Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  A page from the Records of the First Church of Christ in Newport. On June 26, 1757, “Phillis, a Negro woman” was baptized into the church (see line 136). Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.

  After this remarkable sign of divine mercy, though, the rest of the summer of 1757 was grim. In churches, coffeehouses, and the streets, no one could stop talking about French Catholics and their savage Indian allies. Because almost all Protestants at the time saw the papacy as the “whore of Babylon” described in the book of Revelation, they expected the battle with France to be long, vicious, and bloody—as indeed it was. “For Christ’s sake, spare a sinful People,” Sarah pleaded. “O Give not thine heritage to reproach. God be merciful to us sinners.” Whenever the French won a victory (and in 1757, they seemed invincible), she feared that an angry God might have forsaken his “British Israel.”38

  Both of Henry’s sons, his two remaining children, joined the fighting in 1757. (His middle child, Henry, had died sometime after his marriage to Sarah, but we know nothing about the circumstances.) Because twenty-seven-year-old John needed to support his wife and four children, he signed on as a privateer in hopes of capturing a “prize,” a French merchant ship laden with bounty. Privateering bordered on smuggling, but in this case the plundering was legal, and as an advertisement in the Newport Mercury promised, it was a quick way for poor men to “make their fortunes.” Unfortunately for John, however, his voyage was a failure, and if he made any money beyond his enlistment bonus it was soon spent. (Since Sarah disapproved of privateering, she could not muster much sympathy.) Sarah had few kind words to say about John, but he seems to have been a pathetic figure: reckless, “hardened in sin,” and unable to feed his family. Sarah’s solution to his problems, not surprisingly, was to urge him to seek Christ, but he refused. “Turn Him to thyself for Christ’s sake,” she implored God.39

  Henry’s older son, Edward, thirty-three, enlisted as a soldier and sailed to Albany to fight, leaving behind his wife, Mary.40 (Although they had been married ten years, they do not seem to have had any children.) Two months later, Sarah and Henry heard the ominous news that he had been “shot through the body in a Late Engagement with the Enemy.” Nothing else was known: had he survived? Was he recovering in safety away from the fighting? Twelve agonizing days later, they learned that his wounds had been fatal. Since he had never experienced conversion, Sarah had spent every day praying for his “awakening,” but just as she had done after her son Samuel’s death she forced herself to accept God’s will. “After I heard this news God quieted my heart,” she wrote that evening, “and made it submit to His adorable sovereignty. I realized in some degree His infinite wisdom in ordering all Events and was constrained to say He does all things well. The Judge of all the Earth Has done and will do right.” Henry, however, seems to have been anguished. Only one of his three children was still alive. “Sanctify thy rod to my dear consort,” she begged God in her diary. “Lord, support, quicken, humble and comfort him.”41

  In the midst of their mourning, she and Henry decided to extend their compassion to a “poor girl,” Almey Greenman, who came to live with them. Since Sarah wrote little about Almey (and her name does not appear in other Newport records), the relationship between them is not clear, but she could have been a girl from a poor family who was apprenticed to Sarah as a teacher; a ward of the town whose parents were too poor to care for her; or perhaps an orphan who needed a home. Although Sarah clearly hoped that Almey would provide an extra pair of hands for preparing breakfast or teaching school, she also seems to have taken a maternal interest in her. It was almost as if she and Henry wanted another chance to raise a child. “Pity the poor unsteady creature,” she begged God in her diary. “Help her to bend Her mind to business and the affairs of Her Precious soul.” Edward had died without being born again, but Sarah begged God to “snatch this brand out of the burning. Take away her filthy Garments and clothe Her with the Precious robe of thine own righteousness.”42 She and Henry had never known the joy of seeing their own children turn to Christ, but there were still others who needed their prayers.

  Among these were John’s children, and Sarah, deeply in debt, could not stop thinking about their suffering. Describing them as “Poor, Helpless, Neglected Little ones,” she yearned to bring them into her own house, where she could make sure that they were fed, clothed, and reared as Christians. Although she had said more prayers for John than she could count, she feared that he would never become a good father. She begged God in her diary, “Meet with our son Even Now Whilst he is running away from God and from His Duty, Neglecting the Means of Grace and committing those things that are abominable in thy sight.” Sarah never explained the nature of John’s “abominable” behavior (did he fit the stereotype of the drunken, profane, hot-headed sailor?), but at the least he and Abigail seem to have been negligent parents. Later Sarah remembered that their children were “Hungry, Naked, and dragged up as Heathen in a Gospel Land, real objects of charity which Moved my compassion towards them.”43

