Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  Sarah Osborn died on August 2, 1796, alone in her room. Her friends had been keeping watch over her, but after leaving for a few minutes to let her sleep, they returned to find that her breathing had stopped. It was the kind of death she had always wanted: “calm and serene, without the least perceivable struggle or groan.” As was the tradition in early America, the church bell rang to commemorate her passing: six strokes as a sign that she had been a woman, and then another eighty-two for each year of her age.61

  Two days later “an uncommon concourse of people” gathered at her funeral to say good-bye. As her coffin lay in the meetinghouse, Samuel Hopkins preached on a text from Ephesians: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you, that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.” He could not have chosen a better epitaph for someone who had always tried to live a life worthy of Christ. To comfort the crowd of “truly Afflicted Acquaintance and Friends,” he reminded them that she had finally attained her heart’s desire: “We cannot doubt that she has gone to REST: that she has gone to that State where her Heart has long been: that she has gone to the Possession of those Objects on which her Affections have long been placed—that she has gone to JESUS CHRIST, and the General Assembly and Church of the First Born which are written in Heaven.”62

  In a will that Sarah made two years before her death, she directed that her possessions be sold and the money put out to interest. (She also mentioned setting aside a few items, presumably for her friends and family, but the “papers” to which she referred no longer exist.) Always charitable, she wanted the interest to be divided in half to support the poor of the First Church and the pastor, but there was hardly enough money to pay her last debts and her funeral expenses. She had a few small things of value, but most of her possessions were described as “old”: an old maple desk, old kitchen chairs, two old Windsor Chairs (“1 of them very much broken”), an old feather Bed, three old pillowcases, an old fire screen, an old brush, two old combs, old knives and forks, an old candle stand, an old shovel, an old tea table, old blankets, an old coffee mill, an old gown, “a parcel of Old Trumpery.” She had less than a dollar in cash, and the total value of her estate was $44.61. Though better off than many of Newport’s poor, she had less money at her death than some of the slaves and free blacks who had once attended her religious meetings. When her neighbor Scipio Tanner died in 1819, his estate was valued at $59.15.63

  Sarah bequeathed her most cherished possessions, her diaries and other manuscripts, to Samuel Hopkins with instructions to use them as he wished.64 Since Hopkins had already edited Susanna Anthony’s devotional diaries for publication, she probably hoped that he would publish hers as well. Despite her fear of appearing proud, she had always hoped that future generations of Christians would be inspired by her words, and nothing in her last years may have given her more satisfaction than imagining her story in print. By the end of her life she could barely see her own writings anymore, but her friends may have read passages aloud to her, and perhaps for the sake of her future readers she decided to add a few words to the last page of her 1743 memoir. In large handwriting that resembles that in her will (the result of her poor eyesight), she summed up the story of her life: “My Life has been a Life of Wonders, but the greatest wonder is that I am out of Hell.”65

  Like many of the great men of her time, Sarah Osborn hoped that her life would be celebrated by posterity—but with a crucial difference. Radical Enlightenment thinkers placed a high value on historical memory because of their conviction that it was the only path to immortality. According to Denis Diderot, for example, there was no such thing as the soul, and people could live forever only if they were remembered by future generations. In contrast, Sarah believed that no one would ever be forgotten, no matter how obscure he or she had been on earth. A merciful God would remember every detail of their lives for eternity. “Not a single tear or Groan will be Lost,” she testified in her diary. “They are all in the book of the Lord.”66 Sarah hoped her words would inspire people to seek Christ and to trust him in times of doubt, but if her name were wiped off the face of the earth, her story would still endure. Books made of paper and ink could be destroyed, but the “book of the Lord” would last forever.

  Sarah could not be sure what waited for her on the other side of death, but whether heaven turned out to be a place of contemplation, progress, or joyful reunions, she expected to delight in the open vision of God. Quoting from Job, she wrote, “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” Overjoyed by the thought of the revelation to come, she exulted, “O transporting thought! O glorious resurrection! Then I shall gaze to eternity. Then I shall drink my fill. Then I shall be like him, for I shall see him as he is.”67

  Heaven would finish the work that had begun with her conversion, the creation of a new self.

  Epilogue: A Protestant Saint

  Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

  Psalm 116:15

  Protestants have never believed in saints in the same way Catholics do. During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin condemned the Catholic belief in saints as idolatry, insisting that only God was worthy of veneration. Even the holiest people in history could not intercede with God or perform miracles after death. All God’s chosen people were “saints,” members of God’s heavenly kingdom.

