Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  92. SH, Discourse upon the Slave Trade, 610–611; Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement, 148–54; Robinson, Proceedings of the Free African Union Society, 19.

  93. On the fluidity between premillennialism and postmillennialism, see Bloch, Visionary Republic, 131.

  94. SH to Levi Hart, July 12, 1787, and SH to Levi Hart, April 23, 1787, both in Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23.

  95. See “The Rhode Island Census of 1782,” in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 127, no 1 (January 1973): 13. Latham Clarke may have been the same person as the “Spooner” Clark who seems to have shared Sarah Osborn’s church pew (Pew 61) in the 1770s when she was no longer able to attend church. He is listed in FCCR-418, Folder 4, entry for March 15, 1772, and Folder 5, entry for November 26, 1775.

  96. FL, 12–13. Susan was baptized in 1775, and Susanna Anthony probably wrote this letter in 1784. She referred to the effort to repair the meetinghouse, and the church held a lottery to fund the repairs in 1784. Arnold, Vital Record, First Series, vol. 8, p. 404; NM, December 18, 1784.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN. THE OPEN VISION

  1. SH, Memoirs, 124–25.

  2. Ibid, 361.

  3. SO, Diary, July 11, 1753; SO to JF, September 5, 1759, AAS; Joseph Stevens, Another and Better Country, Even an Heavenly (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1723), 20.

  4. FL, 167; Samuel Buell, The Happiness of the Blessed in Heaven (New York: J. Parker, and Company, 1760), 6.

  5. SO, Diary, July 12, July 9th, September 2, 1753, October 1, 1760. The Bible reference is Romans 7:24.

  6. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1908). Since the names listed for Newport are not in alphabetical order, the list seems to be organized according to neighborhood. Elizabeth Melville, Lydia Bissell, and Mary Smith are included in the “List of Admissions, 1744–1796,” in FCCR-BM.

  7. Sarah Osborn was listed as living with the Clarkes in the Rhode Island census of 1782. See “The Rhode Island Census of 1782,” in New England Historical and Genealogical Register 127, no. 1 (January 1973): 13. On Scipio Tanner, see “John Tanner,” Seventh-day Baptist Memorial 3 (July 1854): 111.

  8. FL, 25.

  9. For an example of the First Church of Christ giving charity to a poor member, see FCCR-BM June 3, 1785. On Sarah Osborn’s rent, see SH, Memoirs, 354, 357, and the letters from SH to Levi Hart in the Simon Gratz Manuscript Collection [hereafter Gratz Collection]: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23, HSP, for the following dates: February 26, 1789, February 23, 1792, August 22, 1792, June 9, 1794, July 10, 1794, March 31, 1795, and March 30, 1796. See also SH to Levi Hart, January 26, 1793, in Samuel Hopkins, Letters, Gratz Collection, Case 6/Box 10; SH to Levi Hart, March 8, 1792, Ms.525, BPL; SH to Levi Hart, July 27, 1793, in FCCR-418, Folder 6.

  10. SH, Memoirs, 357.

  11. Ibid., 353.

  12. Ibid., 360.

  13. Ibid., 360.

  14. SO, Diary, July 8, 1753, April 18, 1760, July 12, 1753.

  15. Charles Drelincourt, The Christian’s Defence Against the Fears of Death, with Directions How to Die Well (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1744), 28. Osborn mentions this book in her diary on October 19, 1760.

  16. See David Tripp, “The Image of the Body in the Formative Phases of the Protestant Reformation,” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131–52.

  17. Cotton Mather, The Soul upon the Wing (Boston: B. Green 1722), 11.

  18. John Tillotson, Several Discourses of Death and Judgment (London: R. Chiswell, 1701), 9: 41–42. See also John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 61. The Bible reference is from 1 Corinthians 6:19. On eighteenth-century attitudes toward the body, see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: Allen Lane, 2003).

  19. SO, Diary, July 8, 1753.

  20. JE, Typological Writings, in WJE 11: 92; Isaac Watts, Death and Heaven, 4th ed. (London: James Brackstone, 1742), 166; JE, Ethical Writings, in WJE 8: 378–79; JE, Religious Affections, in WJE 2: 288–89; SO, Diary, March 27, April 11, 1754; SH, Memoirs, 149. On the “animal” nature of the body, see Shaw, The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness (1665; rpt. Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1746), 104–5.

