Two years later Thomas Prince arranged for Sarah Osborn’s letter to be published anonymously in Boston under the title The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity. We do not know whether Osborn chose the title of her book or whether Prince chose it for her, but the words nature, certainty, and evidence connected it to both the rising evangelical movement and the Enlightenment. On one hand, her title echoed scientific works like Benjamin Robins’s Discourse Concerning the Nature and Certainty of Sir Isaac Newton’s Methods of Fluxions, and of Prime and Ultimate Ratios (1735) as well as of “enlightened” religious books like Edward Stillingfleet’s Discourse Concerning the Nature and Grounds of the Certainty of Faith. Stillingfleet, a British Anglican, wanted to make Christianity more rational and less “enthusiastic.” On the other hand, Osborn’s title also resonated with evangelical works like Jonathan Edwards’s Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, which examined the “evidence” that the revivals were divinely inspired, and Jonathan Dickinson’s Witness of the Spirit, which promised to explain the “clear and satisfying Evidences” of conversion. Her emphasis on “true” Christianity was common among evangelicals: for example, Joseph Bellamy published a treatise titled True Religion Delineated.2 Although she may not have been aware of it, her title symbolized the surprising cross-fertilization of Protestantism and the Enlightenment. “Religion is no imaginary Thing,” she testified, “but a substantial Reality.”3
If Osborn’s title sounded curiously “enlightened” to her readers, her subtitle, “In a Letter from a Gentlewoman in New-England,” was even more notable. Those who dared write about weighty matters of nature, certainty, and evidence were supposed to be ministers or philosophers, not gentlewomen. Although many women in early America wrote letters, poems, and diaries, only a few ever saw their work in print. Publishing was almost entirely a masculine enterprise. Of almost seventy-four hundred works published in America between 1640 and 1755, only twenty-six were written by women, and if we eliminate books that were first published in England or France the number decreases to fourteen. If we also remove books from the list that were published posthumously, the number shrinks to eight. Since many books available for sale in the colonies were imported from England, the number of books written by women in circulation was much higher than these paltry numbers suggest, but as Sarah Osborn must have realized, she was a rare phenomenon: an American female author who was alive when her work appeared in print.4
The title page of the 1793 edition of The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity. The 1755 edition listed the author as “a gentlewoman in New England,” but this edition, published in Providence, identified her home as Rhode Island. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
With few exceptions, neither evangelical ministers nor Enlightenment philosophers believed that women were equal to men, but their emphasis on individual experience led to unexpected consequences. Not only did the Enlightenment have a much stronger impact on eighteenth-century Protestantism than we have realized, but it also gave women a powerful new vocabulary to justify their religious authority.
Sharing the Gospel
We know little about Sarah’s life between 1744, the year of Samuel’s death, and 1753, the year that she wrote the letter that later would be published as The Nature, Certainty and Evidence of True Christianity. Only a few facts are clear. In 1745 she lost two of the most important people in her life: the Reverend Jonathan Helyer, a young minister whose “precious sermons” had strengthened her faith during his short tenure at her church, and, only a few months later, the Reverend Nathaniel Clap, the venerable pastor who had first welcomed her into communion. She had loved them both, and despite praying for a spirit of resignation, she felt bereft. Echoing her words after Samuel’s death, she wrote in her diary, “O my God, preserve me from murmuring at thine holy hand.”5 Two of her stepsons, John and Edward, were married in 1747, and her mother, Susanna, after several years as a widow, married a wigmaker, William Caswell, and moved to South Kingstown.6 Sarah occasionally took the ferry to visit her, but since their relationship remained rocky she may have welcomed the new distance between them. Age had not softened Susanna’s sharp tongue. During one visit, she showed her daughter a letter from a male acquaintance criticizing Sarah for being “lifted up with spiritual pride.” Since Sarah could be arrogant, her mother may have thought that showing her these words would do her good, but Sarah was understandably hurt. More than anything she wanted to be a good Christian, but her mother always reminded her of her failures.7
Besides these small glimpses of Sarah’s life, we know that she spent many hours trying to convert others to her evangelical faith. After the agony of watching Samuel die, she seems to have resolved to do everything possible not to let another “naked soul” plunge into eternity without Christ. Even before his death she had prayed with the students in her school, but afterward she prayed with them every day. As Samuel Hopkins remembered, she “seriously addressed them on the concerns of their souls, urging their attention to the Bible, to Jesus Christ, and the way of salvation by him.” Often she began her day with a silent prayer that God would “subdue the stubbornness of their wills.” In a diary entry written only a month after Samuel’s death, she confessed, “I should rejoice if thou wouldst make poor worthless me, an instrument to do them good.”8
The child most often in her prayers may have been Bobey (probably pronounced “Bobby”), a slave boy whom she had reared since infancy. Sarah was too poor to afford a slave, but in 1744, soon after Samuel died, several friends surprised her with Bobey’s purchase. As she explained later, he was “the Gift of many Good Earthly friends. Also it was to me as something saved from shipwreck when all the rest was cast over.” Her friends may have hoped to ease her grief by giving her another child to raise—a child who would someday mature into a sound financial investment. They probably never reflected on the sorrow they caused a different mother, Phillis, whose relationship with her son may have been confined to visits and glimpses on the street.9
