Yet it is important to remember that ministers also argued that children of wrath could be transformed into children of grace. Before the revivals, few ministers believed that children were mature enough to experience conversion (the exception was children on the brink of death who suddenly understood their peril), but in the midst of the awakening they claimed that even the youngest children could be born again. As Edwards remarked, “It has heretofore been looked on as a strange thing, when any seemed to be savingly wrought upon, and remarkably changed in their childhood,” but in his Northampton congregation alone, almost thirty children between the ages of ten and fourteen were converted. (There were also two converts between the ages of nine and ten and one precocious four-year-old.) He welcomed twenty of them into full membership and allowed them to join adults at the table of the Lord’s Supper. Similarly, when the Reverend Samuel Blair described a revival in Pennsylvania, he marveled that two sisters, one seven and one nine, had been genuinely converted. “They speak of their Soul Experiences with a very becoming Gravity, and apparent Impression of the Things they speak of,” he testified. Another minister reported that “there was a Spirit of Prayer upon Young and Old, especially the younger sort. And Children of five, six, seven Years, and upward, would pray to Admiration.”40 Because evangelical ministers believed that religion was a matter of the heart more than the head, they thought it was possible for children to grasp the central Christian message without a mature understanding of doctrine. Few Christian communities at the time treated children’s spirituality with as much seriousness.
Although ministers often used fear to persuade children to seek salvation, they also knew how to offer reassurance. Preaching on a verse from Proverbs, “I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me,” the Reverend Joseph Emerson assured children that if they genuinely longed for grace, they almost certainly had been chosen for salvation. Their desire to please God—to “seek” him—was a hopeful sign that they would find him.41 Time and again, ministers imagined blissful children being gathered up into Christ’s loving arms. There was no anger as fierce as God’s anger, but no love as sweet, as pure, or as boundless.
Ministers argued that it was better to tell children the hard facts about sin and damnation than to lull them into complacency. “Why should we conceal the truth from them?” asked Jonathan Edwards. Although children might find it painful to confront the reality of damnation, there were times when they “needed” to be hurt. In his words, “A child that has a dangerous wound may need the painful lance as well as grown persons. And that would be a foolish pity, in such a case, that would hold back the lance, and throw away the life.”42 “Frighting” children was for their own good.
Obey Your Parents in the Lord
Influenced by what they heard in church and read in childrearing manuals, Sarah’s parents enforced a strict code of obedience. Although Sarah said very little about her mother and even less about her father, her brief portraits of them suggest that they would have admired Edwards’s tenacious defense of original sin. They, too, refused to spare the lance.
It was common to praise mothers for their kindness and patience, but Sarah found that she could not conform to convention: what she remembered was not her mother’s compassion but her anger. The first time she mentioned her mother (on the third page of her memoir), she described being “corrected” by her—in other words, spanked or beaten. Remembering her childhood sinfulness, she wrote: “My corruptions prevailed dreadfully. I remember [I] partook of an angry, ungrateful temper stirring in me especially when corrected by my mother.” Although her words were terse, they set a pattern for the rest of her memoir. She almost always portrayed her mother as a strict disciplinarian. Perhaps because of her father’s absence, she mentioned him only in passing (“my father being in New England, my mother put me to boarding school”), but as she revealed later in her memoir, both her parents had been “severe.”43
Most people in early America believed that physical punishment could be an effective tool of discipline. “Correction” was not simply a penalty for bad behavior, but as the positive valence of the word suggests, a way of instilling virtue. When Martha Gerrish, an evangelical from Boston, wrote a letter to her stepdaughter about childrearing, she warned her not to “spare the rod.” “Don’t overlook their pretty little Faults, as Parents call them: but frown at the Beginnings of Sin in them,” she advised. “When they prate prettily and lisp out a Lie, look serious, and not smile upon ’em. Don’t let them be unmannerly familiar with you.” If children were “Stubborn,” parents should “use the Rod . . . let no ill habits be indulged.” Taking this advice to heart, Esther Edwards Burr, the daughter of Jonathan Edwards, punished her ten-month-old by whipping her. “I have begun to govern Sally,” she wrote to a friend. “She has been Whipped once on Old Adam’s account.” Although she found it agonizing to “chastise your own most tender self,” she rejoiced that Sally had become much more obedient. “It did her a vast deal of good.”44
Historians have usually explained this authoritarian style of childrearing as the logical outgrowth of the doctrine of original sin. Connecting childrearing practices to theology, they have suggested that parents who saw their children as inherently sinful would try to break the will. By itself, however, the belief in original sin has not always led to repressive childrearing practices. August Hermann Francke, for example, a German Pietist, assumed that all humans had inherited Adam’s guilt, but he also claimed that very young children were not capable of deliberate misdeeds. Even Augustine, according to a recent historian, viewed children as “non-innocent” rather than depraved. Although infants were born with the inclination to commit sin, they did not become truly corrupt until they grew older.45