  But when the Reverend Levi Hart, one of Sarah Osborn’s most generous supporters, heard the news of her death in August 1796, he wrote a letter to Samuel Hopkins asking whether it were possible for the dead to pray for the living. Since the letter no longer survives, we do not know whether he mentioned Osborn by name, but based on Hopkins’s response he seems to have wondered whether she still prayed for her friends now that she was in heaven: whether she could stand as an intercessor between heaven and earth. Although he must have known that he was venturing into dangerous territory, Sarah had been such an extraordinary woman that he could not help feeling that she might have an exalted relationship to God.1

  Not surprisingly, Hopkins was offended by Hart’s “papist” speculation. He explained that since the dead were completely happy in the presence of God, they had nothing left to pray for. But perhaps he understood the impulse behind Hart’s question. He, too, had been awed by Sarah’s faith, and in the years after her death he did more than anyone else to elevate her as an icon of evangelical piety. He considered her a saint in the Protestant sense of the term, as a true Christian who had devoted her life to God. Only a month after her death, he published “Sketch of the Character of Mrs. Sarah Osborn” in the Theological Magazine, and with Hart’s help he chose parts of her memoir and diaries to publish as Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn in 1799. (The publisher printed a thousand copies; a second edition was published in 1814.) After Hopkins’s death, his wife, Elizabeth, continued his work by publishing Familiar Letters, Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn, and Miss Susanna Anthony, Late of Newport, Rhode-Island. Though we do not know how widely Osborn’s writings were read, they were reprinted in several evangelical journals in the early nineteenth century.2

  The title page of Familiar Letters, Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn, and Miss Susanna Anthony, Late of Newport, Rhode-Island (Newport: Newport Mercury, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

  Sarah Osborn was particularly remembered by the women of the First Church of Christ, who changed the name of the Female Praying Society to the Osborn Society in 1826, and by the Africans who had once attended the religious meetings at her house. She had always dreamed that some of them would return to Africa to spread the gospel, and in 1826 Newport Gardner and thirty-five other blacks (twenty from Newport) finally set sail for Liberia. On the day before his departure, Gardner wrote a letter to the deacon of the First Church remembering how Osborn, Susanna Anthony, and the Reverend Hopkins had once helped him. Even though all three had been dead for more than twenty years, he had always treasured their memorie
s. Tragically, it was one of the last letters he would ever write: he died soon after arriving in Liberia.3

  When another wave of revivals swept through the nation during the 1820s and 1830s, evangelicals looked back in their history for inspiration, and some seem to have read and admired Osborn’s writings. The Reverend Gardiner Spring published an article on “Christian Sanctification” in 1834 in which he referred to Sarah Osborn and Susanna Anthony as though they were religious heroes. “When we advert to the names of David and Paul,” he wrote, “of [John] Owens and [John] Howe, of [Richard] Baxter and [Henry] Martyn, of Susanna Anthony and Sarah Osborn, whose light will shine through a long line of succeeding generations; we may no longer feel that the sons and daughters of Adam may not become splendid examples of moral excellence.”4

  Nineteenth-century evangelicals shared much in common with Sarah Osborn, and words such as experience, certainty, proof, and evidence were a common part of the evangelical vocabulary. Methodists held experience meetings; Baptists preached experimental religion; and clergy from many denominations confidently proclaimed that true Christians could be virtually sure of their salvation. Given the widespread popularity of this language among men as well as women, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that it was gendered, but it strongly appealed to those who were excluded from formal positions of power, whether white women, lower-class men, or male and female slaves.

  Yet Sarah had been a Calvinist, and by the 1830s her style of evangelicalism had been eclipsed by a new faith in good works and free will. The British evangelical movement had always included an Arminian wing associated with Charles and John Wesley, and these “Methodists,” as they called themselves, became enormously popular in nineteenth-century America. Although there were only three hundred Methodists in the colonies in 1771, their numbers had exploded to two hundred thousand by 1816. By 1850 they were the single largest Protestant denomination in the United States.5

  The Methodists’ message of free will was ideally suited to the new world of nineteenth-century America, and in hindsight the decline of Calvinism seems almost inevitable. As the changes that had begun in the eighteenth century accelerated after the Revolution, many Americans found it increasingly difficult to accept that they were either innately sinful or helpless to determine their own destinies. Not only had they defeated the British, the most powerful empire in the world, on the bloodstained battle-fields of Saratoga and Yorktown, but they had created a republican system of government based on the premise that ordinary people were virtuous enough to govern themselves—an idea that undermined older teachings about human depravity. After the Revolution they also laid the groundwork for a capitalist economy that generated immense new wealth. Even more than the consumer revolution and merchant capitalism, the rise of industrial capitalism was built on an implicit model of the individual as free and self-determining.

  In response to these challenges, Calvinists continued to search for creative ways to reconcile their beliefs with Enlightenment thought. Building on the innovations of Samuel Hopkins and other New Divinity ministers, they softened the doctrine of original sin by claiming that all people were born with an innate moral sense. Though this was a startling reversal of their earlier thinking, they needed to find a new foundation for social order in a democratic culture that celebrated religious freedom and capitalist accumulation. If it were true that everyone had the capacity to behave virtuously, then no one need worry about the future of the republic.6 Leaving behind their suspicion of both democracy and capitalism, evangelicals became vocal supporters of a new economic and political order based on freedom, self-interest, and choice. During the twentieth century they would even try to rewrite history by claiming Jonathan Edwards as a supporter of free market capitalism.7

  In another departure from the past, Calvinists gradually shifted their emphasis away from God’s glory to human happiness. Without renouncing the idea that suffering was redemptive, they softened their language in order to focus on God’s compassion for the afflicted rather than his anger at their sinfulness. Similarly, even though doctrines like predestination and eternal damnation did not disappear, ministers clamed that a loving, benevolent God wanted everyone to be saved. If sinners went to hell, it was because of their own refusal to seek God’s forgiveness.