  21. Shepard quoted in Corrigan, Prism of Piety, 38; Bulkeley quoted in Marilyn J. Westerkamp, “Puritan Women, Spiritual Power, and the Question of Sexuality,” in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, ed. Catherine A. Brekus (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 61; JE, Original Sin, in WJE 3: 270, quoting Job 14:1–4.

  22. SO, Diary, July 27, 1753, July 25, 1760. See also Diary, March 28, 1754, February 18, 1757. On hysteria, see Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); G. S. Rousseau, “‘A Strange Pathology’: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800,” in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. Sander L. Gilman et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 91–224.

  23. See Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston: B. Green and S. Kneeland, 1726), 2: 529; Cotton Mather, Meditations on the Glory of the Heavenly World (Boston: Benjamin Eliot, 1711), 107.

  24. SO, Diary, March 8, 1767.

  25. On heaven as a better earth, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven—and How We Can Regain It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60–61.

  26. See John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 186. On radical Enlightenment challenges to the idea of an afterlife, see Jonathan Irvine Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 79.

  27. John Locke, Reasonableness of Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: John Churchill, 1696), 290–91; letter from Benjamin Franklin to Ezra Stiles (1790), in Kramnick, PER, 166; James H. Hutson, Forgotten Features of the Founding: The Recovery of Religious Themes in the Early American Republic (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2003), 17.

  28. On medieval and Reformation visions of heaven, see Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 69–180. SH, System of Doctrines, in WSH 2: 59–60. John Murray, Grace and Glory; or, Heaven Given only to Saints (Newburyport, Mass.: John McCall, 1788), 24–25.

  29. The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson (Edinburgh: W. Ruddiman and Company, 1772), 1: 149–50; Watts, Death and Heaven, 116.

  30. Watts, Death and Heaven, 127.

  31. JE, Miscellanies, in WJE 13: 482; SH, System of Doctrines, in WSH, 2: 60.

  32. Samuel Webster, The Blessedness of Those Who Die in the Lord, Considered (Boston: Edes and Son, 1792), 16.

  33. SH, Memoirs, 185; SO, Diary, undated entry (late July or early August), 1760; SO, Diary, July 12, 1753.

  34. Watts, Death and Heaven, 122, 124, 126; Murray, Grace and Glory, 31; FL, 36.

  35. JE, Miscellanies, in WJE 13: 478; SH, System of Doctrines, in WSH 2: 44.

  36. Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, 538–39; McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 91.

  37. On Leibniz, see McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 132; McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 277.

  38. John Tillotson, “Concerning our Imitation of the Divine Perfections,” in The Works of John Tillotson (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton, 1748), 6: 274; Cotton Mather, Coelestinus (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1723), 145; Gad Hitchcock, Natural Religion Aided by Revelation and Perfected in Christianity (Boston: T. and J. Fleet, 1779), 19; WJE 13: 275–76. See also Amy Platinga Pauw, “‘Heaven Is a World of Love’: Edwards on Heaven and the Trinity,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995): 399; Sang Hyun Lee, The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 170–210.

  39. SO, Diary, Ap
ril 15, 1760; SH, Memoirs, 119; SO to “Mrs. Noice” [Mary Noyes], January 16, 1767, AAS.

  40. SH, Memoirs, 124–25, 380.

  41. Murray, Grace and Glory, 32.

  42. Charles Chauncy, The Earth Delivered (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1756), 15–16. See also Edward M. Griffin, Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705–1787 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 125.

  43. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics vol. 21 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 3.25.10; Calvin, Commentaries on the Last Four Books of Moses, Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, trans. Charles William Bingham, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1853), entry on Numbers 6:24, p. 246.

  44. 1 Corinthians 13:12; Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest (New York: American Tract Society, n.d.), 72; Increase Mather, Meditations on Death (Boston: Timothy Green, 1707). 167.

