Although the images of women as both naturally pious and naturally passionate may seem contradictory, they were closely intertwined. Because evangelicals took women’s weakness for granted, they believed that women could be easily overpowered by Satan as well as by Christ. Without the advantages of masculine strength and rationality, women were both archetypal saints and archetypal sinners.59
Both evangelical men and evangelical women traced their sinfulness back to childhood, but women’s descriptions of themselves tended to be more extreme. The differences were in degree, not kind. When George Whitefield looked back, he remembered “such early Stirrings of Corruption in my Heart, as abundantly convince me that I was conceived and born in Sin—That in me dwelleth no good Thing by Nature.” Yet when Whitefield’s narrative of his early life is placed next to women’s accounts, his humility sounds comparatively mild. Whitefield described himself as a “poor soul” only once, and he never portrayed himself as “weak” or a “worm.” (The word weak appears only twice in his book, once when he was describing his debility after an illness, and once in a quotation from the poet Joseph Addison.)60 In contrast, Susanna Anthony began the story of her life by remembering her sins at the age of five or six. As she continued writing, she portrayed herself as utterly corrupt and polluted. Her heart was “a sink of sin, more loathsome than the most offensive carrion that swarms with hateful vermin! My understanding dark and ignorant; my will stubborn; my affections carnal, corrupt and disordered; every faculty depraved and vitiated; my whole soul deformed and polluted, filled with pride, enmity, carnality, hypocrisy, self-confidence, and all manner of sins.” (The weak ending to her sentence—“all manner of sins”—is almost humorous in its deflation. After piling up so many adjectives, Anthony seems to have run out of words to express how truly terrible she was.) Hannah Heaton longed to “fly out of this blind withered naked sore stinking rotten proud selfish self love into the arms of a lovely Jesus.”61 In the battle for salvation, women’s greatest enemy was the “polluted” self.
It is impossible to know whether evangelical women actually saw themselves as more sinful than men or whether they were unconsciously echoing popular stereotypes. It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss their language as nothing more than rhetoric. Sarah Osborn may have described herself as “a vile sinner,” “too vile to be forgiven,” and a “vile wretch” because of her sense that women were supposed to sound particularly humble, but these words inevitably affected her understanding of herself.62 Language always shapes perceptions of reality. Indeed, Sarah seems to have recognized that the more she chastised herself for her corruption, the more corrupt she appeared to herself. Denigrating herself was a form of discipline that was designed to make her confront her dependence on God.
Evangelical men and women agreed that true Christians should be humble and self-effacing, but ironically, even when they spoke the same language their words conveyed different meanings because of popular understandings of gender. When evangelical men lamented their sinfulness and their weakness, their words sounded countercultural and almost subversive. Since the dominant discourse of the time equated masculinity with strength, rationality, and boldness, evangelical men implicitly rejected “worldly” values by emphasizing their dependence on Christ. In contrast, when women confessed that they were sinful and helpless, they reinforced feminine stereotypes rather than challenging them. There was nothing either radical or surprising about Sarah’s description of herself as “the weakest, meanest, and unworthiest of all creatures.”63
Yet it is worth remembering that evangelical women (like evangelical men) assumed that recognizing one’s fallenness was the first sign of God’s grace. In a book that Sarah read (probably shortly before she wrote her memoir), she learned that the “best Christians” were the most sensible of their “badness”: “The good person has his Eyes opened to see himself a vile, unworthy, loathsome Wretch, and he can’t but be humble and have the saddest thoughts of himself, as if the worst in the world, because he sees himself so bad: and he hasn’t such a sight of others in their badness, as he has of himself in his.” Paradoxically, Sarah’s description of her vile heart was also an assertion of her salvation in Christ. Despite encouraging women to acknowledge their sinfulness, the evangelical movement also taught them to believe in their own self-worth.64 There were many things that women were forbidden to do in early America, but they could still be saints, the chosen of God.
Sarah Osborn’s sober reflections on her childhood lay the foundation for the rest of her memoir. From her first pages she wanted her readers to understand that sin is real, not an illusion, and even children bear its marks. All humanity has inherited a fallen world, a world of sin and sorrow, and only those who confront this hard truth can be saved. Her vision of children’s corruption and wickedness could not have been more different from the new ideas of human goodness emerging around her.
The controversies over children’s “innocence” grew even more heated in the years after Sarah finished her memoir. As a minister complained, the doctrine of original sin was the one “most eagerly struck at, and virulently opposed by many, in the present Age.” In 1749, the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew stoked the fires of controversy by declaring that “the doctrine of total ignorance, and incapacity to judge of moral and religious truths, brought upon mankind by the apostasy of our First Parents, is without foundation.”65 The fights became nastier during the 1750s when a group of ministers quarreled over whether a compassionate God would sentence infants to damnation. “How can you reconcile it to the goodness, holiness or justice of God, to make them heirs of hell,” Samuel Webster asked, “and send them into the world only to breathe and die, and then take them away to hell, or even send them to hell from their mother’s womb before ever they have seen the light of life?” By the early nineteenth century, many refused to imagine children coming into the world stained with sin but saw them instead, in William Wordsworth’s image, “trailing clouds of glory.” “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” he exclaimed.66
But Sarah put her faith in a darker creed. In her world, a world that rejected the exaltation of childhood innocence, children were taught to lament their sinfulness, parents were urged to be strict, and God, an all-powerful father, brooded over his creation with a mixture of love and wrath, a rod always resting in his hand.
