Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  8. SO to JF, February 14, 1760, AAS.

  9. SO, Diary, November 28, 1759; SO to JF, February 14, 1760, AAS.

  10. SO, Diary, December 31, December 1, December 21, 1759; NM, December 19, 1758, April 22, 1760.

  11. SO, Diary, January 3, 1760. Ebenezer Gray was the only doctor listed in the 1753 pew assessments. He was assessed thirty pounds that year. Moore was a distinguished member of the church who served on many committees. He was assessed twenty pounds in 1753. See the pew assessments in FCCR-DRC, October 1753.

  12. SO, Diary, January 8, 1760.

  13. Ibid., December 1, 1759, March 18, 1762, April 3, 1757; SO to JF, May 3, 1759, AAS.

  14. SO, Diary, January 2, 1760; Whitefield, Great Duty of Charity Recommended, 3; SO, Diary, November 12, 1761. The Bible quotation is from Matthew 9:10–11.

  15. SO, Diary, November 14, 1761.

  16. JE, Charity and Its Fruits, in WJE 8: 294; SO, Diary, undated entry, probably July 11, 1757, November 17, 1753.

  17. SO, Diary, December 10, December 18, 1759. For other examples of her visiting the sick, see Diary, November 13, 1761, and SH, Memoirs, 266.

  18. Cotton Mather, Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good, ed. David Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 17, 32. See also Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 227–60; Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 270–76.

  19. On Bethesda, see Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991). Eleazar Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present State of the Indian Charity-school at Lebanon, in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763).

  20. John Guyse, A Collection of Seventeen Practical Sermons on Various and Important Subjects (London: Edward Dilley, 1761), 183, quoting from Ecclesiastes 9:10. See SO, Diary, November 14, 1761.

  21. Nicholas Gilman to Col. Robert Hale of Beverly, Mass., February 13, 1737/38, reprinted as Appendix 4 of William Kidder, “The Diary of Nicholas Gilman” (M.A. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1972), 381–82.

  22. JE, The Nature of True Virtue, in WJE 8: 560.

  23. Carolyn D. Williams, “‘The Luxury of Doing Good’: Benevolence, Sensibility, and the Royal Humane Society,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 77. On the relationship between sensibility and humanitarian reform, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 461–518.

  24. SO, Diary, December 23, 1764.

  25. Joseph Allin, What Shall I Render! (Boston, 1722), cited in Christine Leigh Heyrman, “The Fashion Among More Superior People: Charity and Social Change in Provincial New England, 1700–1740,” American Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1982): 113.

  26. Samuel Cooper, A Sermon Preached in Boston, New-England, Before the Society for Encouraging Industry, and Employing the Poor (Boston: J. Draper, 1753), 21–22. In his early career, even Jonathan Edwards used this line of reasoning, but by 1749 he had concluded that “God oftentimes gives those men that He hates great outward prosperity”; see JE, God Oftentimes Gives Those He Hates Great Outward Prosperity (Sermon on Luke 12:16–21), 1749, WJE Online. See also Mark Valeri, “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 60, no. 1 (1991): 52.

  27. Samuel Hopkins, An Inquiry into the Nature of True Holiness (Newport: Solomon Southwick, 1773), 69; SO to JF, December 26, 1760, AAS; SO, Diary, January 3, 1760.

  28. Whitefield, Great Duty of Charity, 24, 16; SO, Diary, January 2, 1760.

  29. SO, Diary May 2, 1757; see also November 1, 1753.

  30. Ibid., February 16, 1760.

  31. Osborn mentions the women’s society in SO to JF, December 26, 1760, AAS. SO, Diary, undated entry at the end of July 1760.

  32. SO, Diary, December 17, December 29, 1759, January 2, 1760.

  33. Ibid., July 27, March 6, March 7, April 27, 1760. See also SH, Memoirs, 250–51.

  34. SO, Diary, March 29, April 25, 1760.

  35. SO to JF, February 14, 1760, AAS; SO, Diary, February 3, 1760.

  36. The statistic about Vinal’s alcohol consumption comes from Charles E. Hammett, Jr., “A Sketch of the History of the Congregational Churches of Newport, R.I.” (1891), 130, typescript available at NHS, Vault A, no. 1257. SO, Diary, February 11, April 14, 1760; see also Diary, February 28, 1760.

