Although Sarah did not explain in her memoir why she had been sent away to school, her religious anxiety may have been heightened by troubles at home. Her parents do not seem to have been desperately poor, but they struggled throughout their lives to make ends meet. Her father had recently left the family to emigrate to New England, probably in search of greater financial opportunity, and her brother, her only sibling, went to live with her grandmother in Hartford, a few miles outside of London. Perhaps her mother decided to send the two children away so that she could go to work. (Many British boarding schools were quite cheap.)17 If Sarah sensed that her parents were anxious about the future, she may have felt frightened and vulnerable. Despite her hope that God would save her, she dreaded that Satan might be lurking nearby.
In her second story, Sarah remembered her distress after rebuking her brother for committing a sin. “My brother did something that I thought was wicked and I reproved him sharply for it, but was much perplexed with this text of scripture: ‘Thou hypocrite. First cast out the beam out of thine own eye and then thou shalt see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’ This frighted me exceedingly. I thought I was a vile hypocrite and should never dare to reprove anybody again.” Although her grandmother had told Sarah that it was her duty to speak the truth, she worried that she had not conquered her own depravity. Was she any better than her brother? What would happen to her if she was just as “wicked”?18
Sarah shared these stories because she wanted readers to understand her early “delight in the ways of holiness,” but modern readers cannot help being struck by her emphasis on fear. Later in her memoir she would write rapturous descriptions of Christ’s love, but many of her early memories of God involve a mixture of anxiety and shame. Despite a brief mention of Jesus as a “glorious and compassionate Savior” at the beginning of her memoir, she also warned her readers that if they “abused” his mercy a vengeful God might sentence them to damnation. “Let them alone,” she imagined God proclaiming. “They shall never enter into my rest.”19
Sarah may have exaggerated her religious anxiety in order to conform to religious convention. The first rule listed in The School of Good Manners, an etiquette book meant for children and youth, was “Fear God and Believe in Christ,” and Cotton Mather urged children to memorize a verse from the Psalms: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”20 Yet it also seems likely that when Sarah recalled her childhood, her memories of God’s wrath were stronger than her memories of his love. She had heard many different sermons during the Sundays of her childhood, some comforting and others alarming, but because she was small and helpless she seems to have found the stories about God’s anger particularly vivid. In her young imagination, God loomed as a large, forbidding figure who ruled the world with an iron hand. He had the awe-inspiring power to create and destroy, to reward and punish, to save and condemn.
Sarah’s religious fears do not seem to have been unique. When John Bunyan wrote his life story more than eighty years earlier, he vividly remembered his early terror of damnation. Because his sins had “offended” the Lord, “even in my childhood He did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions.” Obsessed by thoughts of “devils and wicked spirits,” he was afraid to go to sleep at night. David Brainerd, a missionary, was “terrified at the thoughts of death” at the age of seven or eight, while the Reverend Aaron Burr, the future president of Princeton, was troubled by “great terrors and horrors from a guilty Conscience and the Fears of Hell.” When the Reverend John Cleaveland looked back on his childhood, he remembered that his mother “took a Considerable Deal of pains” to warn all of her children that they were “Children of wrath and exposed to Hell fire.” Other children learned they were never too young to pray for God’s mercy. In Jonathan Edwards’s congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, a four-year-old girl spent hours alone praying that God would save her. “I pray, beg, pardon all my sins,” she was heard crying loudly. When her mother tried to soothe her, she “continued exceedingly crying, and wreathing her body to and fro, like one in anguish of spirit,” until she finally managed to put her fears into words. “I am afraid I shall go to hell!” she wept. Her first images of God involved anger and vengeance. “O how fraid was I of God,” remembered Hannah Heaton in her diary. “He appeared to me to be an angry terrible being.”21
Children of Wrath, Children of Grace
For reasons that historians have only begun to explore, the rhetoric of children’s sinfulness seems to have grown particularly heated in the first few decades of the eighteenth century. In some ways evangelicals simply echoed the Puritan belief that children needed to be subjected to strict discipline. Imagining the human race as part of a great chain of being that extended downward from God to the lowest form of creation, the Puritans had feared that infants were only a small step above beasts. As one minister explained, “The Highest of a lower Kind of Creatures, approaches very near to the lowest of a higher Kind.” Determined to rear children who were upright both morally and physically, parents wrapped their infants in tight swaddling clothes in order to straighten their limbs and make them appear more erect, and placed them in special walking stools to prevent them from crawling. (Early Americans seem to have been disturbed by the sight of babies crawling on all fours, an activity which made them look too much like small animals.) With no seats in them, these stools forced children to learn how to stand. Parents also laced girls into stays or corsets to straighten their backs, which is why children look unnaturally rigid in many colonial paintings.22
“Woman at clothesline.” A woman (circa 1800) with a child in a standing stool. With no seats in them, these stools were designed to make children stand upright. Drawing by Michele Felice Cornè. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.
