Sarah Osborn's World

by Brekus, Catherine A.

  8. “M. F.,” Boston Weekly News-Letter, July 19 and 26, 1750, quoted in Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 153.

  9. See Daniel Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (January 1990): 1–33; James A. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991). On capitalism and Puritanism, see Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: Norton, 1995); Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). See also Cathy D. Matson, The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 57. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word capitalism was first used in 1854. It was not commonly used until Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867.

  10. See Roderick Terry, “Some Old Papers Relating to the Newport Slave Trade,” Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society 62 (July 1927): 19.

  11. Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., Hamilton’s Itinerarium (Saint Louis: W. K. Bixby, 1907), 125. See also Skemp, “Social and Cultural History of Newport,” 222. Alexander Boyd Hawes, Off Soundings: Aspects of the Maritime History of Rhode Island (Chevy Chase, Md.: Posterity Press, 1999), 153.

  12. Lynne Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eighteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 51, 56; Richard Henry Rudolph, “The Merchants of Newport, Rhode Island, 1763–1786” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1975), 31.

  13. Charles Chauncy, The Idle Poor Secluded from the Bread of Charity by the Christian Law (Boston: Thomas Fleet, 1752), 7, 17; Cotton Mather, Durable Riches (Boston: John Allen, 1695), 20; John Locke, On the Reform of the Poor Laws (1697), reprinted in The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 101–2. Here I disagree with Lisa Levenstein, who has argued that the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was a product of the nineteenth century. See Levenstein, “Deserving/Undeserving Poor,” in Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy, ed. Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC Clio, 2004), 1: 226–30.

  14. On Newport’s almshouse, see Skemp, “Social and Cultural History of Newport,” 349; Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 61–62. On the warning-out system, see Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2.

  15. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, reprinted in Kramnick, PER, 489.

  16. Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 55.

  17. See Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 72. On poor women in colonial America, see Daniel Scott Smith, “Female Householding in Late Eighteenth-Century America and the Problem of Poverty,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 1 (1994): 83–107; Karin Wulf, “Gender and the Political Economy of Poor Relief in Colonial Philadelphia,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 163–88. On Hannah Lamb see SO, Diary, January 2, 1762, and First Congregational Church of Newport Records, 1744, Vault A, no. 836D, NHS.

  18. On women’s wages, see Gloria L. Main, “Gender, Work, and Wages in Colonial New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1994): 44.

  19. There were seventy-three pews assigned in 1753. Fifty-three percent of the church members were assessed higher rates than the Osborns. See the October 1753 pew assessments in FCCR-DRC.

  20. SO to JF, 1751; SO, Diary, January 9, 1757.

  21. See SO, Diary, undated entry for April 1757; also Diary, April 3, 1757. John Osborn married Abigail Grey on June 19, 1748 (James N. Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, 1636–1850. First Series: Births, Marriages and Deaths, vol. 8 [Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing, 1896], 471).

  22. Nathaniel Clap, The Duty of all Christians Urged (New London: T. Green, 1720), 25; SO, Diary, December 10, 1759; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958).

  23. SO, Diary, April 13, 1757; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), 563; Rudolph, “Merchants of Newport, Rhode Island,” 56; Peter J. Coleman, “The Insolvent Debtor in Rhode Island, 1745–1828,” William and Mary Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1965): 420–23. Osborn mentions “Mrs. Cheapman” in SO, Diary, January 2, 1762. The Chipmans were members of her church. See the Pew Assessments for 1753, First Congregational Church of Newport Records, 1743–1831, Vault A, no. 833, NHS; and FCCR-CB.

  24. See the references to Elnathan Hammond in FCCR-CB, including April 1745 and December 29, 1747. Polly Hammond is mentioned in SO, Diary, July 26, 1760.

  25. SO, Diary, April 19, 1760. See the two undated letters from SO to JF about the controversy over raising her tuition, Folder 1, AAS. Internal evidence suggests that these letters were written in 1755.

  26. Cotton Mather, quoted in John E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 4; SH, Memoirs, 217; SO, Diary, June 11, 1757.

  27. SO, Diary, April 14, 1757.

  28. On Luther and Calvin, see Carter Lindberg, “Luther on Poverty,” Lutheran Quarterly 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 85–101; Bonnie L. Pattison, Poverty in the Theology of John Calvin (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2006). JE, Having No Part in the Saving Influences of God’s Spirit (Sermon on Acts 8: 21), 1735, WJE Online.

  29. SO, Diary, February 18, 1757. On Newport’s lotteries, see Skemp, “Social and Cultural History of Newport,” 214–15.

  30. See Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 24–25. The covenant appears in FCCR-BM, 59.

  31. SO, Diary, June 14, 1757; Anderson, Crucible of War, 182–83, 563; SO, Diary, June 7, June 9, 1757.

  32. SO, Diary, August 2, 1757; SH, Memoirs, 174. For an example of a notation made a year after the original prayer, see SO, Diary, March 6, 1758.