  37. SO, Diary, April 19, June 23, 1760.

  38. Ibid., April 5, August 10, 1760 (quoting Proverbs 19:18).

  39. For a student’s memories of Osborn, see Mary (Fish) Noyes Silliman Dickinson, “Reminiscences” (1801), copy of original made by Benjamin Silliman in 1856, Silliman Family Papers, Manuscript Group 450, Series 3, Box 35, Folders 62, 63, 64, Manuscripts and Archives, SML. On Mather, see SO, Diary, February 3, 1767.

  40. SO, Diary, August 22, 1760. For more on the criminals, see Diary, August 10, August 14, August 21, 1760. In an undated entry following her entry for July 27, 1760, Osborn identifies the criminals as “Parks” and “Hawkins.” Since there are no extant issues for NM during the summer of 1760, the nature of their crime is not clear.

  41. For Enlightenment critiques of prisons and the treatment of criminals, see Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws (1748); Cesare Beccaria, Essay on Crimes and Justice (1764); Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764); and Voltaire, Commentary on the Book of Crimes and Punishments (1766), excerpts from each of which are reprinted in Kramnick, PER, 515–35.

  42. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764), reprinted in The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Touchstone, 1973), 247; SO, Diary, June 25, 1760.

  43. SO, Diary, August 19, August 13, 1757.

  44. Ibid., September 26, 1760; on the capture of Quebec, see ibid., June 25, 1760. Ibid., November 7, 1760.

  45. Ibid., July 25, November 25, 1760.

  46. Ibid., November 11, 1760; NM, April 22, 1760. On Vinal’s wood allowance, see the First Congregational Church of Newport Records, 1743–1831, Vault A, no. 833, NHS, for the following dates: April 7, 1760, July 20, 1761, August 23, 1762, May 27, 1765. SO to JF, May 3, 1759.

  47. SO, Diary, September 30, 1757, October 18, November 17, November 18, 1760.

  48. SH, Memoirs, 252; SO, Diary, October 23, September 30, 1760.

  49. Newport Town Council Records, vol. 13: 1760–1763, entries for November 3 and December 1, 1760, NHS; Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Colony of Rhode-Island (Boston: Jon Allen, 1719), 92–93.

  50. In 1757, Ezra Stiles paid ninety dollars for a fourteen-year-old slave boy and ninety-five dollars for another boy. Bobey was probably worth more because he was older and knew a craft. See Ezra Stiles, Miscellaneous Papers, Reel 14, 185: 28, 29, in the Papers of Ezra Stiles (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1976), microfilm.

  51. SO to JF, May 16, 1754, AAS; SO, Diary, November 13, 1760.

  52. SO, Diary, October 23, 1760; Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 32, 26. When Chesebrough died in 1782, Ezra Stiles estimated that he was worth ten thousand pounds sterling (LD 3: 11).

  53. It is not clear when the Chesebrough family left the First Church of Christ, but it was before 1753. They were assigned a church pew at the First Church in 1744, but not in 1753. Abigail became a full member of the Second Church of Christ in 1756 (LD 1: 53). Abigail especially could afford to be generous because she had secretly married Alexander Grant, Esq., the son of a British nobleman, in October (SO, Diary, November 16, 1760).

  54. SO, Diary, November 19, December 12, 1760.

  55. Elaine Forman Crane lists Coggeshall as a merchant who imported molasses to make rum (A Dependent People, 29). See the 1753 pew assessments in FCCR-DRC. Nathaniel was the great-grandson of John Coggeshall (1601�
�47), the first president of the Colony of Providence Plantations. On Nathaniel Coggeshall’s leadership in the church, see the FCCR-CB. Sarah Osborn mentions Mrs. Coggeshall as a member of her women’s society in SO, Diary January 2, 1762.

  56. See SO, Diary, September 30, 1757.

  57. SO to JF, August 28, 1762, AAS.

  58. SO to JF, undated letter of December 1764, AAS; SO to JF, February 5, 1761, AAS.

  59. SO, Diary, December 31, 1761. For a list of her donations, see First Congregational Church of Newport Records, Contribution Book, 1754–1763, MSS 418, RIHS.

  60. George Champlin Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport: Charles E. Hammett, Jr., 1884), 121; Stout, Divine Dramatist, 22–24.

