Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  This vision of America’s destiny had deep Puritan roots. Like John Winthrop, who described Massachusetts Bay as a “city on a hill,” many New England ministers claimed that God had made a special covenant with America just as he had done with Israel. Portraying America as a chosen nation, a beacon to the rest of the world, they promised their congregations that they would be showered with blessings if they kept God’s commandments, but punished with war, famine, epidemics, or other disasters if they went astray. The only way to appease an angry God was through repentance. Echoing this language, Sarah Osborn not only praised the Lord as “a Faithful covenant keeping God” but also interpreted the Revolution as divine punishment for sin. Remembering the biblical story of Jehu, who sought vengeance instead of peace, she confessed that God would be “Infinitely Just” if he decided to “vindicate his Injured honor” by destroying Americans. Always eager to chastise herself for her sins, she blamed herself as well as others for “drawing down the judgments of God upon us!” Yet she was also hopeful that God would eventually “grant repentance and maintain His own Right in America.” His afflictions were a sign of his love, and if people repented he would restore his covenant with them. Even though America was wallowing in “iniquity,” someday it would be redeemed.52

  It is not clear whether Sarah Osborn believed that America would be the location of Christ’s second coming, a belief that Samuel Hopkins and other New Divinity ministers found idolatrous. But for many other Protestants, both liberal-leaning and evangelical, it was only a small step from the belief that America was a chosen nation to the conviction that it would be the site of the millennium.53 The Reverend Ebenezer Baldwin wondered whether America might become “the Foundation of a great and mighty Empire; the largest the World ever saw,” or even more marvelous, “the principal Seat of that glorious kingdom, which Christ shall erect upon Earth in the latter days.”54 Similarly, the Reverend Samuel Sherwood imagined that the millennium would begin in America and gradually spread to the rest of the globe. After the defeat of the “beast,” he predicted “that peace, liberty, and righteousness might universally prevail; that salvation and strength might come to Zion; and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ might be established to all the ends of the earth.”55

  It is hard to say who influenced the other more: evangelicals who absorbed Enlightenment ideas about the inevitability of progress or Enlightenment thinkers who imagined that America was destined for greatness. On one hand, Enlightenment thinkers seem to have been influenced by religious ideas about the coming of God’s kingdom; as the historian Ruth Bloch has pointed out, even the Continental Congress sounded vaguely millennial when it imagined “the golden period, when liberty, with all the gentle arts of peace and humanity, shall establish her mild dominion,” and “that latest period, when the streams of time shall be absorbed in the abyss of eternity.” On the other hand, evangelical descriptions of the millennium sounded startlingly like Enlightenment visions of educational advancement, material abundance, and commercial expansion. According to Samuel Hopkins, people would grow in knowledge and wisdom, and “all outward worldly circumstances will then be agreeable and prosperous, and there will be for all, a sufficiency and fullness of everything needed for the body and for the comfort and convenience of every one.”56 In the dialectical encounter between Protestantism and the Enlightenment, the influence flowed in both directions.

  Evangelicals did not always mean the same thing as enlightened thinkers when they looked forward to their “liberty” in “Zion,” but the double meanings of these words made it possible for different audiences to unite around a common cause. In a letter to Joseph Fish, for example, Sarah wondered whether she would live to see “the dawn of that blessed day” when Christ would return to earth, and she imagined the joy of the angels in heaven “when millions repent; when a nation, is born in a day!” Although her quotation from Isaiah—“Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day, or shall a nation be born at once?”—had political overtones, it is not clear whether she shared the popular faith that the millennium would begin in America. While others used this text to portray the Revolution as the fulfillment of divine prophecy, she may not have meant nation literally.57 The difficulty in determining her meaning, however, points to the protean power of millennial language to unite people during the Revolutionary years.

