Twelve The New Divines
After the revival ended, Sarah Osborn rose up through her own enterprise. Rarely stopping to pity herself or her troubles, she followed several important pursuits and elevated her profile in Newport. She gathered a growing number of women for Bible study at her home, she taught school to children in the community, and more than anything, she wrote. In the 1750s she was well on her way toward writing, by the end of her life, thousands of pages of devotional text in some fifty volumes, and countless letters and poems and fragments that expressed her understanding of God and her relation to him.
She led a crusade against theatrical entertainment in Newport, calling it a “temple of wickedness,” and for her efforts and those of other evangelicals, Rhode Island later banned such performances. She made her opinions known throughout the town and felt emboldened that God had given her the passion to denounce evil and to uphold righteousness—and she even saw his design in catastrophe. When an earthquake struck New England in 1755, she didn’t ascribe it to his wrath, as Whitefield and other preachers might have, but to his wondrous power. Such an awesome event was a sign of his “adorable perfections” and she felt he was personally offering her “a pledge of his love and faithfulness.” But if God showed his favor by bestowing shock and tragedy on people, then he favored Sarah very much indeed.
More than a decade before, her only son Samuel died at the age of eleven. Stricken as he was with jaundice, scurvy, and tuberculosis, she watched him wither away, ratthng and choking to breathe and writhing in pain. What crushed her hopes, however, was not the fear that he would die, but that he would die unredeemed. Misery overwhelmed her as “I could discern no evidence of a work of grace wrought on his soul” even though she prayed that his spirit might ascend in the afterlife. As he lingered for days in agony, Sarah felt her heart sink at the prospect that the boy might be consigned to hell for lack of conversion: “My heart even almost died with fear of what would become of him.” Letters from her friend Susanna Anthony helped revive her spirit a bit, but Sarah couldn’t avoid thinking of the doom that would befall Samuel. In the end she had to no other choice but to assign the tragedy to God’s mysterious and sometimes cruel plan for her. As Anthony instructed her, “Kiss the hand, though it have a rod in it—it is the hand of your God still.”
Many years had passed since that loss, but Sarah had not forgotten the terrible scar it had left. The death left her without children of her own. Instead of God rewarding her in some way for her persistence and faith, he just seemed to put more obstacles in her path. Her husband Henry could not work a regular job because of his lingering injuries, which forced her to cobble together enough task work to keep the family going, anything from baking and sewing to teaching and spinning flax. She also had to support Henry’s son John (from another marriage), and his wife and their four children—and all this in poverty. When the war with France came, prices accelerated in Newport and made food and household goods, from flour to firewood, expensive for poor families. Reduced to eating pigeons and pudding, she finally resorted to raising the price of her tuition for teaching. Many of her students then left her tutelage, which did nothing to improve her finances. Added to this were her physical ailments that made it hard to walk or even see, and she could not perform common tasks without jolts of pain.
She and Henry were forced to take in boarders to make ends meet, which made her feel like “a poor overloaded weak animal crouching and trembling under its burden.” God kept the tragedies coming: John Osborn died fighting in the war, and left his father saddled with grief, especially since his brother Edward had died two years earlier. Sarah and Henry also had to take in, and somehow care for, another grandchild after its parents had been negligent in their duties. Thus, the impoverished Osborn household had to rely on Sarah’s meager income, and whatever Henry could earn from odd jobs, to support themselves and a bevy of stepchildren and grandchildren, while also living with boarders, a few students, and one slave.
The slave was a child named Bobey, and it was surprising that a poor woman like Sarah could claim title to any human being given her own impoverished condition. But she had owned him nearly all his life, from the time he was an infant after her own son had died (when friends purchased him for her) into the late 1750s when he became a teen. Never far away, Bobey’s mother Phillis was a member of Sarah’s church, as well as her women’s study group. Throughout her son’s life she had maintained intermittent contact with him in Sarah’s household, and doubtless joined the study group to maintain a relationship with him. However, Phillis herself was a slave to another member of the church, and her legal right to care for her son was nil. She could only ask Sarah for leniency in how she treated the boy. Thus she saw it as a great affront when Sarah, desperate for money for her own family, considered selling Bobey for cash.
