Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  59. See Elizabeth Reis, “The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 15–36.

  60. George Whitefield, A Brief and General Account of the First Part of the Life of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1740), 2, 10.

  61. SH, Life and Character, 14, 69; Lacey, World of Hannah Heaton, 56. My reading of these texts differs from those that emphasize men’s and women’s different voices. Mary G. Mason argues that Augustine’s Confessions, “where the self is presented as the stage for a battle of opposing forces and where a climactic victory for one voice—spirit defeating flesh—completes the drama of the self, simply does not accord with the deepest realities of women’s experience and so is inappropriate as a model for women’s life writing” (“The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980], 210). But in fact, most evangelical women’s writings follow this pattern exactly.

  62. SO, Memoir, [99], 37.

  63. Ibid., 135.

  64. Samuel Russell, Man’s Liableness to Be Deceiv’d About Religion, Shewn and Caution’d Against (New London: T. Green, 1742). The copy at AAS is inscribed with Osborn’s signature.

  65. Samuel Niles, The True Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin Stated and Defended (Boston, 1757), 40; Jonathan Mayhew, Seven Sermons (Boston, 1749), 38.

  66. Samuel Webster, A Winter Evening’s Conversation upon the Doctrine of Original Sin (New Haven: James Parker, 1757), 5; William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, rev. ed., ed. Alexander W. Allison et al. (New York: Norton, 1975), 602.

  CHAPTER THREE. AN AFFLICTED LOW CONDITION

  1. SO, Memoir, [133].

  2. William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1975), 935.

  3. On Boston’s population, see Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution, abridged ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 71. For London see J. F. Merritt, “Perceptions and Portrayals of London, 1598–1720,” in Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720, ed. J. F. Merritt (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.

  4. SO, Memoir, 8–10.

  5. Ibid., 10–11.

  6. Ibid., 11–12.

  7. Ibid., 13–15.

  8. John Robinson, The Works of John Robinson, a Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, ed. Robert Ashton (Boston: Doctrinal Book and Tract Society, 1851), quoted in Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19; JE, “Personal Resolutions,” in Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections, ed. Clarence H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 43. See also Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 109–23, 250–55, 318–20; John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 137–38.

  9. For a transcript of the mortgage deed, see Jane Fletcher Fiske, Gleanings from Newport County Files, 1659–1783 (Boxford, Mass.: n.p., 1998), no. 571. (There are no page numbers in this book, but excerpts from the county files are numbered.)

  10. On indoor water, see Sheila Skemp, “A Social and Cultural History of Newport, Rhode Island, 1720–1765” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1974), 19. For Berkeley see Alexander Campbell Fraser, Life and Letters of George Berkeley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), 157.

  11. Petitions of the Rhode Island General Assembly, 1725–1860, Archives, State House, Providence, R.I., quoted in Skemp, “Social and Cultural History of Newport,” 20; SO, Memoir, 16. See also Lynne Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eighteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985); Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).

  12. SO, Memoir, 16–17.

  13. Ibid., 17–18, citing James 4:7–8.

  14. Ibid., 17.

  15. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV) (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 320–27; William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990).

  16. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 106.

  17. SO, Memoir, 16–18.

  18. Miller, For Your Own Good, 129; SO, Memoir, 20.

  19. SO to JF, December 10, 1755, AAS; SO to JF, December 26, 1760, AAS.

  20. SO, Memoir, 2, 9.

  21. Greven, Protestant Temperament, 83. SH, Life and Character, 26.

  22. Increase Mather, A Call to the Tempted: A Sermon on the Horrid Crime of Self-Murder (1724; Boston: B. Green, 1734), 8.

  23. I. Mather, Call to the Tempted; SO, Memoir, 16–17.

  24. SO, Memoir, 16–19.

  25. Ibid., 18.

  26. Ibid., 16, 18.

  27. Ibid., 17; Michael J. Crawford, “The Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1976): 101–3.

  28. Hopkins erases the entire episode with the sentence “After some sore trials and temptations, I was more comfortable . . .” (SH, Memoirs, 14). Compare his account with SO, Memoir, 16–18.

  29. SO, Memoir, 21–23, citing Micah 6:9.

  30. SO, Memoir, 23.

  31. On women’s average age at marriage, see Robert V. Wells, “Quaker Marriage Patterns in a Colonial Perspective,” in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 82. See also Daniel Scott Smith, “Parental Power and Marriage Patterns,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973): 326.

