Brekus Catherine A. - Sarah Osborns Collected Writings

Sarah Osborns Collected Writings

Edited by
Catherine A. Brekus

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.

Copyright 2017 by Catherine A. Brekus.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956007

ISBN 978-0-300-18289-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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In memory of

Liliana Lawrynowicz

and

Gertrude Emma Kneeland Brennan

For the former things are passed away.

Revelation 21:4

WHOSE LIVES DO WE CHOOSE to remember, and why?

This book collects the writings of Sarah Osborn, an evangelical woman who lived in Newport, Rhode Island, during the eighteenth century. Osborn was a published author, a rarity for early American women, and she became well known during her life for leading a religious revival at her house during the 1760s and 1770s. In many ways she was an extraordinary person. But she was also poor and female, two characteristics that are rarely associated with the makers of history, and in the decades after her death she was gradually forgotten. This collection of her writings, along with my narrative history of her life, Sarah Osborns World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America, demonstrates why she deserves to be remembered and, more broadly, why womens stories are crucial to understanding historical change.

A book like this probably would not have been published before the 1960s, or at least not by a major academic press. Perhaps a Christian publisher would have been interested in marketing Osborns story as devotional reading, or a local press in Newport might have wondered whether Osborns writings could have antiquarian appeal. But most publisherslike most scholarswould have questioned whether a relatively obscure womans life could tell us anything important about American history. Earlier generations of historians acknowledged the significance of a few exceptional female leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but they seem to have assumed that ordinary women were so caught up in the cycles of pregnancy, childrearing, and housekeeping that they stood virtually outside of history. Since early American women could not vote, hold political office, go to college, be ordained, or own their own property after marriage, how could they have been the agents of historical change?

Today there are still many historians who share Thomas Carlyles conviction that history is the biography of great men, but these scholars no longer have a monopoly on our understanding of the past. Because of the rise of womens history and social history during the 1960s and 1970s, we now have a broader understanding of who makes history. Most historians now argue that change comes not only from the top down but also from the bottom up. Though leaders are important, they become leaders only when large numbers of ordinary men and women share their vision. For example, George Whitefield would not have become one of the most celebrated preachers of the eighteenth century if not for the thousands of men and women, including Sarah Osborn, who embraced his ideas as their own. His agency was largely dependent on theirs. Without understanding the concerns and aspirations of people like Osborn, we cannot explain how and why historical change takes place.

Like all of us, Sarah Osborn both made and was made by history. She was deeply shaped by the eighteenth-century world into which she was born, and in many ways she perpetuated its beliefs and practices. Most of us uphold the verities of our world more than we challenge them, and Osborn was no exception. Much of her agency involved upholding the social, political, economic, and religious structures of her day: for example, she assumed that women had been created subordinate to men, and for most of her life she did not question whether monarchy was Gods favored form of government. From the distance of more than two hundred years, we can see the ways in which her life, even her very sense of selfhood, was shaped by ideas that she inherited as the truth. There were limits to how she and other eighteenth-century Americans could imagine their lives.

Yet Osborn did not simply reproduce the assumptions of her culture; she also challenged them. When we read her writings we can see a world in motion, a world that was changing as she and thousands of other colonial Americans made new discoveries and sought new answers to enduring questions about human life. By the time that she died in 1796, she had rejected many of the ideas that she had once taken for granted. Rather than accepting slavery as Gods will, for example, she eventually denounced it as a sin. And rather than adhering to the faith of her parents, she devoted her life to a new kind of Christianity that emerged during the revivals of the Great Awakening, a Christianity that emphasized a personal relationship with God, the joy of being born again, and the call to spread the gospel around the globe. Though she was too immersed in her own time to recognize it, she helped to build the religious movement that today is known as evangelicalism. Of all the ways in which Osborn made history, she most wanted to be remembered for her evangelical faith.

Reading Sarah Osborns writings can help us come to a deeper understanding of the changes that took place in eighteenth-century America, including the spread of Enlightenment ideas, the rise of humanitarianism, the emergence of antislavery sentiment, the expansion of womens religious authority, the advent of the American Revolution, and most important to her, the rise of the evangelical movement. All of these transformations took place because of the agency of men and women, most of them now forgotten, who dreamed of creating a different world. When we remember Osborn, we remember that historical change always emerges out of the hopes, fears, and strivings of ordinary people.

IN 1743, Sarah Osborn, a schoolteacher in Newport, Rhode Island, decided to write a memoir. Inspired by the emotional revivals that historians have called the Great Awakening, she wanted to share the dramatic story of her conversion, the religious crisis that had changed the meaning of her life. Looking back, she remembered longing for Gods grace because of her feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness, but fearing that she was too sinful to be saved. She had felt as if there were an immense gulf separating her from God. She was depraved; he was perfect. She was empty; he was full. She was helpless; he was all-powerful and free. And yet just at the moment when she felt most broken in spirit, he had healed her. It is not possible for me... to make anyone sensible what joy I was instantly filled with, she testified, except those that experimentally know what it is. She had been born again, restored, as it were, from the grave.