Since this small poem is our only evidence, we know little about Sarah’s changed attitude. Indeed, we cannot even be certain that it was Hopkins who led her to condemn slavery and not vice versa, but it seems significant that he chose not to describe her as an antislavery activist in his published memoir of her life. Since he praised her as the embodiment of his theology of disinterested benevolence, he probably would have liked to suggest that her selfless love for Christ had inevitably led her to condemn slavery. Yet he remained silent. It would not be surprising if Sarah had initially resisted his arguments. Ever since her first husband, Samuel, had died on board what was probably a slave ship, her life had been tangled up with slavery, and it may have been wrenching for her to confront the reality of her complicity with sin.
Once admitting that Hopkins was right, however, Sarah probably did not spare herself from condemnation. Given her providential imagination, she may have wondered whether a wrathful God had taken her first husband away as punishment for his decision to sail on a slave ship, and when she thought about Bobey she may have been ashamed of her belief that he had been God’s gift to her—a claim that now seemed arrogant. God had “made of one blood all nations of men,” and yet she had treated other human beings like property. Like Hopkins, she had always identified sin with excessive self-love, but now she saw slavery as proof that humans were capable of the worst depredations imaginable, even the selling of one another into bondage.
The census of 1774 listed six blacks in the Osborn household. They are not named, but their presence in her house may attest to Sarah’s changed heart. Perhaps Bristol Yamma or John Quamine lived with her in order to save money before leaving for Princeton later in the year. Since there are no records of what happened to Bobey after 1762, we do not know whether he might have been living with her as well—or even whether he was alive—during the 1770s, but if he still belonged to Sarah she almost certainly set him free. Hopkins strongly encouraged his congregation to free their slaves, insisting that slavery was “a sin of a crimson dye” that had to be immediately repented. As for Phillis, she lived until 1779, but we do not know whether she and Sarah ever talked about their painful past.111 We can only hope that Sarah sought her forgiveness.
Chapter 10
The Latter Days, 1775–1787
The strength and courage I mentioned, which God graciously granted me in times of danger; was not the result of any confident persuasion, that I should not be slain.—No! when the bullets were whizzing around me, I realized the next might have a commission to reach me; and if this was the way, infinite wisdom had chosen, I had no objection to make.—I chose neither life nor death, only that God might glorify himself in me; and that, whether I lived, or died, I might be the Lord’s.—I know every shot was directed by unerring wisdom; and every heart of the enemy, as much at his controul, who hath said to the restless ocean, hitherto shalt thou come, and no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.
Thus I rested on GOD.—Oh! Boundless grace, adorable sovereignty!—Why was I not rather called to drink, the very dregs, of the cup of his displeasure?—Why was I not made, even a terror to myself, and all around me! I, who have had so great a hand, in drawing down the judgments of God upon us!—Oh, my friend, adore, with me; and let me be reckoned, among the chief of sinners! . . .
May not all that hath befallen us, both in Church and State, serve rather to strengthen, than stagger our faith; since our divine Redeemer faithfully warned us of the coming of such things, in the latter days.—We see that not one jot or tittle of his word fails, in this part; and shall not latter-day promises, be as truly fulfilled.—May we not lift up our heads, because redemption draweth nigh! 1
Sarah Osborn dictated this letter to Joseph Fish in 1780, too ill to write it with her own hand. The Revolutionary War was still raging, but the British had left Newport after occupying the city for three years, and Sarah was finally able to communicate freely with the outside world. Remembering the worst days of the fighting, she reassured Fish that God had watched over her, and whether she lived or died she knew that she belonged to him. God was in control of everything: even the bullets that had left many dead.
For years Sarah had prayed that the millennium might be imminent, and she interpreted the war—like the revival at her house—as a sign of the latter days. Like many other Americans she believed that the war heralded the creation of a new era in human history. Newport’s devastation was not meaningless but a fulfillment of biblical prophecies about the return of Christ. God’s kingdom was coming.