As Puritan children grew older, parents fed them a steady diet of catechisms and books designed to transform them into virtuous Christians. The New-England Primer included the story of a youth who spurned Christ’s offer of salvation in order to pursue a life of frivolous pleasure. Although the young man promised to become a Christian in his old age (after he could no longer enjoy the vanities of the world), Christ was so angered by his disobedience that he immediately struck him dead: “Thus end the days of woful youth,/Who won’t obey nor mind the truth. They in their youth go down to hell, Under eternal wrath to dwell. Many don’t live out half their days, For cleaving unto sinful ways.”23
Yet Puritans had mixed these warnings with a more comforting message about their redemption. They were not humanitarians who recoiled at the thought of children’s suffering (and few seem to have been concerned about the fate of “heathen” children like Native Americans), but they did believe that virtually all their own children would be safe from God’s punishment. Identifying themselves as the “new Israel,” they proclaimed that God had entered into a special covenant with them that extended to their descendants as well. As Cotton Mather explained, “The children of Godly Parents, we are bound in a Judgment of Charity to reckon, as much belonging upon the Lord, as Themselves.” Softening the doctrine of infant depravity, Mather reassured “distressed parents” that grace, like original sin, was hereditary. In theory, ministers accepted the possibility of infant damnation, but in practice they tended to be squeamish about it. Michael Wigglesworth, a Puritan poet, even claimed (without biblical evidence) that children would have “the easiest room in Hell.” Most ministers avoided the topic entirely, and when real flesh-and-blood children died they were almost always imagined as rejoicing in heaven.24
But the religious mood began to shift in the 1710s and 1720s. Doctrine had not changed, but ministers now seemed less interested in reassuring parents and children than in shattering their complacency. The number of books and sermons about children increased significantly, and although judgments about style are hard to quantify, these sermons sound harsher than those published earlier. When Benjamin Wadsworth, a Boston minister, preached several sermons on “ea
rly piety,” he described children as “Children of Wrath by Nature, liable to Eternal Vengeance, the Unquenchable Flames of Hell.” Although doting parents might be tempted to see them as innocent, “Their Hearts naturally, are a mere nest, root, fountain of Sin, and wickedness; an evil Treasure from whence proceed evil things, viz. Evil Thoughts, Murders, Adulteries &c.” A few years before Sarah’s family moved to Newport, a minister there urged parents not to neglect their children’s religious education. “The time is coming when you will bitterly bewail it,” he warned, “but it may be They will be Dead and in Hell first.”25
In order to understand why ministers spoke so harshly, it is important to situate them in their own time and place. On both sides of the Atlantic, Reformed Protestants were lamenting that religion had been eclipsed by “the Powerful Love of the World and Exorbitant Reach after Riches.” Covetousness, gambling, drinking, theft, slander, sexual licentiousness—these were only a few of the crimes that ministers identified as symptoms of religious decline, and despite their tendency to exaggerate, they were genuinely concerned that parents were failing to pass on the faith to the next generation. “Nothing is more Threatening to the Welfare of a People, than to have their Young Ones generally Ignorant, Irreligious, Disorderly,” Wads worth warned. “When it is so, it looks as though Iniquity would soon abound, to the pulling down [of] heavy Judgments.” Jonathan Edwards warned parents that unless they set a better example, their children might be “Cast, Gone down into Hell.”26