Sarah believed that blacks were inferior to whites, but like most evangelicals at the time she also believed that they were spiritually equal in the sight of God. Although she raised Bobey to accept his status as property, she also encouraged him to remember that his greatest “master” was God. As they sat in front of the fireplace together in the evenings, she taught him not only how to sew, knit, and mend his own clothes but how to read the Bible and say his prayers. Later Christians would question the wisdom of teaching slaves to read, but Sarah equated religion with literacy. She refused to allow a child in her household to grow up without being able to read the Bible for himself.10
Sarah wrote little about her relationship with Bobey, but by the time he was ten (only a little younger than Samuel had been at his death), she had become concerned about the “bad Examples” that might lead him astray in Newport. She also seems to have feared the strength of her attachment to him. In a letter written to Joseph Fish in 1754, she explained that she and Henry wanted to apprentice him to a Christian master in the country, ideally Fish himself. “He Loves Play very well and is heedless, antic &c,” Sarah admitted, “but I think he is not addicted either to Pilfer, Lie, or call Names.” She and Henry were not seeking money (and in fact, they asked Fish only to supply Bobey’s food and clothing in exchange for his work), but they wanted to find a place where he would be kept out of trouble. “I fear his want of business with us, will be a Hurt to Him,” she explained, “for we have not wherewith to Employ Him, and I know Idleness is an inlet to everything that’s bad, and I can’t be willing he should be brought up in it: I want he should Learn to Labor.” She also wanted him to learn his “distance” from whites. Because of Samuel’s death she had embraced him as her own, but now that he was ten she realized that she could not continue treating him as part of her family. He was not her child but her slave. “I desire if he does come that no favors may be showed to him because he belongs to me,” she explained to Fish. “For
I choose rather he should know his distance. For his being brought up with us as our own from the cradle, and we having no other child, has doubtless made him use some freedoms with us which with strangers he would not Pretend too.” In the end, though, she could not keep a maternal tone from sneaking into her letter. “I hope he will be a Good boy.”11
Since Fish already had a slave boy to help with chores, he did not take Bobey, but Sarah and Henry arranged for him to be apprenticed out to her former brother-in-law in Berkeley (north of Providence) instead. She had known her “brother French” since her marriage to Samuel, and he was one of the few people whom she could imagine trusting with Bobey’s soul. French had been “sober from his youth,” she wrote to Fish, “and in a Judgment of charity I have thought some years Past truly Gracious, keeps up the worship of God in his house &c.” Although he ran a tavern, a minister from Berkeley assured her that it was “orderly.”12 She wanted to make sure that Bobey would live in a respectable Christian household. She had held him as a baby, rocked his cradle, fed him, bathed him, cared for him during his illnesses, and watched him grow into boyhood, and although her love for him was tainted by racism, it was genuine. It was one of the many tragedies of slavery that she wished she loved him less.
Sarah believed that God in his providence had made her a teacher so that she would share the gospel with children, but she also felt called to evangelize women. Many members of the women’s society drifted away during the 1750s, but she continued to meet with a few female friends (especially Susanna Anthony) to pray, read the Bible, and talk about God.13 Perhaps because of her past sufferings, women in distress were ineluctably drawn to her. They wanted her to explain the secret of her faith.
We do not know the name of the woman who wrote to Sarah in the spring of 1753 asking for spiritual counsel, but she seems to have been a friend from Newport. (Sarah mentioned that they had known each other for “some years,” and since she also made a brief reference to past conversations, they probably lived in close proximity.) Although Sarah’s most frequent correspondent was Susanna Anthony, there is no evidence that Anthony experienced a spiritual crisis during 1753, and in fact she rejoiced in May that her love for “all the members of Christ’s body” was growing deeper. Sarah’s anonymous “friend” may have been someone else from either her church or the women’s society. All we know for certain is that the woman was “in great Darkness, Doubt and Concern of a Religious Nature,” and she wrote to Sarah for encouragement.14
Sarah responded by urging her friend to examine the “evidence” of her relationship to Christ. Borrowing the empirical language of the Enlightenment, she argued that Christians could know whether they had been saved. Her own “evidences” included her willingness to suffer affliction, her desire to do good works, and her love of holiness for its own sake. In order to distinguish herself from the Separates, she denied wanting to “establish Assurance as the Essence of saving Faith,” but she insisted that people could be virtually certain of their salvation. “Does or has the bold-daring Spirit persuaded to insinuate that all Religion, is vain, imaginary, and delusion?” she asked. “Does he pretend that none can know they are right?—Tell him from me, He is a Liar, and I am bold to say, I have proved him so.”15
Sarah’s advice to her friend seems to have grown out of her own struggles against doubt. Despite the confident tone of her letter, she filled her 1753 diary with laments about the gulf standing between her and God. As she had done many times before, she wondered why he had “hidden his face” from her, leaving her alone in her time of need. “What a vacancy do I feel while held at a distance from my God,” she confessed. “O Lord, return and Leave me not comfortless and forlorn. Lord, what can I do without thee? What shall I do? Everything is dreadful if thou art absent.”16
Just as Sarah urged her friend to search for evidence of God’s grace, she herself did the same. Because of her belief that religion was “experimental,” she hoped to make “discoveries” about God by studying her experiences as well as the Bible. “Let me have some more discoveries of Eternal things, Lord,” she pleaded in 1753.17 In a poignant diary entry written when she had little money or food, she reminded herself that her past experiences offered convincing proof that a loving God would never abandon her. Addressing him directly, she wrote: “My own experience has ever Proved to me, that thou art the God that has fed me all my Life Long—the God that didst never Leave me upon the mount of difficulty, but always appeared and wrought deliverance.”18
This was the same reassuring language that she used in her letter to her friend. If she knew how to comfort others, it was because she herself had often teetered on the edge of despair, frightened by her feelings of emptiness.
