Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  Of One Blood

  Soon after Hopkins took charge of the First Church, Sarah Osborn stopped holding her evening prayer meetings. Although she continued to pray with the women’s society on Thursday afternoons, she may have thought it would be unseemly to continue her leadership now that her church had a new, sober pastor. Because of her declining health, she may have also lacked the strength. With the help of assistants, she seems to have continued teaching her school, but Hopkins gradually took over her meetings, inviting people to his house on weeknights. Ezra Stiles, perhaps relieved that Osborn’s controversial gatherings had finally come to an end, also began holding prayer meetings, including separate gatherings for men, women, and blacks. In February 1770, Stiles met with seventy young women, and by the winter of 1772 as many as ninety blacks were meeting weekly at his house—a greater number than she had ever reported.90 Departing from Osborn’s ecumenical spirit, however, neither Hopkins nor Stiles seems to have opened his doors to anyone who did not attend his own Congregational church. Sarah had always been ambivalent about Stiles because his theology was more liberal than hers, and despite praising him for his “Lovely, Engaging, benevolent temper,” she criticized him for avoiding the topic of hell. His sermons were polished, agreeable, and usually comforting—and this, in Sarah’s view, was exactly the problem: he cared more about pleasing the ear than telling the truth about damnation. Yet he had occasionally preached at her meetings, and she was willing to collaborate with anyone who wanted to convert Newport’s Africans.91

  In 1773, Hopkins asked Stiles to meet with John Quamine and Bristol Yamma, two of the slaves who had attended Sarah’s meetings, to judge whether they could become missionaries to Africa. Although Stiles was dubious about their intellectual abilities, he was impressed by their zeal. As he recorded in his diary, Quamine “tells me that ever since he tasted the Grace of the Lord Jesus he conceived a Thought and Earnest Desire or Wish that his Relations and Countrymen in Africa might also come to the knowledge of and taste the same blessed Things.”92

  Quamine had been one of Sarah Osborn’s first converts, but we know little about him and Yamma except for a few bare facts. Both men were Ashantis from Ghana who had been kidnapped by slave traders: Yamma at such a young age that he no longer remembered his family, and Quamine after being promised that he would be sent abroad for an education. Although Yamma seems to have been single, Quamine was married and had fathered two children by 1773, a two-year old daughter and a one-year-old son.93 His wife, Duchess Channing (later Quamine), was known as “the most celebrated cake-maker in Rhode Island,” and although she belonged to Stiles’s church instead of her husband’s (probably because her master, William Channing, worshiped there), she was an equally devoted Christian: “intelligent, industrious, affectionate, honest, and of exemplary piety.” Quamine and Duchess seem to have attended Sarah’s meetings together, and Duchess fully supported his desire to become a missionary and perhaps even return to Africa.94 Besides being determined to spread the gospel, he seems to have hoped to be reunited with long-lost family members. After Hopkins sent a letter to the Reverend Philip Quaque, an Anglican missionary in Ghana, he learned that Quamine’s mother was still living, and she had shed “tears of Joy” at the news that her long-lost son was not only alive but hoped to return to his native land.95

  Quaque discouraged Hopkins from sending Yamma and Quamine back to Ghana, insisting that their tribe was too “Savage, Villainous, Revengeful, Malicious” and “Blood-thirsty” ever to convert to Christianity, but Phillis Wheatley was more optimistic. Responding to a letter from Hopkins, she hoped that the mission might mark “the beginning of that happy period foretold by the Prophets, when all shall know the Lord from the last to the greatest.”96 She seems to have met Hopkins through Obour Tanner, a female slave in Newport who was one of her closest friends and a member of Hopkins’s congregation. (Like Duchess Quamine, Tanner had probably attended Sarah’s meetings.)97