Concerns about children were also heightened by changes in the family. In the seventeenth century, ministers had identified the family as a “little commonwealth,” a model for the hierarchical ordering of both church and state. To help them rear obedient, submissive children who would accept their subjection to parents, magistrates, and ultimately the king, Reformed Protestants gave enormous power to parents, especially fathers. Fathers controlled the family’s property; they helped choose marriage partners for their children; and by law they were allowed to administer “moderate correction” to unruly children and servants. They could also request that their children be punished by the courts. In several New England colonies (though not in Rhode Island), children over the age of sixteen who cursed or struck their parents could be put to death. Significantly, no child was ever actually executed under this law, but it was a chilling reminder of paternal power in American culture.27
By the early eighteenth century, however, as larger socioeconomic forces began to reshape everyday life, men began to lose their authority over the family. Because of widespread land shortages, many fathers could no longer provide farms for their sons, and because of the growth of a new, market-oriented economy, they lost control of children who moved away from home in search of greater economic opportunities. Although fathers still tried to influence whom their children would marry, they had little success. As historians have shown, many couples seem to have realized that their best weapon against strong-willed fathers was pregnancy. During the 1740s and 1750s the premarital pregnancy rate in New England rose as high as 40 percent.28
Whether or not evangelicals understood the underlying historical forces that were changing the family, they were disturbed by their effects. As Jonathan Edwards complained after arriving in Northampton in 1726, “Family government did too much fail in the town.” Instead of deferring to their elders, the “youth of the town” were addicted to “frolicking,” “frequenting the tavern,” and such sinful, “lewd practices” as “bundling”—the New England custom of allowing courting couples to sleep in the same bed with a “bundling board” between them. In a sermon Edwards preached to young people, he condemned “taking such liberties as naturally tend to stir up lusts,” including the “shameful custom of fondling women’s breasts.” By sternly admonishing parents to “keep their children at home,” ministers fought a losing battle to strengthen the patriarchal family.29
In addition to their concerns about the sanctity of the family, many ministers feared that the doctrine of original sin was under attack. One of the most controversial questions of the age was whether human nature should be understood as inherently good or stained with sin. On one side stood evangelicals like Edwards who denigrated humans as “totally corrupt, in every part, in all their faculties, and all the principles of their nature, their understandings, and wills.” For Edwards, “There is nothing but sin, no good at all.” On the other side stood a collection of Enlightenment thinkers, British liberals, sentimental novelists, and ordinary Protestant believers who found this kind of language extreme, perhaps even absurd. According to Francis Hutcheson, people were born with an innate moral sense, “a determination of our nature to study the good of others; or some instinct, antecedent to all reason from interest, which influences us to the love of others.”30 Although Hutcheson acknowledged the reality of evil, he believed that if not for false theories of human sinfulness people would act far more benevolently. Influenced by these ideas, sentimental novelists celebrated the quality of “sensibility,” the innate human desire to sympathize with the afflicted and to alleviate suffering. Works like Samuel Richardson’s extraordinarily popular novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) helped popularize a new gospel of human goodness.31
Enlightened thinkers especially objected to the doctrine of “imputation”: the belief that all humans had been cursed for Adam and Eve’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. It did not seem fair to imagine God punishing people for sins they had not personally committed. According to Daniel Whitby, a British theologian, the entire idea of inherited sin was “exceeding cruel, and plainly inconsistent with the Justice, Wisdom, and goodness of our gracious God.” “We dare not say that millions of Infants are tortured in Hell to all eternity,” an Anglican missionary protested, “for a Sin that was committed thousands of years before they were born.”32 At a time when Enlightenment thinkers defended the concept of individual rights, the doctrine of original sin seemed to make the individual irrelevant.