  32. SO, Memoir, 24. On the “marriage portion,” see Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1993), 59–62.

  33. SO, Memoir, 24.

  34. Ibid., 25.

  35. Ibid., 26–27; John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1986), 19.

  36. SO, Memoir, 25–26, citing Proverbs 28:24 and Proverbs 19:26. See SH, Memoirs, 15.

  37. In her memoir (SO, Memoir, 27), Osborn said that she was married in “her eighteenth year,” or at the age of seventeen. She did not turn eighteen until the following February. For marriage laws, see Samuel Greene Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. 2: 1700–1790 (New York: Appleton, 1860), 3.

  38. SO, Diary, November 16, 1760.

  39. SO, Memoir, 27. On “going to housekeeping,” see Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside, 54–62.

  40. SO, Memoir, 26–28.

  41. Ibid., 29–30.

  42. Thomas Brooks, The Silent Soul (Boston: Boone, 1728), 21–22. See also John Willison, The Afflicted Man’s Companion (Philadelphia: W. Young, 1788), 22, and Benjamin Grosvenor, The Mourner (Philadelphia: Aitken, 1781), 55. The Bible citation is Micah 6:9.

  43. John Flavel, A Token for Mourners; or, The Advice of Christ to a Distressed Mother, Bewailing the Death of Her Dear and Only Son (London: Thomas Pankhurst, 1694), 20–21; A Pastoral Visit to the Afflicted (Boston, 1737), 4; Cotton Mather, Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good, ed. David Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 38; Willison, Afflicted Man’s Companion, 20.

  44. SO, Memoir, 29.

  45. Ibid., 30–31.

  46. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life
of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage, 1991), 170, 72.

  47. Mary Cleaveland, Diary, October 14, 1751, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass. On childbirth, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Knopf 1982), 126–45; Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 183–203.

  48. SO, Memoir, 31. On childbirth in colonial times see Ulrich, Good Wives, 127; Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 183–87, 189.

  49. SO, Memoir, 30. On infant mortality, 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), 215. On biblical naming, see Harry S. Stout and Catherine A. Brekus, “A New England Congregation: Center Church, New Haven, 1638–1989,” in American Congregations, ed. James Lewis and James Wind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 38.

  50. Increase Mather, Pray for the Rising Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Samuel Green, 1678), 12. On baptism, see Anne S. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Early New England,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41–68, and E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

  51. SO, Memoir, 31, 33–34.

  52. Based on available records, the Bonadventure is the best match for the dates of Samuel’s voyage. The ship left Newport on October 11, 1733, and did not return until 1734. Unfortunately there is no listing of the month when it returned to port. See The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM, ed. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  53. SO, Memoir, 32.

  54. Flavel, Token for Mourners, 15, 8–9; Charles Drelincourt, The Christian’s Defence Against the Fears of Death, with Directions How to Die Well (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1744), 52–53, original in italics.

  55. SO, Memoir, 32–33, quoting Job 1:21. Osborn mentions reading “Drelincourt on Death” in SO, Diary, October 19, 1760.

  56. SO, Memoir, 32.

  57. Cotton Mather, The Nightingale: An Essay on the Songs Among Thorns (Boston: B. Green, 1724), 10.

  58. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in The Problem of Evil: A Reader, ed. Mark J. Larrimore (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), 220. On the history of Christian interpretations of suffering and evil, see John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1966); Susan Elizabeth Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

  59. Augustine, Free Will, 3.9.26, cited in Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 94.

  60. 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.

  61. One example is Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century bishop who emphasized the “liberating nature of affliction” (Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? 29).

  62. William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1722), cited in Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and Its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 249. See also Norman Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37, no. 2 (1976): 205.

  63. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” in his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London: John Darby, 1711), 1: 33.

  64. See William Whiston, The Eternity of Hell-Torments Considered (1740; 2d ed., London: John Whiston and Ben. White, 1752), 20. On benevolence, see Norman Sykes, “The Theology of Divine Benevolence,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 16 (1947): 278–91. On humanitarianism, see Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought, 200–260; Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion,” 195–218; Daniel Wickberg, “Humanitarianism,” in Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner’s, 2001), vol. 2, pp. 689–97; Karen Haltunnen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 303–34; Ava Chamberlain, “The Theology of Cruelty: A New Look at the Rise of Arminianism in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Harvard Theological Review 85, no. 3 (1992): 335–56.

  65. William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil (London: W. Thurlbourn, 1731), 143 (the statistic on reprintings comes from WorldCat.org); Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in The Enlightenment and English Literature: Prose and Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, with Selected Modern Critical Essays, ed. John L. Mahoney (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1980), 64. This optimism was satirized by Voltaire in Candide (1759).