Phillis didn’t let her lack of rights hold her back. She reacted angrily, telling Sarah she was “vexed” that she could even consider taking the boy away. She wanted her son to remain near her in town, and she could only imagine what horrors might await him after Sarah packed him off to the highest bidder. Phillis’s reaction shocked Sarah, who scolded her for privileging sentiment and anger over reason—but she had no choice but to consider what she said. For ten days Sarah prayed about what to do. She hid in a closet and wrote searching notes to herself. She beseeched God for an answer and found it difficult to reconcile her feelings. Was she not a good and virtuous person, as all her suffering proved? How could Phillis suggest she would be harming the boy, when she had schooled him in God’s grace—despite owning him, despite renting him out for work, despite profiting from his labors. The questions proved vexing indeed to Sarah, because the things Phillis told her went against what she knew from the Puritan divines and Jonathan Edwards: slavery was part of God’s plan, they said, and good Christians could both approve of it and own those of other races without guilt or remorse. But for once, something about the argument rang hollow. Sarah did not sell Phillis’s son.
Phillis and Bobey gradually disappeared from Sarah’s journals and little is known of them beyond her words. However, the young man’s fate and his mother’s brave and desperate protection of him resounded in the years that followed. Because in the 1760s a new Sarah Osborn slowly emerged, one who created her own ministry that respected no boundaries of color, and one who embraced all the controversy that followed.
In the spring of 1765 a group of free black residents of Newport asked if they could use Sarah’s house as a place of prayer and Bible study on Sunday nights. Sarah had already received a letter from a slave named Quaum asking for religious guidance. He likely knew Phillis and learned of Sarah’s evangelical work through her. With little hesitation, Sarah agreed to provide whatever instruction she could to him and the other individuals who had solicited her.
She arranged a series of meetings in her home, and they quickly became popular with a variety of worshippers. Expanding to Tuesday nights as well as Sundays, some forty-two slaves, a smaller number of freedmen and women, and a handful of white children began filling her kitchen to praise God and discuss his role in their lives. Sarah encouraged the gatherings of up to seventy people over the months that followed, acting as a sort of spiritual guide to the groups and drawing even more of them to hear what she said about the meaning of the Bible and God’s great plan for them. In many ways, she became their personal preacher, though she would never admit to such a prideful claim.
Sarah’s gatherings proved to be so popular that by the next year she began a new revival. Word quickly got out that men like Quaum and others had converted to Christ, and other local residents, both black and white, flocked to her house to discover what Sarah could do to elevate their spirits, too. Her life and home were now fully given over to religion: Sunday nights for young men, Mondays and Tuesdays for teenage girls and boys, respectively; Wednesdays for her women’s study group; Thursdays and Saturdays for children; and Fridays for the heads of families. Among these groups she also taught Christianity to the enslaved and to an “Ethiopian Society” of free blacks. While she did not preach liberation, something about her handcrafted ministry nonetheless appealed to them; she offered a place for communion with others of similar background, people who faced cruelty and violence in their own ways. This made the gatherings as much about community building as religious uplift.
Many were Akan, a West African people from the Gold Coast (now Ghana), who had been kidnapped by white slavers, or otherwise sold in interethnic resource wars, and shipped across the Atlantic via the deadly and horrific Middle Passage. On boats known as rum vessels, the captives were tightly shackled and bound in a hold of three-and-a-half-feet high in a voyage of six to ten weeks. Most ended up in the West Indies, but enough were shipped on to Newport that it made the city home to more slaves than any other place in New England. Once the ships arrived, they anchored off the coast, often among 100 other such vessels, until the captives were transferred to white owners who would shave their heads and brand their hips or other body parts with hot irons as a chattel mark.
Most were beaten and abused into compliance; others manifested “turbulent and unruly tempers” that led to their punishment with thumb screws and other devices. The great majority were stripped of their own traditions, names, and religions and given Anglo-American replacements. Thus, Quaum became John Quamino, and Okyerema Mireku became Newport Gardner. As slaves they lived closely among whites in the city as forced laborers, mostly for child rearing and manual labor, though some were sent out to work on local plantations for raising dairy cows and brewery grains. Those who were free had gained freedom from white Quakers in previous decades. The Quaker annual meeting in 1761 had officially forbidden the practice of owning other humans.