Beyond their religious motivations, parents seem to have hoped that “breaking the will” would prepare children to be good subjects of the king. Most early Americans did not want to raise children to be independent; they wanted them to accept their place in a hierarchical social order. The School of Good Manners, an etiquette book, listed obedience to the king as second in importance only to the fear of God. Although children were expected to resist if anyone tried to force them to do something sinful, they were also supposed to be unfailingly obedient to their parents. Reflecting on her childrearing philosophy, Martha Gerrish wrote, “We are to train up our Children in the Exercise of Love, Respect, Obedience, & Modesty, and not to allow them too much Familiarity in their Speech or Behavior towards us.” In Osborn’s words, children must “submit to and obey their own parents or other superiors in all things right.”46
Of course, not all evangelicals believed in breaking the will, and some took a more gentle approach to childrearing. While almost everyone agreed that children needed to be “subdued,” they disagreed about whether they should be trained with rewards or “severity.” According to Cotton Mather, Christians should use love, not fear, to discipline their children. In Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good, published anonymously in 1710, Mather swore that he would “never dispense a blow, except it be for an atrocious crime, or for a lesser fault obstinately persisted in.” Like the philosopher John Locke, whose Essay on Education (1693) became a best seller in America, Mather lamented that “the slavish, raging, fighting way of education” was “a considerable article in the wrath and curse of God, upon a miserable world.” Without rejecting corporal punishment outright, he insisted that parents should beat their children only as a last resort, and even then not in a “passion and a fury.”47
The Reverend Joseph Fish, one of Sarah Osborn’s closest friends as an adult, also recommended that parents treat their children with kindness. While he was not opposed to beating on principle, recommending it for “vassals, negroes and other sordid slaves when nothing else will do,” he thought that it did more harm to children than good. (Although he never examined his racial assumptions, he clearly meant that it harmed white children.) “If Children are of a tender Make,” he reasoned, “they neither need, nor
can they bear, nor even be supposed to deserve, Severity.” On the other hand, “if they are of a more hardy and stubborn Make, what so Likely, as Goodness, Moderation, and Patience, to work them into a human shape, and mold them into a Gospel Temper?” Instead of “governing” his two daughters with force, he guided them with “the gentle reins of Love and Tenderness.”48
Since Sarah never described how often she was corrected, we do not know whether her punishments involved a quick spanking or a whipping. But it is clear that her parents, unlike Fish, believed in using severity.
What is most missing from Sarah’s account of her childhood is a sense of her emotional attachment to her parents. Her attitude seems to have been profoundly ambivalent. By 1743, the year of her memoir, many people had begun to advocate bending the will rather than breaking it, but she echoed her parents’ conviction that her punishments had been for her own good.49 On one hand, she complained that her parents had been too harsh, and even as an adult she remembered her “angry, ungrateful temper” as her mother had corrected her. In a provocative slip of her pen, she implied that she wanted to be thankful for her strict upbringing but could not feel genuine gratitude. “I desire to be thankful I never escaped correction for the sin of Lying,” she wrote in the margins of her memoir. Contrary to her desire, she may not have been able to swallow her lingering feelings of resentment. On the other hand, she also claimed that sinful, disobedient children deserved to be punished. “If at any time my mother convinced me that she did it because it was her duty for my sin against God,” she explained, “I could bear it patiently and willingly, yea thankfully.” Raised on the biblical wisdom that “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes,” she dared not question the justice of corporal punishment.50
Since psychological studies have shown that young children often describe God and their parents in remarkably similar terms, Sarah’s childhood experiences may have shaped her early image of God, but it would be a mistake to see her conception of him as nothing more than a projection of her mother or father. Her spiritual life was probably far more complex: children construct their image of God not only out of family relationships but also from their experiences in the world. Contrary to what one might expect, for example, many abused children today do not envision God as violent, but as caring and compassionate. Despite suffering from feelings of worthlessness, they struggle to envision a God who looks nothing like their parents.51
At the same time, when Sarah was very young, too young to have learned about God on her own, she seems to have imagined him as a larger, more powerful version of her mother or father. Besides being influenced by catechisms, primers, and children’s songs, her images of God were also shaped by what she witnessed in her own family. She developed a more complicated understanding of God during adolescence, but as a small child she saw him as a volatile mixture of love and anger, mercy and vindictiveness. Like her father, who left his family to go to New England, God could be remote, hiding his face when she desperately called out to him in prayer. Like her mother, God could be stern, sharply reproving her for sin. And like both her parents, God could be physically violent, deliberately inflicting pain in order to make her behave.