  Both Protestants and Enlightenment thinkers dreamed that the American Revolution might change the world: enlightened thinkers because of their faith in republican government and Protestants because of their faith in God. “When the set time to Favor Zion is come, then Christ will be avenged on Satan for all the mischief he hath done,” Sarah exulted in a letter to Fish. “The old Serpent shall be bound, that he deceive the nations no more! God shall pour out his Spirit, in plentiful effusions. The knowledge of God, shall cover the earth, as the waters fill the sea.—Then Christ Jesus will reign triumphant, King of Nations, as he is now King of Saints.”58

  The Wickedness of the World

  It is remarkable that Sarah Osborn could write such a jubilant letter at a time when Newport lay in ruins, but like other evangelicals she assumed that a period of tribulation would precede Christ’s return. As the world sank into corruption, people would finally realize that Christ was their only hope for salvation. According to Jonathan Edwards in his History of the Work of Redemption (which Hopkins bought for the First Church in 1775), “’Tis reasonable to suppose that just BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD the wickedness of the world should be at its greatest height.”59

  Sarah was not sure whether she was witnessing the end of the world or only the prelude to it, but in the terrible winter after the British evacuation she had no doubt that “wickedness” was increasing. Like Susanna Anthony, who lamented “the torrent of universal corruption” and “the dreadful degeneracy” unleashed by the war, she was shocked by “the prevalence of error and delusion” at a time when people should have been begging for God’s mercy. “We remain as a people thus hardened and impenitent,” she confessed to Fish.60 If not for her confidence that God was setting the stage for his triumphant return, she would have fallen into despair.

  To Sarah’s eyes the world seemed to be filled with signs of God’s wrath. Although she was thankful as her old friends trickled back into the city after the evacuation, she could hardly bear to listen to their stories of suffering and loss. It was “too much for my feeble frame,” she admitted to Fish. When John Tanner returned to his house he came alone; his wife, Mary, had died during their exile in Hopkinton.61 Many others chose not to return to Newport at all, including Ezra Stiles, who had become president of Yale. With as many as 500 buildings in ruins, warehouses empty, and wharves damaged, most merchants moved their shipping to Providence, taking ropewalkers, distillers, and sailors with them. From a high of 9,208 in 1774, Newport’s population plunged to 5,530 in 1782, a decline of 40 percent, and many of those who remained were single women and widows with nowhere else to go. Adult white women made up 30.6 percent of the population; adult white men, 17.6 percent.62 “The Inhabitants of the Town are greatly diminished both in numbers and Circumstances,” wrote Christopher Champlin. “Commerce at a low Ebb—our Society small—our Taxes high.”63

  When Samuel Hopkins returned to Newport he found that his congregation had shrunk, its few remaining members impoverished and anxious about the possible return of British troops. Because the interior of the First Church had been gutted, Sarah Osborn’s house became the spiritual center of the congregation, the place where church members baptized their infants and met for prayer. Hopkins also arranged to hold public services at the Seventh-day Baptist meetinghouse, one of the few houses of worship not destroyed by the British. No one knew why it had been spared, but some speculated that British troops had hesitated to tear down the table of the Ten Commandments mounted behind the pulpit, its letters edged in gold. (The table had been John Tanner’s gift to his church.)64 The Baptists’ good fortune seemed to be proof that God had not abandone
d his people, and yet Sarah and the rest of her congregation could not help wondering why he had allowed their own beautiful church to be destroyed.

  Adding to the sense of devastation, the winter of 1779–80 was brutally cold, even worse than the previous year, when British soldiers had frozen at their posts. According to a historian, “For the only time in recorded history, all of the saltwater inlets, harbors and sounds of the Atlantic coastal plain, from North Carolina northeastward, froze over and remained closed to navigation for a period of a month or more.” George Washington worried that his troops would die from exposure at their winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey—or desert their posts—and ice and snow made it almost impossible to get provisions. “We were absolutely, literally starved,” a soldier remembered later.65 Many people in Newport feared they would not survive the winter.

  But Sarah’s friends made sure that she was well-cared for—a blessing she may have interpreted as a sign of God’s enduring covenant with her. “I have known no sufferings, this hard winter, but what hath been the effect of sympathy,” she wrote to Joseph Fish, “for while many others have been ready to perish, I have had a constant supply of food and fuel.” Many friends helped her: not only Susanna Anthony, John Tanner, and the Coggeshalls, but a Mrs. Mary Mason, who had left the Anglican church to become a member of the First Church in 1775. Since Sarah was too ill to reopen her school, she had no source of income, but Mrs. Mason generously “supplied many of her wants.”66