Despite the Quakers’ efforts, the trade in human flesh continued in Newport without restraint. Along the town’s main street, the minister of the Second Congregational Church, Ezra Stiles, counted numerous warehouses and businesses for spirits distillation, transatlantic shipping, and slave trading—all part of the triangle trade that connected the export of African slaves, West Indies molasses, and New England rum. From 1763 to 1774, Newport’s trade with Africa in liquor and slaves peaked, with new shippers and investors entering the field, and the rice plantations of South Carolina emerging as an alternative destination for many bondsmen. Almost one in seven residents of Newport was a slave, equating to more than 1,200 people deprived of freedom. Profiting by their suffering, the slave traders and merchants of Rhode Island brazenly showcased their financial success by building great estates and displaying their wealth conspicuously. Although such blatant greed was the very thing that the revivalists of earlier years had denounced, they continued to turn a blind eye to the much greater sin of turning humans into chattel.
This made it appear strange that so many slaves in Newport, who so often resisted the demands of their owners at the cost of violence and trauma, should embrace the Christianity preached to them, the faith of the oppressing class. However, the Newport revival wasn’t just about their acceptance of the religion of the slave owners. In fact, many converts maintained their spiritual beliefs and traditions from Africa, or combined them with Christian theology to form a new syncretist belief system, or solely became Christians but put the Old and New Testaments in a much different light than the slave lords—emphasizing the liberation they saw in its stories instead of the labored justifications for their captivity.
Unlike most of the ordained ministers who preached the gospel, Sarah Osborn spoke to the pain and trauma of what colonial society could do to a person. Although she could never possibly understand the horrors of slavery, her poverty and illnesses made her a sympathetic figure. She also had a magnetic personality, and a compelling gift for words that made her appear divinely inspired—a strange, holy woman whom God had cursed with infirmities and yet blessed with the gift of inspiration. The black residents of Newport had recognized it first, and once they drew attention to her ministry, many others followed until the numbers of worshippers became huge, even shocking. In the summer of 1766 Sarah hosted 500 people a week at her house, and 140 alone on Sunday evenings. The house obviously wasn’t suited for such great numbers of worshippers, yet they kept coming—filling her kitchen and overflowing into other rooms and other people’s houses. She attracted Baptists and Anglicans as well as Congregationalists—almost all the Protestant sects except Quakers. It made for a stunning homemade revival, and to her it was proof of the creator’s glorious ways. She asked, “Who would ever have thought that God by such a mean, despicable worm would have gathered such a number as now steadily resorts to this house every week?”
By the winter of 1767 the revival showed no signs of abating. Some 525 people now crowded her house every week, and she “greatly feared that it would be as the river Jordan overflowing all the banks.” But more worrisome was the sharp counter-reaction to her ministry from the town elite. Since the Ethiopian Society remained at the center of the movement, increasingly vocal critics accused her of “keeping of a Negro House” and violating the social codes that kept the races apart and fearful of each other. They raised the issue of miscegenation—the dangerous intermixing of white and black—and the slave owners claimed that large groups of free and unfree black people would incite rebellion or otherwise threaten the town and, presumably, their profits.
Sarah acknowledged the criticism but would not end her ministry. To those who said she had no business praying in public in front of black men, she said the approval of God was all that mattered, and that “Man can’t determine me . . . Man’s opinion alone shant content me for or against.” She also defended her actions to her spiritual advisor, Reverend Joseph Fish, and said that she had asked male authority figures to guide the revival and they had no interest in it, and that the presence of other Christians regardless of color gave her life meaning and purpose. She said she would starve without her regular religious practice, and that “sweet refreshing evenings [were] my resting reaping times.” And she became disgusted with Fish for even questioning her leadership, asking, “Would you advise me to shut up my mouth and creep into obscurity?”
