When the Constitutional Convention refused to outlaw slavery (and decided to count each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of political representation), Hopkins felt confirmed in his belief that the world was growing more sinful as the millennium was approaching. Even though Rhode Island had outlawed the slave trade in 1774, merchants found ways to evade the law, and by 1800 the volume of trade had returned to prewar levels.83 In a widely publicized murder case in 1791, Captain James De Wolf of Newport was accused of killing a slave woman who was ill in order to prevent her from infecting others on his ship. After separating her from his crew, tying her to a chair, and suspending her from the rigging, he decided that allowing her to remain on board at all was too great a financial risk. He bound her eyes and mouth with a handkerchief to prevent the other slaves from hearing her screams, and despite the objections of his crew he flung her, still alive, into the sea. Later he was reported to have remarked that he was “sorry he had lost so good a Chair.”84 A Newport jury indicted De Wolf, but a judge in the West Indies cleared him of any wrongdoing. He became one of the wealthiest men in Rhode Island and a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives.85
Stories like these confirmed Hopkins’s belief that the world was descending into a pit of corruption, and yet he was almost Panglossian in his optimism, insisting that God would bring good out of evil. Despite his conviction that slavery was “a direct and gross violation of the laws of Christ” (the ends never justified the means), he also refused to accept that a just God would allow slaves to suffer for no reason. “This dark and dreadful scene will not only have an end, but is designed by the Most High to be the means of introducing the gospel among the nations in Africa,” he argued. He dreamed of a day when the nations of Africa would be prosperous, peaceful, and Christian. “Thus all this past and present evil which the Africans have suffered by the slave trade, and the slavery to which so many of them have been reduced, may be the occasion of an over-balancing good; and it may hereafter appear, as it has in the case of Joseph being sold a slave into Egypt, and the oppression and slavery of the Israelites by the Egyptians, that though the slave traders have really meant and done that which is evil, yet God has designed it all for good.”86 Few whites in the eighteenth century detested slavery as much as Samuel Hopkins, and yet few were more optimistic about the future of the enslaved.
Hopkins argued that slavery, deism, and the other evils of the world were all signs that the millennium was coming. According to his biblical calculations, it would not take place for another two hundred years—around the year 2000—but God had already begun to pour out the “sixth vial” described in the book of Revelation, and the darkness and degeneracy of the present age were heralds of Christ’s spiritual return. “Ignorance, error and delusion, and open vice and wickedness abound, and are increasing,” he explained, “and infidelity is rapidly spreading in the Christian world. The unclean spirits, like frogs, appear to have gone forth to all the kings’ courts, and the great men in Christendom; and the greatest corruption and abominable vices are spread among them, and real Christianity is neglected, run down and opposed.” (Revelation describes “unclean spirits” coming out of the Dragon’s mouth like “frogs.”) The world trembled on the brink of its darkest age, and yet Christians knew that they should look forward to the future with hope. “These evils,” Hopkins explained, “both natural and moral, however undesirable and dreadful, in themselves, are necessary for the greatest good of the church of Christ, and to introduce the Millennium in the best manner, and there will be then, and forever, more holiness, joy and happiness, than if these evils had never taken place.”87 The millennium would be especially glorious because of the epidemics, famines, and moral depravity that had preceded it.
Hopkins believed that there were already small signs of hope that a better world was on the horizon. A group of free black men, including many who had once attended Sarah Osborn’s meetings, had founded the Free African Union Society (FAUS) in 1780, an organization that revealed how deeply its members had internalized her message of piety, hard work, and thrift. One of the leaders of FAUS was Newport Gardner (Occramar Marycoo), a remarkable man who had arrived on a slave ship in 1760 at the age of fourteen. Though at first he could not speak English, “he early discovered to his owner very superior powers of mind. He taught himself to read, after receiving a few lessons on the elements of written language. He taught himself to sing, after receiving a very trivial initiation into the rudiments of music. He became so well acquainted with the science and art of music, that he composed a large number of tunes, some of which have been highly approved by musical amateurs, and was for a long time the teacher of a very numerously attended singing school in Newport.”88 Besides being a member of the First Church, he was a sexton and close friend of Samuel Hopkins. Gardner, Salmar Nubia, and more than two dozen other FAUS members saved enough money to buy their own houses, laying the groundwork for the creation of a black middle class.89