  When General Rochambeau and six thousand French troops occupied Newport in July 1780 in order to make the city the base of their operations, the weary residents rallied to give them a hero’s welcome, firing rockets from the Grand Parade and illuminating their houses. After years of suffering they had finally found a reason to celebrate, and the French soldiers—many from elite families—proved to be so charming that balls and parties took place almost every night.67 For Sarah Osborn, however, the arrival of the French, many of whom were Catholic, may have seemed like further proof that “infidelity” would run rampant in the latter days. Even though the French had pledged their lives to the American cause, Samuel Hopkins accused them of bringing religious corruption and degeneracy to Newport with them. When George Washington arrived in March 1781 to meet with Rochambeau, a thrilling event that was celebrated with torch-lit processions, music, and balls, Hopkins and Osborn may have resigned themselves to the American alliance with the French, but only because of their belief that God could demonstrate his power by bringing something good out of the false “church of Rome.”68

  The French were still in Newport in May 1781 when Sarah heard the sad news that Joseph Fish had died at the age of seventy-six. Losing him after almost forty years of friendship was hard to bear, but she knew that he had died knowing the depth of her love and gratitude. There had been no unsaid words between them, no feelings of regret. Writing with the help of a friend a year earlier, she had said good-bye to him in case her illness made it impossible for her ever to write again. “I thank you, Sir, for all your past indulgence,” she declared, “and for all the helps you have afforded me, in my various trials.—The Lord reward you.—May a double portion of his Spirit, rest upon you.” After expressing her hope that he would always taste the Lord’s sweetness, she sent him and his family her “tender love.” “Farewell, my dear friend; farewell!”69

  Sarah had kept all his letters, storing them carefully, and now that he was gone she may have especially treasured them. She had always treated her friends’ letters as evidence of the communion of saints, the unity of all Christians in Jesus. Throughout the years, when she had signed her letters to Fish “your sister in Christ,” she had meant those words literally. Someday, she believed, she would sing God’s praises in heaven with him, and the love once expressed in their letters would last for eternity. Until then, his letters offered her a small glimpse of the cloud of witnesses waiting beyond the grave.

  The war finally ended in October when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. Eight thousand American soldiers had been killed during the five years of combat and as many as twenty-five thousand wounded, and the survivors knew that they might return home to find their houses or farms reduced to wreckage.70 Soon after the victory, the people of Newport sent a petition to the General Assembly begging to be exempted from state taxes because so many of them were “destitute of the means of subsistence.”71 A French visitor described Newport as “an empty place, peopled only by groups of men who spend the whole day idling with folded arms on street corners. Most of the houses are in disrepair; the shops are miserably stocked. . . . Grass is growing in the public square in front of the State House; the streets are badly paved and muddy; rags hang from windows; and tatters cover the hideous women, the emaciated children, and the pale, thin men, whose sunken eyes and shifty looks put the observer ill at ease.”72

  Americans kept their faith in progress in the post-Revolutionary years, but they were also sobered by the difficulties of creating a new nation. The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, marked the formal end of the war, but tensions with England remained high. The Articles of Confederation gave so much power to individual states that the national government had little authority, and federalists and antifederalists were locked in bitter controversy over whether the United States should have a stronger, more centralized government. As commercial shipping resumed and people rushed to buy consumer goods, hard currency drained out of the country, resulting first in inflation and then in depression. Pirates from the Barbary States harassed American ships, forcing the U.S. government to pay huge tributes. Indians threatened settlers on the western frontier. And in 1787, after Daniel Shays and a mob of impoverished Revolutionary veterans tried to prevent the collection of debts, the Massachusetts state militia attacked them, imprisoning Shays and killing many others.