Sarah’s evangelical faith in the millennium existed in tandem with a secular discourse of American progress and American nationalism, and sometimes the two were difficult to tell apart. Evangelicals denied that humans could make progress without God’s grace, but they sounded optimistic about the future, imitating the most ardent defenders of the Enlightenment by rhapsodizing about the blessings of a republican government. Secular thinkers insisted that humans could use their reason to create a more perfect world, but their descriptions of the future sounded like the heavenly kingdom, a paradise of liberty and peace. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Thomas Paine proclaimed. “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”2
Although the evangelical faith in the millennium and the secular faith in progress were not identical, the encounter between Protestantism and the Enlightenment may never have been more fateful than during the Revolutionary era. If not for the widely shared faith that a new age was possible (whether through divine providence or human agency), the American Revolution would never have taken place.
Precious Liberty
As the revival at Sarah’s house waned in the late 1760s, so too did her physical strength. Her illness seems to have been in partial remission during the mid- and late 1760s, but by the early 1770s she could no longer deny the severity of her symptoms. In a letter to Mary Fish Noyes, Joseph Fish’s daughter, in 1770, she admitted that she could barely write because the “pain” was “too severe.” Shocked by her declining health, she seems to have wondered whether she was near death. “Farewell, my dear sister,” she wrote. It was as though she could not imagine taking another breath after being “cut off” from her ability to read and write.3
And yet Sarah lived for another two decades. The desire to write still burned “like a fire” in her heart, but because of her poor eyesight and physical weakness she rarely picked up her pen. Hungry to express herself, she sometimes asked friends to write letters for her or composed poems in her head. But one of the greatest joys of her life had been lost. Each day she had to reconcile herself to silence.
Because of Sarah’s difficulty writing, we know little about her life during the Revolution. After her 1767 diary and her letter to Mary Fish Noyes, her only surviving writings are two letters dictated in the late 1770s, a poem from an unknown date, and the will she wrote with her own hand in 1793.4 Yet even though Sarah’s own voice almost entirely disappeared from the historical record, we can catch fleeting glimpses of her in church records, census records, and other people’s letters and diaries. Besides including a brief account of her last years in his Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn, Samuel Hopkins also mentioned her in his correspondence with Levi Hart. Although these scraps of evidence leave many questions unanswered, they allow us to piece together an account of her experiences during the Revolution, the creation of the new republic, and the last years of her life.
Based on Sarah’s letters, it is clear that she was a Patriot who interpreted the war in millennial terms. Despite disdaining local politics as a distraction from the more important business of salvation, she believed that God guided the ballot box, and in times of crisis she mixed political and religious images in her writings, freighting her words with double meanings. On the first anniversary of the Stamp Act’s repeal, when ships in the harbor displayed their colors and soldiers fired a royal salute, s
he prayed that “Liberty, Precious Liberty were used for the Glory of God. Let not this day be remembered only by way of reveling instead of thanksgiving. Lord, bring me and others of thy children to rejoice in the Liberty wherewith Christ Has Made us free, and Let us not be again Entangled with the yoke of Bondage. Lord, free us yet More from the bondage of sin.” Although Sarah emphasized that there was nothing more important than repentance, her words suggested that she wanted to be liberated from political oppression as well as the “bondage of sin.”5 She had been born in England and had always prayed for the king, but after the Stamp Act, the Coercive Acts, and the Boston Massacre, she denounced the British as the “enemy.”6