Comparing herself to a warrior who wore “the whole armor of God” and wielded a “shield of faith” to fight Satan and all his wickedness, Sarah was not alone as a woman fighting for her ideas in this tumultuous age. During the years preceding the Revolution, Americans argued about women’s role in society, especially the need for education and their contributions to the culture. No longer accepting the demand to be silent and submissive, many women like Sarah found their creative outlet in religion. In Sarah’s First Congregational Church of Newport, more than 70 percent of the members were women, and that number was not unusual for the time. Thanks to the revival and the growing power of parishioners, they influenced the course of worship; they formed their own study groups; and they sometimes even chose the minister himself. Sarah had a role in all these things.
Taking such a prominent position in her community meant getting embroiled in church politics. And in the late 1760s at First Church, the main subject of contention was the minister, William Vinal. Though he would never admit it, the reverend was clearly an alcoholic, and it affected the way he led the church. When questioned about his behavior, he frequently lapsed into paranoia and anger against his parishioners and accused them of undermining him behind his back and scheming at Sarah’s own house. She tried to assuage his concerns and explain the congregants’ feelings and said that if he was unable to perform his duties, visiting ministers could be brought in to help with services. He responded by telling her she was the wrong kind of Christian and a near fanatic: “Your zeal for God if you are not on your guard will carry you astray.”
Sarah kept trying to encourage him not to drink, but his illness became worse and he lashed out at anyone who raised the subject. Eventually the governing committee of the church, doubtless under her influence, fired Vinal from the pulpit after twenty-two years, for “bad habit of body” and other euphemisms. He went down fighting, blaming church members for being “odious, malicious, cruel, unmerciful,” and singled Sarah out as a saboteur. She was shocked by the charge and mounted a forceful defense. But as much as she wanted to clear her name, she also knew most of her energies needed to be spent finding a new minister.
In the months after, the people of First Church auditioned a series of pastors by inviting them to demonstrate their skills at Sarah’s house, which became the temporary, de facto home of the church itself. The members saw a number of good and worthy men with a flair for explaining the gospel, but the one that appealed most to Sarah and Susanna Anthony was an unexpected choice.
Sarah had been reading the works of contemporary theologians like Joseph Bellamy, who had taken the ideas of Jonathan Edwards and altered them with a greater call for “communalism, social responsibility, and moral reform”—all things Edwards had preached, but that his followers now gave greater importance to due to the torn fabric of American society, rent by inequality and economic malaise. Bellamy, along with Edwards’s own minister son, was labeled as part of the New Divinity movement, whose proponents updated ideas of original sin, free will, and divine providence to underscore the importance of human responsibility and moral virtue. In so doing, they also gained a reputation for being judgmental and censorious and for lording over churches racked with schism and plagued by controversy—almost as if it were 1740 again. One of the other prime figures of this movement was Samuel Hopkins.
Hopkins was a middle-aged preacher known in theological circles, but otherwise obscure to much of the Newport public, as a former minister to a frontier congregation in far western Massachusetts. He had learned Calvinism from Jonathan Edwards himself, arriving at his doorstep as a stranger in 1741, inspired by the revival aflame in New England and eager to learn more about it. He spent two years intermittently studying the Bible with the theologian, often doubting his purpose and whether God intended any good use for him. However, thanks to his studies, the residents of the hamlet of Housatonic, later called Great Barrington, gave him the opportunity to be their minister in a unanimous vote in 1743, and he accepted. Although there were only thirty families in the congregation, and life in the hinterlands was difficult, he persisted in his role for twenty-six years.
During that time the Boston commissioners of a frontier Indian mission offered him the role of pastor of Stockbridge. He turned them down and instead recommended his mentor Edwards, recently fired by his congregation in Northampton. Edwards of course accepted the role and for the next six years lived only seven miles from his former student, the two of them regularly sharing thoughts on religion and faith and the difficulty of life on the frontier. After the trustees of the College of New Jersey offered Edwards the presidency of the school, Hopkins regretted that he “should lose the future benefit of his company and instructions. But I considered him as so eminently qualified for the presidency of a college” that he offered his highest recommendation. A year later, Edwards was dead, and Hopkins had to find his own way in matters of God.