The debates over original sin always revolved around the same axis: the status of children. Because Enlightenment thinkers and liberal-leaning Protestants knew that infant damnation was a hard doctrine to swallow, they scored rhetorical points by forcing the orthodox to defend it. As Edwards affirmed, it was “exceeding just, that God should take the soul of a new-born infant and cast it into eternal torments.”33 To be clear, Edwards and other evangelicals never argued that all infants and children who died before conversion would be damned, and they assumed that many, especially those with godly parents, had been saved. (It is a tribute to the success of anti-Calvinist propaganda that even in the nineteenth century there were rumors that Calvinists had once taught that hell was paved with infants’ bones.)34 But because they preached that every individual’s fate was decreed before birth, they could not avoid the logical corollary that infants as well as adults could be damned. Their critics pounced. John Taylor asked, “Must it not lessen the due Love of Parents to Children, to believe they are the vilest and most wretched Creatures in the World, the Objects of God’s Wrath and Curse?” In The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination, a work that went through three editions in only six years, Taylor condemned the doctrine of original sin as “absurd”: “And pray, consider seriously what a God he must be, who can be displeased with, and curse his innocent Creatures, even before they have a Being,” he cried. “Is this thy God, O Christian?”35
Intellectuals were not the only ones who had doubts about the doctrine of original sin. Much to his frustration, Jonathan Edwards discovered that many parents in his congregation perceived their children as “innocent,” and they denounced him for “frighting poor innocent children with talk of hell fire and eternal damnation.”36 In response, he accused parents of being too indulgent. But as he seems to have sensed better than almost anyone in his generation, Calvinist thought was being eroded by deeper tides of change. People who could elect their own lower assemblies, read the latest books from England, and choose wha
t to purchase in an expanding consumer marketplace seem to have found it hard to view themselves—or their children—as either helpless or unworthy. Free to make choices that most of their parents and grandparents had never imagined, they developed a stronger sense of their own agency.
Although historians sometimes write as though evangelicals dominated eighteenth-century American life, the evangelicals did not see themselves in this way at all; rather they thought of themselves as a besieged minority trying to defend their beliefs against attack. Certain that they had been called to save the world from apostasy, they asserted their theology in deliberately provocative language. In order to defend the doctrine of original sin, Edwards claimed that children were not innocent, but “young vipers, and . . . infinitely more hateful than vipers,” and Thomas Prince warned unconverted children that “God utterly abhors you and is angry with you.” Sarah Osborn concluded that her childhood sins were proof that all humans “have a fountain of corruption in them that is ever flowing.”37
Disturbed by this fierce language, historians have presented a grim picture of Puritan and evangelical attitudes toward children. They have accused them not only of “committing a crime against childhood” but of teaching children “perverted ideas of God.”38 Rather than trying to assuage children’s natural anxieties about monsters, abandonment, and death, ministers seem to have deliberately heightened these fears, using the threat of hell as a crude form of social control. When Isaac Watts published his Divine and Moral Songs for the Use of Children, he included songs warning children not to be lazy, vain, greedy, or selfish. Even James Janeway’s best-selling A Token for Children, which reassured devout children that they would rejoice in heaven, tried to frighten the “naughty” into obedience. “Whither do you think those Children go when they die, that will not do what they are bid, but play the Truant, and lie, and speak naughty words, and break the Sabbath?” Janeway asked. “Whither do such children go do you think?” In a response that must have sent shivers down many a spine, he answered: “Why, I will tell you, they which Lie, must to their Father the Devil into everlasting burning; they which never pray, God will pour out his wrath upon them; and when they beg and pray in Hell Fire, God will not forgive them; but there they must lie forever.”39
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