  33. SO, Diary, June 24, 1757.

  34. We know that Phillis had two children only because of a brief entry in Sarah Osborn’s diary. Praying for Phillis, she wrote: “O appear for Her offspring, both of them” (SO, Diary, December 15, 1761). The other child may have belonged to Timothy Allen, Phillis’s master. On Allen, see LD 1: 84, 140, 327, 428, 504. Gosper is mentioned in SO, Diary, October 19, 1761. It is clear that Gosper was Bobey’s father; see SO, Diary, December 4, 1761. I am assuming that Phillis and Gosper were married because otherwise the church would not have accepted her as a full member. On Phillis’s acceptance into the church, see FCCR-BM. Phillis is listed as a member of Sarah’s women’s society in SO, Diary, December 4, 1761, and January 2, 1762.

  35. SO, Diary, May 2, 1757.

  36. Ibid. On Leandrow, see FCCR-BM. The church records (FCCR-BM) for July 3, 1749, contain this entry: “Baptized Cudjo, a Negro Man servant of Mr. Nichols, upon His Bed, at his Masters House, he having first owned the Covenant for Baptism in presence of some of the Church.” On the meetings with the Reverend Vinal and the Allens, see SO, Diary, May 2, 1757.

  37. SO, Diary, September 19, 1757.

  38. Ibid., August 9, 1757. On Protestant understandings of the French and Indian War, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 233–58.

  39. SO, Diary, July 13, 1757; NM, January 2, 1759; SO, Diary, September 26, 1757.r />
  40. Edward married Mary Young in 1747 (Arnold, Vital Record, First Series, vol. 8, p. 423).

  41. SO, Diary, August 7, August 19, 1757. Edward served with Captain John Whiting under Colonel Samuel Angell; see Howard M. Chapin, Rhode Island in the Colonial Wars: A List of Rhode Island Soldiers and Sailors in King George’s War, 1740–1748 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1994), 107.

  42. SO, Diary, September 15, September 17, 1757.

  43. Ibid., February 21, 1758, September 26, 1757; SO to JF, May 3, 1759, AAS.

  44. SO, Diary, October 3, October 13, 1757, March 21, 1758.

  45. Ibid., April 27, 1757, March 4, 1758. The list of possessions is drawn from SO, Will and Inventory, Probate Book no. 3, pp. 11–12, Newport City Hill, Newport, R.I.

  46. On opening a boarding school, see SO, Diary, March 15, March 19, March 21, March 23, April 2, 1757.

  47. NM, December 19, 1758.

  48. Luke 12:19; SO, Diary, April 2, 1757.

  49. John Guyse, A Collection of Seventeen Practical Sermons on Various and Important Subjects (London: Edward Dilley, 1761), 21; George Whitefield, Sermons on Various Subjects (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1740), 2: 10; George Whitefield, The Folly and Danger of Parting with Christ for the Pleasures and Profits of Life (London: C. Whitefield, 1740), 30.

  50. Benjamin Colman, Some Reasons and Arguments Offered to the Good People of Boston and Adjacent Places, for the Setting Up Markets in Boston (Boston: J. Franklin, 1719), 11–12; Benjamin Wadsworth, Vicious Courses, Procuring Poverty (Boston: John Allen, 1719), 23. See also Ann Smart Martin, “Frontier Boys and Country Cousins: The Context for Choice in Eighteenth-Century Consumerism,” in Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture, ed. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Bernard L. Herman (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 71–102.

  51. Joseph Fish, Christ Jesus the Physician, and His Blood the Balm (New London: Timothy Green, 1760), 10; Thomas Clap, A Brief History and Vindication of the Doctrines Received and Established in the Churches of New England (New Haven: James Parker, 1755), 20; Thomas Clap, An Essay on the Nature and Foundation of Moral Virtue and Obligation (New Haven: B. Mecom, 1765), 16–17; SO, Diary, May 2, January 16, 1757. On self-interest, see Mark R. Valeri, Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 96–100; Crowley, This Sheba, Self, 15–19; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 276–80. James D. German argues that because Jonathan Edwards and his followers believed that God could bring good out of the evil of self-interest, they implicitly legitimized it. Yet as he himself points out, they also argued that those who were motivated purely by self-interest would be damned, which hardly seems like legitimization. Despite their belief that evil served God’s larger purposes, these evangelicals did not see evil as actually good. See James D. German, “The Social Utility of Wicked Self-Love: Calvinism, Capitalism, and Public Policy in Revolutionary New England,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 965–98.

  52. Benjamin Wadsworth, Sermon preached September 13, 1696, in “Nineteen Sermons,” Harvard University Archives, quoted in John Corrigan, The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 105; Samuel Cooper, A Sermon Preached in Boston, New-England, Before the Society for Encouraging Industry, and Employing the Poor (Boston: J. Draper, 1753), 2.

  53. JE, Freedom of the Will, in WJE, 1: 163–64.

  54. Samuel Johnson, Ethices Elementa (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1746), 9, 12; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), in Kramnick, PER, 507. See also Corrigan, Prism of Piety, 116.