  45. Charles Chauncy, Joy: The Duty of Survivors, on the Death of Pious Friends and Relatives (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741), 14–15; Simeon Howard, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Elizabeth Howard (Boston: T. and J. Fleet, 1777), 26. Webster, Blessedness of Those Who Die in the Lord, 14. Roy Porter argues that “the traditional primacy of the beatific vision was replaced by an accent on human love, expressed through family, friends and neighbours” (Flesh in the Age of Reason, 106).

  46. JE, Miscellanies, WJE 13: 275.

  47. Elizabeth Rowe, Friendship in Death: In Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living (London: T. Worrall, 1728), 11.

  48. SH, Memoirs, 377. For other examples of Osborn’s hoping to see loved ones in heaven, see ibid., 210; SO, Diary, August 31, 1760. On heaven as a “home,” see Diary, June 8, 1754, October 14, 1753, January 30, 1760.

  49. SH, Memoirs, 126.

  50. Ibid., 375–80.

  51. See Griffin, Old Brick, 171–72; Charles Chauncy, The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations (London: Charles Dilly, 1784).

  52. JE, “The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous,” quoted in David Levin, Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), 223.

  53. Psalm 73:25; SO, Diary, December 2, 1759; Isaac Watts, Nearness to God the Felicity of Creatures, in Watts, Sermons on Various Subjects (London: John Clark, 1721), 357.

  54. Gilbert Tennent, The Good Man’s Character and Reward Represented, and His Loss Deplor’d (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1756), 27, 28–29; Aaron Burr, A Servant of God Dismissed from Labour to Rest (New York: Hugh Gaine, 1757), 11.

  55. SH, Memoirs, 157; SO to JF, September 5, 1759, AAS.

  56. SH, Memoirs, 377.

  57. SO, Diary, June 21, 1754.

  58. SH, Memoirs, 362.

  59. Ibid., 137.

  60. SO, Diary, April 2, 1754 (quoting Ecclesiastes 7:1); SH, Memoirs, 136–37. For two examples of references to Psalm 23, see SO, Diary, July 16, 1753, March 13, 1760.

  61. SH, Memoirs, 363. On church bells, see Edwin Tunis, Colonial Craftsmen and the Beginnings of American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 142.

  62. Ephesians 4:1; SH, Memoirs, 363; NM, August 9, 1796.

  63. SO, Will, Probate Book No. 3, 11–12, Newport City Hall, Newport, R.I.; Benard, “Free African American Cultural Landscape,” 95.

  64. Stephen West, ed., Sketches of the Life of the Late Rev. Samuel Hopkins (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1805), 104.

  65. SO, Memoir, [143].

  66. McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 167, 172; Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 123; SO, Diary, April 8, 1762.

  67. SO, Diary, October 9, 1755, quoting Job 19:25.

  EPILOGUE. A PROTESTANT SAINT

  1. SH to Levi Hart, August 18, 1796, Simon Gratz Manuscript Collection [hereafter Gratz Collection]: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23, HSP.

  2. Ibid. On Hopkins’s reliance on Hart to help him choose which entries to publish see SH to Levi Hart, December 17, 1796, January 11, 1797, September 12, 1798, Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23. The second edition of SH, Memoirs, was published by N. Elliot in 1814. Crito [Samuel Hopkins], “Sketch of the Character of Mrs. Sarah Osborn,” Theological Magazine 2, no. 1 (September–October 1796): 1–4. See SO, Nature, in Massachusetts Missionary Magazine (Boston), 2, no. 4 (1804): 163–66. SH, excerpt from Memoirs, in The Weekly Recorder, A Newspaper Conveying Important Intelligence (Chillicothe, Ohio), February 19, 1819, 220. Elizabeth West Hopkins was not named on the title page of FL, but she was clearly the editor. See Elizabeth Hopkins to Levi Hart, Jan. 12, 1787, Gratz Collection: American Colonial Clergy, Case 8/Box 23.

  3. First Congregational Church, Records of the Osborn House, Vault A, no. 1999, NHS; Letter from Occramar Marycoo (Newport Gardner) to Samuel Vinson, January 2, 1826, Vault A, Box 106, Folder 13, NHS; NM, December 17, 1825, January 14 1826; Rhode Island Republican, June 15, 1826.

  4. Gardiner Spring, “Christian Sanctification,” in The Literary and Theological Review (New York: Appleton, 1834), 1: 115.