  66. John Tillotson, Sixteen Sermons Preached on Several Subjects and Occasions (London: Ri. Chiswell, 1700), 191, 194.

  67. Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (London: n.p., 1730), 33–34, 36, 90. See also Stephen Lalor, Matthew Tindal, Freethinker: An Eighteenth-Century Assault on Religion (New York: Continuum, 2006), 156–57. On eighteenth-century views of happiness, see David S. Shields, “Happiness in Society: The Development of an Eighteenth-Century American Poetic Ideal,” American Literature 55, no. 4 (December 1983): 541–59.

  68. John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); SO, Diary, April 24, 1754.

  69. Gilbert Tennent, Twenty-Three Sermons upon the Chief End of Man (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1743), 15, 18.

  70. SH, Memoirs, [68]. SO, April 2, 1757.

  71. Benjamin Wadsworth, Considerations, to Prevent Murmuring and Promote Patience in Christians, Under Afflictive Providences (Boston: B. Green, 1706), 6–7; Samuel Willard, The Just Man’s Prerogative (Boston, B. Green, 1706), 10.

  72. Willard, Just Man’s Prerogative, 14–18, 5, 21–22.

  73. Samuel Hopkins, Sin Through Divine Interposition, an Advantage to the Universe, in WSH 2: 504, 511. E. Brooks Holifield argues that Puritans responded to the early Enlightenment by moving in a rationalistic direction: “In trying to defend tradition against what they saw as rationalistic reduction, they of necessity accentuated the function of reason in theology” (Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003], 69).

  74. SH, An Inquiry Concerning the Future State of Those Who Die in Their Sins in WSH 2: 465, 472–73; Joseph Bellamy, Sermons upon the Following Subjects, viz. The Divinity of Jesus Christ, The Millenium [sic], The Wisdom of God, in the Permission of Sin (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1758), 65–66.

  75. Sue Lane McCulley and Dorothy Zayatz Baker, eds., The Silent and Soft Communion: The Spiritual Narratives of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 2005), 27; Crawford, “Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole,” 112; SH, Life and Character, 57.

  76. SO, Diary, March 28, 1754, May 20, 1757; SO to “Mrs. Noice” [Abigail Noyes], January 16, 1767, AAS. See also SO, Diary, July 12, 1757, April 25, 1760.

  77. JE, Prayer and Supplication to God in a Time of Sore Drought 1730, WJE Online 44.

  78. SH, Memoirs, 196. She was quoting from John Mason, Spiritual Songs; or, Songs of Praise with Penitential Cries to Almighty God upon Several Occasions, 11th ed. (London: J. and B. Sprint, 1718), 100.

  79. SO, Memoir, 33–34, citing Psalm 146:9.

  80. Ibid., 34–35. On the 1730 law, see Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Newport, 1744), 94–95; Skemp, “Social and Cultural History o
f Newport,” 117.

  81. SO, Memoir, 35. On women’s work in New England seaports, see Crane, Ebb Tide in New England, 98–138. On Newport’s methods of poor relief, see Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 56–63.

  82. SO, Memoir, 35.

  83. Ibid. On humoral theory see Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale, 55–56. On medicine in colonial New England, see Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620–1820, ed. Philip Cash, Eric H. Christianson, and J. Worth Estes (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1980); Medicine and Healing, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 1990); Volney Steele, Bleed, Blister, and Purge: A History of Medicine on the American Frontier (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 2005), 323.

  84. William Douglass, quoted in Eric Christianson, “Medicine in New England,” in Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 141. See Leonard J. Goldwater, Mercury: A History of Quicksilver (Baltimore: York Press, 1972), 239–48.

  85. Henry Bradley, A Treatise on Mercury, Shewing the Danger of Taking it Crude for All Manner of Disorders, 2d ed. (London: J. Roberts, 1733), 27. See also Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Sickness and Health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 43; John W. Francis, An Inaugural Dissertation on Mercury Embracing its Medical History, Curative Action and Abuse in Certain Diseases (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1811), 32; N. J. Lanford and R. E. Ferner, “Toxicity of Mercury,” Journal of Human Hypertension 13 (1999): 651–56.

  86. SO, Memoir, 36.

  87. SH, Memoirs, 58–59. Historians have identified Isaac Newton’s tremulous handwriting as possible evidence of mercury intoxication, but Osborn’s handwriting was straight and steady; see L. W. Johnson and M. L. Wolbarsht, “Mercury Poisoning: A Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 34, no. 1 (July 1979): 1–9; Leonard J. Goldwater, “Newton and Mercury Poisoning,” Science (November 13, 1981): 742. As revealed by the 1950s Minamata disaster in Japan, organic mercury is especially toxic. Sarah Osborn took an inorganic form, probably either mercuric chloride or mercurous chloride, also known as calomel.