Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  28. Fiering, “First American Enlightenment,” 309, 336; Bushman, GA, 35–38.

  29. Thomas Chubb, A Discourse Concerning Reason, with Regard to Religion and Divine Revelation (London: T. Cox, 1733), 7; Benjamin Colman to William Hooper, February 15, 1739/40, quoted in Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 22.

  30. On Whiston, see John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule, and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 165–67. See Daniel Whitby, A Discourse Concerning . . . the True Import of the Words Election and Reprobation, 2nd ed. (London: Aaron Ward and Richard Hett, 1735), 75; Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (London: Will. Botham, 1705); Clarke, The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (London: James Knapton, 1712); David D. Hall, “Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press 2000), 430.

  31. [Samuel Moodey], A Faithful Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with a Person Lately Recovered from the Dangerous Error of Arminius (Boston, 1737), cited in Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 22; Edward Wigglesworth, An Enquiry into the Truth of the Imputation of the Guilt of Adam’s First Sin to His Posterity (Boston: J. Draper, 1738), i. See also Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1954).

  32. Samuel Osborn, The Case and Complaint of Mr. Samuel Osborn (Boston, 1743), cited in Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism in America, 25. On Kent, see Levi A. Field, An Historical Sketch of the First Congregational Church in Marlborough, Mass (Worcester, 1859), cited ibid., 23. On Balch, see Letters from the First Church in Glocester to the Second in Bradford, with their Answers (Boston, 1744), cited ibid., 61.

  33. John White, New England’s Lamentatons (sic) (Boston, 1734), quoted in Wright, Beginnings of Unitarianism, 21.

  34. WJE 4: 10.

  35. See Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 99.

  36. Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 2000), 52.

  37. [William Douglass], A Discourse Concerning the Currencies of the British Plantations in America (Boston, 1740), cited in T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 75. On greater freedom of choice, see also T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall, “Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1411–39.

  38. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 38–39. See also John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in En gland and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Butler, Becoming America, 50–88.

  39. Thomas Bacon, “A Sermon to Maryland Slaves, 1749,” in Religion in American History: A Reader, ed. Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 83.

  40. For statistics on southern slavery, see Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 240; Crane, Dependent People, 76.

  41. Miller, New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 485.

  42. SO, Memoir, [59], [123].

  43. Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-England (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743), 218–19, 48, 51. On the schisms that erupted during the awakening, see C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalist and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).

  44. Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts, 99; Ezra Stiles, A Discourse on the Christian Union (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1761), 50.

  45. SO, Memoir, 1, [134]. David Shields, “The Manuscript in the British American World of Print,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 102, no. 2 (1993): 403–16.

  46. JF to SO, June 13, 1751, Benjamin Silliman Family Papers, Group 450, Series 1, Box 1, Manuscripts and Archives, SML.

  47. Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 345.

  48. SO, Memoir, [136].

  49. Ibid., 51.

  50. Ibid., [133].

  51. SO, Diary, October 4, 1757.

  52. SO, Memoir, [64]; Psalm 23:25.

  53. On Lackington, see Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 340–42, 348, and D. Bruce Hindmarsh, “Reshaping Individualism: The Private Christian, Eighteenth-Century Religion and the Enlightenment,” in The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism, ed. Deryck W. Lovegrove (New York: Routledge, 2002), 77–78, 81.

  CHAPTER TWO. THE NAME OF CHRIST

  1. SO, Memoir, 2–4.

  2. Ibid., 3, 1, 5, 2.

  3. On childhood in early America, see Gerald F. Moran and Maris Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and the Life Course: Explorations in the Social History of Early America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

  4. Louis K. Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 66.

  5. I have borrowed the image of the “door of childhood” from Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1990), 12; SO, Memoir, 3, quoting Psalm 58:3.

  6. SH, Memoirs, 5; Colin Haydon, “Religious Minorities in England,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 241–42.

  7. Cotton Mather, A Family Well-Ordered (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1699), 10–11. SO, Memoir, 3.

  8. The Westminster Assembly, The Shorter Catechism (Boston: B. Harris and J. Allen, 1693), 3; WJE 11: 54; John 3:16.

  9. SO, Memoir, 5; Mark 10:14.

  10. Ephesians 1:4; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics vol. 21 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 3.23.7. On early American Calvinist theology see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31–50; Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 25–78.