  When Quamine and Yamma bought a ticket in the Newport lottery and won three hundred dollars, Hopkins, Stiles, and Sarah Osborn believed it was providential—an extraordinary answer to their prayers. After splitting the winnings, Quamine was able to buy his freedom, but because Yamma’s master refused to free him for less than two hundred dollars, he needed to raise another fifty dollars, a sum that Hopkins eventually donated himself. Hopkins and Stiles also circulated a letter asking “pious and benevolent” Christians to contribute money to send both men to the College of New Jersey to be educated. “These persons,” they testified, “have good natural abilities; are apt, steady, and judicious, and speak their native language; the language of a numerous, potent nation in Guinea, to which they belong. They are not only willing, but very desirous to quit all worldly projects and risk their lives, in attempting to open a door for the propagation of Christianity, among their poor, ignorant, perishing, heathen brethren.”98

  Sarah Osborn and the women’s society held a day of fasting and prayer, and by 1774 Hopkins and Stiles had raised enough money to pay for Quamine and Yamma’s expenses. Drawing on the transatlantic evangelical network that had been forged during the 1740s, they received donations not only from people in New England but from London and Scotland. (The Society in Edinburgh for Promoting Christian Knowledge donated thirty pounds sterling.) In November 1774, soon after the meeting of the First Continental Congress, Quamine and Yamma set sail to embark on their education.99

  Sarah must have been elated. Their desire to become missionaries to Africa seemed to be evidence that God himself had vindicated her meetings.

  As she eagerly awaited news from Princeton, Sarah also prayed for another new convert, her cherished granddaughter Sarah, nicknamed Sally. There are no records of what happened to Sarah and Henry’s three other grandchildren, but Sally seems to have been deeply affected by what she witnessed during the revival. By the summer of 1773, when she was in her early twenties, she had been born again. Although Sarah rarely went to church any longer because of her illness, she almost certainly found a way to get to the meetinghouse to see Sally’s baptism and to share communion with her. There was now a second “Sarah Osborn” in the First Church. A year later, on September 1, 1774, Sally was married to Daniel Fellows, a church member who seems to have shared her desire to perpetuate her grandmother’s legacy. The two of them sat in the family pew every Sunday morning.100

  Yet even as Sarah praised God for the many happy events in her life, her past conflicts with the Reverend Vinal still weighed on her mind. During the summer and fall of 1774, Vinal continued to accuse the First Church of mistreating him, even claiming that his confession had been coerced at a time of “bodily infirmity and weakness of mind.” The church had sent him a letter of admonition in 1770 and then censured him in 1771 (a serious penalty that barred him from taking communion in Congregational churches), but in response he sent harassing letters, accused Hopkins and Elnathan Hammond of slander, and even dragged Sarah’s name through the mud. He claimed that she, Susanna Anthony, Deacon Coggeshall, and two other men had been guilty of drunkenness, telling lies, and other “immoralities.” When a church council made up of local ministers finally convened in the summer of 1774 after years of delay, they cleared the First Church of any wrongdoing and demanded that Vinal apologize to those he had maligned, but to little effect. When the church received a halfhearted apology from him in December 1774, the members angrily voted not to accept it. “He has made no satisfaction to most of the individuals he has injured,” they complained, “and has not so much as mentioned them, nor many of the abuses he has offered them.” After all Sarah’s kindnesses to him over the years, she must have been both stunned and wounded by his bitter accusations.101

  But if Sarah were ever tempted to condemn Vinal for his weakness, she soon realized that she, too, had reason to be ashamed. Indeed, she feared that she had committed a far worse sin.

  Until Samuel Hopkins moved to Newport he seems to have assumed that slavery had been ordained by God, and he himself
had owned a female slave during his earlier pastorate in Great Barrington. Yet after meeting large numbers of slaves at the Osborn house, seeing them in chains on the public auction block near his church, and listening to their tragic stories of captivity, he became increasingly troubled by the contradictions between slavery and his Christian faith. Though he had always known that humans were corrupt, he had never understood the depth of human depravity until witnessing the suffering of Newport’s slaves. It is not clear whether the realization came slowly over the course of several years or suddenly in a flash, but at some point before 1775 he became convinced that slavery was sinful, an abomination that had to be immediately repented.102 Sarah’s distress—and perhaps resistance—must have been great when he told her that the slaves who had gathered in her kitchen deserved more than an otherworldly gospel: they deserved to be free.

