopkins preached his farewell sermon, many people in the congregation wept, with Sarah and her friends probably among them. In response, the male members met again to take a new vote, and this time they agreed to invite Hopkins to be their pastor.87 It is not clear whether Henry was well enough to attend church that day, but many of the other men who voted—including Deacon Coggeshall, William Gyles, and Benjamin Peabody—were married to members of the women’s society.88
Hopkins knew that Sarah Osborn’s support had been crucial for his election, and in the years ahead he treated her as one of his most trusted and respected confidantes. Unlike Vinal, who had resented her leadership, he recognized her importance to the congregation by treating her house as virtually an alternate church. Because her illness made it difficult for her to walk to the meetinghouse, he sometimes preached at her house during the week, and the entire church gathered there for “prayer and Christian conference, and for the transacting of any other affairs” before the monthly celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In a letter to a friend in the fall of 1770, Sarah praised Hopkins as “a dear indulgent Pastor” who had “never been one week absent from our House from His first coming here to this day.”89 He usually had tea with her on Saturday afternoons to discuss his upcoming sermon.
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