He admired Edwards but came to differ from him in several key ways. For one, unlike the preacher of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Hopkins was a rough and blundering orator; he drawled and mumbled and had a difficult time pronouncing common words. Moreover, he preached a severe strain of Calvinism that emphasized human depravity and God’s absolute power, and adopted peculiar ideas that departed from Edwards’s own: eager converts were worse than heathens because they were selfish, sin had a noble purpose in contrasting with goodness, and a “true Christian should be willing to be damned for the glory of God.” Despite these curious notions, he did establish one key parallel with his mentor: his congregants eventually became sick of him and fired him from his job.
Hopkins’s church members harbored a number of complaints about him. Not only did they chafe at his bland orations in the pulpit, they warred with him over his Calvinist rigidity, his strict limitations on who could receive the sacraments, and his fierce anti-imperial politics. Disgusted with his intransigence, they refused to pay him and forced him to seek a position in another town. With his dismissal, Hopkins became dejected and considered becoming a farmer instead of persisting as a preacher.
The parishioners of First Church in Newport rescued him from that fate, at least temporarily. With Sarah’s strong encouragement, they offered him a chance to preach to them and possibly to become their leader. He accepted the offer and preached for more than a month of Sundays, impressing enough of the all-male voters on the governing committee that he survived a narrow vote to become their minister. He was pleased with the outcome, for he enjoyed the local atmosphere and found among the church members “a number who appeared to be excellent Christians, and the best regulated church that I had seen.” But as he began to settle in and contemplate life as a pastor in Rhode Island, the trouble began.
Second Congregational Church’s minister Ezra Stiles let it be known that he dreaded the arrival of Hopkins in Newport as his colleague. The man’s fusty Calvinism was an embarrassment, and a reminder of First Church’s backward and lower-class congregation, so different from Stiles’s own wealthy and enterprising church members. Charles Chauncy wrote to Stiles to take pity on him, recounting all of Hopkins’s drawbacks, and claiming he was such a bad preacher, he drove his flock in Great Barrington toward Anglicanism. “He will preach away all his congregation at Newport, or make them tenfold worse than they are at present.” The threat carried some weight in the town, where the Quaker and Congregationalist faiths were declining at the hands of a revived Church of England, which found success in converting members of the upper class along with many slave merchants.
Things got worse for Hopkins when an anonymous pamphlet mocked his tedious style in the pulpit. The tract was crude but had some merit: Hopkins seemed to have little interest in adopting the theatrical style of preachers like George Whitefield and could only offer his plodding praise of the Lord. The pamphlet had a baleful effect on the minds of church members, and Hopkins discovered many of the congregants “had appeared dissatisfied with my doctrines, and pains had been taken to promote prejudices against me.” Soon the church leaders rescinded their endorsement of him. Embarrassed by the debacle, Hopkins withdrew from consideration to be their minister. He preached a farewell sermon and prepared for a life of agriculture.
Surprisingly, his last sermon had a greater effect than he expected. Many parishioners cried and let his words affect them deeply. The next morning, “there appeared to be a revolution in the congregation” as his opposers repented their actions and “said that their consciences accused them so severely of their wickedness in what they had done, that they had little or no sleep during the night.” Others were struck by the power of his homilies and asked him to forgive their rude treatment of him. His farewell preaching affected his allies the most: Sarah Osborn and Susanna Anthony planned to use their influence to get him his job back.
Hopkins had befriended many in the women’s society ever since he had come to town. He had discussed God with Sarah and had assisted with her home ministry and found a number of friends in the group who were willing to fight to ensure he would be their pastor—even in the face of resistance from the small number of men who voted. But while women like Sarah fully endorsed him, Hopkins himself had fears over whether the position suited him, and knowing how abruptly he had been chucked out of the pulpit in Great Barrington, he worried that it would happen again.
Unlike Reverend Vinal, he opened up to Sarah about his anxieties and weaknesses, and he told her “I have been much dejected and sunk in my own mind” and hesitant to accept the job even if it were offered to him a second time. He knew his limitations in the pulpit, and later reflected that his strongest sense of God’s grace came in his private devotions, while in public “my preaching has always appeared to me as poor, low and miserable, compared with what it ought to be; and frequently a sense of my deficiencies in this has been very painful and discouraging.” Even with his own considerable doubts, though, Sarah and Susanna saw something in this preacher—a spark of the Holy Spirit, perhaps—that made them even more determined to put him in the pulpit. They prayed fervently to God for his success, and they lobbied the voters to grant Hopkins the job once more.