  61. SO, Diary, October 16, October 24, October 21, 1761. See Sheila Skemp, “A Social and Cultural History of Newport, Rhode Island, 1720–1765” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1974), 232. The act was repealed in 1793. See Mason, Reminiscences of Newport, 123.

  62. See Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  63. SO to JF, May 16, 1754, AAS.

  64. SO, Diary, November 13, 1760, December 1, December 13, 1761.

  65. Ibid., December 4, 1761.

  66. Ibid.; Thomas Bacon, “A Sermon to Maryland Slaves” (1749), in Religion in American History: A Reader, ed. Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73–87; SO, Diary, December 13, 1761.

  67. SO, Diary, December 7, 1761.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ibid., December 9, 1761.

  71. Ibid., quoting 1 Samuel 8.

  72. Ibid., December 8, December 10, December 12, December 13, 1761.

  73. Ibid., December 13, December 15, 1761.

  74. Ibid., December 13, 1761.

  75. Ibid., December 9, December 15, December 25, 1761, January 2, 1762.

  76. Ibid., December 15, 1761.

  77. Osborn’s last mention of Bobey occurred ibid., January 13, 1762, when she prayed for “Poor Bobey” along with her friends and “Kind Benefactors.”

  78. Ibid., January 26, 1762.

  79. Ibid., March 6, 1762; SO to JF, August 28, 1762, AAS. The estimate in American currency is Sarah Osborn’s. I have not been able to locate any correspondence between Osborn and Guyse.

  80. SO, Diary, February 24, February 21, March 6, 1762.

  81. Ibid., March 6, 1762; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958).The Bible quotation is from Matthew 6:34.

  82. SO, Diary, March 18, 1762, quoting Psalm 68:5.

  83. Ibid.

  84. Ibid. Johnny seems to have moved to Sarah and Henry’s house in early April. See ibid., April 5, 1762, in which she asks God to bless the “young one” who has come into her family.

  85. SO to JF, May 3, 1759, AAS; SO, Diary, March 18, 1762.

  86. SO to JF, May 16, 1762, AAS; SH, Memoirs, 297.

  87. SO, Diary, November 27, 1761; SO to JF, June 2, 1763, AAS. See also Mary Beth Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities,” Signs 2, no. 2 (1976): 527–28.

  CHAPTER NINE. JORDAN OVERFLOWING

  1. SO to JF, undated letter, AAS, probably written in 1765.

  2. SO to JF, June 12, 1766, AAS; SO to JF, June 29, 1766, AAS.

  3. SO to JF, undated letter, AAS, probably written in 1765.

  4. SH, Memoirs, 326.

  5. Ibid., 76, 320; SO to JF, September 3, 1764, AAS; SO to JF, April 21, 1765, AAS; Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized (Boston: B. Green, 1706).

  6. SO to JF, February 14, 1760, AAS.

  7. SO to Mary Fish Noyes, July 13, 1764, AAS. See also SO to JF, November 2, 1761, AAS. On millennialism in New England, see Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), 373–76.

  8. Susanna Haggar died on March 21, 1764; see SO to JF, December 1764, AAS.

  9. LD 1: 367. Quaum had attended Sarah Osborn’s meetings in the 1760s; see SH, Memoirs, 78n.

  10. LD 1: 366; JF to SO, September 4, 1765, AAS. See the list of members in FCCR-BM, 26.

  11. SO to JF, undated letter, AAS. Osborn mentions blacks meeting in the kitchen in SO, Diary, April 8, 1767.

  12. SO, Diary, March 4, 1767.

  13. SO to JF, June 12, 1766, AAS; SO to JF, June 29, 1766, AAS; James Janeway, A Token for Children (1671; rpt. Boston: Nicholas Boone, 1700).

  14. Mary Beth Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities,” Signs 2, no. 2 (1976): 525. Sarah mentioned that the children of Friends (Quakers) did not attend her meetings. SO to JF, June 12, 1766, AAS.

  15. SO, Diary, January 27, 1767; SO to JF, undated letter, AAS. Osborn mentioned the presence of strangers in Diary, April 11, 1767.

  16. SO to JF, August 9, 1766, AAS.

  17. NM, June 6, April 25, 1763, September 10, 1764. See also Barbara E. Lacey, “Visual Images of Blacks in Early American Imprints,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1996): 137–80. I counted sixty-five advertisements in the extant issues of NM.

  18. NM, June 10, 1765. See also Richard Henry Rudolph, “The Merchants of Newport, Rhode Island, 1763–1786” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1975), 151–57.