  It is a testament to the depth of Sarah’s faith—and her generosity—that she could contemplate taking in three grandchildren at a time when she and Henry could barely afford to feed themselves. His job as a watchman was only part time, and though Sarah worked herself to exhaustion they could not keep up with mounting prices. She wrote in her diary, “Our Expense is unavoidably Greater then our income, notwithstanding I take every Prudential step I can think of to Lessen it.” Having little cash, she offered to pay some of her creditors with things she could make at home. “In his Providence, yesterday 2 persons took flax from me instead of money,” she recorded gratefully. Despite her own struggles, though, she kept praying for her needy grandchildren, and as 1757 drew to a close she became convinced that God wanted her to take them in. At first she and Henry hoped to take the three oldest (the youngest was a baby), but either because of their own indigence or John and Abigail’s resistance, they took only one instead. In March 1758, Sarah thanked God for bringing “this dear Little one under my care.”44 (Her diary entries are vague about details, and it is not clear whether the child was a boy or a girl.)

  Most of Sarah’s diary for 1758 has been lost, but it is clear that financially she and Henry could not afford to feed yet another mouth. While she never seems to have regretted her generosity to Almey or her grandchild, she spent many hours worrying about money. Whenever a student withdrew from her school, she prayed for the strength to trust in God. After a boy stopped coming in March, she reminded herself, “God fed me and clothed me before I had Him and will again, and He knows when tis best to remove Him.” To save money she and Henry moved in April to a house that they had to share with their landlord—their second home in two years. They were descending the economic ladder instead of climbing it, always in search of cheaper rent. A few bedsteads and featherbeds, chairs, skillets, blankets, a desk—their possessions were easily bundled up and loaded onto a wagon for a trip across town.45

  By the winter of 1758 Sarah was so worried about money that she seriously considered opening a boarding school. She hesitated, though, because of her fear that caring for boarders might interfere with her devotional life. Like other evangelicals, she imagined her faith as the foundation of all her financial decisions, not as a private concern that could be separated from the grubby reality of money making. If opening a boarding school would take too many hours away from reading the Bible, praying, and writing, then she would have to find a way to make ends meet without the extra income.46 But she feared that if she did not do something soon, she would not be able to support her own family or find the extra cash to help John and Abigail, who were even poorer than she was. Because several of her students were ill, they had stopped coming to school in the fall, and she did not know how she would pay the rent. Even with all her scrimping and saving, she could not imagine stretching her small income any farther. In December 1758, after more than a year of thinking and praying about it, she placed an ad in the Newport Merc
ury announcing her plans to open a boarding school. Though willing to take both boys and girls, she especially advertised her ability to teach needlework.47

  An advertisement for Sarah Osborn’s boarding school in the Newport Mercury, December 19, 1758. Photograph courtesy of the Newport Historical Society.

  Even after her decision, though, she worried. She did not want to be like the rich man in the Gospel of Luke who decided to pull down his barns to build bigger ones so that he could “eat, drink, and be merry.” The “fool,” as Sarah branded him, had died before realizing that only God could satisfy his craving for happiness. “God alone can fill and satisfy,” she reminded herself.48

  The Needle’s Eye

  Given Sarah Osborn’s precarious finances, her trepidation about whether to raise her tuition or open a boarding school may seem overly scrupulous. It is hard to imagine that anyone would have accused her of grinding the face of the poor when she herself was impoverished. But her anxieties about a rising spirit of “covetousness” make more sense when understood as part of a larger evangelical conversation about wealth, poverty, and, on a deeper level, self-interest and choice. If Christians were supposed to sacrifice their own interests for the good of the whole, then what did that mean for their participation in an expanding marketplace? “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” Jesus had proclaimed (Matthew 19:24).

  On both sides of the Atlantic, evangelicals worried that commercial success had led to a decline in religious faith. While John Guyse, Sarah’s uncle, asked his congregation whether their “Plenty” had been “turned into Means and Occasions of feeding our Pride and Ambition, Intemperance, Luxury and debauchery,” George Whitefield accused his listeners of worshiping Mammon rather than God. In a sermon titled The Folly and Danger of Parting with Christ for the Pleasures and Profits of Life, he protested that many so-called Christians cared about their “pleasures” more than God. “If they can but indulge their sensual appetite, please and pamper their bellies, satisfy the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life,” they would forget who had created them.49 Food, sex, and money—these were their gods.