Chapter 3
An Afflicted Low Condition
I have oft thought god has so ordred it throout my days that I should be in an aflicted Low condition and enclind the hearts of others to relieve me in all my distresses on purpose to suppress that pride of my nature which doubtless would have broke out greatly to his dishonour had i had health and prosperity and so as it were Lived independent upon others i will think it best for me for the tenderness of my friends to me has always had a tendency to humble me greatly and cause me to admire the goodness of god to me.1
As Sarah Osborn continued to write her memoir, she put aside her childhood recollections in order to focus on the tumultuous years of her adolescence and early adulthood. From her vantage point in 1743 she could look back at a long string of trials that had tested her faith, and as she tried to make sense of the past she had to confront the difficult question of suffering. She remembered soaring moments of communion with God (moments that had lifted her out of “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” to borrow an image from Yeats), but also dark times of doubt that had led her to the brink of despair.2 Poverty, chronic illness, the loss of loved ones, self-hatred, suicidal thoughts—all these lay in her past.
Sarah claimed that her afflictions had not only been “ordered” by God; they were “best for her.” At a time when many Enlightenment thinkers insisted that a compassionate God did not want his creation to suffer, she found it more alarming to imagine that God was not responsible for affliction. If there was no divine providence in the world, but only fate or luck, then human life was sheer chaos, an abyss of meaninglessness that was even more frightening than hell. Either God controlled
everything, including suffering, or there was no God. Echoing the words of Psalm 119:71, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted,” she portrayed her suffering in rational terms as the means to a higher good: her salvation in Christ.
Evangelicals resisted the stream of Enlightenment thought that would later be known as humanitarianism, but as Sarah Osborn’s memoir reveals they were also influenced by it. Despite denying that God’s actions should always be understood in rational terms as promoting human fulfillment, they absorbed some of the ideas and language they found most troubling. Christians throughout history have viewed suffering as religiously meaningful, even redemptive, but under the pressures of humanitarian thought, evangelicals ended up wedding a new vocabulary of benevolence, happiness, and “reasonableness” to an older one of divinely ordained suffering. Instead of simply defending suffering as God’s will, they claimed that in the long run it would make people happy. As Sarah reflected on the meaning of her life, she described her afflictions as a path to holiness, a dose of strong medicine for the soul, a rational good.
The Sin of Disobedience
When Sarah sailed into the Boston port with her mother in 1723, her burned hand still tender, she must have wondered what sort of life she would have in their new home. Long before the Revolution transformed America into a rising national power, it consisted of only a few small colonies strung along the eastern seaboard. Even though Boston was one of the largest cities in the colonies, with a population of eleven thousand, its busy wharves, wide streets, and crowded shops looked small and mean in comparison to the magnificent city of London. (London’s population at the time exceeded half a million.) Despite its pretensions to gentility and refinement, America was still a distant outpost of the British Empire, a borderland where thousands of immigrants hoped for a better life.3
Although Sarah never explained why her parents decided to move to America, they may have hoped to make a fresh start in a country that would offer them greater economic opportunity. Her father was a tanner, a skilled craftsman who made leather goods, and as he labored to support his family, he uprooted them three times in the six years after their reunion at the Boston port. After spending two and a half years in Boston, they moved a few miles south to Freetown, then across the Taunton River to Dighton, and finally to Newport, Rhode Island, where Sarah remained for the rest of her life. Her brother, who had stayed in England with his grandmother, did not come to America until twelve years later in 1735.