  55. Gilbert Tennent, The Espousals; or, A Passionate Perswasive to a Marriage with the Lamb of God (New York: J. Peter Zenger, 1735), 46; JE, The Sin of Extortion (Sermon on Ezekiel 22:12), 1747, WJE Online; rules of discipline, FCCR-BM; Mark Valeri, “The Economic Thought of Jonathan Edwards,” Church History 60, no. 1 (1991): 52–53.

  56. Letter from Samuel Davies to Joseph Bellamy, July 4, 1751, Joseph Bellamy Papers, Case Memorial Library, Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut, quoted in Valeri, Law and Providence, 87; letter from David Moore to Eleazar Wheelock, May 6, 1742, Eleazar Wheelock Papers, Dartmouth Library, available on microfilm at Wheaton College, Reel 1, no. 742306.2. On taxes, see the statistics in Withey, Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island, 128. See also Daniel Walker Howe, “The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14, no. 3 (June 1972): 316–17.

  57. Gilbert Tennent, Twenty-Three Sermons upon the Chief End of Man (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1744), 174–75, 210; SO, Diary, April 24, 1757; Samuel Hopkins, The Life and Character of the Late Reverend Mr. Jonathan Edwards (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1765), 103.

  58. D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 108. See also Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 80–81.

  59. Michael Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature,” William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1995): 317. On the arguments over defining capitalism, see the introduction to Matson, Economy of Early America, 33–34. On the attraction of the market, see Daniel Walker Howe, “Charles Sellers, the Market Revolution, and the Shaping of Identity in Whig-Jacksonian America,” in God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860, ed. Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 59. See also Joyce Oldham Appleby, “The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–18.

  60. SO to JF, September 17, 1750, AAS.

  61. Here I disagree with Charles Sellers, who has argued that “every popular cultural or political movement in the early republic arose originally against the market.” He exaggerates when he portrays Sarah Osborn as opposed to the market, though she was certainly worried about self-interest. See Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 205–8. Katherine Carte Engel coins the term “moral capitalism” to describe the Moravians’ acceptance of profit making in the eighteenth century, but she does not consider the tensions between Moravian theology and capitalist values; see Katherine Carte Engel, “The Strangers’ Store: Moral Capitalism in Moravian Bethlehem, 1753–1775,” Early American Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 90–126. Richard Bushman argues that in Connecticut, evangelicalism appealed to merchants who felt guilty about their economic success. See Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee.

  62. SH, Memoirs, 231.

  63. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, in Kramnick, PER, 489.

  64. Cooper, Sermon Preached in Boston; Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Gary B. Nash, “Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 1976): 3–30.

  65. See Gary B. Nash, “Poverty and Politics in Early American History,” in Down and Out in Early America, 1–37.

  66. Wadsworth, Vicious Courses, 24, 31.

  67. Here I disagree with J. Richard Olivas, “‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’: Religious Explanations of Poverty in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630–1776,” in Down and Out in Early America, 262–88. Olivas argues that “ministers by the 1750s had completely abandoned the idea that God caused poverty, believing instead that people were poor because they were unwilling to work” (265). Olivas equates a few liberal ministers, especially Benjamin Colman and Charles Chauncy, with the entire Congregationalist clergy.<
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  68. SA to SH, June 14, 1770, in Susanna Anthony, 34 Letters, 1749–1776, Simon Gratz Manuscript Collection, HSP.

  69. See Newman, Embodied History, 143–48; Nash, “Poverty and Politics,” 19–20.

  CHAPTER EIGHT. LOVE THY NEIGHBOR

  1. SO, Diary, October 21, 1761.

  2. Ibid.; Ibid., March 11, 1757; Luke 10:25–37, 21:2, Mark 12:42, Matthew 25:40; SO, Diary, October 21, 1761. For examples of Osborn’s visiting the sick, see SO, Diary, November 13, 1761, and SH, Memoirs, 266.

  3. George Whitefield, The Great Duty of Charity Recommended (London: C. Whitefield, 1740), 22.

  4. SO, Memoir, 46, quoting Proverbs 18:14. On the humanitarian impulses within early evangelicalism, see D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 69–72.

  5. SO to JF, May 3, 1759, AAS. On the number of students, see SO, Diary, May 20, 1759.

  6. SO to JF, May 3, 1759, AAS. It is not clear when the second child came to live with Sarah and Henry, but probably sometime between January and May 1759. In Sarah’s diary for 1758, she did not mention taking in another child, but by the time she wrote to Joseph Fish in May 1759, two of John’s children were living with her. In 1759, Rhode Island was forced to offer men bounties to enlist in the army. Some were offered as much as twenty pounds plus a ten-pound bonus if Canada was defeated. See Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), 320.

  7. On Vinal’s death, see SO to JF, September 5, 1759, AAS. Sarah Vinal was born on June 29, 1754. See the information available electronically on the Family History Library Web site maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: www.familysearch.org (accessed November 17, 2011). For Sarah Osborn’s diary entries, see SO, June 30, June 25, 1754.