  Whitefield’s angry words stood in a long Christian tradition of condemning avarice and luxury. Yet as he and other evangelicals seem to have sensed, there was something new about economic life in the eighteenth century that went beyond the age-old problem of greed. For centuries Christians had assumed that hierarchy was a natural part of God’s creation, with some people created to be rich and some to be poor, but as more goods became available for sale in the marketplace no one seemed to know his or her “place” anymore. As early as 1719 Benjamin Colman reminded the “good people of Boston” that the most opulent goods for sale in the market were meant for those of the highest rank, not ordinary farmers and tradesmen. People with “little Money” should not be “prodigal,” he admonished. “We should be willing to live low, where God has set us.” Another minister complained that the “very poor” owned many of the same goods as those who were worth “Hundreds of pounds”—gold rings, jewelry, lace, silk, and ribbons. He asked angrily, “And is not this abominable Pride?” In the early years of New England, sumptuary laws had forbidden anyone except the elite to wear silk and lace, but in the new, modern world of consumption, people were free to pursue their own interests. Individual choice, not law or tradition, determined how they would spend their money.50

  Since ideas about humanity and God and are always connected, the expansion of the marketplace changed popular understandings of both God and the self. As people could buy a greater variety of goods than ever before, adorning themselves with expensive silks and serving imported tea in their parlors, traditional Christian suspicions of self-love suddenly seemed overly strict. Especially in large cities like Newport, the burgeoning consumer economy helped pave the way for a more positive view of the self as good and worthy of gratification. The middle and upper ranks were able to buy not just what they needed but what they wanted, and this frank pursuit of individual desire gradually undermined older Protestant understandings of the self as sinful and unworthy.

  Self-interest, freedom, choice—these would become three of the most important words in modern America, but in the eighteenth century they were laden with controversial theological meanings. Self-interest, for example, was one of the most divisive issues of the age. Influenced by the Puritans, evangelicals believed that “self-love,” as they called it, was the result of the Fall. As Joseph Fish explained, “When Man forsook the Lord, he lost sight of the only Object of his Happiness, retired into himself, and made himself the Object of his Love, and the Centre of all his Desires and Actions.” Writing against what he called “a new scheme of religion,” Thomas Clap, the rector at Yale, condemned the belief that “the natural Tendency which Things have to promote our own Interest, is the sole Criterion of moral Good and Evil, Truth and Falsehood, Right and Wrong.” As he explained, “For a Man to make the sole, supreme, or ultimate End of all Being and Action to be for himself alone or his own Happiness, as the Summum Bonum, and to regard God and all other Beings, only so far as they may serve himself, or be subservient to his own Happiness, or gratify his Principle of Self-Love, is the most absolute inversion of the Order, Dignity and Perfection of Beings: and one of the worst Principles that can be in human Nature.” Even though many people did not realize how deeply their lives were tainted by self-love, true Christians knew that they must take up the cross of self-denial in order to be saved. In her closest moments of communion with God, Sarah Osborn rejoiced that she was filled with a spirit of “self-abasement” and “self-abhorrence.” “Strip me entirely of self,” she prayed.51

  Other Christians, however, had a more positive view of human nature, and they argued that self-love was the foundation of their love for God. They did not love God for abstract reasons but because he offered them salvation. According to Benjamin Wadsworth, “man’s . . . chief end is God’s glory and his own happiness . . . and if they are not the same, yet they are so closely connected that they cannot be separated from the other.” Echoing the ideas of liberal Anglicans, humanitarians, and other Enlightenment thinkers, they insisted that self-love did not have to degenerate into selfishness or pride. The Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, a liberal-leaning Congregationalist, scoffed at the idea that Christians should abhor themselves. “Were it possible for a rational Creature, to extinguish the Principle of Self-Love,” he protested, “far from being any Virtue or Perfection, this would at once appear a gross and monstrous Defect in his Constitution. For Self-Love is at least as necessary to the Support and Happiness of the World as social.” Although Cooper assumed that the self had to be disciplined, he did not think it had to be annihilated.52

  Two other fighting words—choice and freedom—also caused divisions among eighteenth-century Protestants. In contrast to Enlightenment thinkers, who celebrated human freedom, evangelicals insisted that there were limits to their self-determination. On one hand, they urged people to “choose” salvation, and they insisted that all were free to do what they wanted. As Jonathan Edwards explained, “Let the person come by his volition or choice how he will, yet, if he is able, and there is nothing in the way to hinder his pursuing and executing his will, the man is fully and perfectly free, according to the primary and common notion of freedom.” Humans were free in the sense that they could decide how to act at any particular moment—to choose, for example, whether to churn the butter or milk the cow. On the other hand, humans were not free in a deeper, moral sense. No matter how hard they tried, they could not make the correct moral choices without God’s grace.53