Sarah’s church rallied behind the Patriot cause. To encourage the women of his congregation not to buy British imports, Samuel Hopkins hosted a spinning bee in the parsonage with eighty spinning wheels, and he refused to admit a Mr. Malcolm, a customs’ officer, to the table of the Lord’s Supper on the grounds that his “Morals” were “exceptionable.” Perhaps Malcolm was guilty of something more than his willingness to collect taxes for the king, but the First Church of Christ was home to few, if any, Loyalists. Like Hopkins, Ezra Stiles was an ardent Patriot, and the First and Second Churches of Christ fasted and prayed for American independence. Peter Oliver, a Loyalist sympathizer, derided Congregationalist ministers as the “black regiment” because of their militant support of the Patriot cause.7
Like many other Protestants at the time, Sarah seems to have believed that the British government had joined forces with the Catholic Church to deprive Protestants of their liberties. In the wake of the Stamp Act, Patriots tried to discredit the British government by accusing it of being “popish” and totalitarian, but after the 1774 Quebec Act, which granted toleration to Catholics in Canada, many argued that Parliament was engaged in a sinister plot “to destroy the British Protestant colonies; and to establish the most arbitrary and despotic government throughout America.” According to an article in the Newport Mercury, the English ministry planned “to destroy the English constitutions and thereby lay a sure foundation, on which to build and establish POPERY.” Another article reported that the pope was plotting to reestablish the Catholic Church in England “and bring George the third to kiss his Holiness’s great toe, and humbly acknowledge his supremacy throughout Christendom.”8 Although these articles said more about Protestant anxieties than reality, many Americans imagined that they were engaged in an apocalyptic battle with the Antichrist. In the summer of 1773, Sarah’s church bought a copy of Antonio Gavin’s Master Key to Popery, a sensational account of corrupt priests and licentious nuns who worshiped the “beast” instead of God.9 Any church member was allowed to borrow it. A few months later, during the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot, a Newport mob burned effigies of the pope, the devil, Lord North, and the despised governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson.10
Not all churches in Newport, however, supported the Patriots, and Anglicans in particular tended to have Loyalist sympathies. Every Sunday at Trinity Church, the largest single church in Newport, the congregation prayed for the king (the head of the church), and many members were wealthy merchants who opposed the nonimportation movement. Because of their pacifist convictions, Quakers also hesitated to endorse armed resistance to England, and Baptists were ambivalent about joining the Congregationalists—who had often persecuted them in New England—to mobilize political support for independence. In small New England towns dominated by the Congregationalist establishment, support for the Revolutionary cause was almost ubiquitous, but the religious diversity of Newport meant that it was a city of divided political loyalties.11
In April 1775 the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, killing both American minutemen and British soldiers. Some colonists still held out hope for peace, but the Newport Mercury’s editor, a staunch Patriot, saw no alternative to war. “Thus,” he wrote, “through the sanguinary Measures of a wicked Ministry, and the Readiness of a standing Army to execute their Mandates, has commenced the American Civil War, which will hereafter fill an important page in History.” He hoped that it would “speedily terminate in a full restoration of our Liberties.”12 The Second Continental Congress met in May, and George Washington was named commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in June.
It was a frightening time to bring a child into the world, but Sarah’s granddaughter Sally and her husband, Daniel, welcomed their firstborn, a daughter, in July. Probably in honor of either Sarah’s mother or her closest friend, Susanna Anthony, they named her Susanna. We can only imagine Sarah’s happiness on the day that her great-grandchild was baptized into the covenant, or her prayers for God’s protection as the fighting approached Newport.13 With an infant at home, the war seemed especially menacing.