  11. Influenced by Philippe Ariès’s groundbreaking book, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962), which argued that childhood was not “discovered” until the seventeenth century, many have argued that early American children were perceived as miniature adults. For an example, see Karin Lee Fishbeck Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992). For challenges to this view, see Ross W. Beales, “In Search of the Historical Child: Miniature Adulthood and Youth in Colonial New England,” American Quarterly 27, no. 4 (October 1975): 379–98; Moran and Vinovskis, Religion, Family, and the Life Course, 118. On eighteenth-century understandings of children’s development, see Kenneth Keniston, “Psychological Development and Historical Change,” in Growing Up in America: Historical Experiences, ed. Harvey J. Graff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 64, and Joseph F. Kett, “The Stages of Life,” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, 2d ed., ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 166.

  12
. Isaac Watts, The First Catechism of the Principles of Religion; or, The Catechism for a Young Child, to Be Begun at Three or Four Years Old (London, 1730; rpt. Norwich, Conn.: J. Trumbull, 1788), 4–5, 6–7. See also John Cotton, Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (Cambridge: Hezekiah Usher, 1656), 6.

  13. The New-England Primer Enlarged (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1727).

  14. Isaac Watts, Divine and Moral Songs for the Use of Children, 27; see also C. John Somerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), 142. SO, Memoir, 8.

  15. SO, Memoir, 4.

  16. Ibid.

  17. J. H. Plumb, “The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 67 (May 1975): 76.

  18. SO, Memoir, 5–6.

  19. Ibid., 1–2.

  20. The School of Good Manners (1715; rpt. New London, Conn.: T. Green, 1754), 1; Cotton Mather, Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good, ed. David Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 45.

  21. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1986), 18; JE, The Life of David Brainerd, in WJE 7: 101; Burr quoted in The Great Awakening at Yale College, ed. Stephen Nissenbaum (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1972), 15; John Cleaveland, Memoir, vol. 2, in the Cleaveland Family Papers, 1742–1891, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.; JE, A Faithful Narrative, in WJE 4: 200, 201–5; Barbara E. Lacey, ed. The World of Hannah Heaton: The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century New England Farm Woman (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press 2003), 3.

  22. Joseph Fish, Angels Ministring to the People of God (Newport: J. Franklin, 1755), 4–5; Calvert, Children in the House, 19–38.

  23. “A Dialogue Between Christ, Youth, and the Devil,” in New-England Primer Enlarged, n.p.

  24. Cotton Mather, Help for Distressed Parents (Boston: John Allen, 1695), 13; Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom (1662; rpt. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2003), 55. See also Peter Gregg Slater, Children in the New England Mind: In Death and in Life (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1977), 40.

  25. Benjamin Wadsworth, “The Nature of Early Piety,” in A Course of Sermons on Early Piety. By the Eight Ministers Who Carry on the Thursday Lecture in Boston (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1721), 10; Benjamin Bass, Parents and Children Advised and Exhorted to Their Duty (Newport: [James Franklin], 1730), 3.

  26. Samuel Wigglesworth, An Essay for Reviving Religion (Boston, 1733), in The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences, ed. Alan Heimert and Perry Miller (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 6; Wadsworth, “Nature of Early Piety,” 29; JE, “Sermon on Ephesians 6:4,” February 1748, Jonathan Edwards Collection (1696–1972), BL.

  27. On “paternal power,” see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf 1996), 96–137.

  28. See Daniel Scott Smith, “Parental Power and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts,” in The American Family, ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), 255–68; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press), 17–21.

  29. JE, Faithful Narrative, 146; JE, “Sermon on Job 14:2,” quoted in Helen Petter Westra, “Cornerstones, Cannons, and Covenants: The Puritan Clergy as Cultural Guardians,” Pro Rege (September 1990): 28.

  30. JE, The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners, in WJE 19: 344–45; Hutcheson quoted in Norman Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: As Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37, no. 2 (1976): 207. On Hutcheson see Michael B. Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 135–200.

  31. Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion,” 205; Janet M. Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986).

  32. Daniel Whitby, A Discourse (London, 1710), quoted in H. Shelton Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin: A Study in American Theology Since 1750 (New York: Scribner’s, 1955), 12–13; John Beach, An Appeal to the Unprejudiced (Boston: [n.p.], 1737), 6.

  33. WJE 13: 169.

  34. See, e.g., Lyman Beecher, Sermons Delivered on Various Occasions (Boston, 1828), 17, quoted in Slater, Children in the New England Mind, 83; Beecher, “Future Punishment of Infants Not a Doctrine of Calvinism,” Spirit of the Pilgrims (January–March 1828): 89–90.