  Protestants responded to the political wrangling, economic hardship, and social unrest of the 1780s in a variety of ways. The majority continued to insist that the millennium was coming, but they claimed that it would develop gradually over time. Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, argued that the Revolution had been the prelude to acts of “higher importance,” and others insisted that the future would bring westward expansion, commercial success, and international power. Both liberal and evangelical Protestants invested the nation with sacred meaning, portraying it (in Abraham Lincoln’s later phrase) as the “last best hope on earth.”73

  But not all evangelicals believed that the nation enjoyed a special covenant with God, and not all assumed that it was destined for economic or political greatness. On the contrary, New Divinity ministers like Samuel Hopkins, Joseph Bellamy, and Levi Hart portrayed the United States as a nation like any other, and they warned that it would prosper only if its people obeyed God’s moral law.74 In the short term, according to Hopkins, the country’s prospects looked bleak. As he recorded in his letters (and as he probably discussed with Sarah during their Saturday afternoon visits), Americans were guilty of “general stupidity and carelessness about the important things of religion” and “selfishness and worldliness.”75 Alarmed by books like Ethan Allen’s Reason: The Only Oracle of Man (1784), he complained that “Deists, universalists, and deistical Christians prevail in general, and take the lead. The unclean frogs are croaking all around me, so that I can hear little else.” Although Hopkins was exaggerating, deism was indeed becoming more militant after the Revolution, and he probably encountered more than a few merchants in Newport who prided themselves on their rationalistic critique of Christianity.76

  Of all the sins Hopkins decried, the worst in his eyes was slavery. During the Revolution he had argued that the war was God’s punishment for the sin of enslaving Africans (a view that few other evangelicals seem to have shared), and he warned that Americans must liberate their slaves or face even greater “calamities.”77 After the war he joined forces with Moses Brown, a Quaker, to lobby for slave emancipation in Rhode Island. Despite strong opposition, the state legislatur
e passed a gradual emancipation act in 1784 requiring masters to free their slaves as they reached adulthood—girls at the age of eighteen, and boys at the age of twenty-one.78 In the same year, the First Church voted to forbid slaveholders from becoming members, condemning slavery and the slave trade as “a gross violation of the Righteousness and Benevolence which are so much inculcated in the Gospel.” (Eleven years earlier, in 1773, Newport’s Quakers had demanded that all members emancipate their slaves on penalty of being read out of the meeting.) Yet even Deacon Coggeshall had not freed his slaves until he had been forced to do so, and many states, including Rhode Island, seemed ambivalent about outlawing slavery in the new nation as a whole.79 In 1787 Rhode Island passed a strict law prohibiting the slave trade—every slave ship would be fined a thousand pounds plus an extra hundred pounds for every slave on board—but the law was rarely enforced.80 Most people in Newport cared more about making money than resisting slavery. “It is notorious that it is the African trade that prolongs the existence of this declining town,” argued the Newport Mercury, “and the poor of this place well evince who benefits them most, the African Trader or the Abolition Man.”81

  Samuel Hopkins (and perhaps Sarah Osborn) condemned this kind of economic thinking as selfish, greedy, immoral—and dangerous. A righteous God would not be mocked. In 1787, at the same time the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia, Hopkins warned his listeners that God would destroy the new nation if slavery were not immediately abolished. God had guided Americans to victory during the Revolution because of the Continental Congress’s decision to outlaw the slave trade, but now that the Constitutional Convention seemed willing to allow slavery to continue, he was preparing to pour out his wrath. “All the blood which has been shed constantly cries to Heaven,” Hopkins warned, “and all the bitter sighs, and groans, and tears of these injured, distressed, helpless poor have entered into the ears of the Lord of hosts, and are calling and waiting for the day of vengeance.” God had already begun to sharpen his sword. “And is not Heaven frowning upon us now?” Hopkins asked. “We are as yet disappointed in our expectations of peace, prosperity, and happiness, in consequence of liberty and independence. Instead of rising to honor, dignity, and respect among the Nations, we have suddenly sunk into disgrace and contempt. Our trade labors under great disadvantages, and is coming to nothing.” Debts, war with the Indians, and “violent opposition to government” (a reference to Shays’s Rebellion) were all signs of God’s anger, and Rhode Island, especially Newport, had “fallen into a disagreeable and very calamitous situation.” Slavery was “the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended,” and the town had grown rich “at the expense of the blood, the liberty, and happiness of the poor Africans.” (One historian has estimated that Newport merchants sold forty thousand slaves between 1760 and 1776.) Now the town was “fast going to poverty and inevitable ruin,” reaping the ugly fruits of what it had sowed. God’s message was frighteningly clear: if Americans allowed slavery to continue, they would “bring the guilt of this trade and the blood of the Africans on our own heads and on our children.” Hopkins’s grim warning alluded to Exodus 20:5: “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”82