  Historians have often puzzled over how and why Hopkins became one of the leading antislavery activists of his time and, more generally, why antislavery sentiment suddenly blossomed in the 1770s and 1780s after centuries of indifference. Although there had been isolated critiques of slavery in the past, most whites accepted it as an inevitable part of the social order. Explanations for the rise of the eighteenth-century antislavery movement have ranged widely, but many historians have been struck by the fact that it emerged in tandem with the humanitarian movement, revolutionary rhetoric, and mercantile capitalism. As we have seen, many people who prided themselves on their compassion did not oppose slavery, but by equating virtue with “sensibility” (the ability to feel others’ pain), the humanitarian movement raised troubling questions about the justice of owning another human being. In London, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (composed mostly of Quakers) commissioned a seal of a kneeling slave in chains who raised his manacled hands to heaven and asked, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Although historians have sometimes denigrated eighteenth-century reformers for their sentimentality, abolitionists understood the power of sympathy. In a graphic depiction of the cruelty of slavery, Samuel Hopkins asked his listeners to imagine thousands of “poor Africans . . . Staked to the ground and burnt by inches, or hung up by their thumbs and after 8 or 9 days Expired in torments.” Appealing to his listeners’ emotions, he asked, “Can we, I say, See this and hold our peace?”103

  The revolutionary demand for freedom also contributed to an emerging climate of antislavery. After the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and the Boston Massacre, many colonists accused the British of “enslaving” them by depriving them of the right to political representation. The Newport Mercury, for example, denounced the Stamp Act for being “indisputably subversive of our inestimable Rights, and calculated to reduce us, together with Millions yet unborn, to irredeemable Slavery, and the most abject Poverty.” In 1771 the newspaper unveiled a new masthead blazoned with the words “Undaunted by TYRANTS,—We’ll DIE or be FREE.” While Sarah Osborn seemed deaf to the absurdity of Patriots demanding their political liberty while defending slavery, other Americans recognized the hypocrisy for what it was. As an anonymous author complained in the Newport Mercury, it was “amazing” that colonists should rail against being “enslaved” by the British while they were guilty “of enslaving, and promoting the slavery, of thousands, and tens of thousands of their fellow creatures!!!”104

  The rise of antislavery also coincided with the emergence of merchant capitalism, but the exact relation between the two has been the subject of debate among historians. According to David Brion Davis, many early antislavery activists were wealthy Quaker merchants who condemned “unfree” labor in order to legitimize “free” wage labor in factories. Though they couched their arguments in Christian language, they seem to have unconsciously hoped to convince wage laborers (and themselves) that factory work was superior to slavery—a conclusion that might not have been immediately obvious to the men and women who spent sixteen hours a day, seven days a week doing repetitive work in dark, crowded spaces. In contrast, Thomas Haskell has offered a more positive assessment of the relation between antislavery and capitalism, arguing that people gained a greater sense of their ability to create change through their involvement in markets. As merchants traded goods with others around the world, they may have realized both the far-reaching effects of their actions and their power to eradicate entrenched evils like slavery.105