  35. John Taylor, The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin Proposed to Free and Candid Examination (London: M. Waugh, 1767), 4th ed., part 3, p. 274, part 2, p. 153; Taylor uses the word absurd in part 2, pp. 112, 141, and 148. On attitudes toward original sin, see Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin; Clyde A. Holbrook, “Original Sin and the Enlightenment,” in The Heritage of Christian Thought: Essays in Honor of Robert Lowry Calhoun, ed. Robert E. Cushman and Egil Grislis (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Merle Curti, Human Nature in American Thought: A History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (Boston: Starr King Press, 1955), 59–90.

  36. JE, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival, in WJE 4: 394.

  37. Ibid.; Thomas Prince, “The Great and Solemn Obligations to Early Piety,” cited in Sandford Fleming, Children and Puritanism: The Place of Children in the Life and Thought of the New England Churches, 1620–1847 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), 97; SO, Memoir, [119].

  38. Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family: From Colonial Times to the Present (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1917), 1: 111; Fleming, Children and Puritanism, 153.

  39. Watts, Divine and Moral Songs; James Janeway, A Token for Children (Boston: T. Hancock, 1728), viii.

  40. JE, Faithful Narrative, 158; Kenneth P. Minkema, “Old Age and Religion in the Writings and Life of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 70, no. 4. (December 2001): 688; “The Rev. Mr. Blair’s Account of the Revival of Religion at New-Londonderry in Pennsylvania,” CH (October 13, 1744): 85; John White, “The said account we have thought proper to insert as follows,” CH (April 7, 1744): 58.

  41. Joseph Emerson, Early Piety Encouraged (Boston: J. Draper, 1738).

  42. JE, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival, 394.

  43. SO, Memoir, 3–4, 18.

  44. Gerrish reprinted in Nathaniel Appleton, The Christian Glorying in Tribulation from a Sense of Its Happy Fruits. A Discourse Occasion’d by the Death of that Pious and Afflicted Gentlewoman Mrs. Martha Gerrish. . . . To Which Are Annexed Some of Mrs. Gerrish’s Letters (Boston: J. Draper, 1736), 63; The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–1757, ed. Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 95, 107.

  45. See Marcia J. Bunge, “Education and the Child in Eighteenth-Century German Pietism: Perspectives from the Work of A. H. Francke,” and Martha Ellen Stortz, “‘Where or When Was Your Servant Innocent?’ Augustine on Childhood,” in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 247–278, 78–102. On “breaking the will,” see Greven, Protestant Temperament, 32–42.

  46. School of Good Manners, 1; Gerrish reprinted in Appleton, Christian Glorying in Tribulation, 52; SO, Memoir, 18.

  47. Mather, Bonifacius. 48. See John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 150.

  48. Fish quoted in Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, Jr., The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1984), 9, 209.

  49. Philip Greven argues that there were three styles of childrearing present in early America: the evangelical, the moderate, and the genteel. Yet almost all of his examples of the “moderate” style date from the 1740s or later, suggesting that the 1740s marked a watershed. See Greven, Protestant Temperament.

  50. SO, Memoir, 3–4; Proverbs 13:24.

  51. The literature on children’s images of God is vast. For an introductio
n, see Bradley R. Hertel and Michael J. Donahue, “Parental Influences on God Images Among Children: Testing Durkheim’s Metaphoric Parallelism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 34, no. 2 (June 1995): 186–199; Jane R. Dickie et al., “Parent-Child Relationships and Children’s Images of God,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 1 (March 1997): 25–43. On abused children, see W. Brad Johnson and Mark C. Eastburg, “God, Parent, and Self Concepts in Abused and Nonabused Children,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 11, no. 3 (1992): 235–43.

  52. SO, Memoir, 6–7.

  53. Increase Mather, The Times of Men are in the Hands of God (Boston: John Foster, 1675), 7; Thomas Brooks, The Silent Soul (Boston: Boone, 1728), 12 (originally published as The Mute Christian Under the Smarting Rod); Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather (New York: Ungar, 1957), 1: 24.

  54. Brooks, Silent Soul, 17; Samuel Willard, The Mourner’s Cordial Against Excessive Sorrow (Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1691), 16–17.

  55. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4; Ava Chamberlain, “The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2000): 289–322.

  56. Laqueur, Making Sex, 108; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 15–38.

  57. Look E’re You Leap; or, A History of the Lives and Intrigues of Lewd Women, 11th ed. (London: J. Clarke, C. Hitch, J. Hodges, T. King, and T. Harris, 1741), 23, 16–17.

  58. Benjamin Colman, The Duty and Honour of Aged Women (Boston: B. Green, 1711), 5; Edwards, Faithful Narrative, 149. Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 163. On images of women in sermons, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” American Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1976): 20–40.