Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  109. Sassi, “‘This Whole Country Have Their Hands Full of Blood,’” 71, 81, 66. On the dating of this sermon, see page 34.

  110. SH, Memoirs, 278, 373.

  111. Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation Taken by the Order of the General Assembly (Providence: Anthony Knowles, 1858), 24; SH, “A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans,” in WSH 2: 571; Death and Burial Records, NHS.

  CHAPTER TEN. THE LATTER DAYS

  1. FL, 155–56, 158. This letter is not dated, but since it refers to a letter that Sarah Osborn wrote to Joseph Fish on December 2, 1779, and since Osborn refers to “this hard winter,” it was written sometime during the winter of 1780. That winter became legendary for its cold temperatures.

  2. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Newburyport, Mass.: Samuel Phillips, 1776), 54.

  3. SO to Mary Fish Noyes, September 1, 1770, AAS.

  4. SO to JF, December 28, 1779, AAS; FL, 154–60. (I am assuming that the letter reprinted in FL was dictated, but the original does not survive.) SH, Memoirs, 374–80. Sarah Osborn, Will, Probate Book No. 3, 11–12, Newport City Hall, Newport, Rhode Island.

  5. SO, Diary, March 18, 1767. On the celebration, see NM, March 16–23, 1767. On the double meanings of liberty, see Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 63; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 298–99.

  6. SO to JF, December 28, 1779, AAS.

  7. NM, June 13, 1774; LD 1: 106, 39; Stout, New England Soul, 266.

  8. NM, September 26, August 29, November 14, 1774. See Bloch, Visionary Republic, 57–58.

  9. The list of books purchased for the First Church of Christ during Hopkins’s tenure, 1770–75, includes “Master Key of Popery.” See FCCR-DRC, June 23, 1773.

  10. NM, November 7, 1774.

  11. See Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 121.

  12. NM, April 24, 1774.

  13. James N. Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island 1636–1850. First Series: Births, Marriages and Deaths, vol. 8 (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing, 1896), 404.

  14. Florence Parker Simister, The Fire’s Center: Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era, 1763–1790 (Providence: Rhode Island Bicentennial Foundation, 1979), 66; Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 122.

  15. NM, December 11, 1775; LD 1: 642.

  16. LD 1: 649.

  17. FCCR-DRC, November 15, 1774. See also SH to the Congregational Churches of New England, no date, ibid.

  18. Their donation may have been left over from Guyse’s bequest, or perhaps Sarah inherited the money after her mother’s death. The church records list multiple contributions from Sarah Osborn for a “privet subscription” as well as a contribution from Sarah Anthony for “a sunscription [sic] for the Woman’s.” Private subscription libraries were common in the eighteenth century. There are no records of what books were purchased. See FCCR-418, Folder 4. SH, Memoirs, 370.

  19. Mary Callendar to Moses Brown, January 24, 1776, quoted in Lynne Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eighteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 83.

  20. NM, November 28, 1774; SA to SH, August 29, 1776, in Susanna Anthony, 34 Letters, 1749–1776, Simon Gratz Manuscript Collection [hereafter Gratz Collection], HSP.

  21. Letter from John Witherspoon to SH, February 27, 1775, quoted in Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1981), 146.

  22. On Nubia, see Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins, To the Public (Newport: n.p., 1776). SH to Levi Hart, June 10, 1791, in Samuel Hopkins, 4 Letters, 1770, 1791, 1796, and no date, Gratz Collection. See also Ralph E. Luker, “‘Under Our Own Vine and Fig Tree’: From African Unionism to Black Denominationalism in Newport, Rhode Island, 1760–1876,” Slavery and Abolition 12, no. 2 (1991): 23–48. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement, 146–48.

  23. John Quamine to Moses Brown, June 5, 1776, cited in Mack Thompson, Moses Brown: Reluctant Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 105.

  24. NM, February 20, 1775; diary of Fleet S. Greene, quoted in Simister, Fire’s Center, 113; Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 82.

  25. C. P. B. Jefferys, Newport: A Short History (Newport: Newport Historical Society, 1992), 30.

  26. Levi Hart recorded in his diary in 1776 that Sarah Osborn wanted to find “a proper place for a grandson of hers.” In 1777 he noted that she had found him a place and needed no more assistance. See Levi Hart, Diary, November 11, 1776, January 13, 1777, in Gratz Collection: New Lights Sermon Collection, Box 6.