Because of Rhode Island’s gradual emancipation act, the liberation of black soldiers, and large numbers of runaways during the Revolution, free blacks outnumbered slaves in 1790 for the first time in Newport’s history, and although slave traders did a thriving business with southern planters, slavery seemed to be gradually dying out in the North.90 Relatively few slaves had converted to Christianity, but both Hopkins and Osborn were heartened that a small community of blacks in Newport seemed interested in forming their own church. They asked Hopkins to preach to them, and despite his worries about making “enemies” among slave owners, he agreed. When he published his System of Doctrines in 1793, a theological tome that stretched to more than six hundred pages, the subscribers included seventeen free blacks from Newport and Providence. Among them were “Solmar” (Salmar) Nubia, Bristol Yamma, Obour Tanner, Newport Gardner and his wife, Jenny, and John Quamine’s widow, “Mrs. Duchess Quamine.” (By giving a black woman the honorific, “Mrs.,” Hopkins made a radical statement about black equality.) Many of the black subscribers not only supported Hopkins’s book but also remained committed to his vision of sending missionaries to Africa. When Sarah remembered the remarkable meetings that had begun two decades earlier in her kitchen, she may have dreamed that her legacy would be carried across the Atlantic. Although Bristol Yamma died in 1794 after an illness, Salmar Nubia and Newport Gardner hoped to return to their native land.91
Hopkins supported the colonization movement because of his conviction that blacks would never achieve racial equality in the United States. As he explained, “The whites are so habituated, by education and custom, to look upon and treat the blacks as an inferior class of beings, and they [the blacks] are sunk so low by their situation and the treatment they receive from us, that they never can be raised to an equality with the whites, and enjoy all the liberty and rights to which they have a just claim.” Though his assessment was bleak, the members of the Free African Union Society shared it. Because many of them had been born in Africa, they felt like “strangers and outcasts in a strange land.” They did not believe that the millennium would begin until their triumphant return to their “own country.”92
In the nineteenth century, millennialists would split into two groups: postmillennialists (often theological liberals) who believed that Christ would return after a thousand years of peace, and premillennialists who believed that Christ would appear before the millennium in order to engage in an apocalyptic war against Satan. While the first group tended to emphasize gradual human progress, the second insisted that humans were too corrupt to bring about the millennium on their own. Reading the book of Revelation literally, with its violent depictions of plagues, beasts, and the Great Red Dragon, they warned that there would be unimaginable bloodshed and devastation before the world was cleansed of its sin. In the eighteenth century, however, these different positions had not yet hardened, and Hopkins did not fit neatly into either category.93 Technically he was a postmillennialist who predicted that Jesus would not return until after a
thousand years of peace, but unlike later Protestant liberals he denied that progress was possible without God’s direct intervention. He was an optimist, but only because of his faith that God would not allow humans to wallow in sin forever—merely another two hundred years.
During the Revolution, Sarah Osborn seems to have thought that the millennium might be imminent, but, influenced by Hopkins, she may have eventually resigned herself to the likelihood that she would not live to see it. In 1787, the year the Constitution was ratified, she was seventy-three and in “generally low” health, and without Mrs. Mason’s help she would have been unable to afford food or rent.94 She had moved yet again, probably in search of cheaper rent, this time to live with Latham Clarke and his wife, Elizabeth.95 Yet if Hopkins can be trusted, she continued to affirm that she lived in the best of all possible worlds. When her beloved great-grandchild Susan died, probably at the age of nine, a tragedy that may have brought back memories of her son Samuel’s death many years before, she received a letter from Susanna Anthony urging her to accept her suffering as a sign of God’s love. According to Susa, it was possible that God had taken Susan away to prevent her from becoming a burden on her great-grandmother’s strength. “While the dear babe lived,” Susa wrote, “I viewed it as growing up in the church of God, and much more than supplying our places: But when Dead, I thought, perhaps this young plant, would have drawn too much sap from the spreading, yet aged oak, and so eclipse her beauty, mar her importance, and weaken at least, her shady indulgence.”96 We do not know whether Sarah was comforted by these words, but she had always tried to believe that everything that happened to her was for the best.
As Sarah reflected on the Revolutionary years she knew that God would somehow bring good out of evil. Unlike Enlightenment thinkers she envisioned history as a spiral that sometimes circled backward rather than as a straight line moving forward, and she insisted that grace, not reason, would bring history to its glorious completion. But still, she was sure that the millennium was bearing down on the world and nothing could stop it—not the horrifying violence of the Revolution, not deism and infidelity, not even the barbaric human traffic in slaves.
Chapter 11
The Open Vision, 1796
But now, behold, the vail is rent from top to bottom. I will never any more hide my face from thee. Come, all thy desires are fulfilled; all thy imperfections are done away; and, according to thy wish, thou art made perfect in holiness. Thou shalt never find any more weariness in my service. And thou mayest now with open face behold me, constantly look on my perfections, see my glory, and the luster of it shall not confound thee. Come, here is the open vision, the full fruition thou didst long for. Come, drink in as much of God now as thy finite capacity can hold, and I will still enlarge thy capacity: Thou shalt pass from glory to glory, and be more and more transformed into the same image. Come, drink and swim, and drink again of those rivers of pleasure, which flow from the right hand of God forevermore. Here is the boundless ocean, in which thee mayest dive throughout the endless ages of eternity, and thy delights shall be forever new.