  19. SO to JF, June 12, 1766, AAS; SO, Diary, January 20, 1767, June 12, 1766.

  20. Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times,’” 524; George G. Channing, Early Recollections of Newport, R. I., from the Year 1793 to 1811 (Newport: A. J. Ward, C. E. Hammett, 1868), 103; SO to SH, July 29, 1769, in Sarah Osborn, 5 Letters, 1769–70, Simon Gratz Manuscript Collection [hereafter Gratz Collection], HSP.

  21. Joseph Fish, The Church of Christ a Firm and Durable House (New London: Timothy Green, 1767), 157n; JF to SO, September 13, 1761, Benjamin Silliman Family Papers, Group 450, Series 1, Box 1, Manuscripts and Archives, SML.

  22. Hopkins failed to mention that Osborn had once held separate meetings for Baptist men and women two days each week. See SH, Memoirs, 81–82; SO to JF, June 12, 1766, AAS.

  23. SO to JF, August 9, 1766, AAS.

  24. SH, Memoirs, 78; SO to JF, undated letter [August 1766], AAS; SO to William Vinal, tentatively dated 1771–74, in FCCR-418, Folder 9. In a later letter to Vinal, Osborn mentioned a letter she had written in the spring of 1766.

  25. Letter from William Vinal to Ezra Stiles, January 31, 1766, Washburn Collection, 14: 15–16, MHS; SO to JF, undated letter [August 1766], AAS; letter from William Vinal to the First Society, November 3, 1766, in FCCR-DRC.

  26. SO to JF, September 13, 1766, AAS. (This letter was a continuation of an undated letter from August 1766.) Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times,’” 523.

  27. SO to JF, September 13, 1766, AAS, quoting Psalm 104:8.

  28. Ibid.; SH, Memoirs, 327.

  29. SO, Diary, January 27, 1767; SO to JF, January 27, 1767, AAS. The black population of Newport in 1755 was 1,234. For population figures, see Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 76. Sydney James is skeptical of these figures, which he considers too low: “There was no incentive for the citizens anywhere in the colony to make known the numbers of their slaves, who either were or might become taxable property” (Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History [New York: Scribner’s, 1975], 255n).

  30. SO, Diary, April 7, 1767.

  31. Ibid., January 27, 1767. See also ibid., January 29, February 2, 1767.

  32. Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times,’” 526, 529, 523.

  33. Ibid., 523–24.

/>   34. Ibid., 526, 523.

  35. Ibid., 526.

  36. Ibid., 527, quoting from 1 Corinthians 1:27.

  37. Ibid., 527–28.

  38. See NM, November 24 –December 1, 1766; SO, Diary, May 6, 1767.

  39. SO to JF, May 26, 1767, AAS; SO to JF, September 15, 1767, AAS.

  40. SO to JF, April 17, 1768, AAS.

  41. SO, Diary, March 10, March 17, March 24, March 9, March 23, 1767.

  42. In 1771, William Haggar was listed as a “halfway member” of Stiles’s church who could not yet take communion (LD 1: 83). Based on one of her diary entries, Sarah Osborn’s step-grandson may have been studying for the ministry: “Turn and Look Him into an Evangelical flow of repentance that shall never be repented of and arouse Him to His Work, and O, Let it yet Prosper in His Hands and Souls be Gathered by Him into the fold of Christ. O yet cause that vine to flourish for thy Mercies sake” (February 27, 1767). I could not find any records of an Osborn who was ordained to ministry in the late eighteenth century.

  43. SO, Diary, May 27, 1767.

  44. Ibid., April 14, April 24, 1767.

  45. Ibid., March 17, 1767; SH, Memoirs, 331.

  46. George Whitefield, Journals (1740), in Bushman, GA, 31. On evangelical attitudes toward slavery, see Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 213–33.

  47. Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized (Boston: B. Green, 1706), 1; Sydney V. James, A People Among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 234.

  48. See Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 268; Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 164; Lester B. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619–1819 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1975), 86.

  49. JE, Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival, in WJE 4: 346; Whitefield, Journals (1740), in Bushman, GA, 26; JE, A History of the Work of Redemption, in WJE 9: 480.

  50. SO, Diary, March 17, 1757, March 13, 1758 (quoting from Song of Solomon 1:5); James G. Basker, Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 292.