  27. Letter from SH to the Congregational Churches of New England, no date, FCCR-DRC. See William Gerald McLoughlin, Rhode Island: A History (New York: Norton, 1986), 95. On the destruction of the First Church of Christ, see Edward Peterson, History of Rhode Island (New York: John S. Taylor, 1853), 324.

  28. SO to JF, December 2, 1779, AAS.

  29. SH, Memoirs, 354–55.

  30. FL, 130, 131, 134.

  31. SO, Diary, June 29, 1757. On Tanner, see his obituary in NM, January 22, 1785; “John Tanner,” Seventh-day Baptist Memorial 3 (July 1854): 104–11; Dan A. Sanford, “Entering into Covenant: The History of Seventh Day Baptists in Newport,” Newport History 66, no. 1 (Winter 1994), 45; and the Records of the Seventh-day Baptist Church, 1708–38, 1816, NHS.

  32. Hopkins claimed that Daniel and Sally Fellows stayed in Newport with the Osborns, and Stiles included them on his list of people who stayed in Newport after the British siege. See LD 2: 133. The Fellowses are not listed as heads of a household in “The Occupants of the Houses in Newport, R.I., During the Revolution,” Newport Historical Magazine 2 (July 1881): 41–45. They probably lived with the Osborns. According to Charles Hammett, Mary Anthony lived with Sarah Osborn during the Revolution. See Charles E. Hammett, Jr., “A Sketch of the History of the Congregational Churches of Newport, R.I.” (Typescript, 1891), 242, Vault A, no. 1257, NHS.

  33. “The Occupants of the Houses in Newport, R.I., During the Revolution,” 44; “John Tanner,” Seventh-day Baptist Memorial, 110.

  34. For examples, see SO, Diary, March 6, August 16, September 26, 1757, January 15, 1762, February 20, 1767. Sheryl Kujawa quotes one of Osborn’s undated letters to Fish that she claims offers a description of Henry’s death (“Religion, Education and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island: Sarah Haggar Wheaten Osborn, 1714–1796 [Ph.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1993], 337). In fact, Sarah was quoting from a letter by Elizabeth Prentice about the death of Prentice’s husband.

  35. Sarah Fellows appears in the 1820 census in South Kingstown, Washington County, Rhode Island. See Heritage Quest Online, http://persi•heritagequestonline.com (accessed September 15, 2010). SH, Memoirs, 355; SH to Mrs. Pemberton, January 7, 1778, MHS.

  36. SO to JF, December 28, 1779, AAS; SH, Memoirs, 83. Susanna Anthony left Newport in 1775 after her mother’s death plunged her and her sisters into poverty. Hopkins seems to have arranged for her to serve as a housekeeper in Connecticut, but she had returned to Newport by the summer of 1776. See SA to SH, May 3, July 21, September 4, 1775, January 26, 1776, August 29, 1776, all in Susanna Anthony, 34 Letters, 1749–1776, Gratz Collection.

  37. See Lorenzo J. Greene, “Some Observations on the Black Regiment of Rhode Island in the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 37, no. 2 (April 1952): 142–72.

  38. “Mrs. Mary Almy’s Letters About the Siege of Newport, 29 July–24 August 1778,” typescript, 7–8, NHS; Simister, Fire’s Center, 129–66.

  39. FL
, 156.

  40. Solomon Southwick to William Vernon, quoted in Simister, Fire’s Center, 153.

  41. LD 2: 378; Luker, “‘Under Our Own Vine and Fig Tree,’” 26. For the age of Quamine’s children, see Akeia A. F. Benard, “The Free African American Cultural Landscape: Newport, R.I., 1774–1826” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 2008), Appendix. Duchess Quamine eventually bought her own freedom. See Encyclopedia of African American Business, ed. Jessie Carney Smith and Millicent Lownes Jackson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2006), 1: 142; George G. Channing, Early Recollections of Newport, R.I., from the Year 1793 to 1811 (Newport: A. J. Ward, C. E. Hammett, 1868), 170–71n.