Sarah’s most vivid childhood memory involved her first experience of God’s hatred of sin. Recounting a horrifying story of his wrath, she claimed that when she was eight years old, he had brutally punished her for the crime of playing on the Sabbath. As she and her mother were sailing to America to rejoin her father (her brother remained in England), she became so sinful that God sentenced her to an excruciating ordeal: “On board the ship I Lost my good impressions and grew vile so that I could play upon the sabbath then. But I was convinced of that sin by an accident that befell me, or rather what was ordered by infinite wisdom to that end. For as I was busy boiling something for my baby [a doll], I fell into the fire with my right hand and burned it all over, which I presently thought was just upon me for playing [on] a sabbath day. And I was ashamed and sorry I had done so.” Despite the fact that she was only eight, still young enough to play with dolls, she had been so vile that she had deserved to be badly burned. Intentionally sending her into the flames, God, like her parents, had chastised her for her sins.52
By claiming that her burned, blistered hand was not the result of an accident but a sign of God’s “infinite wisdom,” Sarah echoed what her parents had taught her. Because Calvinists believed that “God hath decreed and determined whatever cometh to pass in the world,” they denied that there was any such thing as chance or luck. Everything that happened, whether prosperity or illness, was God’s providence. As one minister explained, “There is no sickness so little, but God hath a finger in it, though it be but the aching of the little finger.” When Cotton Mather had a toothache, he immediately interpreted it as punishment for sin. “Have I not sinned with my Teeth?” he asked. “How? By sinful, graceless, excessive Eating.” His toothache, like Sarah’s burned hand, was a reminder that a transcendent God controlled even the smallest details of human life.53
Sarah interpreted her agonizing burns as a sign that God had punished her out of love. Just as she had submitted to her mother’s beatings “patiently and willingly, yea thankfully” as penalty for sin, she accepted God’s afflictions with humility and gratitude, praising him in the midst of her pain. True Christians should behave like the “Turks,” a Puritan minister explained, who, “when they are cruelly lashed, are compelled to return to the judge that commanded it, to kiss his hand, and give him thanks, and pay the Officer that whipped them, and so clear the Judge and Officer of Injustice. Silently to kiss the Rod, and the Hand that whips with It, is the noblest way of clearing the Lord of all injustice.” Samuel Willard envisioned God as an angry father who stood over his children with a rod in his hand and beat them with heavy blows. “It consists well enough with the love of God, for him to be angry with his children,” he preached, quoting from Proverbs, “and when he is so, he can lay hard blows upon them, and love them still, because they are for their good and not hurt; yea, because he loves them he chastens them. . . . And sometimes he strikes so hard he kills them.”54 Sinners needed to be corrected, and gratitude, not anger, was the proper Christian response to affliction.
Feminine Weakness
Besides reflecting the religious expectations of her time, Sarah’s emphasis on her childhood sinfulness and her need of correction accorded with contemporary stereotypes of femininity. Although she never shared her reflections on what it meant to be reared as a girl rather than as a boy, she grew to adulthood in a world that assumed women’s weakness and inferiority. By the time that she was born, witchcraft trials were only a memory (the Salem crisis took place in 1692), but negative images of women as gossips, seductresses, and scolds still lingered. Despite her belief that sexual differences would someday disappear in union with Christ, Sarah also assumed that “weak” women had been ordained to be subordinate to men on earth.
On the surface, people in the eighteenth century seemed to have a relatively fluid understanding of sex. Unlike later generations of Americans, who emphasized the inherent differences between men’s and women’s bodies, they believed that the sexes were more alike than different. According to medical treatises, women’s sexual organs were identical to men’s except they were turned inside out: the vagina was an interior penis, the ovaries were testes, and the uterus was a scrotum. Anatomically, men and women were simply two representations of a single model of sexuality. By the end of the century this understanding of sex had been replaced by a less fluid model of difference, but in the 1740s most Americans still assumed that there was only one sex, the male sex, and men were the standard against which women were measured.55
Yet despite this belief in the similarity between the sexes, early Americans did not believe that men and women were physically or intellectually equal. Since they saw men’s bodies as the norm, they believed that women were inferior, underdeveloped versions of men. Women were lesse
r men who were governed by different bodily fluids that influenced their characters. In contrast to men, whose “humors” were dry and warm, women were dominated by cold, wet humors that supposedly made them more deceitful, erratic, and passionate than men.56 According to a misogynistic tract that was printed eleven times in England before 1741, most women were naturally “lewd,” even those who were not prostitutes. “There are lewd women that are no whores, and yet are ten times worse,” the writer complained, “because their lewdness is more difficult to be known, and harder to be avoided.” It had all started with Eve, who had been “transformed into a Kind of a Devil incarnate” when she ate the apple, and it had grown worse with every generation. “History will abundantly inform us, that as the World grew in years, so Women grew in Wickedness, each Age being worse than the preceding.”57
Although Puritan clergymen challenged these images of women’s sinfulness as early as the seventeenth century, the stereotype proved persistent. On one hand, women were praised for their “Zeal, Faith, Purity, Charity, [and] Patience” and, as growing numbers of them swelled the pews, ministers began to argue that women were inherently more pious than men. In 1736, when Jonathan Edwards penned his famous account of the revivals in his Northampton congregation, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, he filled it with descriptions of godly women, including a “frivolous girl” whose sudden conversion was “the greatest occasion of awakening to others, of anything that ever came to pass in the town.” George Whitefield frequently corresponded with women, including the patron of the Methodists, the countess of Huntingdon, and he elevated them as models of piety. On the other hand, both Puritans and their evangelical descendants remained suspicious of women’s “passions.” As the historian Harry S. Stout has pointed out, Whitefield often criticized young, attractive women for their “lust,” “Worldliness,” and “idolatry,” but “rarely did he level similar charges against young men.”58
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