They won. With a near-unanimous vote, Hopkins again secured the pulpit and became the minister of First Church. Even Ezra Stiles couldn’t help but be impressed with the astounding coup Sarah and her allies had pulled off, twisting enough arms to make her church’s governing committee admit their error and do the right thing: “Mrs. Osborn and the sorority of her meeting are violently engaged and had great influence.” Stiles was impressed enough that he even preached at Hopkins’s installment as minister and published the honorific tract throughout New England.
Once Hopkins assumed the role of pastor, he continued his strong bond with Sarah and Susanna. With the former he met regularly, sharing tea and prayer on Saturdays and receiving her advice on his sermons. His relationship with Susanna, though, was much more intense, and the two enjoyed sublime and wide-ranging conversations on God and faith. They both corresponded with leading Calvinist ministers in New England, shared their thoughts on theology, and drew so close together that some town folk made cutting insinuations there was more to their relationship than just friendship. But like Sarah, they had learned to ignore the jibes of others, regardless of how low and spiteful they might be.
Much more unexpectedly, Hopkins found a friend in Ezra Stiles, his theological adversary. While neither man could agree with the other’s ideas of the gospel truth, they found each other’s company congenial and could regularly be spotted walking together in Newport, the lumbering Hopkins towering over the small, sprightly Stiles. They even exchanged pulpits on occasion and cooperated in each other’s missionary work, and one project in particular.
With Sarah continuing to decline in body, Hopkins assisted her by ministering to the still-numerous black students and congregants who came to her house every week for study and worship. She continued her women’s society, but desperately needed assistance with other groups to keep the meetings going. Soon, a growing number of slaves and freedmen paid visits to Hopkins’s house to hear the preacher speak, and they also visited the quarters of Reverend Stiles.
Hosting ninety black visitors every week, Stiles preached his own, more liberal version of the gospel, as both he and Hopkins continued the revival Sarah had begun more than a half-decade before. This cooperation was unusual, the Old Light and New Light ministers working in tandem instead of denouncing each other as they might have in years past. Stiles and Hopkins made for an odd pair, differing in theology but coming to agree on many social and political subjects. Stiles learned that, for all his Calvinist bluster, Reverend Hopkins possessed one critical virtue that so many other men of the cloth lacked: the ability to listen and change his mind.
Hopkins began to change his views about one critically important subject almost as soon as he arrived in Newport. He heard his black congregants’ stories of their cruel and despicable treatment, and their desire for freedom, and he started to inquire more about the slave system that brought them there. He witnessed the horror of the auction block in Newport and saw the slave markets at Mill Street and at North Baptist Street where human beings were bought and sold as commodities, the marks on their bodies proving how their captors viewed them as animals. Most white Newport residents consciously ignored such sights, but Hopkins knew he couldn’t. He had to accept the truth that he witnessed. He remembered how he had once owned a slave in Great Barrington as part of his ministerial salary, but now felt shame and guilt for it.
He continued to study and learn: he met Obour Tanner, an enslaved woman active in women’s gospel work who acted as mentor and friend to the poet Phillis Wheatley; and he corresponded with Wheatley herself and other black evangelicals, and learned a new perspective on faith in light of the desire for freedom. He befriended artists like Newport Gardner, who learned to read and write in English and several African languages, and then taught himself to sing and compose music until he was one of the city’s best musicians—giving the lie to those who claimed enslaved people were inferior to whites in any way. He saw the dedication of John Quamino and Bristol Yamma to higher education, and with Ezra Stiles did all he could to raise funds for their education at the College of New Jersey as the first black students at the school. He may have even seen the elaborate, joyous funerals of former slaves, which proved the boundless capacity of the human soul in the face of the greatest terrors; and may have paused at their gravestones, carved by master stone mason Zingo Stevens. And thus through the accumulated, indisputable weight of the evidence, and the friendship and testimony of black residents of the city, he came to a conclusion that no other prominent minister of a mainline faith had ever preached in America: Slavery was a sin against God, an abomination to which he had closed his eyes throughout his life, and yet now those eyes were open, and he became inspirited with truth. He would speak against the brutal practice in the pulpit and denounce those who gained by it.