  Since a movement as complicated as antislavery probably did not emerge from a single cause, it is possible that both these interpretations capture some of its complicated relation to capitalism. But Hopkins’s example—and the example of the Quakers—suggests that there was yet another thread in the tapestry of antislavery: a suspicion of capitalism because of its acceptance of rational self-interest as a positive good. Although there is no doubt that the rise of antislavery eventually legitimated free market capitalism, it is impossible to know whether Quakers “unconsciously” intended this, and they seem to have been deeply ambivalent about their success as merchants. At the same time as Quaker leaders condemned the evil of slavery, they also began an internal “reformation” to root out the sins of materialism, luxury, and greed. The Quaker leader John Woolman, an outspoken opponent of slavery, decried the “carnal” desire for wealth and prayed that people would “set aside all self-interest and come to be weaned from the desire of getting estates.” Like Woolman, Hopkins was also suspicious of self-interest, and his theology can be understood as an almost desperate attempt to reclaim an ethic of the common good. He branded slave traders “Extortioners” who had “robbed” Africans of their rights. Many antislavery writers in the late eighteenth century condemned slavery as “barbaric traffic,” a perversion of what commerce was supposed to be. Although they did not propose an alternative economic order, their impassioned opposition to slavery reflected their anxiety about the moral quandaries raised by commercial capitalism.106

  Besides these intellectual, political, and economic explanations for the rise of antislavery, it is important to remember that white Americans were also influenced by the testimonies of slaves themselves. Hopkins’s personal interactions with John Quamine, Bristol Yamma, and the other slaves whom he met at Sarah Osborn’s house may have contributed more to his abolitionist stance than his fears about political tyranny or economic self-interest, and in addition to reading Phillis Wheatley’s poetry (and purchasing a copy of her book for the church), he was probably familiar with the published works of other black evangelicals. (Gronniosaw’s Narrative was advertised in the Newport Mercury.)107 Not everyone who read these books was willing to acknowledge the intelligence of the enslaved, but their writings were a haunting testimony to their humanity. Although Thomas Jefferson claimed that Wheatley’s poems were “below the dignity of criticism,” he criticized them anyway, fearful that other readers might glimpse something that he refused to see. Hopkins thought that Wheatley was “a remarkable African.”108

  Hopkins’s antislavery convictions grew out of his encounters with slaves, his suspicion of economic self-interest, his humanitarian sympathies, and his faith in human equality. As we have seen, there was nothing about evangelicalism (or Christianity more generally) that inevitably led to abolitionism, and, in fact, Christianity and slavery had coexisted since the first century. Nor was there anything about the Enlightenment that inevitably led to racial egalitarianism, and many Enlightenment thinkers treated blacks as if they were a different species. But when Hopkins combined the Christian belief that “God hath made of one blood, all nations” with the Enlightenment language of sympathy and individual rights, the result was a powerful indictment of slavery. In 1776 he preached an angry sermon that combined biblical allusions with references to the Declaration of Independence. Besides condemning slaveholders for treating Africans as chattel, defacing “the image of God in them” in order to satisfy their own greed, he excoriated them for violating the maxim that “all men are created equal and alike endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, as Life, Liberty the pursuit of happiness.” “Our
hands are full of Blood,” he thundered. Speaking as a prophet, he threatened his listeners that a vengeful God would hold them accountable for “the Blood of Millions who have perished by means of the accursed Slave trade.”109 The most radical critics of slavery in the eighteenth century were not Enlightenment thinkers but a small group of Christians (especially evangelicals and Quakers) whose absorption of selected Enlightenment ideas allowed them to think about God—and human beings—in new ways.

  During the 1760s Sarah Osborn had never dared question the morality of slaveholding, but after Hopkins became convinced that slavery was sinful, she eventually concluded that he was right. Exactly how and when this happened is a mystery, and if not for a single poem that she composed sometime during the last twenty years of her life, we would not even be sure of her change of heart. Imagining heaven, she wrote:

  New wonders still! Lo, here are they,

  Unjustly brought from Africa!

  They’ve heard the gospel’s joyful sound,

  Though lost indeed they now are found.

  Those we see here who once have been

  Made slaves to man by horrid sin.

  Now through rich grace in Christ are free,

  Forever set at liberty.

  Hopkins reprinted this poem in his Memoirs of Mrs. Sarah Osborn but did not say when she composed it or when she realized that slavery was a “horrid sin.” According to him, however, she began dictating poems to friends sometime in the 1770s or 1780s after her failing eyesight made it impossible for her to keep a diary any longer.110