Sarah wrote nothing about her years in Boston, but when she remembered her adolescence in Freetown and Dighton, she made it clear that her relationship with her parents was tense. No matter how much she tried, she could not conquer the sin of “disobedience.” She had been a liar, a “fool,” a “wretch,” and “an abuser of mercy,” she confessed, and despite her burns she had not kept her promise to “lead a new life.” Sometimes she was “diligent in the performance of prayer,” but as her language suggested, she was only performing: even though she tried to speak to God, she did not feel as if her words came from the depths of her heart. Often she “agonized” that he was not listening. Fearful that she was too stubborn to be converted by “ordinary means” (for example, sermons or religious reading), she begged God to afflict her again, praying that he “would do anything with me, though ever so terrible, so that I might be drove from my evil courses and turned to God.” (At first she had written that she had asked him to “give me a sight of hell with my bodily eyes,” but realizing how extreme this sounded, she scratched it out.) Even falling into a blazing fire, the closest thing to hell on earth, had not been enough. She thought that she needed more sorrow and more suffering—even the unspeakable sight of hell—before she could become a true Christian.4
All the stories that Sarah told about her adolescence were designed to reveal God’s love for her despite her “disobedience.” When she remembered her stormy relationship with her parents during their unsettled years in Massachusetts, she decided that two stories were especially crucial. In the first, she remembered that at the age of thirteen she had deliberately flouted her parents’ “commands” by venturing out in a canoe at night. As she drifted downstream with the tide, she lost control of the boat, and, fearful that she might drown, she knelt down on the wooden bottom and clasped her hands to pray. “All my former convictions revived, and the sin of disobedience to my parents especially appeared odious,” she wrote. “I thought it was just with God to bring me into this distress for it, and with great vehemence and self-abhorrence confessed and aggravated my sins before God, pleading for an interest in the blood of Christ, and for pardon for his sake.” Given her sinfulness, she thought it would be “just” for God to take away her life.5
Yet for the first time in her memoir, in a remarkable turning point that she never explained (and, indeed, she may not have been able to explain, even to herself), Sarah remembered a blissful, almost mystical moment when she felt consumed by Christ’s “everlasting love.” Alone on the water in the dark, lost in prayer, she forgot her sadness, her fears, and her anger at her parents. For a fleeting moment, the wrathful God of her childhood disappeared, eclipsed by a compassionate Jesus. Sarah finally knew what it meant to experience the gift every Christian longed for: the gift of forgiveness. “I felt a secret Joy,” she exulted, “verily believing that I was forgiven and that Christ had Loved me with an everlasting love and that I should be happy with him, and Longed for the time. I was immediately resigned to the will of God, quite willing to die, and willing to Live, begging that God would dispose of me as most consisted with his Glory. And after I had thus resigned myself, soul and body, into the hands of God to do with me as seemed him good, I was as calm and serene in the temper as ever in my life.” Only after this moment of communion with Christ did she try to save her life. “At Last [I] bethought myself that self-preservation was a great duty,” she explained, “and therefore I ought to try to get on shore.” She screamed for help for several hours until she was hoarse and exhausted, and at last neighbors paddled out to rescue her.6
Of all the stories that Sarah could have told about her adolescence, she seems to have chosen this one because of the sudden insight she had gleaned on the water that night. She never wanted to forget that even when God seemed angry, he was watching over her with love.
The second story she shared about these years was much like the first. After her brush with death in the canoe, she remembered that her life had become more “sweet and pleasant,” but a year later, at the age of fourteen, she forgot her promise to be a more obedient child. (What happened next, she believed, was God’s way of reminding her that he still held her life in his hands.) Contrary to her parents’ strict “orders,” she decided to cross the frozen river after a “great thaw,” making her way across watery ice that seemed to sink with her every step. With the tide rising, she was surrounded by “holes as big as houses, or larger,” but after a desperate search for a way back to land she finally found a narrow bridge of ice to shore. Later she realized “how just God would have been if I had been drowned for my disobedience to my parents,” but even though she was “a poor sinful worm, so unworthy of the Least mercy,” he had spared her. With gratitude she wrote, “I am amazed when I consider how Miraculously God preserved me.”7
Shaped by a religious culture that saw anger as sinful, Sarah never openly admitted how much these two episodes of “disobedience” grew out of her resentment of her parents. Although many eighteenth-century Americans accepted and even encouraged expressions of anger (one thinks, for example, of southerners who defended the honor of dueling), evangelicals tried to repress it. Like John Robinson, a Puritan minister who had vividly described the “wrathful man” as a “hideous monster,” with “his eyes burning, his lips fumbling, his face pale, his teeth gnashing, his mouth foaming, and other parts of his body trembling, and shaking,” they reviled anger as one of the seven deadly sins. Unlike God, whose wrath was always righteous, humans were so corrupt that their anger easily turned into u
ncontrollable, poisonous feelings of rage. Writing in 1723, Jonathan Edwards resolved to suppress “an air of dislike, fretfulness, and anger in conversation”: “When I am most conscious of provocations to ill-nature and anger,” he promised himself, “I will strive most to feel and act good-naturedly.”8
Sarah, too, tried her best to appear “good-natured.” Even though many lines of her memoir pulse with anger, she struggled to repress it, burying her bitter feelings under self-blame. Instead of criticizing her parents, she insisted that she—a “stupid” and “ungratefull” sinner—had been at fault. Yet even though she never asked herself why she had rashly endangered her life on two occasions, she seems to have been deeply angry at her parents, and whether to get their attention, to force them to express their love, or simply to spite them, she recklessly put herself in danger.
After the family moved to Newport in 1730, Sarah’s parents may have hoped that she would outgrow her rebelliousness. They had saved enough money to purchase two lots at Easton’s Point, a Quaker neighborhood where many of Newport’s most successful craftsmen lived, and for the first time in years the future looked bright.9 Her father not only worked as a tanner but opened a shop in order to make extra money.
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