Come, search into the wonders of redeeming love and grace, which has brought so many of the apostate sons and daughters of Adam to glory: And now, in this everlasting now, give to God the glory of his sovereign grace. Come, tune thy harp, and sound upon the highest string. Shout aloud for joy; for he has given grace and glory too. Here is no danger of ostentation or spiritual pride; or of grieving any of the inhabitants of this world. No, they will all join with thee, and each for himself, and on thy behalf, give glory to God, in the highest strains. Didst thou long to be thus employed? Well, go on forever to praise and adore the glorious Three [in] One. Didst thou delight to commune with me in providences, as well as in ordinances? Well, thou mayest now learn the mysteries of them: They shall be unfolded. Unbelief shall no more molest thee.1
August 1796. Sarah Osborn lies in her room, her breathing labored, and listens to a friend read the Bible aloud. In her eighty-two years she has often dreamed about dying and going to heaven, but now she knows that the time is near. Weak, swollen with edema, and out of breath, she seems to be suffering from congestive heart failure, a condition often linked to rheumatoid arthritis. Soon, she tells her friends, she will be “going home.”2
Sarah has imagined heaven so many times that it is as real to her as the four walls of her room. At the moment of her death she expects her soul to float away from her body, free from the “clog” that has weighed it down, before she comes face to face with Jesus, her greatest desire. She has always loved him as her “dearest Lord,” her bridegroom, her shield and fortress, and her covenant God, but now she will finally “see him as he is, Enjoy him as he is, Know as I am Known.” In heaven there will be no more illness, no more mourning over sin, no more weeping over the loss of loved ones, and “no more trembling fears and doubts.” There will be no more oppression and no more slavery. According to Joseph Stevens, one of her favorite authors, “There the Believer is freed from all the Miseries and Sorrows of this World. There all Tears are wiped away. There the Weary are at Rest, and the Wicked cease from troubling. There is no pricking Briar nor vexing Thorn: No Discontent, no Discord, no anxious Cares, or Fears.”3 Nothing but joy.
Sarah believes that she will bask in God’s love until Judgment Day, when her resurrected body will join her soul in heaven. Her bliss at that moment will be deeper than she can imagine, the zenith of her existence. Instead of the frail, crippled body that has imprisoned her on earth, she will be given a new body like Christ’s. After a lifetime of lamenting her pollution and corruption, she will finally be “clean,” freed from “the intolerable burden, sin!” She will no longer be poor, but rich in God’s grace; no longer broken, but whole; no longer empty, but overflowing with love. Her body will be “Immortal, Incorruptible, Spiritual, Strong, Vigorous and Beautiful; so as to shine in the perpetual and everlasting Bloom of Youth.”4 Rejoicing with the whole communion of saints, she will spend eternity gazing at God and swimming in the boundless ocean of his love.
This Body of Sin and Death
Sarah’s lyrical description of the beatific vision (inspired by Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians) sounds like something that could have been written by a medieval Christian or a Puritan, and she imagined heaven existing outside history—an “everlasting now” that transcended the boundaries of time and space. But even heaven has a history, and the eighteenth century marked a watershed in the way it was imagined. Under the pressures of the Enlightenment, the growth of a consumer economy, and revolutionary politics, many eighteenth-century Americans were beginning to develop new ideas about heaven or, in some cases, reviving older ones to make sense of their changing world. Rather than envisioning heaven as a place of rest and eternal contemplation, they hoped that it would be filled with progress, activity, knowledge, and friendship—heaven as a more perfect earth.
Even as evangelicals helped popularize this new idea of heaven, they remained ambivalent about its sanctification of everyday life. Despite their desire to live in a paradise in the next world, they never wanted to forget that their greatest happiness would come from worshiping a sovereign God. With her death drawing near, Sarah’s dreams of heaven always returned to the joy of seeing him face to face, a hidden God made visible.
Sarah’s life had been ebbing away slowly since the end of the Revolution, her world shrinking in on her with every passing year. Deprived of almost all her former enjoyments, she could no longer read the Bible on her own, and although she managed to write down a few of her poems, she lacked the stamina to meet with the women’s society. She had always imagined her body as a “clog” and a “Lump of clay” weighing down her soul, but as her illness grew worse she may have felt as though her flesh and spirit were at war. Echoing the words of Paul, she longed to escape from “this body of sin and death that so betrays me and separates between my God and me.”5
Sarah was too ill to care for herself during her last years, but she was surro
unded by people who admired and loved her. Although Newport was a religiously diverse city, she lived in a predominantly evangelical neighborhood. According to the 1790 census (which seems to have been taken from door to door), Sarah lived next door to Susanna Anthony and in close proximity to several other female members of the First Church of Christ, including Elizabeth Melville, Lydia Bissell, and Mary Smith. Also in the neighborhood were her friends Elizabeth and Latham Clarke (whose house she had once shared) and Scipio Tanner, a free black who had probably attended her religious meetings in the 1760s.6 (He had been a slave of Sarah’s friend John Tanner before being freed in Tanner’s will in 1785.)7 With all these friends only a few steps away, Sarah knew that someone would always be available to cook or clean for her. Her friends were poor (even Samuel Hopkins could barely support himself), but they were willing to share the little they had.
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