Sarah’s friend liked the letter so much that she shared it with others, and somehow a copy ended up in the hands of Thomas Prince. Given the length of the letter—fifteen pages in print—Sarah seems to have viewed it as a significant piece of writing, but she was probably surprised when Prince encouraged her to publish it as a tract. Although she agreed, she requested that it appear anonymously. As a brief note on the title page explained, “Though this Letter was wrote in great privacy from one Friend to another: Yet on representing that by allowing it to be Printed, it would probably reach to many others in the like afflicted Case, and by the Grace of God be very helpful to them; the Writer was at length prevailed on to suffer it—provided her Name and Place of abode remain concealed.”19 Whether written by the Reverend Prince or by Samuel Kneeland, the publisher, these words portrayed Osborn as a humble, self-denying woman who had not wanted to publish her letter, but who had finally “suffered” it because of her compassion for others in spiritual distress. She was identified on the title page only as “a Gentlewoman in New-England,” a designation that made her sound slightly more genteel than her actual status warranted. Though she was not well-to-do, Prince wanted the evangelical movement to be associated with politeness and civility.20 Evangelical women, he implied, were refined enough to participate in the republic of letters. The woman who had written hundreds of pages of diaries and letters had finally become a published author.
A Poor, Nothing Creature
With the exception of Ann Maylem, who had published a complaint against a Newport distillery in 1742, Sarah Osborn was the only published female author in Newport during the 1750s. Many other women wrote diaries, letters, and memoirs, and some may have shared their manuscripts with friends, but Osborn’s publication set her apart as a remarkable figure of religious authority. Although she described herself as “a poor nothing Creature,” her friends (including Susanna Anthony and the Reverend Fish) knew that she was the anonymous “gentlewoman” whose letter had been published, and it seems likely that they broadcast the news. Many must have been surprised to discover that the schoolteacher in their midst had been singled out for the honor of publication.21
If Sarah had lived a hundred years earlier, her letter probably would not have been published. Only three books by American women found their way into print before 1700, including Anne Bradstreet’s Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Mary Rowlandson’s Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and Sarah Goodhue’s Copy of a Valedictory and Monitory Writing. When Bradstreet’s brother-in-law arranged for her poetry to be published in England in 1650 (without her permission), he included an elaborate preface apologizing for the book. Assuring his readers that she had not forsaken her family responsibilities in order to write, he explained, “These Poems are the fruit but of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other enjoyments.” As the literary critic Elaine Showalter has pointed out, “no fewer than eleven men wrote testimonials and poems praising her piety and industry, prefatory materials almost as long as the thirteen poems in the book.”22
There were many reasons for the scarcity of women authors. Besides being less literate than men, women were discouraged from “meddling” in the masculine world of theology, politics, and law. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachu
setts Bay, explained one woman’s mental illness as the result of too much “reading and writing”: “For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper of men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits.” Although women were encouraged to read the Bible and write devotional diaries, they were not supposed to seek public recognition, and those who dared publish their writings instead of keeping them private were subjected to withering criticism. “Your printing of a Book, beyond the custom of your Sex, doth rankly smell,” a New England minister wrote to his sister in England in 1650. Even Cotton Mather, who praised female devotional writers for their piety, insisted that the best women writers were “Patterns of Humility.” In his words, “They have made no Noise; they have sought no Fame.”23
The number of titles by women grew in the first four decades of the eighteenth century, with nine more books published before 1740. Eight of these focused on religious topics (the exception was Hannah Penn’s letter to Governor George Keith), and as before they were usually prefaced by a man’s testimonial or apology. As the publisher of Sarah Fiske’s Confession of Faith (1704) explained, “’Tis not with a design to blazon the Fame and Reputation of any Person, that this is now presented to the Public View.” Since Fiske’s writings were published after her death, the editor’s apology seems extreme (a dead woman could not take pride in her fame), but he seems to have been genuinely concerned about tarnishing her character. Since the greatest sign of a woman’s virtue in early America was anonymity, any attempt to gain public recognition seemed morally suspect.24
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