He knew this would set much of the white town folk against him, and would “procure me many enemies.” With few exceptions, no minister of any sect spoke against slavery; only the Quakers, whose numbers were small and whose theology was atypical. Hopkins was alone, but he felt imbued with faith in his own judgment. He called out other ministers for defending and upholding slavery, and said there were “many established falsehoods, as well as many vulgar errors wherein multitudes of men have followed one another for whole ages almost blindfold.”
He first spoke against slavery from the altar in 1771. No record exists as to what he said, but he likely had a resounding effect on his flock. Only one family resigned its membership in response to his exhortation, and the other members listened in silence to his dramatic condemnation: “The majority of his hearers were astounded that they, of themselves, had not long before seen and felt the truths which he disclosed to them.” Many of the First Church members were common workers or poor and did not have the same vested interest in slavery that some of the parishioners at Second Church did. Still, even that church’s pastor, Ezra Stiles, cooperated with Hopkins and tried to raise funds for a missionary society that would work to discourage slavery in Africa.
As the years passed, more and more of Hopkins’s words were devoted to raising the specter of God’s wrath against slavery and those who gained from it, and he banned slave holders from becoming members of First Church. His actions and stirring rhetoric convinced others in the New Divinity school to follow him. Figures like Levi Hart and Ebenezer Baldwin also renounced the practice, demanding the “opening of the prison to the bound . . . [for] slavery or bondage is terrible and to be avoided.” Like Hopkins, they took the ideas of Jonathan Edwards and innovated them and reconciled their contradictions, and asserted that people could not be liberated in Christ if they denied liberation to others. And joining them in revising the elder Edwards’s ideas was his son Jonathan Jr., who raised the specter of hypocrisy against white American colonists for demanding liberty when they withheld it from those of a different race. And he posed the provocative question, “If it be lawful and right for us to reduce the Africans to a state of slavery, why is it not as right for Great Britain, France, or Spain, not merely to exact duties on us; but to reduce us to the same state of slavery, to which we have reduced them?”
Hopkins seized on the ideas of the younger Edwards and expanded them with the most conspicuous statement he could muster, A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans. Just weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he dedicated an address to the Continental Congress and spoke of the true meaning of virtue, faith, and freedom. He demanded that they, as revolutionaries, put an end to the vile trade and to release “thousands of blacks in slavery, who have an equal right to freedom with ourselves” as the colonists battled for their own independence. He called for immediate abolition and asked them to deliver bondsmen “out of the hands of the oppressor; and be the happy instruments of procuring and establishing universal LIBERTY to white and black, to be transmitted down to the latest posterity!” It disgusted him that Europeans and Americans claimed to possess high-minded ideals and Christian beliefs, but “by the murdering or enslaving of millions of millions, they have brought a curse upon themselves,” through trafficking in terror and barbarity. “Who can realize all this, and not feel a mixture of grief, pity, indignation and horror, truly ineffable! And must he not be filled with zeal to do his utmost to put a speedy stop to this seven-headed monster of iniquity, with all the horrid train of evils with which it is attended.”
In an accompanying dialogue, he broke down the excuses for slavery that had been made over the centuries and recounted the horror stories of Africans kidnapped from their land, abused, enchained, and otherwise denied their freedom before God. For it was “inexpressible unjust, inhuman and cruel [and] glaringly contrary to the whole tenor of divine revelation.” He said the promoters of slavery had twisted and misrepresented passages from the Bible to make money on human misery, and that God was not indifferent to slavery but outright condemned it—and he offered chapter and verse to prove his point. Ultimately, he told all slave owners that their actions risked the wrath of the Almighty unless the practice was ended immediately. He told them God would punish oppression, and asked, “Are you willing to be the instruments of bringing judgments and ruin on this land, and on yourselves and families, rather than let the oppressed go out free?”
Perhaps only an extreme Calvinist could have been brave enough in 1776 to aim an antislavery sermon to a group of revolutionaries that included many slave owners. But Hopkins did just that, and his fearless words inspired both praise and derision in the years that followed, along with a growing interest in abolition among other preachers of his stripe. He knew ministers of all kinds for far too long had winked at slavery, had allowed it, had made excuses for it, had even indulged in the practice themselves—he had been one of them. But now, motivated by penance as much as virtue, Hopkins seized the mantle of abolition and inspired others to do the same.
