Sarah Osborn

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Sarah Osborn (1714–1796) was an early American Protestant writer and preacher whose memoirs describe a personal religious awakening during the birth of American evangelicalism. Through her diaries and life story, she shown how faith, hardship, and devotion could inspire others.

Early life
- Born February 22, 1714, in London to Benjamin and Susanna Haggar. Her family moved to New England when she was eight, and she later lived in Rhode Island as a teenager.
- Raised in a religious Puritan home and studied the teachings of Puritan preachers. She wrestled with feelings of sin and unworthiness from a young age.
- At seventeen she married Samuel Wheaton and later became a widow with children. She remarried Henry Osborn. Poverty and personal losses marked much of her early adult life, so she earned a living as a seamstress and schoolteacher.

Spiritual pilgrimage and evangelical work
- Osborn joined the First Church in Newport in 1737 and deepened her faith, creating a strong personal relationship with God.
- She helped start the Religious Female Society to support women’s spiritual lives and to keep the church active.
- From 1764, she hosted religious meetings in her Newport home, drawing hundreds of attendees, including enslaved people. She kept careful notes about attendance and conversions, using her diaries as a record of God’s work in her life.
- Osborn believed that personal experience and grace showed God’s mercy. She encouraged others to seek a spiritual rebirth and to live by faith.

Enlightenment and later religious context
- The Enlightenment promoted science, reason, and human-centered thinking, which Osborn often opposed. She rejected the idea that salvation could come from human effort alone.
- She emphasized God’s sovereignty and the need for divine grace, arguing that faith and salvation come from God, not from human cleverness or self-improvement.
- The era’s changing ideas about women and religion shaped Osborn’s belief that women could contribute meaningfully to church life and communities.

The Great Awakening and Osborn’s influence
- The Great Awakening was a religious revival of the 1730s and 1740s that stressed emotional preaching, personal conversion, and grace.
- Osborn experienced a personal awakening and used revival language to explain how people could be saved through faith.
- She led revival-style gatherings, helped form groups around the First Church, and trained women to share in spiritual leadership.
- Her work reached many people across New England, including enslaved individuals, and she is seen as an important figure in early American evangelicalism. Her leadership among women helped to shape ideas about women’s roles in religion and missions.

Late life and legacy
- Osborn’s diaries and memoirs were published by Samuel Hopkins, helping to spread her ideas about faith, poverty, abolition, and women’s roles.
- She endured chronic illness, near blindness, and limited mobility, but remained confident in God’s love and purpose for her life.
- She died August 2, 1796, in Newport, Rhode Island, at the age of 82.

Sarah Osborn’s life shows how one woman’s faith, writings, and community work helped nurture early American evangelicalism and the broader role of women in religious life.