  42. LD 2: 427; William Ellery, quoted in Simister, Fire’s Center, 155.

  43. SO to JF, December 28, 1779, AAS. On Tanner’s return, see Sanford, “Entering into Covenant,” 45.

  44. Perry Miller describes the Puritans as “cosmic optimists” in spite of their faith in original sin in Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 18.

  45. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 31, 130. On the Christian roots of the idea of progress, see Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949); David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

  46. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on Arts and Sciences” (1751), in Kramnick, PER, 363–69; Voltaire, Essay on the Manners and Spirits of Nations (1754), ibid., 369–75; Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, “On the Successive Advances of the Human Mind” (1750), ibid., 362; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), ibid., 505–15; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in The Age of Enlightenment, ed. Lester G. Crocker (New York: Walker, 1969), 300. See also Clare Jackson, “Progress and Optimism,” in The Enlightenment World, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2004), 177–93; Roger Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic, 1980).

  47. See excerpts from Claude-Adrien Helvétius, A Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and His Education (1772), in Kramnick, PER, 287–96; John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), ibid., 222–28. On ideas about the pliability of the human mind, see Spadafora, Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 135–78.

  48. John Adams, Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies (Boston: John Gill, 1776), 15; Abbé Raynal, History of the Two Indies (1772), quoted in J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 169.

  49. Sylvanus Conant, An Anniversary Sermon Preached at Plymouth, Dec. 23, 1776 (Boston, 1777), quoted in Stout, New England Soul, 308.

  50. See, e.g., Joseph Bellamy, “The Millennium,” in The Works of Joseph Bellamy (Boston: Doctrinal Book and Tract Society, 1853), 454.

  51. Joseph Lyman, A Sermon Preached at Hatfield December 15th, 1774 (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1775), 9; Adams quoted in Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 119.

  52. SO, Diary, August 31, 1753; FL, 156; SO to JF, December 28, 1779, AAS. On covenant theology, see Stout, New England Soul; Miller, New England Mind: Seventeenth Century.

  53. See Mark Valeri, “The New Divinity and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1989): 741–69.

  54. Ebenezer Baldwin, The Duty of Rejoycing Under Calamities and Afflictions (New York, 1776), quoted in Stout, New England Soul, 308. On the timing of this political form of millennialism, see Bloch, Visionary Republic, 82; Stout, New England Soul, 306 and 383n.

  55. Samuel Sherwood, The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness (New York: S. Loudon, 1776), 39.

  56. The Continental Congress quoted in Bloch, Visionary Republic, 75; SH, Treatise on the Millennium (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1793), 69. Bloch argues that most Americans were less influenced by Enlightenment ideal of progress than by millennialism (see p. 77), but the two sets of ideas often overlapped during the Revolution, making it difficult to draw neat lines between them.

  57. FL, 159; Stout, New England Soul, 307–8.

  58. FL, 159.

  59. JE, “History of Redemption,” Notebook A, Works of Edwards transcription, BL, cited in George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 485. The list of books purchased for the First Church of Christ during Hopkins’s tenure, 1770–75, includes Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption. See FCCR-DRC, March 18, 1775.

  60. FL, 109, 157; SO to JF, December 28, 1779, AAS.

  61. On Mary Tanner’s death see “John Tanner,” Seventh-day Baptist Memorial, 106.

  62. See Crane, Dependent People, 144, 159; Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 115.

  63. Champlin quoted in Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial New England, 88.

  64. SH to Stephen West, June 23, 1780, in Samuel Hopkins, Letters, Gratz Collection, Case 6/Box 10. For records of baptisms at Sarah Osborn’s house, see FCCR-BM, November 18, 1779, 28, and August 4, 1780, 28. See also Arnold, Vital Record, First Series, vol. 8, p. 400. On Tanner, see Sanford, “Entering into Covenant,” 28n, 33.

  65. Ray Raphael, “America’s Worst Winter Ever,” HistoryNet.Com http://www.historynet.com/americas-worst-winter-ever.htm/1 (accessed September 2, 2010).

  66. FL, 156–57; SH, Memoirs, 355. See also SH to Levi Hart, April 23, 1787, Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23.

  67. See Arthur Tuckerman, When Rochambeau Stepped Ashore (Newport: The Preservation Society of Newport County, 1955); George Champlin Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport: Charles E. Hammett, Jr., 1884), 77.