  5. See Nathan O. Hatch, “The Puzzle of American Methodism,” Church History 63, no. 2 (June 1994): 178.

  6. See Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 103.

  7. See the essays in Mark A. Noll, ed., God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mark Valeri, “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 60, no. 1 (1991): 39n5.

  8. Charles E. Hammett, Jr., “A Sketch of the History of the Congregational Churches of Newport, R.I.” (Typescript, 1891), 107, Vault A, no. 1257, NHS.

  9. Jacqueline Hornstein, “Sarah Osborn,” in American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Lina Mainiero (New York: Ungar, 1979–82), 3: 311; Mary Beth Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities,” Signs 2, no. 2 (1976): 521–22.

  10. See James Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Project?” Political Theory 28, no. 6 (December 2000): 734–57.

  11. SO, Diary, June 21, 1754.

  12. See Matthew 22:37.

  Acknowledgments

  This book began many years ago when I came across a reference to Sarah Osborn’s manuscripts in the catalogue of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. I was having difficulty finding sources for my dissertation, a study of female preaching in early America, and I decided to look at any book or manuscript collection that might be even remotely related. What I found was far beyond my expectations: a memoir so compelling that I sat in Beinecke’s light-filled reading room until closing time, enthralled by my introduction to Sarah Osborn. For a month I put aside my research on female preaching while I immersed myself in Sarah’s world. Even though I soon realized that she would make only a small appearance in my dissertation, I knew that I would return to her someday. I have always imagined the study of history as part of the humanities, an opportunity to reflect on the varieties of human experience across time and space, and Sarah’s manuscripts are filled with her thoughts about the human condition. Her voice is unforgettable. I will always be thankful that she decided to share the story of her life.

  I began working on this book in earnest more than ten years ago, and I have incurred many debts since then. When I discovered that Sarah Osborn’s manuscripts at the Beinecke Library were only a fraction of her surviving corpus, I was both excited and daunted: excited by the prospect of reading more about her, but daunted by the challenge of piecing together the fragments of her writings. Her manuscripts are scattered in different archives in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and often I had to read them out of order: for example, half of her diary for 1757 is at the Beinecke and the other half is at the Newport Historical Society. Without the help of the staff of many different archives, I would nev
er have been able to write this book. I am grateful to Thomas Knoles and Jaclyn Penny at the American Antiquarian Society, Joan Youngken and Jennifer Robinson at the Newport Historical Society, and the staffs of the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Manuscripts and Archives department of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Boston Public Library, and the Archives and Special Collections department of the Buswell Memorial Library at Wheaton College.

  My work was generously supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Henry Luce III Faculty Fellowship in Theology from the Association of Theological Schools. Sharing my research with the other Luce Fellows—a remarkable group of historians, ethicists, biblical scholars, and theologians—was an invaluable experience that helped me clarify my ideas. It was a pleasure to be part of such a vibrant intellectual community. I am also grateful to the University of Chicago Divinity School for providing research assistance. Paula Gallito, Monica Cawvey, Amy Artman and Philippa Koch contributed to this book in many ways: compiling bibliographies, tracking down obscure references, and reading eighteenth-century sources.

  I have benefited from the opportunity to share my research with students and faculty at many colleges and universities, including Wheaton College, Miami University of Ohio, the University of Tennessee, and Duke University. My conversations with Mark Noll, Peter Williams, Jonathan Yeager, Grant Wacker, Richard Jaffe, and Tom Tweed helped me to think more deeply about the rise of evangelicalism, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and the category of experience. Peter Jauhiainen shared his research on Samuel Hopkins with me, and the members of the History of Christian Practice project, led by Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, encouraged me to think about the practice of devotional writing. All of the historians involved in that project—Anthea Butler, Heather Curtis, Kathryn Lofton, Michael McNally, Rick Ostrander, Sally Promey, Roberto Lint Sagarena, Tisa Wenger, and David Yoo—offered astute comments on my work. I have been privileged to be part of a supportive community of scholars who share my interest in women’s religious history, including Elizabeth Alvarez, Amy Artman, Anthea Butler, Kathleen Cummings, Heather Curtis, Pamela Jones, Amy Koehlinger, Susanna Morrill, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, and Sarah McFarland Taylor.