The British targeted Newport because of its importance as a trading port. In the summer and fall of 1775, Commander James Wallace blockaded the harbor to prevent smuggling, and he promised to “lay the town in ashes” if his ships were not supplied with provisions.14 The British fired on the town whenever they needed food, terrifying the inhabitants. At one in the morning on a cold December night, British troops went on a rampage in neighboring Jamestown, ordering families out of their houses and “driving out the women and children, swearing they should be burnt in the houses if they did not instantly turn out.” They stole beds and furniture, stripped women of their best clothes, and slaughtered oxen, cows, sheep, and hogs for food before setting the houses on fire. “This morning we were awaked with the Conflagration of Jamestown,” Ezra Stiles wrote in his diary. “An awful sight!”15
By January 1776, Stiles estimated that “more than three quarters of the Inhabitants” had fled.16 Besides being afraid of British troops, residents were worried about being plunged into destitution if they remained in the city. Wallace’s blockade had destroyed local trade, leaving everyone from sailors to distillers without jobs. According to Samuel Hopkins, there was “an almost total stagnation of trade and business,” and he was forced to rely on voluntary donations because so few in his congregation were able to contribute to his salary.17 As the population dwindled, Sarah closed her school. She and Henry were financially stable at the beginning of the war (though still too poor to pay taxes), but they had generously donated more than 145 pounds to their church between 1770 and 1774 to create a private subscription library for the women’s society. According to Samuel Hopkins, Sarah often gave more money to the church than “many wealthy persons of the same congregation.” But now, with little in the way of savings, she and Henry worried about their ability to afford food and fuel.18
Concerned about the plight of the poor, a Quaker woman lamented that “many for want to employ are already reduced to live many days together on bran and water boiled together and a bit of bread, and some have hardly that, to eat at a time.”19 The Continental Congress had resolved to boycott anyone who raised prices to take advantage of shortages, but some of Newport’s merchants could not resist the opportunity to get rich. “We hear several persons in this town are taking advantage of the times, by raising the price of the articles they deal in,” complained the Newport Mercury, “from which base, selfish practice we advise them to desist, lest we should be obliged to hold them up to the public in a very disagreeable light.” Writing several months later in August, only a month after the Declaration of Independence, Susanna Anthony worried that if everyone stayed in Newport, “numbers must perish for want of food or fuel through the winter.”20
John Quamine and Bristol Yamma, however, had no choice but to return to Newport from Princeton. According to John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey, they were “pretty good in reading and writing and likewise have a pretty good Notion of the Principles of the Christian faith,” but they had run out of money to pay their expenses.21 Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles had hoped to raise enough money to send Salmar Nubia to the college as well, but the war destroyed their plans. (Nubia was a member of Stiles’s church who had almost certainl
y attended Sarah Osborn’s meetings.) All three men were eager to return to Africa as missionaries, but in the meantime Quamine enlisted as a privateer in order to make enough money to buy his wife’s freedom.22 Before leaving he wrote a letter to Moses Brown, a well-known Quaker abolitionist, thanking him for his work:
Having some late understandings of your noble and distinguished character, and boundless benevolent engagements, with regard to the unforfeited rights, of the poor unhappy Africans in this province; and of your sundry petitions to the General Assemblies in their favors, [there] has existed [in] one of that nation, though an utter stranger, [a desire] to present thee with gratitude and thanks . . . , the only returns he is capable of, for all your ardent endeavors for the speedy salvation of his poor enslaved country men, and for what you were kindly disposed to do already of this kind, in freeing all your servants.
This is the only one of Quamine’s letters that has been found, and it suggests both his intelligence and his devotion to the emancipation of slaves.23
People in Newport were relieved when Captain Wallace and his fleet left in March 1776, but in December, General Sir Henry Clinton and eight thousand troops sailed into the harbor and occupied the city without a fight. (This despite the boast of the Newport Mercury that Newport’s militia was “equal to any regulars in the King’s dominion.”) British troops looted stores, raided farms for provisions, forced residents to quarter soldiers in their homes, and tore down houses for firewood. “It is dangerous to walk the streets after dark,” a resident wrote in his diary. “Men have been beat up by the Hessians.”24 Most people fled, but not everyone was either willing or able to leave, including the Osborns. The population dropped precipitously, from 11,000 in 1775 to 5,300 in 1776.25 Among those who left were Sarah and Henry’s grandson, whom they seem to have sent away to begin an apprenticeship.26 Daniel, Sally and six-month-old Susanna stayed behind, perhaps to be close to Sarah and Henry.
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