  68. See Edwards Amasa Park, Memoir of the Life and Character of Samuel Hopkins (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1854), 91.

  69. FL, 160.

  70. See John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 249–50.

  71. “Memorial of the Town of Newport to the General Assembly,” October 1781, quoted in Richard Henry Rudolph, “The Merchants of Newport, Rhode Island, 1763–1786” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1975), 318.

  72. Jean Pierre Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 1788, ed. Durand Echeverria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 128.

  73. Timothy Dwight, A Sermon Preached at Northampton (Hartford, 1781), quoted in Bloch, Visionary Republic, 101; Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862, available online, http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm (accessed September 20, 2010).

  74. See Valeri, “New Divinity and the American Revolution,” 769.

  75. SH to Stephen West, June 23, 1780, in Samuel Hopkins, Letters, Gratz Collection, Case 6/Box 10; SH to Levi Hart, April 23, 1787, Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23.

  76. SH to Levi Hart, November 27, 1787, Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23. See Kerry S. Walters, Rational Infidels: The American Deists (Durango, Colo.: Longwood Academic, 1992).

  77. SH, A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans (1776), in WSH 2: 551. Levi Hart also opposed slavery. See John Saillant, “‘Some Thoughts on the Subject of Feeing the Negro Slaves in the Colony of Connecticut, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of All Friends to Liberty and Justice,’ by Levi Hart,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002), 107–28.

  78. See Sydney V. James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York: Scribner’s, 1975), 366; NM, June 27, 1774.

  79. FCCR-BM, March 5, 1784. Three months before passing this resolution against slavery, the church voted “That whereas deacon Coggeshall did, more than two years ago, promise before the church, that he would secure the freedom of his black girl, Sarah, that she should be free upon his decease, it is the opinion of this church that he ought without delay, to deliver
to us a paper properly authenticated, securing to said girl her freedom, as abovesaid” (ibid., January 30, 1784). On Quakers, see Luker, “‘Under Our Own Vine and Fig Tree,’” 25.

  80. Rudolph, “Merchants of Newport, Rhode Island,” 340.

  81. NM, September 2, 1790.

  82. SH, The Slave Trade and Slavery (1787), in WSH 2: 615, 619, 620, 621. See also SH, A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans (1776), in WSH 2: 587. For the estimate of the slave trade in Newport, see Crane, Dependent People, 23.

  83. By 1800 “slaving voyages equaled the volume of the 1770s” (Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 97).

  84. James DeWolf Papers, Vault A, Box 43A, Folder 24, NHS.

  85. On James DeWolf, see the film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, http://www.tracesofthetrade.org/ (accessed November 24, 2010).

  86. SH, Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, 557; SH, A Discourse upon the Slave Trade and the Slavery of the Africans (1793) in WSH 2: 607.

  87. SH, Treatise on the Millennium, 145, 152–53; Revelation 16:13–16.

  88. John Ferguson, Memoir of the Life and Character of Rev. Samuel Hopkins (Boston: Leonard W. Kimball, 1830), 90. For more on Gardner, see Edwards Amasa Park, ed. The Works of Samuel Hopkins (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1852), 1: 154–56.

  89. See Benard, “Free African American Cultural Landscape,” 76–77, 92. On the Free African Union Society, see William Henry Robinson, ed., The Proceedings of the Free African Union Society and the African Benevolent Society, Newport, Rhode Island, 1780–1824 (Providence: Urban League of Rhode Island, 1976); Free African Union Society, Minutes, Vault A, no. 1674c, NHS.

  90. See Crane, Dependent People, 161.

  91. SH to Stephen West, June 23, 1780, Samuel Hopkins, Letters, Gratz Collection, Case 6/Box 10; SH, System of Doctrines (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793), 1: xi. On Yamma’s illness and death, see SH to Levi Hart, July 29, 1793, and June 9, 1794, Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23. After Gardner won the lottery in 1791, he was able to buy his freedom. See SH to Levi Hart, April 27, 1791, Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23; SH to Levi Hart, June 10, 1791, in Samuel Hopkins, 4 Letters, 1770, 1791, 1796, no date, Gratz Collection.