In Newport, his ministry continued with an elevated profile, as he discussed plans for abolition with the slaves and freedmen who had inspired the revival of the 1760s, and who had first directed his attention to the cruelties of slavery. Some did a great deal to promote liberation and alleviate suffering: Newport Gardner and Zingo Stevens founded the African Union Society, a mutual aid society that provided assistance for the poor and financial resources for loans and property purchases to aid black people in Newport, as well as an apprentice program to help the enslaved. Obour Tanner launched the Free African Female Benevolent Society to clothe and educate black children in poverty, support the widows of slaves, and provide for their children. John Quamino and Bristol Yamma worked as missionaries to abolish slavery. Though Quamino died at sea, Yamma returned to help lead the African Union Society. Along with these figures, countless other lesser-known members of First and Second Church would take action in Rhode Island and throughout New England to change the heart of its people and outlaw the import, trade, and persistence of any form of human bondage.
In years to come dozens of New Divines would join them in the campaign and would create organizations like the Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage. And the Rhode Island legislature enacted gradual prohibitions against the practice—first banning the internal trade in human cargo to the colony in 1774, then establishing gradual emancipation a decade later. Unfortunately, such measures had a limited effect at first, because many of the powerful merchants were as much investors in the wider business of North American slavery as they were participants in the rum and slave trade. Newport remained a center of human oppression in one form or another for years to come.
Though it would take decades longer to convince the people of New England to support abolition, and still longer to change the minds of other Northerners, the antislavery ministry that Samuel Hopkins championed at the dawn of independence would eventually reach its goal. He knew this monumental struggle would continue after his death, and might well involve bloodshed, as it eventually did. But he had faith it would succeed, just as he had faith he could change an individual soul as much as he could an entire society. For him, the most important belonged to the person that first drew him to First Church.
At some point during the 1770s, Hopkins’s jeremiads against slavery had a moving effect on Sarah Osborn. She was infirm by then and scarcely able to leave her house due to her mounting ailments, and Hopkins often gave Sunday services in her home so she could participate in them. He had done well in her eyes and fulfilled all the hopes that she and Susanna had put in him. In return she opened her eyes to the truth as he preached it: The Bible did not uphold slavery but condemned it, and any good Christian knew better than to risk the wrath of God by arguing otherwise. During this time she composed a poem that expressed her new feelings, describing a view of heaven for slaves released from their chains: “Those we see here who once have been / Made slaves to man by horrid sin / Now through rich grace in Christ are free / Forever set at liberty.”
Sarah’s release from her own suffering came in 1796, at the age of eighty-three. She had accomplished much in her years, from batthng grief and debt and poverty, to supporting her extended families, to founding religious societies and enflaming revivals, to seeking out Samuel Hopkins as the minister of First Church. Her body collapsed long before her spirit, and from her example, Hopkins gained much of his own inspiration. At Sarah’s funeral, a surprising number of people came to honor her memory. Fitting with her life, the funeral sermon preached was a plea to God: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you, that you walk worthy of the vocation, wherewith you are called.” Hopkins would live for another seven years after her, as the first major white abolitionist of the new republic, and the author and editor of memoirs on Jonathan Edwards, Susanna Anthony, and Sarah herself. Moreover, he would become widely known for his new, muscular version of Calvinism, which took Edwards’s theology and stripped it of its contradictions, until it became a real moral force of reform well into the nineteenth century.
Ultimately, though, the most important participants in the struggle were lesser-known to posterity: Phillis the enslaved Christian, who first demanded protection for her son from Sarah. The black religious seekers who created a color-blind revival. The free and unfree congregants of First Church who convinced Hopkins of the need for abolition. And the many freedmen and bondsmen who led their own revivals in Newport, worshipping with whites and telling their stories of violence and hardship to anyone who would listen. For it was they who knew slavery firsthand who struck the first blow against it and began to alter the terrible system of human oppression, with Osborn and Hopkins the willing agents of their crusade.