  By the end of the nineteenth century Sarah Osborn seemed like an anachronism, a relic of an evangelical past that few wanted to remember. The same qualities that had made her such an admirable figure during her lifetime—her denial of free will, her acceptance of suffering as a positive good, her emphasis on human depravity, her intense self-abasement—struck later evangelicals as extreme. When a member of the First Church wrote a history of the congregation in 1891, he praised Osborn for her activism in the church, especially her meetings for Africans, but he denigrated her piety as “morbid.”8

  A few women’s historians tried to recover Sarah Osborn’s memory during the 1970s and 1980s, but they, too, seemed ambivalent about her religion. A literary critic complained that her moments of doubt had been linked to “hysterics and excessive agitation,” disparaging her collected writings as “sentimental,” “moralistic,” and “replete with tear-stained emotion.” The historian Mary Beth Norton was more sympathetic, and she helped lift Osborn’s name out of obscurity by transcribing and publishing several of her letters to Joseph Fish. But she seems to have been influenced by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the revolutionary book that chronicled the unhappiness of 1960s suburban housewives, and she portrayed Osborn as a restless, discontented woman who was driven less by faith than by a desire for personal authority and “freedom.” Reflecting on Osborn’s description of her meetings with Africans as “sweet refreshing evenings, my resting reaping times,” Norton commented, “Behind these words one can discern a lifetime of drudgery, dutiful wifely submission, and feminine inconsequentiality suddenly transformed by God’s miraculous will into a life of leadership, purpose, and social importance.” According to Norton, Sarah Osborn understood her meetings “in terms more personal than spiritual.”9 Whether this interpretation holds a grain of truth (Sarah herself would have found it condescending), it reveals the distance between Sarah Osborn’s world and ours. In the wake of the Enlightenment we may find it easier to dismiss her faith as “morbid,” “sentimental,” or a repressed desire for freedom than to appreciate her desire to glorify God.

  Sarah Osborn’s story reveals how deeply the Christian tradition was shaped by the forces of modernity. Even when religious leaders tried to reject the Enlightenment, they implicitly defined themselves in relationship to it, allowing Enlightenment thinkers to set the terms of the debate. The evangelical movement is often portrayed as backward looking, but there was no religion in the Western world—including Catholicism and Judaism—that remained unaffected by the Enlightenment language of freedom, progress, and human goodness.

  If Sarah could have foreseen the transformation of evangelicalism in the nineteenth century, she almost certainly would have condemned it as a decline, a rejection of the principles that had stood at the center of her life. Yet as we think about the relationship between the evangelical movement and the Enlightenment, our own reaction might be less clear-cut. Different readers will find their own meanings in Sarah’s story, but during the many years that I have spent reading her manuscripts, I have often reflected on the way her faith burdened as well as uplifted her. Though I have come to a deeper appreciation of what was lost when Christianity encountered the Enlightenment, I have also recognized what was gained.

  The Enlightenment used to be imagined as one of the greatest triumphs of human history, an intellectual revolution that swept away the cobwebs of the past in favor of democracy, humanitarianism, religious toleration, and capitalism. But in recent years critics have been far more cynical about its legacy. Liberals have argued that the Enlightenment commitment to “universal” rights was based on a white, European, and male model of humanity that stigmatized women, racial minorities, and the “unc
ivilized” as irrational. Despite its rhetoric of freedom, the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for Western totalitarianism, sexism, imperialism, and racism. Conservatives, meanwhile, have argued that it led to secularization and the silencing of religion in the public sphere. By imagining the universe in mechanistic terms, Enlightenment thinkers made it seem naive to believe in a sovereign, personal God who sustained the world. The Enlightenment is now frequently referred to as the “Enlightenment project,” a derogatory phrase that suggests that Enlightenment thinkers marched in lockstep to achieve a single (oppressive) goal.10

  Yet as we have seen, the Enlightenment was not a single movement, and its effects on Christianity were far more diverse than its critics have acknowledged. Many Enlightenment thinkers stigmatized poverty as a moral failing, but they also defended the humanitarian ideals that laid the groundwork for the rise of the antislavery movement. They promoted a crude faith in progress that was used to justify war and violence, but they also refused to imagine suffering as God’s retribution for sin. They underestimated the possibility that self-interest could degenerate into avarice and selfishness, but they also insisted that humans have a natural capacity to do good works. And they denigrated women and racial minorities as inferior and inherently irrational, but they also gave them a powerful language of experience to justify their authority. This language was devalued in the nineteenth century as it became increasingly identified with subjectivity, emotion, femininity, and racial inferiority, but it has never lost its power. In the twentieth century both feminist and black theologians would argue that their experiences could offer insight into the nature of God.